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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.
In my estimation, it is over. The fat lady has sung. We are now again in the continuous update mode.
I've found much of what you have contributed tonary is mostly "money" words or terms."
Could you point us to some of this evidence please. Like everyone who is affected I want to know what to do next.
To test the idea of a dictionary I wonder if otheres here could share, what evidence they have found that all/some of this recent Google effect can't be explained by on page text and link back keywords?
My site sells widget insurance. I have those two words in that order in the title, h tags, image alts, anchor text, out bound URLs, first words and a high percentage of all words on one page in question.
My page has been dropped. If I search for -fufufu widget insurance I'm back in at number 2. If I search for category widget insurance where category is a particular type of widget I go back in at number 1.
The one thing that the pages that fill the top ten slots for widget insurance now have in common is that 8 do not have <h> tags and the other 2 have style codes inside there <h> tags so they are not properly formed in terms of what many beleived Google previously required.
My point is this, the new algo could work like this: If two word term occurs in both title and <h> headings then if this two word term occurs more than x times and/or at a density more than x% drop the page from results for that two word term. This would work without a dictionary. So what evidence is there that this no dictionary hypothesis is wrong?
Please understand I'm not trying to start an argument, I'm simply trying to gain a level of confidence in what is right and what is wrong before I decide what to do next.
Many thanks in advance to anyone who can provide further enlightenment on this one.
Best wishes
Sid
Some of my previous post got missed out, not sure why.
Anyway the first para should have said:
I've found much of what you have contributed to this discussion very interesting. I then referred to your statement about evidence for a dictionery.
After this bit I hope that my post makes at least some sense.
Best wishes
Sid
Is anyone else out there looking into the abyss of $0 income? Anyone else trying to decide how to find gainful employment to pay the bills?
And seriously, is SEO a viable career path if these alterations hold? I am reading a lot of theory and hypotheses but nothing that resembles a coherent assessment of the new standards established by Google. I feel that, based on the SERPs that I have seen, there is still nothing to react to. Content has not been validated as the critical component and spam has not been invalidated as a promotional method.
Seriously, based on the current status, is there a future in independently developing and maintaining a commercial website? I, for one, am one more strong body blow from throwing in the towel.
I agree by midnight the FAT lady will have sung! So go out and bid up adwords, or start redirecting your google hits to a "google sucks" page and bury them like they buried you!
have you looked at my message #392 at [webmasterworld.com ]? how does this compare with your theory? (i'm not saying it does or doesn't, as at this point, i'm not sure of anything).
Well I'll be up the river without a paddle if We don't get a top listing back on Google.
They didn't go. They weren't in this thread.
When Part 3 reached about 70 pages, the last 20 pages were cut off and became the first 20 pages of Part 4.
A few dozen "me too" posts were deleted along the way though.
***
You all still have only two choices.
1. Google is broken - Not completely broken mind you, but very messed up.
2. Google is displaying these results on purpose, for whatever reason.
<edited> cuz I made a statement I could not back up.</edited>
[edited by: BradBristol at 9:15 pm (utc) on Nov. 23, 2003]
Baloney. If political correctness was the issue, then Google would quit selling Adwords to pornographers. If the IPO has anything to do with this, the motivation is raising profits, and not being PC.
Maybe the new "search inside the book" feature on Amazon might be the reason they are appearing at the top in many of the results.
amazon most likely has put some major $$$$ on the table somewhere
Maybe their is just a few more weeks to go and the major update will be completed. Just like the updates in May/June etc, results were showing PDF's, Amazon links etc.
Two weeks after the update we had a mini update which corrected the listings and all was well again.
Think you all need to chill out on the conspiracy theories.
Not a chance.the dc's are showing different results and no they are not new fresh results.Google have gone home for the weekend.
They took the engine apart to give it a good clean and now they are having trouble putting it back together.
mainstream results in adult and adult results in mainstream.I don't think its over by a long shot and if it is its not webmasters who should be worried but Google itself because these are amateurish attempts to be a search engine.
Forgot to mention that we are pointing them all to Altavista
[edited by: ronhollin at 9:49 pm (utc) on Nov. 23, 2003]
26 of them have electronically confirmed that they would, result in about 80,000 less searchers. If we pass this along to everyone we know and work with I think we can start what will be a very damaging consequence for Google.
