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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!)
Well its been a week now. Something must have gone way
wrong, for this to continue so long.
PR1's (I never knew that there was such a thing) are in top 20 of a very competitive category that used to be dominated by PR5 - 6's and an occassional 4 but never below PR4. In the top 20 results there are 2 PR1s, 2 PR2s, 4 PR3s, 10 PR4s, 1 PR5 and 1 PR6.
You can judge for yourself if PR was good or not or what weighing should be applied to it. But if PR1s and PR2s, with 1 or 2 internal backlinks can beat out all the previous PR5 & PR6s, forget trying to get links. I haven't figure what is important but it sure isn't PR.
Regardless, PR that made Google famous (forget weighing discussions) appears to be out the window. It's just hard to believe that that's true.
Proof they don't know what a couple days [google.com] is.
Another thing. The reason that the hyphen glitch got fixed so fast (has Google ever moved this fast?) is because as long as the glitch was in place, a clever SEO could have run some search scripts for keywords with and without hyphens, and determined from the difference between the results whether the terms were in the dictionary or not. If you could whip out a script fast enough, a couple hundred runs would have given you a birds-eye view of what was in the dictionary for the sort of sites you manage. And, more importantly, what was not in the dictionary. The same thing would work if you have a pre-update search vs. a filtered search. Too late. Anyone who discovers an equivalent glitch probably won't be posting it.
I think I found another trick to replace the hyphen trick:
This used to bring up the pre-filter results:
keyword1-keyword2 instead of keyword1 keyword2
and got fixed yesterday or the day before.
Now try this:
keyword1 keyword2 -wqwqzw instead of keyword1 keyword2
(Basically, you are telling Google to exclude a word that won't be found anyway.)
Can anyone confirm that this works? It worked for me. I wonder how long it will work?
Get those dictionaries compiled, all you SEOs!
(I don't sell widgets and my sites were unaffected, so that's why I'm posting this. I just enjoy watching Google.)
Works for me. I enjoy being back at the top even if I'm the only one that sees it.
Am I the only that has good results only on -gv?
information is easy to find on the internet.
go to inktomi to find info or go to news groups.
google has been showing top stuff.. now they are no more
than inktomi or many news groups.
this is supposed to be the age of spiders...but now the
spiders are back to 1994.
anything I say here is monitored by google. I know this.
whatever we say here is monitored by google. EVERYTHING!
So nevermind me;-)
And how I might benefit from it - Im reading your posts hard but dont see where youre coming from.
Cheers
Fiver
Been away from this forum for far too long. Came back when I started noticing some sites getting more hits from MSN than G! Took me several DAYS just to read thru these posts - Geez!
tourist attractions new york...Romania
Am I the only one to notice that the top (unrelated) site did not have ANY of the keywords in the title? A closer examination of why that non-relevant result got to the top of what I would think is a fairly competitive area might shed some light on what is going on here.
I have been looking at various searches, and what I seem to be noticing is a loss in the importance of prominance and proximity of keywords in the search terms, both in the body text, and particularly in the title.
For example, if you did a search for
keyword1 keyword2 keyword3
you would expect that a page containing that exact phase, or at least where the keywords were fairly close to each other on the page, would be a better match for that search than a page where each of the keywords was found randomly sprinkled across the page contents. If you ignore keyword proximity, you are going to get a lot of non-relevant results.
The outdated concept that any match of the keywords in the body makes a page relevant became obsolete way back when AltaVista was king. Search relevancy has come a long way since then, so the faulty argument that "well, the body contains all the words" as justification for unrelated pages getting top listings for highly competitive phrases just doesn't hold water, people here should know better than that.
Also, keyword prominence and proximity in the title seems to have changed. For example, a search for -
large blue widgets
A page with the title -
large blue widgets at the best prices
would normally be considered more relevant than a page which only had "blue" sprinkled somewhere in the title.
