Latest google changes are bringing back old problems

Just got knocked out of #2 position by 2 junk ads

[lgn]

Well things finally changed after 6 months and not for the better.

I don't mind getting knocked down by a competitor,
but when you get surplanted by a book company with the same name as a river which resides mostly in brazil, I got to wonder. And when they take up two top spots, then that really gets me cranked up.

When people are searching for merchandise, they don't ussually want to buy a book on buying that merchandise.

I think Google can do better. I wish they would fix their filter for good so it stops listing this company unless the search term is for "book on widgets" or something similiar. (ie reporting relevent content for a relevent search term)

[Marcia]

>>they take up two top spots, then that really gets me cranked up.

What can really get us cranked up is, how those pages are getting into the top spots? Is it anchor text, high PR, on-page factors? Is there some kind of redirection going on?

How'd they get to be ranking so high?

[claus]

>> Is it anchor text

I'd reverse the two first words and add affiliates ;)

[Lightfoot]

Claus,

I concurr - what a mess!

[gibbon]

Ign, well I bet if I had 39,000 backlinks and PR8-9 I would be able to give your rankings a run for their money ;)

Ive had a few runins with the big A for certain keywords, but luckily they havent gone into most of my areas as yet ... prob only a matter of time though.

[seofreak]

i know the pain. for my main keyword my competitor gets the 1st spots, the 3rd spot is again spaced out by on it's sub-domains, 4th spot by a doorway / fake 100 pages some content site, 5th a new domain but came content as the 1st and 2nd spot site, 6th is mine. I've submitted several reports about the site but no help from google yet :(

[ap_Rhys]

How'd they get to be ranking so high?

There's a thread on Big A's associate discussion board about this. It has been pointed out that Big B - a well-known bricks and mortar competitor - has a similar PR, similar content and yet doesn't appear anywhere near the top SERPS on most keywords dominated by Big A.

Big A started taking over the top spots about the time when they got into bed with Google for content Adwords. Some affiliates think that the sleeping arrangements have gone a lot further.

[Iguana]

Forget Amazon main page and overall PR and examine individual pages. If I select a recent album I get 316 backlinks to it - mainly from affiliates. If I had a few thousand pages with 300+ backlinks I could pack in the day job.

The affiliates link to a certain URL (www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/) but the page that shows up with the credit in Google is a different (www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/?v=glance). Now these pages are not the same and it's not a redirect when you click through. How does a link to one URL get translated to boosting a different URL with different content? I suspect cloaking.

Is it a coincidence that this all happened shortly after Google and Amazon formed an alliance? But no great conspiracy theory is needed and no change of the algo on Google's part - the Google engineers just need to show Amazon how to cloak an affiliate link for Googlebot to lead to the browse page for the album. It's not really unfair - why shouldn't those affiliate links count towards the main Amazon page for that product.

That's my observation and mild conspiracy theory - anyone thnk it justifies a Google spam report?

[lgn]

I suspect that consumers will just begin to
subconsiously ignore the A* ads, and will skip
over them, if they flood the top spots with this
type of tactic. I will keep an eye on my weblogs
to see the effect on traffic between:

#1 real competitor
#2 A* spam
#3 A* spam
#4 you

and

#1 real competitor
#2 real competitor
#3 real competitor
#4 you