My Positive Esmerelda Experience

I just thought it would be fun to post about being HAPPY with Esmerelda

[mtaco]

I just thought it would be fun to post because I have pretty much had only positive experiences with Esmerelda and I'm tired of reading all the hand wringing.

Of course, this has nothing to do with Google, rather it's because my website switched from being part of the "dark web" to being indexable after I changed our url strategy to remove? based links. No magic really, I change our links after being generated from:

../wa/pagename?param1=blah&param2=blah2

to

../ps/pagename/param1=blah/param2=blah

and then reverse the change before they get processed.

So prior to Esmerelda I had 338 pages in Google out of 160,000 (we have about 10 pages per stock for 15,000 stocks, so do the math). I had a PR of 6 for the home page, but it wasn't doing me any good.

Just prior to Esmerelda, Google started going much deeper into our site, picking up about 8,000 pages. So when Esmerelda when live, 8,0000 pages got added. Since then, Google has added about 500 more pages each week. www-fi is reporting 10,800 pages in Google this morning. The PR for the home page dropped to 5, but PR seems to be less important compared to relevancy I've been finding.

So while we don't show up for any of our important keywords, we do show up in many general stock searches, often on the first page. We don't get a lot of clicks that way, but we do get some. We get a lot more from our AdWords.

Meanwhile, as far as backlinks go, we added a kind of viral feature to our site where people can have a "public" page that lets them post links into their account.

Our members love this, and have been using this a lot it turns out. Google hasn't found any of these yet since the timing didn't quite jive with Esmerelda, I expect to do well in the next update.

So the moral of the story:

1. Don't be dark.

2. Content is king.

Pierce

[edited by: WebGuerrilla at 7:01 pm (utc) on July 7, 2003]
[edit reason] Removed Specifics [/edit]

[Chndru]

I feel the term "content" is over-abused. Anyone care to give a precise definition of "content" in the context of a website?

[JonR28]

Content is something people would want to go to your site for. People don't want to go see a bunch of happy graphics... they want see content. For instance, this forum has alot of great content for webmasters.

[g1smd]

Content is the actual words on your site. Search engines index all of those words.

Searchers use words to tell the search engine what they are looking for. Search engines then list sites that use all of those words on their site.

If your site doesn't use all of those words you will not be in that list. If your site does use all of the words then you will be in that list -- somewhere. Exactly where will depend on just how you have used those words; and that is one of the secrets to designing good web pages.

More: [webmasterworld.com...]

[kmtell]

My experiences have been positive as well. Though, the lesson I've learned is that changes to my site have no bearing on Google rankings (granted, our site is probably one of the best in our industry in terms of content and design). We were #10 for a hot 2 word key phrase and after the last update we were kicked back to #70. Now, we're back up at #8. We've made 0 changes to the site. So, I don't know what happened, but we're happy happy happy!

[g1smd]

Two sites:

One at #1 for most of the last three and a half months. Unstable in the first 6 weeks, then solid #1 all the way (except for the odd two day periods where it dropped to #64 once a week or so -- the last of these was over a month ago). Solid #1 all the time for the last month.

Other site appeared in listings a month ago and has been #1 for 24/7 since then. I'm just not seeing these roller-coaster ride SERPs that others complain about.

[Jakpot]

People don't want to go see a bunch of happy graphics... they want see content.

Please provide reference(s) to the results of marketing research on what people want to see.
Thanks

[Hawkgirl]

I shot to #1 for a decent keyword I've never had cross into the top 5.

I also crept up in a few other search terms. So nothing really exciting to report, but nothing dreadful, either.

Now if I can just do a little mass hypnosis and get all of my potential customers to start using that search phrase ...

[Danilo]

I verified that working on content to be first in Google is the best way to obtain good results.
First of all I look for good keywords on which I realize all the content of the site.
Working on this way, a site of mine is first in Google.it with "appunti web marketing". The second one is its b-blog. :-)

The content is the king.

[Marketing Guy]

>Please provide reference(s) to the results of marketing research on what people want to see.
Thanks

This forum offers a large sample of qualitive data from webmasters around world, the majority of whom testify that content = traffic.

It is up to the webmaster of the site to convert that traffic into sales.

The fact that many of the webmasters here are running successful businesses based on the theory that content is king, shows that it has some merit.

But naturally, any old content wont do. No point attracting visitors looking for cars if you're selling waffle ovens.

Perhaps the generic term "content" is over used, but I believe it refers to "relevant, useful content" on most occaisons.

Scott :)

[Luke_SR]

" So while we don't show up for any of our important keywords, we do show up in many general stock searches, often on the first page. We don't get a lot of clicks that way, but we do get some. We get a lot more from our AdWords."

Since you lost position on the better keywords and you are not getting much traffic from the other keywords, I can't see why you would compromize and "be happy" with google.
Google has only one thing going for it and it's the stregth of its brand name. They are known to provide good results. Google seprated itself from the rest of what was "commodities engines" by being better.
Google was a search engine site and now it's more of an advertising agency. I suspect that one way for them to get better advertising dollars, as you indicated, ss to provide better experience in Adwords rather then better search engine results.
In my eyes, the google brand name is in trouble. They are now just another commodity in a large market of search engines.