Update Florida - Nov 2003 Google Update Part 2

[GoogleGuy]

Continued from part 1: [webmasterworld.com...]

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I stopped by several times yesterday, but it seemed like people were into the analysis stage already. caveman, this update didn't add any penalties for hyphenated domains, so that's not a factor. Just a reminder that people with specific feedback (good or bad) can send it to webmaster [at] google.com with the keyword "floridaupdate" somewhere in the email. I've mentioned that a few times, but as more than one person has pointed out, it can take 2-3 hours to read the whole thread from beginning to end. :)

[HayMeadows]

waiting till the update is complete before showing results to the public.

Amen DazzlinDonna. And Amen means "So Be It". I would bet big money that this is the last time we see this happen! This, I believe, is the one more update that GoogleGuy talked about at Esmeralda. We were waiting for this and expecting it. And thankfully it sounds like its only going to take 3-5 days from start to finish this time.

Does Google know what they are doing, you bet. They are going to be presenting the best results they have ever had. We will be praising Google for killing the spammers just before Christmas. Spammers will be forced to buy Adwords in 1-2 weeks for the biggest shopping day of the year - and hopefully the rest of us, will outbid them :-)

[edited by: HayMeadows at 6:14 pm (utc) on Nov. 17, 2003]

[deanril]

I would be willing to bet after the money Google makes this year we will see the exact same thing again this time next year.

As far as Google presentinbg the best search results, they promissed that after dominic? Were they the best? No, you have to remember google is company, a company must make money, you or I are not their friends, we make them -money.

[edited by: deanril at 6:16 pm (utc) on Nov. 17, 2003]

[sd2001]

~ Spammers will be forced to buy Adwords in 1-2 weeks for the biggest shopping day of the year - and hopefully the rest of us, will outbid them ~

Except one big issue - No traffic = Less cashflow.

If more people have to use Adwords then it will cost more to be seen as more people are using it its a no win situation.

[edited by: sd2001 at 6:19 pm (utc) on Nov. 17, 2003]

[deanril]

Except one big issue - No traffic = Less cashflow.
If more people have to use Adwords then it will cost more to be seen as more people are using it its a no win situation.

I lost you here? More adwords is bad for Google? So more money in your pocket is bad for you, but for me thats a good thing!

[killipso]

Being a novice website person would someone give me a example of a keyword link?

I am really confused as I read over google guidelines again and saw no mention of linking to a certain text was wrong.
I made sure my sight did not have anything the guidelines said not to have.

On my front page I have as a example : [Welcome to blah blah .. we have informative [blue widget articles]
[blue widgets] being hyperlinked to the actual page.

Also is it wrong to name the page /blue-widget.html?
If so what would you name it?
I thought revlancy was a good thing?

I did this on my site because I read everyday on this forum and other informative websites about ways the spiders are working and whats recommended.
Ive been looking at my site for 2 days now trying to figure out what is wrong. It didnt vanish all together - Matter a fact its doing better then before but my theres 2 areas it was #1 and number 4 that were most important and they are gone now. I am really really confused as how can I be penalized for 2 keywords and not for 30 others?

I am stuck as if I redo or change things it might upset what I have. Its really difficult as there are no answers any where to this kind of a problem. I think if someone that has been in this biz for years had the knowledge and could have a website that kept up to date on google and actually show a correct struture of a website for us new guys it would be a high traffic site.
Thanks,
Dan

[sd2001]

The more people using AdWords the more it will cost to be seen in the results, the traffic is not worth the outlay in most cases.

[deanril]

I dont know I still dont get what your saying.

I see it this way.

November 14th google has 300million adwords customers bringing in 200 million dollars dailly.

Novemeber 25th Google has 600 million Adwords customers bringing in 500 million dollars dailly.

This is bad for google? In what way?

How did it jump to 500 million yet the cutomers only doubled? Because of the bidding..........

[drdsl2000]

Hey everybody relax. Do you remember who built Google? I do. "I" helped build Google's popularity and so did you. We told all my friends and co-workers, etc.