The reason for this is clear - a title describes the purpose of the page, so a good match on the title is far more likely to result in a relevant result than random keyword matches in the body text.
It is true that SEO would normally include an "optimized" page title. However, it is also true that any competent webmaster would include a good, descriptive title for his web pages. Either way (optimized or no), a good match with the title is a good indicator (one of) for determining page relevancy.
If G de-valued the title, or keyword proximity/prominence, (to try to thwart "white-hat" SEO?) they would be shooting themselves in the foot, as such a change would also cause a substantial loss of SERP relevancy.
Which I believe is what we are observing?
Again, the results seem to be bouncing all over the map right now, but it seems that in at least some cases, proximity and titles are getting lost in the mix.
Any of the rest of you seeing examples where unrelated sites with unrelated titles and just a couple keywords randomly somewhere in the body getting high rankings above relevant sites for highly competitive search phrases?
P.S. - Also noticed different SERPs when add a -jdfksddsf, as well as different # of results!
P.P.S. - PR update speed seems to be faster now that some have reported. Created a brand-new site last month, with no inbound links until earlier this month, PR already credited for new links! (at least in toolbar)
[edited by: aspdesigner at 5:14 am (utc) on Nov. 22, 2003]
>keyword1 keyword2 -wqwqzw
Doesn't work for mine at all. Same results either way.
Claus, your mention of Olin2003's post about the "bad incoming link" deal got me thinking (and looking) - and we seem to have the same type of thing going on with our site - many many many spammy pseudo directory sites linking to us with snippets of our site included. Not links we asked for certainly.
We've been at the top of the serps for a handful of specific regional phrases for quite some time, this particular domain has been up for around 5 years. Now we're buried in the serps, somewhere below 500, along with some of our best competitors. Our pages were optimized, but in keeping the Google's guidelines, nothing questionable there, just clean pages. We're still in there somewhere, even saw fresh tags for the 20th on some of our buried listings, but we're nowhere to be found in our usual serps for several common keyword1 keyword2 region searches.
Now, how does that work?
LisaB
If this will help any...the behaivour I was observing all day long (Nov 21) was about 15 minutes of every hour Google was displaying www-va (the datacenter that has stood strong through these troubled times and is actually the only datacenter showing the recent backlink update for Yahoo..at least when I checked a couple of hours back)....this is where my clients are doing very well....
Then displaying from the other data centers for the other 45 minutes or so where the listings are...well quite frankly...stunning (on the negative)...where my clients top primary keywords and double keyword phrases for both singular and plural are nowhere to be found..
All of my interior or secondary phrases (3 words or more) are still completely intact in the "new"? index...
So the 2 word filter is definitely in play here....
Not sure when this will settle down and start to make some sense but one can only sit tight and ride it out...
keyword1 keyword2 -wqwqzw instead of keyword1 keyword2
That works for me as well Kackle. My disappearing sites all appeared on the first or second page again - back from nowhere to be found. Seems to confirm the theory of the filter others have mentioned and what I believe to be in place for certain keyword combinations or keywords in general.
I have never been hit like this. I was not hit in April and Dominic/Esmerelda was fine for me. But now, I got hit and hit bad. Bummer. :(
:(
this datacenter is not updated right?
I can find my site when I use quotes around my usual terms, unfortunately, most people don't use quotes, do they? ;)
Time will tell, but it's not fun waiting.
LisaB
Did anyone ever try such a thing before florida. Without a baseline it is difficult to draw any conclusions as to what it all means
WBF
Just did a search for FreeBSD.org and it shows description and category in Chinese. Then repeated same search restricting it to English only sites and got same thing.
Also, on my new page that G just picked up yesterday only keywords from the title are indexed. When I run search for "MyNonCompetetiveKeywordInTheTitle" it shows up #1 then if I run it with any other word on the page it doesn't show it even with site:mysite.com and -adsfasdfasdf
Has anyone experienced similar?
Continued in part 4: [webmasterworld.com...]