Hmmmm........watch out Google theirs going to be another velvet revolution.
Its about time i was out of here, the topics of the posts are well out of control and I will return in a few weeks time once everything has settled.
You guys gotta take it easy :)
I find it interesting what a Google representative actually sent from the Guidelines Tuesday.
>Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
>Make sure that your TITLE and ALT tags are descriptive and accurate.
Basically I have enough money for my family until March but that’s dipping into savings. I will soon join the thousands of unemployed textile, furniture, and tobacco workers in my home state.
This update is about money, as all things are. The big boys have taken over and the little guy bites the dust as usual. Looksmart though the same way.
Not to start another conspiracy theory or nothin...
This IS THE TIME for online Christmas shopping! Not a few weeks from now. How very convenient for the Amazons, Targets, Walmarts, etc. to be on the top of the heap.
Just imagine the Business news reporting "higher than expected" online sales for these companies. What would reports like that be worth to Wallstreet, Politics, etc.
If this turns around in a couple of weeks, small internet retailers will have missed the Christmas sales.
I'm sorry, but if filters change, fine. Many sites would have lost ground. BUT, to be thrown out of the game is just ridiculous. Something must be broken somewhere.
A lot of people are pis*ed with google, but I don't think they intended this to happen. I expect a lot of damage control to come from google in the next few days.
Google has made things right in the pass, I expect it will be the same this time.
How many of the thousands of webmaster/seo people are thinking of using overture or adwords now?Actually I was thinking of starting a new Search Engine based on the model that made google in the first place.
[edited by: BradBristol at 10:03 pm (utc) on Nov. 23, 2003]
Forgot to mention that we are pointing them all to AltavistaI'm considering a popup(under) for anyone referred by Google "Since you were referred by Google you are probably not seeing all the quality information on <search query>. To get a better idea try your search on AltaVista" with a link to the search. Anyone know how to do this?
sim64,
In this thread [webmasterworld.com], Brett mentions how its our fault, perhaps you would like to run his theory by the sites in your list. I don't know how to test it, however.
If it is a simple case of 301 redirecting domain.com to www.domain.com, wouldn't/couldn't/shouldn't Google have announced this prior to the update?
How come they could do it before, but can't now?
Why can all the other se's figure it out?
Thanks to anyone who has been following better than I who can do that : )
[edited by: Josefu at 10:09 pm (utc) on Nov. 23, 2003]
Could you point us to some of this evidence please. Like everyone who is affected I want to know what to do next. To test the idea of a dictionary I wonder if others here could share, what evidence they have found that all/some of this recent Google effect can't be explained by on page text and link back keywords?
There has yet to be a report that noncommercial sites are affected by this filter. And there has yet to be a report that non-English language sites are affected by this filter.
Both of these suggest that there is some initial threshold. You don't have to call it a dictionary. In fact, I'm not at all clear as to whether it's a dictionary of single words, or a dictionary of word pairs, or some combination of these. I don't think it's a dictionary of three-word combinations -- this would get too complex because there are too many possible combinations. However, there may be an initial parsing algorithm so that longer search terms get broken up and two passes are made at the dictionary.
"Dictionary" is just a euphemism that describes the initial decision about whether to apply a filter to the searcher's results or not. Make up a new word if you don't like the word "dictionary." You'll still have to explain the evidence by coming up with some sort of concept to explain the initial decision.
But in fact, lookups in dictionaries are extremely fast for computers. With a dictionary of only 20,000 English keywords, I can do an amazing amount of screening at a speed that boggles the mind, using B-tree lookups. I can keep the entire dictionary in less than half a meg of memory, which is peanuts these days. I've programmed with custom dictionaries, and it's just amazing how few words are really needed to catch 99 percent of what you want to catch.
There are always linguistics experts and artificial intelligence people who insist that Google would never do anything as crass as a dictionary lookup. They're locked into looking at things from the perspective of a particular profession. No engineer has ever gotten a promotion for coming up with the idea of a dictionary. It's too stupidly mundane.
