Forum Moderators: open
I suspect it is more a case of identical internal and/or anchor text is being 'ignored' after a certain point. Thus previous benefit is lost and sites are dropping.
"GG said site cannot be penalised for external factors"
He is still consistent with this. Sites are not being penalised for loads of duplicate anchor text in, the anchor text is just being ignored at a certain point, maybe a percentage level. 'Ignoring text' is different to 'penalising text'. Other factors have to be equally on theme for the site to rank well.
The algo may be being applied slowly, so some sites are still ok.
If its a filter it makes sense that they would weight all manner of factors not just simply if all links are perfect.
I think I may be seeing a set of results from a week or 2 ago now.
Hopefully something will work. I don't want to resort to placing keywords in comment tags or placing keywords in small text at the bottom of my page. I am considering it though...
...and Yahoo/Ink...and MSN...they are coming...
1. When you see your sites move from #1 to disappeared does this look like it is a result of the restoration of an existing index ie is the page showing when your #1 always the same. You might be able to test this if you could see if there are other pages that follow the same in/out change pattern. If it is it would imply they might be just restoring some large part of the index from backups. Also, do the pages that show up at the top when your out change from cycle to cycle. If they do then it would imply that a new index has been computed for that search.
2. Does anyone have an estimate of how long it takes Google to apply an algorithmic change to its database? I am wondering what would be the time of a change/compute/test debug cycle. I realize this is very dependant on the code but assuming its doing something relevant to the discussions here (for example counting/comparing anchor text across x million sites), what would be a ball park figure, hours, days a week?
It does sound to me like they could be testing new indices and then restoring backups when they find they haven't fixed the problem. Of course its also complicated by the presence of the 'fresh' crawl data.
Really? Go on then.... over to you. You have no capital for traditional marketing, you have no bricks and morter... solve the above problem.
It's not the above posters' fault that Google represents a near monopoly. It didn't start like that. That's what evolved.
It doesn't help anyone to sit on the sidelines pointing fingers telling folks they have a problem because they depend on the biggest SE in town. It doesn't help one jot, and is frankly rather annoying.
The real problem here is that Google is not currently demonstrating an awful lot of social responsibility. Responsibility is something that should come with power, and those with power should exercise it accordingly.
The current situation is rather disappointing from this perspective. For some reason I expected better from Google.
charlier, I see where you're coming from but in my experience the changes are new, and unlike previous rankings.
Some pages that people would normally expect to do well as a result of links coming from other domains are not doing well; lesser pages within the same sites are often beating them.
That's the way it has always been for me since I started in 95. It's been said here many times before, you just need to diversify.
I currently get more traffic from incoming links and MSN (and other minor engines) than I do from Google. Why? Because I've been through this stuff years ago and plan for it in every step I make now. I also take it further by running a couple related sites rather than just the one bread winner. So, while the update is a pain, my traffic and sales don't take too much of a hit, and if they do on one site, another site is likely doing well. Pretty standard stuff...
> It doesn't help one jot, and is frankly rather annoying.
Sorry you find it annoying, but it is absolutely helpful. I'd argue that it is probably the most important lesson people can take from all this update mess. And it's exactly why the more experienced members on the board tend to sit on the 'sidelines' through all these update threads.
> Google is not currently demonstrating an awful lot of
> social responsibility
I can agree with you somewhat here, but I think their real responsibilty is to their users, not webmasters.
Despite showing my "vocal" continued displeasure at Google a few times in the last few days. And agreeing Spam is useful, short term, if you have the time and have been left in the cold. I think anyone who believes Google is not "broke" is, well, smokin Cobald (hope I got that right) County Blue Hawaiian!
I am doing a bit of the short term stuff too now sure. If Google is not man enough to accept that and be able to filter it out, oh well (there loss). But I know it is short term, and I would not throw my content sites in to the Hormel soup. Today I spent most of my day w3c validating a huge sub domained site. Whenever you get a "Yes, this page is 4.01 transitional compliant". They give you a tip of the day. I had to validate 54 sub domain front indexes. They have 5 tips of the day (the same every day). Let me give you two of them.
1) The title is the most important part of a web site.
2) Use your H1 as your title.
All those people who are still on about "on page factors". Do you really think Google is at odds with w3c?
Then it is down to keyword in backlinks. IMHO, you want to spread the load anyway, so why not stop worrying about links to your index page alone. And whether you need to rotate your keyword with various other words, so as not to be caught out. Chances are, this is all a data (actually, calculation of that data) loss thing anyway. They are obviously working on it, otherwise they would have added the Spam filters they clearly have not. The fact GG says nought, says a lot.
I have stopped worrying. If Google don't fix the problem, people will vote with their keyboards.
No, actually it's just horribly annoying. I earn a large amount of revenue through many means of marketing. I also have many sites that are only deriving income from SE's.
