Forum Moderators: open
Good to here all is well for you. However, as you may have surmised from your reading here, all is not well for everyone.
In fact many people took a hit that will take some time to recover from, and have no idea what they did to get pummeled so hard.
So, with your permission, people will continue to ask questions, point out issues, try to figure out what's going on and generally vent their frustration.
Oh yeah... something positive to say about the update... Adwords profits should go up heading into Christmas, as this update happened with impeccable timing...
Make that "hear" not "here".... brain frying....
Hope you are right, since (as many have said), as long as the keywords are not overused in the URL string then the format is logical and should not hurt you.
I haven't ruled out the issue however, because *if* it exists, I don't think it exists in a vacuum. It would probably exist in conjunction with other keyword-related factors. So if yours is a generally clean site, as I'm sure it is, then perhaps there are simply not any other factors that, combined with your URL string, set off the filter.
If on the other hand, where overuse of keywords in file names is found to co-exist with other heavy-handed keyword practices, that just *might* send one's page into the depths.
Not saying it's so, just that I see some evidence of it and can't rule it out yet. My hope is that it's non-issue, and that this will all set itself right soon. There are enough credible examples in here that one would expect G to be looking at this closely, as they always do in the midst of big changes.
BTW, congratulations on running a site that's pretty clean, or clean enough, anyway...
;-)
ps...seems we're still in the "GG goes quiet" stage...
Loads of peeps loved that funny WMD page. And they linked to it, probably using the phrase.
And in an annoying way, it's right that it should still be there because, it's probably the funny page that most people now searching on that phrase are hoping to find.
Stupid and useless stuff can be popular! That's the beauty of democracy folks.
a trivial point I know. Good luck to all who are worrying
Utter rubbish. Why is a humorous page put up by what I presume was someone who thought the US president lied to wage war about "weapons of mass destruction" not relevant to a search for that term? What would be cheating is if a porn site with no relevant content to the search phrase scammed their way to the top. This site didn't cheat. People linked to it because they agreed with it (or, at least found it funny.) That page is PR7, and has an ODP listing to boot in Society > Issues > Warfare and Conflict > Specific Conflicts > Iraq > Humor. I'd accuse Google of political censorship if they removed that page.
Get your nose out of your own site and you won't end up wasting your time thinking about nonsense. Well-organized site.com/directory/keyword.html sites are doing fine all over the place. The tunnelvision people have around here can be staggering sometimes.
All those little bells and whistles that are mildly user-friendly and have zero negatives, like naming directories /word/ instead of /x124/, are still valued and doing just fine all over the place. The same with targeted anchor text, H1 tags and anything else you can name.
When dom happened my index page disappeared for months with no apparent reason, but eventually it reclaimed it's position. Hopefully this is what will occur this time.
I agree. This is superstitious thinking. "My site dropped, so it must be the site.com/directory/keyword.html URL that is responsible." NO, it could be something else.
I havent see this happening earlier.
**** that page which was way behind mine has been appended with me?
I have quite a bid of observational eveidence that suggets "over-optimization" could be very real... unless of course something changes...
I would be interested in hearing your opinion....
Technically, you are both just pages on the geocities.com site. This is correct.
The creative/productive fun of information exchange is becoming a frustrating waste of time and effort to just keep up with the rules. This is true throughout society, not just with this Google update.
It seems that "search engine optimization" has come to mean trickery and manipulation instead of good design to facilitate information exchange which is what the internet was created for.
It is to every search engine's benefit to give the searcher what they are searching for - that is THE PURPOSE.
Google has done an admirable job of that and I'm sure wants to continue to do that. I'm sure they go back and check search results to see if they themselves can find what they are searching for - I'm sure they don't want to get a bad rap right before the busiest time of year. I'm sure it will get fixed. I'm also sure their timing was lousy and agree 100% that it should have been tested privately.
Sorry for the sermon.
Hmm, 500 new postings in this thread in the last 20 hours since i last visited. I'll post this now without reading any of them, as it will take three hours to get back to here, by which time at least another 70 will have been added.
.
Site online in March, added to ODP in May, shows Google Category link in Google SERPs in August (but category not actually in Google Directory yet) .
Site added to Google Directory in November (on the 2nd), and today, for the very first time (in -zu and -va only) the site shows the ODP backlink at last.
Site has shown backlinks as 2 internal pages and only one external page for the last 6 months. Now it shows as 4 backlinks. However, using a URL fragment as the search term reveals that there are really about 25 backlinks!
Although -zu and -va now show updated backlinks for this site, I note that for another site (online for several years) the reported backlinks have gone down from 20 to 17 (no change of position yet though).
Google uk is now more important the google.ca though .ca has more links
Could Googleguy just confirm when the update is done so I can start panicking?
Amen. I am seeing many unprofessional sites with little or no content above me.
At least let us know! :(
i think uk sites are doing better with this update
Definately. I see that as well. Also, lots of sites with "?" from Japan, etc that are not in English and not translated.
KW1 KW2 KW3 used to be #1 now #280 out of 75,500
New relatively unrelated keyword:
KW1 KW2 #1 on UK & COM out of 1,930,000
Did massive amounts of index pages completely drop out of the picture like we're experiencing now with Update Florida? Or, did pages become restored with some reasonable semblence of order relatively quickly?
[edited by: optimist at 10:26 pm (utc) on Nov. 18, 2003]
My take: The update is not finished.
SERP results for some domains I watch closely are rock solid.
Serps for others, completely skewed. These are serps and domains using the exact same site architecture methods.
- Jason
And there are millions that continue to show good results. Why doesn't that make you stop and think for a second?
"Over-optimization" is such a broad word that it isn't very helpful. Basically every active thing a webmaster does is optimizing. Google appreciates and justifiably rewards good/sensible/natural/truthful optimization, like making site maps, titling pages well, etc.
What Google has done here for sure is one thing: devalued the importance of anchor text. That isn't a penalty of any sort, and it is very plainly a sensible thing, since anchor text is only a very trivial thing when it comes to actual usefulness of a page. No longer are the SERPs near exact duplicates of the allinanchor: search. But anchor text is still tremendously important, probably still the #1 thing.
Google makes mistakes. People would do well to look back at the Dominic and Esmerelda mess. Many folks denied the obvious for awhile. Many nellies were running off changing headers and imagining phantoms. Google had a problem with its data. Google Guy even solicited feedback here. They very slowly recovered. Obviously different things may be effecting different people, but a lot folks should be thinking that mistakes will be fixed rather than hare-brained poppycock that runs completely counter to the high rankings for thousands and millions of websites.
There is only one difference 1 week before the update we lost our DMOZ listing due to an editors error, this was restored on the day of the florida update, though it still doesn't show in Googles directory.
Views on this one anyone?