Yet you have to wonder whether some sort of dictionary wouldn't be adequate for a filtering task such as the one we're seeing. And certainly, since the algo is implemented on the fly, Google would be very interested in CPU overhead. If you read their early papers, Google engineers have always been very conscious of CPU overhead and storage space -- down to the point where you save a single CPU cycle or save a single bit in a bit-masked byte of storage.
You don't scale the way Google has managed to scale over the years by doing things the most complicated way possible. PageRank was an exception -- it required too much overhead. I think that's the main reason it is on its way out. Besides, the early engineers couldn't criticize PageRank as being unnecessarily complex. In the early days, I'm sure no one dared tell Sergey and Larry that there were easier ways to accomplish the same thing without spending several days a month computing Pagerank.
i cant even begin to imagine why either brett or gg would say that we would need a 301 redirect from www.somedomain.com to somedomain.com to avoid a duplicate content penalty. i could believe the sky is falling (literally) before i could believe that one. <shaking my head in utter disbelief>
All your conspiracies and concoctions are all null and void.
This is not the index, this is between beginning and end of this update.
Only thing I can see is it helps release some of people’s anger towards the current serps, other then that this is useless.
I too watch what people with over 1000 posts say, because the rest of this is pure Looney tunes.
Im certain you will see them very soon, if not from one of our properties them something similar from elsewhere!
I too watch what people with over 1000 posts say, because the rest of this is pure Looney tunes.
Too easy for google "moles" to jump in and say how much they love the current results. IMHO # of post alone doesnt mean increased credibility.
As for being over - its 11.23.03 - Its OVER two day!
There has yet to be a report that noncommercial sites are affected by this filter.
My editorial content site has been affected. More specifically, several index.htm pages for my "sites within a site" have disappeared from their usual positions (#1, in one case) in the last 36 hours or so.
I posted a hypothesis on why this happened in the "How many front pages did you lose?" thread:
[webmasterworld.com...]
I seem to recall that this may have happened before, quite a while ago, and it got corrected in fairly short order. (And it isn't a disaster, since most of my Google referrals arrive on inside pages anyway).
There hasn't been any recent communication from GG about the current situation, unlike the last big update, when he said more data will be folded in over time - "less than months, more than weeks". Now that is worrying, because we all twiddled our thumbs and waited till they popped back last time. Now? Who knows. According to GG, the data is in there and as every update goes - some sites drop, some gain.
Why would sites MIA suddenly appear just by adding -blahblah after the keywords? Obviously some sort of Scroogle filter is in place.
Has anyone tried stripping out those "poison" keywords from the Title and Body of the index page? - Did it make any difference?
Well at least I can tell my clients that their competitors are gone too LOL.
I think Kackle's point more precisely is non-commercial search phrases as opposed to non-commercial sites. So the question is - are your index pages missing for search phrases that have commercial connotations?
Too easy for google "moles" to jump in and say how much they love the current results. IMHO # of post alone doesnt mean increased credibility.As for being over - its 11.23.03 - Its OVER two day!
What does 11-23-03 have to do with anything?
Yeah # of post do mean a lot of things, experienced members, you'll notice this board has a lot of experienced members but how come they are not posting in here?
Because they know....
That's not exactly true. Searches on non-commercial, non-competitive sites HAVE been affected; the result has just been less dramatic and less negative. The Florida update has caused a shift in rankings and a vanishing of irrelevant porn spam from educational searches I've looked at. I still say the effects are just less disastrous in less competitive searches because there aren't thousands of sites jockeying for position, so a change in the algorithm (or a bug for that matter) won't vault 250 sites over a previously high-ranking one, just two or three. Which, obviously, is an acceptable vagary of fate.
I wonder if this is just a simple miscalculation on Google's part--that is, if they rolled this update out with the successfully improved non-commercial results in mind, not quite realizing the chaos it would inflict on the 5% of most competitive searchterms.
My editorial content site has been affected. More specifically, several index.htm pages for my "sites within a site" have disappeared from their usual positions (#1, in one case) in the last 36 hours or so.