Webmasters and IT Geeks! We found Google and promoted it to the regular folk. Only through word of mouth did Google become known. Yes, they are a great search engine, but
they wouldn't have come this far with out the Geeks!

Well guess what? Google will succeed only if they are fair to webmasters/seo professionals, which I believe they have been so far.

If they do unethical things, We Geeks will be the first to
inform the General public about it.

If they upset enough webmasters, then we will all find another search engine to praise and promote just like we did for Google. It might even be Yahoo again :)

With Great Power comes Great Responsibility!

CS

[lasko]

Why would the number of adwords increase?

Those who went down will use adwords, those who went up wont use adwords.

I think this topic is a little far fetched seen as the update hasn't finished (I hope)

:)

[synergy]

killipso:

Welcome to Webmaster World!

I don't think you should do any major changes to your site until this update settles down.

Patience is virtue. I have faith that those of us that have done the right thing will be placed back to where we should be.

[edited by: synergy at 6:35 pm (utc) on Nov. 17, 2003]

[PhilC]

HayMeadows. Spam is still all over the results so what do mean about killing the spammers just before Christmas?

Parts of the changes may have something to do with spam, but only in part, and they are not terrifically effective. I am sure that the biggest change is to do with links and multiple/generic links in particular. We've all noticed a massive absence of index (home) pages in the serps, but some domain URLs have gone too, and the occassional index page is listed. So what is it about index pages? They are linked to from almiost everywhere in most sites - and they are very often linked to using the filename instead of the domain URL. Also, they are usually linked to using identical link text. I feel that those two things have been taken into account in this update.

Google bases its relevancy on votes for pages by pages (links and link text), but they had no desire for generic links and certain multiple links to come into the reckoning. For instance, links in sig lines in forums are not genuine votes, and are not desirable for Google's relevancy scheme. Generic links to home pages are not genuine votes either, etc. etc.

I feel sure that the main changes in this update are an attempt at dealing with those generic and indentical links. That's my current theory :)

[edited by: PhilC at 6:37 pm (utc) on Nov. 17, 2003]

[optimist]

Someone posted about domains with hyphens being considered for penalization. on Page 47,

Was this stated by Google or anyone from Google? What makes anyone think this?

[edited by: optimist at 6:34 pm (utc) on Nov. 17, 2003]

[deanril]

yeah drdsl2000 but holding 80% of all searches they dont care how they got there, justhow much can be made now. You must remember from that time(when google was first made) till now, there is a whole new outlook on business.

How many businesses will go out of business? And do you really think google cares? Common, welcome to the world of big business!

[Tropical Island]

killipso said:

Also is it wrong to name the page /blue-widget.html?
If so what would you name it?
I thought revlancy was a good thing?

Of course there is nothing wrong with that!

Most web sites are built that way. Most also have links from the text in their copy to the correct pages.

When I start reading that this is wrong or that is wrong I ask myself "what is reasonable?"

It would be totally unreasonable to penalize millions of websites for doing this as it is a natural process. Most people creating websites are not reading WW and have no idea that this is even considered wrong by a few posters here.

I, for one, just don't believe it and would caution anyone that making changes at this moment if you know you are "white hat" would not be the smartest move. There are too many much more serious examples of 'black hatting" going on to worry too much about this issue.

[dazzlindonna]

PhilC,

you said, "Generic links to home pages are not genuine votes either". i don't understand what you mean. why would a link to my home page not be a genuine link?
---
optimist,

googleguy has said they have NOT punished domains with hyphens in them in this update.

[edited by: dazzlindonna at 6:38 pm (utc) on Nov. 17, 2003]

[willybfriendly]

I have been doing my best to mkake sense of this update, but like others can find no pattern to the drastic changes seen in my niche.

What I have not seen discussed is the relationship between the fact that the Directory was recently updated. I am seeing some data suggesting that placement in the directory has effected the swings. Anyone else seeing this?

WBF

[lasko]

Keywords in domain names I believe will not get a penalization as this is not really logical at all, however keywords in the url like

/keyword-keyword/more-keywordstuffing/yet-another-keyword

would be a very black hat tatic.

pure keyword-keyword.com wont.

