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If you speak to all the best Internet Marketing Pros they tell you SEO is a waste of time longterm, everyone in the industry has lost their position at somepoint from what I gather - or am I wrong?
I want to hear from anyone who has had long term success with SEO say for 6 months or longer....
Winnipeg real estate
What on earth is wrong with that?
1 good site out of 10. Nice!
Here's number 4:
the fifth estate MacKinnon, Leslie ... World Report Maffin, Tod »Real Life Chronicles ... Marilyn » CBC News: CountryWide - Winnipeg ¦ CBC News ...
AltaVista, circa '96
Even a hammer is no good for hammering in nails if it's not used properly!
AltaVista, circa '96
My question still stands.
Name one other popular SE that spiders ALL web pages in the world for free.
ding! AlltheWeb
Try it on 'Winnipeg real estate' much better SERPS :)
ALLTheWeb;
Submitted sites will be scheduled for addition to AlltheWeb.com. We do not add all submitted URLs to our index, and we cannot make any predictions or guarantees about when or if they will appear.
You might also want to check your stats to see just how popular they are......not :o)
Dave
Google is now in a different league to any of the other SEs. AV is simply where Google was last month
Sounds like a recommendation for AV. :)
Google SEO longterm?
Who knows?
SEO actually helped Google provide good results for quite a while. Although a few spam sites appeared in the results, most SEO techniques were done to help bring more relevant pages to the top of the SERPs. (I know I wasn't attempting to optimize my blue widget pages to appear at the top of the SERPs for red thingamajigs.) Proper SEO techniques required study and hard work and rewarded good sites. This has been a tough balancing act for Google and the SEOs.
This latest algo change, in my opinion, has upset that delicate balance.
In Google's ideal world, no one would attempt to do any optimization, and Google would continue to modify their algorithm providing what they believe are better and better results.
In the real world, people are going to continue to do whatever they can to bring their sites to the top of the SERPs.
The only certainty is that things will continue to change.
To survive, you need to adapt to the changes.
Sid
As long as you have that mind-set you are going to lose "the game". Google never has and never will tell you "the rules" so you are playing blind-folded.
I hear you Dave.
The SERPS are the face of their algorithm though. The SERPS don't lie, the SERPS are like the cookie crumbs lying on the floor leading to the cookie thief:)
By the time you *think* you have figured out one of the rules, it will have changed.
I've seen clear glass windows which are less transparent than Google's ranking criteria;) It's only been a few days, give us some time;)
Dave
Submitted sites will be scheduled for addition to AlltheWeb.com. We do not add all submitted URLs to our index, and we cannot make any predictions or guarantees about when or if they will appear.
effectively the same as google,
no guaranteed inclusion
no guaranteed schedule
ALLTheWeb;
Submitted sites will be scheduled for addition to AlltheWeb.com. We do not add all submitted URLs to our index, and we cannot make any predictions or guarantees about when or if they will appear.
Ding!
Google
We do not add all submitted URLs to our index, and we cannot make any predictions or guarantees about when or if they will appear.
You might also want to check your stats to see just how popular they are......not
Who said they were popular?
Wake up Hawley :)
Beat me to it :)
I can only see a few out of the first 10 that are not relavent.
With respect (and I mean that) there are many more sites out there that are more relevant. Sites that are primarily about, oh I don't know, Winnipeg real estate?
I think Google needs to add a new search tip on top of their results.
Tip: if you actually want to find what you typed in the box, try adding -plplplplplpllp. Or quotes. Or both. If that doesn't work, make sure you use a 3 word search term and add -plplplplplpllp twice.
It just so happens thats some results being returned that are relative but lack in quality etc.
As in the article above I have started to use the -mt-tb.cgi after a keyword. I am finding the results far better and this is nothing to do with my own sites.
I have searched for hotels + destination and the top result was the weather site and then a page that had links to sites for the destination.
Its also seems that sites over 500 pages are not effected much however sites with only 200 pages or less are being thrown all over the place.
Again I keep saying this update is not finished and it will be weeks less then months before we see good results again.
SEO long term is very important as in structure of your site and content.
:)
Who said they were popular?
Ok, let me spoon feed you then. I asked the question;
<<Name one other popular SE that spiders ALL web pages in the world for free>>
You replied with: AlltheWeb so YOU are the one saying they are popular, not me. Good grief!
Now, while Google have basically the same no guaranteed inclusion text there is one major difference. Google WILL find your site so long as any other site links to it.