I did see one site that was a *.co.uk that got zapped for optimizing on the term "law essays." But both words are, perhaps independently, somewhat commercial terms. One because of lawyers who advertise, and the other because of college students looking to buy their homework. There's going to be a gray area between commercial and noncommercial. I still think it's generally true that this filter is not aimed at noncommercial sites.
There is a clear intent here to FILTER out pages based on the search term used. The same page could appear at the top of the SERPs under a different search term.
The filter definitely has something to do with the page being over-optimised. I thank people for the -fufuf trick, it helps to explain a lot.
It doesn't matter if it's a one word search term, or a four word phrase, the filter still works. I know this because I have a page being filtered out for a four word phrase, and at least two pages that I know of being filtered out for just a single word.
I have no idea if it's only "commercial" words being filtered, but if Google wanted a list of commercial words and phrases, the obvious source for that list is the Adwords database. Just add up all the money being bid for a particular word or phrase, and then you know how commercial it is. I don't see why Google would program some complicated algorithm that might now work in all circumstances when a very simple query on the Adwords database could figure it out with perfect accuracy.
To the extent that commercial sites are filtered out, to be replaced by sites that have nothing to do with the keywords in question, Google will undoubtedly increase its Adwords revenue.
The danger of "unoptimizing" the site to get back into the free Google results is that you could lose your ranking in Yahoo and MSN and still not get back into Google. You'll be throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
deanril, your comments makes me think of the words Churchill spoke during the darkest days of WW2
"This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning"
Please note that I am not associating Google with Nazi Fascist Tyranny and abuse of power in any way :)
This is the way the index will stay? Who?
Wheres your proof?
I have proof that this is not the way the index will stay. Look at the last 4 major updates(1.5 year+).
Everyone needs to chill.....These searches suck, they are not the final index.
As for "Money Words" you will notice that with most of the bad searches(sites missing) there is a Google/Dmoz category at the top of the first page. Most of the unchanged still ranking good pages have no Google/Dmoz category on top.
These pages are commonly updated, where as the pages with out a Google/Dmoz are not commonly updated(once a month typically). As far as I can tell Adwords has nothing to do with it, the page without the Google/Dmoz listing that are uneffective have plenty of Adwords aswell.
Our site was one that wasn't affected... it stayed the same, #1 on our important kw's and actually improved on certain more competitive ones. I've been watching googlebot closely in the logs through this. During the "update", while normally we have about 15-25% of our ~150 pages hit by googlebot per day, it dropped to only the index and 1 - 3 pages. Yesterday it kicked back up... we had about 40 pages taken by the bot. Freshtags are appearing on our main pages updated daily, Nov 23 right now.
Maybe they'll fine-tune things, as they always do on an irregular schedule post dom/esm, but we're likely back to the rolling update now. The big tweak is over.
Shouldn't the Internet be free? Even for commercial sites? I think so. It started out that way and it should have stayed that way. Everyone knows that the Government is actively trying to tax emails. How would that affect people sending emails?
An ironic statement considering the the purpose the majority in this forum have for getting to the top of the Google rankings is so that they can make money. The internet ceased being about anything but money a long time ago.
Regarding the taxing of Emails, it's an urban myth, but I think it would be a good idea because it would get rid of all the spam. If someone doesn't want to pay 5 cents to reach me, I don't wan't to read his Email.
How can the "big tweak" be over.
I have no idea if it's only "commercial" words being filtered, but if Google wanted a list of commercial words and phrases, the obvious source for that list is the Adwords database. Just add up all the money being bid for a particular word or phrase, and then you know how commercial it is. I don't see why Google would program some complicated algorithm that might now work in all circumstances when a very simple query on the Adwords database could figure it out with perfect accuracy.
Some of us feel this in their gut, but few say it. Google will never admit to it. There are possible legal implications if Google were to admit this. There will be people lining up to denounce you, and you'll never know if they are "sent men."
Think of it this way: by saying it's a dictionary of commercial terms and that Google is cleaning up over-optimized spam in the organic listings, Google remains "cool." As the kiddies say, "Google rocks."
By saying that Google is surreptitiously forcing e-comnmerce to pay for listings, you are accusing Google of having already become the next Microsoft.
