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The panic is settling down, the whine of worry is receding to a steady hum in the back of my head, and several recovery plans are forming...
I lost my index page entirely, due to lazy keyword stuffing. My fault! Unfortunately, mine is a very small business: no listing = no food (let alone xmas).
I was planning on overhauling the website anyway, and I've given myself until 1/1/04 before I accept an opening with another business and abandon my own. The question now is: overhaul the index page and resubmit to Google immediately, overhaul the entire website and resubmit the whole thing in a few weeks, overhaul the website (starting with the index page of course) and wait for Googlebot. Time is most definitely a factor.
...are any of these plans likely to restore my index page to the directory before I have to throw in the towel in January?
There are also longer range options of starting over with a new website and closing the old.
Mahalo Nui Loa! (Thank you very much!)
Is anyone getting deepcrawled durring this update?
The first couple of days it, we had the same bot visits as normal; the last couple of days, just the index and one or two other pages.
Also, what does the date after the domain name mean on google? Obviously that it's being affected by the index update, but the date changes every day. Today it shows Nov 19, 2003
Thanks!
One site has been hit harder than usual in the last few days though it could be attributable to moving from a PR5 to PR6 I guess.
Since the data is not continuous data, the sample size required to estimate six sigma quality with any sort of confidence would be between six million and ten million.
Traffic has gone up double or triple on most sites and conversion has gone down by about 50% overall.
This results in a slight increase in conversions but it is certainly not what GG said they were trying to achieve back in D and E.
His indication was that traffic should go down and conversions should go up.
Anyone else noticing this?
[edited by: quotations at 4:37 pm (utc) on Nov. 20, 2003]
This results in a slight increase in conversions but it is certainly not what GG said they were trying to achieve back in D and E.His indication was that traffic should go down and conversions should go up.
Anyone else noticing this?
yup!
I am finding the opposite. My conversion rate has doubled since this update. Traffic down by 30% sales up by 20%
I'm not really sure how to use an allinanchor search properly, to be honest. :-0 I'll describe what I see in one case, and maybe the more tech-savvy of you will have a better idea of whether I'm seeing something real or illusory:
There are two two-word phrases which are exact synonyms for each other. Searching for "Phrase A plural," the #1 site returned doesn't have "phrase A plural" anywhere on it-- although "phrase B plural" is in the title and "phrase A singular" is in the body several times. (This is NOT a bad result--the two phrases refer to the exact same thing and the site is all about that topic.)
Allinanchor also ranks this site highly for "phrase A plural," however when I manually look at the sites which are linking to it, all of them have anchor text with either "phrase A singular" or "phrase B plural" in it. None of the top twenty or thirty backlinks have "phrase A plural" in it.
So it's still possible that some of the other backlinks have "phrase A plural" in them (I didn't have time to go through all of them and couldn't figure out how to get "allinanchor" to show me this stat automatically)... or it's possible that allinanchor AND regular google search are BOTH counting "phrase A singular" or "phrase B plural" as equivalent to "phrase A plural."
Since other results returned on the first page for the "phrase A plural" search definitely have BOTH "phrase A plural" in the title AND many backlinks with that exact text in it, my totally uninformed guess is that it's the latter. I don't see why a site without the searchterm in it or the searchterm in any of the highest-ranking links to it would be outperforming a site with the searchterm in it and with the searchterm in the highest-ranking links to it... UNLESS Google had (correctly in this case) ascertained that the singular form and/or the synonym mean the same thing as the searchterm and given the site credit for them in both the title and the anchor text.
I could be completely wrong, but I hope I'm not. I'm liking the results it's showing. The whole first page of this search was good and relevant, FWTW.
I am with you. Traffic all around is down slightly--but more importantly conversions have crashed and burned.
The new search results are incredibly general. People are repeatedly coming to my sites looking for things I don't offer--my site just happened to contain the word or words somewhere.
Visitors used to come to my sites after searching for what WHAT WE OFFER.
Net result:
SEARCHER disappointed
VENDOR disappointed
I can't believe that this is what Google had in mind.
I saw very significant changes on www-in until this morning - I thought this was the update that everyone was talking about and we were just waiting for it to migrate to the other datacenters. But now all the Datacenters show the same SERPS for my searches and all my pages I have checked seem to be back in the same places as last week.
Is it just that my sites and pages have been completely unaffected by the update?
Is it "officially" over yet? Can I "officially" panic now?
I think non commercial sites have been largely unaffected. My serps have hardly changed at all.
I was going to concur, then I realised I don't actually know what Google might be *looking* for if it were to gauge a site as non-commercial. Two of my sites sell something, but I'd regard them as primarily information sites.
Is this distinction one that's only in the eye of the beholder, or can someone define it in a way that everyone agrees with?
I rather fear it's another metric that we can't actually apply!
DerekH
My guess is that clients seem to be switching to Yahoo, probably because the serps in my industry are irrelevant in Google.
Links from an Internet Search Engine
- Other search engines 71
- MSN 35
- Yahoo 13
- Mamma 13
- Google 8
- Overture 4
- AOL 2
- Go.com 1
What is interesting here is to see that, if results stay like this, in certain industries, the end user may start to look at other major search engines.
Yahoo comes to mind as a natural.
>[keyword 2]
Same guy has 7 of 10 first page.
Similar results across the board for all popular drugs sold on the internet all pointing to affiliate template sites.
This guy made out like a bandit.
He must be praying to the Google gods night and day.
>>>
yep, he is all over the place! with all of the drugs, each one of his site is clocked at ALL THE PAGES!
It seems that google does not care, he cross link all of his sites and also with PORN sites
He is craching google HARD!
[edited by: tedster at 6:12 pm (utc) on Nov. 20, 2003]
[edit reason] no specifics, please [/edit]
The ToS of this forum might be a good start - especially the bit that goes:
We are not the Google spam reporting system or the place to "shop the competition" knowing that Google techs may read it. Posting someone elses url or a search term is no different than violating them by posting their name and address. Again, that includes posting of Google search terms.
spam@google.com?
I'm noticing oodles of bloody stuff on my favorite searches!
That's definitely possible; I'm really a neophyte in the ways of Google. However, I'd think it would be odd for a site with a keyword phrase nowhere on the page and nowhere in the high-PR anchor text to rank higher for that phrase than a site with the phrase in its title and in its high-PR anchor text... UNLESS Google has figured out that the keyword phrase is essentially equivalent to other ones that ARE prominent in the first site's title and backlinks.
But, could be it just has 10,000 low-PR backlinks with the other anchor text. I couldn't figure a way to check if there was any anchor text pointing to the site with the other phrase.
Either way, the site in question is on-topic and informative; its placement doesn't bother me. I'm just speculating. (-: Even merging different forms of a word (like singular and plural) sounds like a great idea to me.