Georgeek, I think you should think before you type :o)
With respect (and I mean that) there are many more sites out there that are more relevant. Sites that are primarily about, oh I don't know, Winnipeg real estate?
The number 1 site was about just that. Also, whether the SERPs are relevant or not will vary from user to user. As I have already said, if you want more relavence then learn how to search with Google.
What worries me so much is many of you guys are in the business of SEO.
Dave
Presuming the update stays as is;
Fact - Google is not as relevant as it was (if anyone tells toy different they have a hidden agenda)
Fact - Users will realise
Fact - Users will go elsewhere
Fact - This is good news if you can ride the storm
At last all eggs will not be in one basket (traffic wise)
Would love to see Google roll this update back and then hear people swallow their words, but I fear that may not happen
R.I.P Google - You were good - very good
Would love to see Google roll this update back and then hear people swallow their words, but I fear that may not happen
Yeah right, Google would rather go out of business than admit the SERPs are not as good.
It would appear many here have been offered some good advise, yet most STILL insist on helping WW grow and complain to deaf ears rather than spending the energy on their own sites.
Oh and BTW as you say the SERPs are so bad for "winnepeg real estate" I take it you have the SERPs for this search term pre Florida?
Dave
[edited by: Dave_Hawley at 9:18 am (utc) on Nov. 25, 2003]
It would appear many here have been offered some good advise, yet most STILL insist on helping WW grow and complain to deaf ears rather than spending the energy on their own sites.
Hey we all need a break now and then eh?
It would appear many here have been offered some good advise, yet most STILL insist on helping WW grow and complain to deaf ears rather than spending the energy on their own sites.
You seem to be listening with interest Dave;) I guess not all ears are deaf;)
I know other Google people/employees read this thread too, maybe they laugh and disagree with the criticisms, but our feedback is being made known to Google and if they laugh at it then so be it. Oh well, that's our problem to deal with.
If your pages truly were not hurt during the florida update then that's great and I wish you congratulations, but it also means that you probably did not rank well for any POPULAR money terms in the first place either.
It's hard to understand the situation we are talking about if you were not in our category of search terms to begin with. Lots of people who never ranked well for POPULAR money words survived the florida-update without a scratch, since those people had little to lose anyway.
I mean, if you rank #1 for the KW phrase: "orange and blue polka dotted jumpsuits in miami" and you survived the florida update then great, but that's not real surprising to me.
Anyway - I think that the 'winnipeg real estate' search quoted and discussed several times above is a good example of what many people here are actually complaining about.
Do the searches - with and without the -wastheywereusedtobe
filter - and the new number one for 'winnipeg real estate' is now a lame javascript redirection to a flash site.
Personally - I think that if Google makes ONE change to improve the serps on update Godiva - the 'next' update - PLEASE make it by filtering all javascript redirections.
Potentially - there will be so much less collateral damage - yet so many more spammers/ crap lazy no-added-value-affiliates all flushed in one easy filter.
That would be a much better outcome for searchers - filtering out 'lazy seo' javascript redirections...
Abuse needs manual input. Blacklist the spammers instead of fiddling with an algo which blanket bombs innocent webmasters.
Like I said in my other post today :-
The term "SEO" in future will stand for "Sadly Everything's Over".
Lets over simplify for a second......
Users use google to find information. They started using Google as it was the best way to find information on the Net.
Now its not (Or at least the definition of what is relevant has changed)
Users will go to the search engine that is supplying the most relevant resaults.
I have made a "floridaquality" spam/quality report, but as someone eluded to earlier I don't know I'm doing the work for Google?
I don't get GoogleGuy sending me a "Site Report" on the things I need to change on my site!
G is trying to inspect quality into the results. It cannot be done. It MUST be designed in. A quote from a Ph.D.
Can't tell you how many times I have seen code get really FUBAR'ed, (fouled up beyond all repair) G is really looking like a bunch of amateurs to me.
Without reliable results Google will soon join the ranks of Infoseek.
I am positive Google are of the view that a few moaning webmasters after an update is something normal. Don't be so sure boys. There's always somebody more than willing to take your place.
History is a great teacher, and Google should start to look at the engines which are no longer with us, and WHY they are no longer with us.
firstly my target keywords generally generate about 6 million results so fairly competitive. prior to florida my site ranked 1st or 2nd for my 2 term search phrase, following florida it still does well, so why am i posting?
i'm posting because the serps look really poor now, as mentioned i ranked 2nd for 'blue widgets' with other competing uk sites on the first page. now i rank 10th with the other uk sites outside of the top 100! since my 'blue widgets' are only relevant to uk residents i should be over the moon since uk searchers won't find the competition but somehow i'm sad that google has made the serps american dominated and all of the other uk sites have disappeared.
even for the search 'blue widgets uk' the opposition has vanished, mainly replaced by business directories.
in the short term i am winning but as an advocate of google i'm worried that poor quality results will drive searchers away from them.