This is, however, a Google forum and if webmasters are trying to figure out why they are dropped from Google (Also AOL and Yahoo! now), it is not helpful to tell them you get your traffic from MSN and links. I get traffic from Radio ads but who cares?
If you are getting more traffic from MSN than Google and partners, you may want to read up a bit because you are missing out on serious revenue since 75% of searches come from the big G and friends.
As far as more "senior" members not showing concern about recent events, that simply is not true. Nearly every senior member (as well as anyone with half a brain) has commented and pontificated on the oddities of the current GG.
There are many forums here where you can discuss various ways of marketing. This is forum 3 and happens to pertain to Google. I guess you can start another thread titled "Why Google is not important to me".
Anyone jumping in with the old boring repetitive line that we should look elsewhere for traffic is about 100 miles off the point.
Back ON the point, the musical chairs are moving around again for some of those sites... but sadly again, only some of them.
Do you really think Google is at odds with w3c
Yes!
Google as we all know has already dropped image tags. vaildation and good code is what w3c is looking at. Relevancy is what google is looking at. Google may well have taken the view that to maintain relavancy across the board it needs to fight the growth of SEO. If this means google sets its own standards im sure they will happily do that.
First, happy 4th of July!
On late evening Sunday June 29, my index page recuperated its top ten position. However, early on July 4 with the new fresh tags July 2 or July 3, my index page vanished again.
I just checked my main keyword phrase using allinanchor word_1 word_2 word_3 word_4 and my index page is number 10. The same index page is hard to find under allintitle or allintext.
On June 28, I adjusted the text on my index page. I brought down keyword density for word_1 and word_2 to 5.23% each and word_3 and word_4 to 4.65% each.
I checked total percentages on other 6 web sites within the top ten (word_1 word_2 word_3 word_4) and these are the results:
Web site A: 17.68% (site uses doorways)
Web site B: 7.31% (site uses link farm)
Web site C: 19.16%
Web site D: 9.65%
Web site E: 17.66%
Web site F: 18.44%
My site: 19.76%
The first six sites are still showing in the top ten under a regular search for word_1 word_2 word_3 word_4. My web site isn't showing on the top 100.
The main difference in between my web site and the first 6 is that mine is 7 or 8 months old. The first six are 2 to 5 years old.
I believe the problem is described on paragraph no 5 in a study made in late 2002 by Microsoft and HP: "The Google search engine attempts to maintain a fresh index by crawling over 3 billion pages once a month [7], with more frequent crawls of hand-selected sites that are known to change more often. In addition, it offers access to cached copies of pages, to obviate problems arising some of the crawled URLs being out-of-date or having disappeared entirely." [research.microsoft.com...]
But the current serps aren't "settled", so any sort of action to create more targeted anchor text would be premature. Besides pagerank and the Directory not being updated yet, it is safe to assume that no matter what Google hopes to accomplish with a rolling update one of those things is *not* for a site to be #2 three days a week, and number #200 four days a week. #2 and #7, yes, maybe. These massive changes, no way. Google wants to deliver the best searches to people seven days a week, and they are not that freaking indecisive as to be unable to decide between 2 and 200.
Again, look through the serps for dozens of searches. Anchor targeted text is the key, both for quality sites and the spammy ones. And then also notice that many sites are simply not ranked well, moving around like jumping beans, very likely the result of bad data from bad crawls. Thinking you can "do" something about those sites jumping is pure folly.
Right now I see some complete goofball results in places, but I also see many less instances of the obvious errors when the serps showed "the worst of the bad" Dominic-esque stuff. A few days ago it seemed to me that Google had finally settled and gotten it right. Everywhere I looked, great quality. But then, in comes the bad data. Part of the "bad" is the fresh garbage which amazingly appears to be prefered (as in one "fresh" anchor text link from a guestbook is better than three older ones from Yahoo, Dmoz and a topical authority site). Still, some progress appears to be being made, even if the pace is terribly slow.
Overall, I'd say that the Esmeralda switchover went relatively well.
rather than comment on what i believe this means, i will leave it to others to determine that for themselves.
At the top of these serps are three sites whose titles are keyword-secondword, even though they have very little content on the topic. Anchor text, keyword in title and freshness, at this point those are the best SEO thingees to exploit. Who knows about tomorrow though...
some days...it has been nearly two weeks since the datacenters lined up.
we have also been jumping all over the map for the last couple months....one hour at #3, next hour gone, everytime we got fresh tags we were gone off the map... this would happen only to our main keyword and to our index page. Secondary keywords and interior pages had much less of an impact. About 1.5 weeks ago we decided to deoptimize our index page, removed the H1 tags and reduced density... Since then we have been off the roller coster and now that the ride started again we have only very minor movement on our #1 keyword and our idex page, moving from #3 to #5 with the July 02 and July 03 Fresh tags. I am totally convienced that deoptimizing for your #1 keyword as significantly helped. We made no other changes, did not add any new links, pages, etc. Anyone else experience this?
