The Google Specialist.....

...an endangered species?

[glengara]

It's certainly not the good old dependable G any more, but I can't quite figure out if it's deliberate or accidental.
My head says it's not working properly yet, and things will settle back down, my gut says it's added chaos theory to the algo to keep things in a continual state of flux.
The latter makes more sense, as due to the number of potentially relevant pages, searchers see little if any difference in results, while we are left in the dark as to what steps are worth taking.
Google 1 SEOs 0?

[Napoleon]

>> The added emphasis on "freshness" (for lack of better or more precise words) has surely made the serps less predictable and even - in an increasing number of cases - totally unusable for the queries i perform when i really need to know something now. <<

I have to agree with Claus on this.

Google has a difficult balance to strike. It has to find the right emphasis to place on new material.

I don't believe that it has this correctly set at present. 'New' is being overvalued, to the detriment of quality, and importantly, stability.

The effects of this on the search experience may be more profound than anyone in the company realizes. People's search habits are being affected, as are people's perception of what is happening. I think the stability angle is perhaps more important than is commonly understood, and will manifest itself in some very strange ways (IMHO).

Those knobs that GoogleGuy spoke of a few months ago, possibly need a small twist anti-clockwise in term sof fresh weighting.

[SlyOldDog]

Google's rise was largely due to the fact that it was so much better than the rest. If it fails to keep that margin, some users will inveitably drift away.

Besides - it's boring to use the same site all the time. Maybe Google should build a backup site ;)))

[Marcia]

I've been thinking about this thread, related to the topic as started in the title and description

The Google Specialist.....
...an endangered species?

Aside from other issues being touched on, if that's referring to people who are associated with optimizing sites for Google being an endangered species, imho that's far from the case and I don't see it happening for a long time to come.

The more confusing things get the more needs to be explained to the layman, and instead of being able to tell people what the regular crawling and update cycle is, it's now necessary to make them aware of the instability and fickle behavior. That means explaining that it takes 6 months time to work on a site, make adjustments and additions and maximize the results of efforts.

Gone is the one-shot deal where they expect an overnight or one-week miracle. Leave that for doing Inktomi PFI optimization, which was quite a good deal until AOL made the switch - it rocked. Now it's contingent on being restricted to those people willing to do an initial consultation with no further commitment or those willing to enter into a longer term arrangement.

Very confusing, and imho could easily have been intended to foil SEOs and make us appear less credible. All that takes is learning to shuffle the deck of cards we've now been handed.

The demand has never been higher than it is right now.

[jim_w]

>>The reality is that for any given search term, you could re-sort the top 50 results 50 different ways without the average searcher ever getting upset over relevance.<<

Wouldn’t it be interesting if G did that? Put in a random numbers generator and randomly selected a different algorithm to list the results.

>>User behaviour tends to show that many users are happier to return to a search engine and enter in the search term they used yesterday / last week to find a url they've forgotten than to use bookmarks... perhaps because this keeps the in-browser bookmark list relatively short<<

I’ve seen this a lot. The same IP, from a company, coming back from G after entering the same keywords. I think they do it to see if there are any new sites to look at.

>>The answers, in turn, are mostly found on good old static html pages that haven't updated, changed or moved one bit since the last time i saw them. For this reason (?) they are buried deep down in the serps if they're even there.<<

I also have a heck of a time trying to find old techno stuff to be used for references. I have to try to remember, verbatim, what text was on any given page so I can search with quotes.

[vitaplease]

If the top 10 results are still fluctuating after a couple of months, then non of the webpages in the top ten have any significant extra amount of quality external inbound links.

The Google Specialist.....
...an endangered species?

When I think of a specialist I think of a brain surgeon and what he/she needs to know to remove a tumour.

With so few variables to play with that carry any weight, I doubt anyone can really call him/herself a real SEO Google specialist. If you are better than your competitors at getting more qualilty, well motivated external inbound links, than thats 90% of what it takes to be a Google SEO "specialist".

One can research and specialise in the marginal ranking variations of increased Keyword density, Heading wording variations etc, yet these marginal improvements can be nihilated by a competitor buying or asking and getting one good extra inbound link.

[GranPops]

Back to the grindstone after a few days break, just to say brill post WG and Marcia.............let there be light!

[claus]

>> If the top 10 results are still fluctuating after a couple of months,

...few months from today? ..from may? ..from "the-fritz-thing-that-wasn't-really-an-update"? I'm not sure the serps will stabilize, or, rather i think that the algo is now getting (close to) stable and the serps are not and will not be (the algo is stable - running as intended - and the serps still fluctuate, as this fluctuation is built in due to the new weighting of freshness/on-page/whatever). All we need is a little spam-filtering on top to take care of the problems the new weights create.

>> significant extra amount of quality external inbound links.

I've had new pages take the #1 spot for a two-word keyphrase within the last forthnight. It's not a competitive search but all the others in the top of the 822 results have external inbounds as well as Tbar PR(*), these new pages have neither. They went straight to #1 after being indexed.

I have thought about this. As it's an uncompetitive search, the competing pages have little or none on-page optimization done. I think it's on-page factors beating inbounds.

/claus

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(*) Just checked again, one of the pages beaten has Tbar PR 5 and 7,149 inbounds (Alltheweb link:command - Google shows 129) - the new pages have a total of 9 inbounds, all on-site/internal (1xPR5, 1xPR4, 7xPR3)

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Added:
In terms of "Search Quality" the thing with the above pages is good for the searcher, as my pages are the most relevant for this keyphrase (a fair amount of research has been put into them,) so in this case Google is doing the right thing although it's not what we would expect from PR- and link-considerations alone.