I have been looking at this for days, and I can see no pattern. It almost appears that google is scoring sites and placing sites with near identical scores into a bin
For example google will choose sites that score 95-100 based on their algorithm, and choose a mixture of commercial and informational sites and dump them into a bin. There may be a hundred sites in that bin, but google may only choose 5 of them. The same process is then repeated for 90-95 scores and so on.
Im just using this as an example, but using any method that intoduces controlled pseudo-randomness in combinations with bining will blow SEO out of the water.
If HHTP_REFERER = Google then
have-you tried-this-engine-pop-up.asp
End IF
Anyway, from what I've seen, Google may have been trying to target SEO'd pages that were optimized for relevant content, but is so doing, adversely effected rankings for all sorts of pages with very strong relevancy.
The result is a lot of SERPs have a variety of not-quite-it to completely-unrelevant sites included in the top listings, with a very noticable loss of overall search quality.
Sites with high relevancy and exact phrase matching are being replaced by sites with keywords sprinkled randomly in the body.
You do a search for pretty blue widgets, and you get a site for real estate in blue county.
Users are understandably confused and a bit miffed.
The idea that people need to be "trained" to change how they do their searches is total crap. Google exists to serve the surfers, not the other way around.
It used to be standard advise to put good content that was strongly relevant to your target audience. Now I see GG advising people to add random semi-unrelated pages to your sites?
I did take a look at some recent logs as suggested. I noticed a few things -
* we're getting a large # of hits from other SEs as well, especially MSN
* many of the searches people are finding us on via Google are not relevant to our site. (the random sprinkled keyword thing) It's nice to know we are top-10 for things we aren't even relevant for, but I'm sure it's got to be p*'ing-off some surfers!
* the hits we are getting from other SEs are much more relevant to our site (particularly from MSN and ASK)
Given what saw, and M$'s expressed desire to take-over the SE marketplace, maybe Google should refrain from telling people to look at their logs until the referrals make more sense?
I am particularly concerned that a select few of the senior folks here have taken a "rose colored glasses" approach to this whole situation. I am well aware that there is always some crying by the newbies whenever there is an update, but you also need to recognize when something is actually amiss. The very length of the update thread (including by senior and experienced SEOs) should be a clue.
Those who have been around a few years may remember another time Google had a "problem". They had just gotten some bad press about the whole "Googlebombing" thing, and somebody decided to turn the knob WAY the other way, resulting in an update where backlink pages were at the top of the SERPs! (i.e. - your heavily-linked page about "widgets" dropped out of site, replaced by top-ranked unrelated sites linking to you instead!)
People were screaming bloody murder. Google never admitted that anything was wrong. But on the next update, all the SERPs mysteriously changed back to normal. Another experiment gone horribly wrong.
I dearly love Google as an SE, and promoted it to others back when no one had hear of them. But if they want to continue their success, they need to wake up and smell the coffee on this one, or suddenly one day soon we'll all realize that 'ol Bill took over another market, and Google going the same way as Netscape and RealNetworks.
You mean something like this? -
<%
If InStr(UCase(Request.ServerVariables("HTTP_REFERER")),"GOOGLE") > 0 then
response.write("<SCRIPT>")
response.write("NewWin = window.open('GoogleSux.asp','_blank');")
response.write("</SCRIPT>")
End If
%>
Haven't tested this, BTW
[edited by: aspdesigner at 2:02 pm (utc) on Nov. 25, 2003]
Away from the topic of being 1st or 100th in Google
Using the
Keyword keyword -mt-tb.cgi
query in the search box of Google actually cleans the results.
Now I am not going to go on about rankings and changes of the positions but what i will say is this
At the moment I get nothing put links to internal pages
like this
../dir/page.htm
.../dir/another_page.htm
After using the magic -mt-tb.cgi
the results appear nice and clean
www,mysite.com/
www,anothersite.com/
I would also point out that those using Sponsor Listings at the top and on the side don't always appear.
On one search I had to Sponsor listings at the top the same search a few seconds later and they were gone.
So I would not say that its just rankings and being 100th is the only thing wrong its generally across the whole system.
I still think this update is yet to be completed :)
