Forum Moderators: open
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....
Hard to argue with that. I agree it's a problem and I hope the "big brains" at Google can figure it out. I'd hate to see this ground leveler simply become another business catering to big business....
Another problem I see. If you take the travel industry as an example... there are really only a couple of big players. These guys own just about every affiliate maketing program and they book zillions of $ for the businesses they represent.... If Google were to "thin the affiliates out" in the travel market, what repercussions would that reap...?
How about other manufacturers and distributers. These guys are making a pile of cash from the web... probably huge sums from affiliate programs as well... what do you suppose the ripple effect would be if 20% or 30% of the sites selling their products simply went away?
Anyways, my home page dropped from #2 to infinity for my popular two keyword phases.
I wonder if google is taking other pages in account when calculating its score for displaying results for 2 word keywords.
Can anybody have a dynamic site with only a home page spidered in google that has not dropped in the rankings.
Spot on.
This is not a case of a few seo types hitting filters, this is a case of .... rising to the top.
It is also a window of oportunity...
I'm sure there are a few AdWords accounts that have been reactivated, but I'm not sure it was Gs intent with this update. After all there are still only 10 spots on page 1. If they reduced this to 8 then you may have a point.
I do have to say that I am showing up at the top of a wider range of searches than I was before. I don't know why, but I'm not complaining.
We are strong Adwords clients both before and after Florida. I do not believe that this mess has anything to do with that.
We need to be focussing on what changes are necessary in our sites to bring the serps back to relavancy.
If we could just figure out why our sites return with the
-foofoo trick. What is it that triggers the "filter"?
Crickey... I thought we were WAY past that.
"GG, just as a general pointer your user support guys & gals would be wise to run some searches at the various country specific Google's. It seems the relative lack of web pages magnify's the quality problem, makes it much easier to see."
You must know how much me and NFFC love each other, but again, I really hate to say it, but he's right.
If Google can't see this by now... you guys really do have REAL problems.
GG: Sadly, I think your superiors already know this, and frankly it really makes me weep. The heritage of what you built deserves MUCH better than this type of sell out.
You guys painted a genuine masterpiece and now have scribbled all over it like a kid. Someone there needs to stand up and tell it like it is. A fantastic technical achievement being torn apart.
Yes maybe it's emotional (I always have been, sorry), but I really admired what you had and how you stood against short term buy in, to produce something built on genuine effort and value. Brilliant.
Now someone there has reversed it. I'll never buy into that... and I guarantee it will be your achiles heel. There's still time.
[edited by: Napoleon at 9:52 pm (utc) on Nov. 24, 2003]
That 'inkjet cartridge' example actually yields a link farm particpant as the number one result. 'phentermine' shows a guestbook and blog spammer. #2 for 'canada pharmacy' is a keyword stuffer and blog spammer.
At least the results returned are relevant.
I think I understand that people are saying that the new algorhythm favors more specific searching over general searching.
IE 4 word search will bring up more specific listings, but a 2 word search will likely be a broad match that brings up authority type high PR sites.
But my index page has been optimized for some time now for
KEYWORD1 KEYWORD2 KEYWORD3 KEYWORD4
and had been #1 for a long time.
Since Florida it has spent most of the time at #189.
If there is no "penalty" as GG stated, shouldn't I have just held my rank considering it is such a specific search.
Or am I misunderstanding what people are saying?
Thanks for any advice.
So the thing is that your site WAS optimised, but now might not be.
[edited by: frup at 11:45 pm (utc) on Nov. 24, 2003]
I think there is widespread denial about the future of search on the Internet, and its centalization around big/trusted/successful players. We have people here complaining that they lost their top ten placement for two million or more word searches. Think of that. Millions of sites could be ranked in the top ten. Google somehow manages to rank sites well (choose your word) some/most/alot of the time. This despite an ever increasing amount of pure crap that is put up online for anything that might possibly earn income, plus ever increasing non-crap that is put up also trying to get a buck.
There are only ten sites in the top ten. As has been said before, if you are selling a widget, and millions of others are selling a widget, to think that you should have a ranking in the top 1000 even is hard to justify. Google doesn't rank widget selling sites based on price, or customer service, or pretty pages.
Google SEO in the longterm has to be built on a foundation of information. That's what people want. Price and ability to order online and how to do it and all that stuff is just one aspect of providing information.
Google has made a great step with Florida in more highly valuing sites that are authoritative information sources. Just because you sell widgets doesn't mean you can't be an authoritative source. But if you aren't, you are going to lose out to other information sites on the information web. If you are losing out to an edu-type site that is only marginally on topic, then you need increase your own authority within your niche and assume Google's knob turnings will appreciate that more (and more and more) sometime soon.
Unfortunately for some people though, they want quick and easy answers: more anchor text, change their heading tags (egods), talk about absurdly conceived penalties, and whatever other quick fixes might come to mind. It's not that easy.
