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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!)
Maybe if we all wrote AOL and Yahoo about the problem search results, something might get done! Yeah Right! I am surprised the media hasn't picked this up yet, Google's results are the worst they have ever been as far as relevance. Link pages are out ranking quality content pages everywhere, Spam rules more than ever, And with the up coming IPO can Google really afford to screw with their core and only business? SEARCH We made Google by word of mouth, it won't be Bill Gates they have to worry about, it's just word of mouth - So Spread the word!Someone from the NY Times has seen this thread and had already heard about the update but had no idea how serious it was. I would suspect the word will be out tomorrow at the latest.
Friends at the bar just asked me who sang "The dawning of the age of aquarius" Google did not have the answer on the first two pages. Both ATW(sponsored listing) and alta vista had the answer for me on page 1. Yes, the results could be called on target, but they weren't what I was looking for. Google used to be able to give me what I was looking for, not just words.:(
The 5th Dimension
These results are just totally off.
But -va is not much different than the other servers from what I am seeing.
I still am having trouble with the kword1 kword2 kword3 in the title not showing up for the exact same search. But for kword1 kword2 kword3ish search I'm doing very well.
This must have something to do with the broad match thing.
Draw your own conclusions.
All I'm getting is guestbook and link pages from sites LINKING to the relevant pages. This is even on relatively non-competitive searches (approx 100,000 searches)
These results can't stay surely?!
In other news, I also went to another engine to look for information today. I hate leaving the familiar feel of google.
On the point of being on Page1, Page 2 and Page 3 for the same keyword - this probably means that the servers within a data centre are not aligned in addiition to the data centres themselves differing!
I was sure GG said this update would be complete within 3-4 days. Be nice if we could rewind the thread to before the rants and invite GG to provide some light on the situation.
Lol - Far from it, I don't do dirty tactics, but to be on page 1, 2 and 3 for the same keyword sucks compared to when I used to be #1.
I'm not worried YET, long way to go.
Ouch!
Yes you are correct not working now.
This time I agree.
However, I am convinced this update is not over - to confirm this you only have to spend a few seconds looking at wildly fluctuating results.
[edited by: James_Dale at 3:49 pm (utc) on Nov. 21, 2003]
anyone had the googlebot go through - I see nothing across any of my sites now for about a week
I have about 10 all on different IP's, domains and topics - zip!
our logs show a rather hefty bot parade in the early am this morning which wasn't noticeably different from most of their parades. Red carpet guests included google-bot 2.1, slurp/cat, slurp/si, scooter and fast atw-crawler.
I have been awol from my keyword off and on now. Right now I am OFF.
I just realised that doing a search for my keyword is returning directory listings in some odd order.
We sell widgets. We are listed in G Dir under "Shopping>...>...>etc".
If I do a search for widgets, the results are first a reference to a "new" category "Home> Consumer Information>...>...>etc".
Then the very first positions are from the G Directory ">...>...>Manufacturing".
So, right now a search in regular Google for widgets is EXACTLY the same as when I do a "search ONLY" for Widgets in the G Directory ">...>...>Manufacturing".
No wonder we are nowhere to be found!
Do a search on Google for Widgets (literally). Now open another window and got to Googles Directory and drill down into a category.
Do a search in that category for Widgets and be sure to select to "search only in '(category)'".
The results have been identical for me.
If I want to buy a widget I can not even drill the directory to Shopping and then search, hoping to get past the "about widgets, history of widgets, manufacturers of widgets, etc." The same results will come up.
Now, thats relevancy for you!
Here is my opinion.
-va does not have an adult filter in place. All others datacenters do. The word "sex" in the search term seems to be having the most filtered results. My one site has ranked on the first page for sex and another keyword for years. Now I can't even find it going 15-20 pages deep on anything but –va. On –va it is still number 1. Other terms seem to be unaffected. But if “sex” is in the search term, my site is no where to be found.
My site is a still a solid PR 5. Searching for the name of the site yields a number 1 result and searching with other adult terms also seem to be unaffected. It is also listed in dmoz.org as a Mature Content site so that might also have an impact.
-- Message --
By default, Google searches for variations of your search terms. To search only for an exact term, place a '+' sign before it.
--
This message ONLY appear using some keywords ( Not all ), the results that are returned are really bad, If you put a + sign infront of the search the "OLD" great results is displayed ( tried the + sign on www.google.com but it still show the Florida results ).
Could it be that this new search algo is the reason that some sites have problems with the Florida update and others not ( only happens on some terms ) ,
I think: the florida update is all about a PR update , they took a old dataset and now compare it to the fresh crawl , and only links that are in the "old" and in the "new" crawl counts as PR , this way google removes sites that have used blogs - guestbooks - ffa - forums etc. to gain PR ( rotating pages ) , I think that this type of old to new link compare started in september with a month to month compare, but did not do the trick so they took a old dataset and compared to a fresh. If you got problems with the florida update perhaps this is your problem.
Anyway this thread is about the new search algo, to me it looks like really unrelated results, as the message indicate google now search for the keyword you enter but also search for related keywords and then mix the results and sort them by PR.
GOOGLE: I do not think this type of search is why google is popular, on google you should get "exact results", the new type of search is more for a site like ask.com where you do a search and ask.com try to figure out what you want, i know that this is what all search engines wants to be able to do, but i do not see this as a "google thing", well perhaps if you implemented it in another way and not as the default.
English is my second lang. hope you understand me :-)
I woke up this morning to find our main site goone for the keyword that it has ranked well in for years. Never #1 but was #2 and has been in the top 10 for at least 2 years. It has no tricks - normal link exchanging.
The only thing I've done different was to file a spam report yesterday on a term unrelated to our business and used my WW moniker. Hopefully that's not the cause however it does give me pause to think.