[synergy]

What I have not seen discussed is the relationship between the fact that the Directory was recently updated. I am seeing some data suggesting that placement in the directory has effected the swings. Anyone else seeing this?

I've tried bringing this topic up several times in this thread and it was by-passed.

My recent addition to the DMOZ directory has been added to the G directory in some datacenters. Weired thing is.. the directory is showing a PR7 next to my listing when my site actually has a PR6, more recently a PR5.

[edited by: synergy at 6:44 pm (utc) on Nov. 17, 2003]

[sd2001]

We have never moved more that 2 places before, but an editor on DMOZ decided our UK site was a USA one and deleted it, Google updated there version not including our site, we are now back on DMOZ as it was an error on their part, but Google no.

[PhilC]

dazzlindonna. I meant that Google's relevancy system is based on votes by pages for other pages. If a page votes for another page by linking to it, then the receiving must be important in the voting page's eyes.

Generic internal links to home pages are not votes in the same way - they are just a way of getting to the front of the site again. So I'm suggesting the Google doesn't want to count such generic links as proper votes, and that they have tried to deal with it in this update. But it's just my theory. It would account for the disappearance of so many index (home) pages and a few domain URLs too. And it may also account for what people are reporting regarding link text.

[deanril]

Makes some sense Lasko my newer site is currently blowing my old site away, and the old site has no keywords in the url, but new one(after learning here) has www.Keyword-Keyword2.com ..... I have also noticed one of my long term cloaking competition sites is gone.....

[dazzlindonna]

ah, i see... you meant INTERNAL links to the home page are generic and may not count as much. ok, i can understand that. i don't think though, that that would cause so many index pages to fall by the wayside. i know my site has many more EXTERNAL links to the home page than INTERNAL links, so although this might be one factor, i doubt it is the only/main factor.

[wanna_learn]

Spammers will be Spammers!
they will never go for Adwords...as they are more innovative in finding the way to spam Google.

Google is still not able to catch hold of most popular- visible- known spam techniques till now....how it is suuposed to put an end to upcoming spam?

Guys!
I see a big debate over "Google should switch to evaluate the site most on content then anything else".

[HayMeadows]

PhilC,

By no means do I think these results are spam free. Heck no, I was talking about the results we will see in 24-48 hours - I'm very optimistic we will see the best results we have ever seen from any search engine.

I'm signing off the Update thread, until we can have the serious algo thread :-)

Dan

[deanril]

-GV Is looking pretty good right now for me, maybe have a look see for your sites.

[PhilC]

HayMeadows. Ok, I understand you now. I don't believe it will happen in the next few days because there's no sign of it happening yet, but you never know.

[Umbra]

What I have not seen discussed is the relationship between the fact that the Directory was recently updated. I am seeing some data suggesting that placement in the directory has effected the swings. Anyone else seeing this?

I don't see any relationship. I have a domain which moved up in the directory; however, the same site has vanished from the SERPs for the main keywords.

[killipso]

Thanks for the reply Tropical,
Now I don't know what it could be.
GG mentioned slight data would be added.
I don't think this is gonna resolve what ever happened.
I'm just trying to figure out what the solution could be and a course of action now - so that when the update is complete I am ready to go and improve my website.
If I did something wrong then I can live with the penalty.
Thats life live and learn.
It's the not knowing that scares me and not having the resources to find out the reasons why.
Think all I can do is make a google cow out of gold and do some worshipping. :)
Ill ask again if anyone who has a vast knowledge of websites could take a peek at my first 2 pages and comment on anything It would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
Dan

[sd2001]

From what I've seen and read any kind of update or movement in the directory and the sites go AWOL.

[TheDave]

I think PhilC is right on the money, that G is trying to demote generic links back to the home page. I can't be bothered to look, but I bet you'll find a lot of sites that remain in the index use "Home" as their link home, and not keywords. What annoys me is that before I started using keywords to link home (ie I used "Home") I was ranking ok for the term (nothing special, but ok) now I'm just totally off the map. Lucky I built this web so I only have to change it in 1 spot! ;) Back to "home" text for now, I don't see things changing.