We are past the "buggy update" stage. Unless the entire Googleplex has been getting fat on gourmet lunches and working it off on the golf course, for the entire last week, this thing would have been turned off by now. The "hyphen fix" that they pulled off within a few days of its discovery means that they could also turn off this entire filter just as quickly -- if they wanted to. It has to be deliberate. GoogleGuy speaks volumes by his absence.
If you concede that it's deliberate, and you still want to believe that Google is merely fighting spam, then consider:
Even if the dictionary was compiled entirely separately from the list of top Adword terms, what sort of overlap would you expect? 80 percent? 90 percent?
Does it matter to Google which list they use? Yes, in front of a judge or jury the question of motivation may matter a lot. Does it matter outside of a courtroom? No, apart from the need to keep unthinking journalists from asking too many questions, it doesn't matter much at all.
In the end, the consequences of using either list are approximately the same.
I think you just hit the nail on the head.
I just experimented and found that it works, I lost my index page after being number 1 for a few months. I will now remove my keywords from titles and h tags and concentrate on the content.
Looks like google is looking more at content than anything else.
Across the board, it seems to be Dot Gov and also Dot Org sites. Information related sites that searchers are NOT looking for (they want to BUY the insurance related products that the business oriented sites are actually SELLING).
We've been gone for about 5, maybe 6 days now. I'm beginning to think this "new and improved" algorhythym thing is a major disaster.
Maybe we should start a Dot Org site?
Anyone else seeing same or similar results?
Anyone have any hope that google will come to its senses?
If I didn't know better, I'd swear google was trying to "force" business related sites to cough it up and start paying to play! ArG!
You are ignoring the fact that the Internet is now used by millions of people to buy things - as well as to find information.
If I type in, for example, 'cepheid variable stars' - then I expect, and should receive an informational site about astrophysics.
But if I type in - I don't know - 'U bend for toilet', I expect to see plumbing sites that specialise in this. Not a pdf. for a tribute site to a band called 'U bend', followed by 2 pages of sites about camper vans that feature a toilet.
Pretty poor hypothetical examples, I admit - but to deliberately favour 'de-optimisation' is so illogical and so crazy, that if Google has done this, it has finally lost it.
Unfortunately, despite being initially unconvinced, I now think this is what Google has done. The addition of a nonsense -anyolddrivel$ to a search term, which then shows up sensible results is potent evidence of this.
This discovery is an indication of the quality of the minds on this forum, and I am sure Google will have been surprised, even shocked that this has been noticed.
What we are seeing is a commercial filter. But only commercial sites are likely to spam, so it can easily be explained away as a spam filter. But the damage caused could be immense. My business is certainly in danger of folding.
users.htcomp.net/website/ring.html is top ten for jewelry one of the most searched terms on the net and in the past google has served up the top 100 results as 100% relevant for this term.
Relevancy has declined in many important e-business areas. If that is not a "buggy update", What is?
There is a problem. It will get fixed or google will get a bad reputation as a lousy search engine.
Radically different and I mean all top ten results totally different on my 500-800 visitor per day search term on google.com in the last two minutes.
On competitive searches, all of the datacentres are never in sync are they? Perhaps you're just hitting different datacentres if you're using .com for the searches.
I thought it was just a buggy stage, but I'm afraid the effects of adding -anyoldnonsense to search terms, discovered by someone much earlier in the thread, has convinced me. It is a commercial filter, and as such, many of us are ruined if it stays in place.
I am packing it in. Why? Because even if the SERPs improve, there is no guarantee that Google will not decide to do this again in future.
This means there is no stability in Internet marketing, all investment is unreliable - it is essentially an Internet financial crash.
Sure there is stability. Buy Adwords.
In that case I am No-one. Which government, BTW?
Apart from that the update seems fairly undramatic in the sectors that I know best.
Search for Keyword1 Keyword2 - no where to be found
Search for Keyword1 Keyword2 -dfdfdf - #2
Don't this this "penality" is going to get lifted anytime soon. Hope I am wrong.
This sucks! Just increased the max/day on the Adwords, again. Glad someone is making some $
Sticky me and I will give you the URL..
