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Kackle - can you explain the "dictionary" for me? And how I might benefit from it - Im reading your posts hard but dont see where youre coming from.
Sure. But you have to act quickly. Google will fix this one just like they fixed the hyphen.
1. Google is depreciating pages/sites that are over-optimized for certain keywords or keyword combinations. It does this by looking up search terms in a dictionary of target keywords or keyword pairs that it has compiled. This dictionary is Top Secret, because if you knew what was in the dictionary, you could avoid these words in your optimization efforts.
2. If the search term or terms hit on a dictionary entry, the search results for that user's search are flagged. This means that before the results are delivered, the order of the links, or even the inclusion of links, are adjusted so as to penalize pages that have overoptimizated for those terms. Most likely the title, headlines, links and anchor text are examined. It's possible that external anchor text pointing to that page has also been pre-collected and is available for scanning, but this is much less likely. (Besides, external links are not something within your immediate control, so don't worry about it right now.)
3. You want to find out which keywords that are relevant to your site are in Google's dictionary. Compile as many relevant keywords you can think of that searchers might use to find your site. Now take these words singly and in pairs, according to how users might search. Run two searches for each combination and compare the results.
4. If the results are strikingly different for the pre-filter and the post-filter search on a particular term or combination of terms, it means that some variation of those terms has been flagged because something was found in Google's dictionary.
5. Do lots of searches and you can come up with a list of "sensitive" words that you'll want to avoid when you re-optimize your pages.
It's a nice weekend project.
The spam filter database is a separate process from the "rolling update" which caches and re-ranks your new page data, the two processes are not tied together.
I totally agree jmho however.
Anyway...
We got a sale from AltaVista today! I didn't even know we were ranked #1 for our prime keyphrase until now.
Google seems to have forgotten that a large proportion of searches (40% by some accounts) are commercial in nature - people looking to buy something. It DOES happen.
We don't even appear under our company name any more - a unique two word business name that can only mean they were looking for us. eg. Bumnut Enterprises.
Instead you'll find an episode of Star Trek when Barry Bumnut guest starred.
(Note: hypothetical)
Alex
I doubt that statistic is anywhere close to accurate. And, for commercial searches, from Google's perspective they would prefer you use the Adwords. ;)
SERPs look fine to me.
>By the way, the H1 tag is also not being penalized since some of these high ranking sites use the H1 tag on every page, and thes pages all survived the Florida Massacre with #1 rankings for various popular terms.
I disagree to a point. I see very few top ranked commercial sites using either an H1 or H2 tag. And when they do, they don't contain any of the search terms.
GuinnessGuy
Is majority of people here in agreement at least on the idea that current Google's results are so bad that Google is whether not done with whatever update they are doing or will have to roll back or improve it very VERY soon?
Yes, couldn't agree more! Not just for my search terms but in general for most every search I have done.
Just checked Alta Vista - #1 for all major keywords...
AltaVista DOES rock!
We're STILL #1 AND #3 on that SE.
And that goofy bras site doesn't show up at all.
Screw google.
I'm taking their search engine OFF of our site!
You and I were both thinking along the same lines at the same time, and I totally agree with your analysis.
We are starting to get some definitive traits of this new algo, we are making some good progress after just a few days of testing.
Let's keep up the testing and post our analysis as we find it.