And how does Adwords reduce your credibility?
customdy check the google cache. I changed my site today
also to remove <Hx tags and I have the Nov 23 freshbot, but
the cache shows the old content with the <Hx tags when I
view the browser source. It may take a few days for
the freshbot data to be incorporated in the google index.
[edited by: lgn1 at 12:04 am (utc) on Nov. 24, 2003]
Think about it - de-optimisation is crazy. You deliberately do a poor job, in order to convince Google that you're doing a good job!?
I sell widgets, but am I expected to redesign my entire site to convince Google that I am actually doing something else? whilst sneaking in the odd reference to my products.
This would be a new form of spam wouldn't it? Perhaps we should call it Anti-spam?
Let's try it - I sell widgets:
Meta Title: We will sex your Gerbils
Meta Description: Gerbils sexed by professionals, widgets also sold.
Content: Although we have some interest in Gerbil sexing, we also sell widgets, you can buy (no) purchase (risky) procure (looks o.k.) our widgets here.
Footer:
p.s. Apologies to those people who wanted the sex of their gerbils determined, but we actually sell widgets - but we are anti-spamming Google in order to get our honest commercial site back in the listing.
[edited by: superscript at 12:08 am (utc) on Nov. 24, 2003]
keyword1 keyword2 --adsfrt
Yesterday I took a page that is awol, deoptimized the hell out of it, left one occurance of keyword phrase in title, one in meta description, one on page, no H1 or H2, made sure
sprinkling of each keyword around the page did not occur more than 3 times --- page text containing 750 words.
No backlinks to be concerned about anchor text other than the home page which does contain the phrase as anchor text.
New tags are the 23rd showed up a while ago.
Zip - Nada - All she wrote. Page rank did not change and when I eliminated the --adsfrt could not find the page anywhere for the two term search.
The singular version of the phrase moved a little because I removed it from the title area.
My guess is that once a penalty is trigered, the site url is taged for the penalty regardless of where the problem really is.
What makes me say this is somewhat of a confession.
I have an outside domain pointed to the same page. It got indexed under it's domain name, while on a meta redirect to the inside page, as a resultit has the(exact same page content, but a different url)
This page comes up number 2 in a regular search for the keyword phrase.
To me it looks like clean it all up, and then maybe we will let you back in. I also believe, just a gut feeling, that the penalty is not reconsidered on a refresh update, but rather, on the next big loop around.
Which means, figure many months to get back up top, even if started tommorow.
I think de-optimzation is NOT the way to go right now. Do some searches, and you will find that optimized sites still rank in the top 10 for some keywords - while others do not.
Why? Because those sites have webmasters who have de-optimized their sites? No...because these pages have huge numbers of backlinks.
I think what we're seeing here is backlink importance beginning to mean a lot more.
Think about it: would google suddenly start penalizing sites for keyword optimization? No. That would make no sense.
I was reading an article earlier today about the probabilty of certain additions to the algo. There is a very low probability that google has effectively stopped optimization - and a very high probability that backlinks either aren't factored in yet, or mean a lot more now.
For example, if you do searches for "home plans" or "make money," you'll see none of the top 10 listed sites have started "de-optimization" practices. They do have large amounts of backlinks, however. So, it dosen't make sense to me for Google to drop some sites due to optimization practices and not others. These sites that still rank in the top 10 for largely competitive keywords have not de-optimized: they have done nothing and stood still the entire time.
So, what can we do to get our sites back to the top?
I think we should all begin start linking with HOME PAGE LINK EXCHANGES. I have had two webmasters email me in the past week, stating that their sites have dropped from Google SERPS, but they're beginning home page link exchanges. They think this will put them back in the top 10 for keywords.
I'm not going to de-optimize my site: it took a lot of bloody time and pacience to optimize the way it is. And if you think about it: Amazon and other commercial sites that are having their pages on a keyword rank in the top 10 for those keywords is because Amazon has thousands of backlinks.
This is all theory - but I think if we all begin home page link exchanges with relevant sites - that our sites will come back in the top 10 again.
Perhaps backlinks now mean more then optimization. Maybe someone's anchor text repeated thosands of times over is now more important that how one optimizes. Perhaps I should de-optimize my site and wait for the spider to come around.
But I've been looking at people who hold top positions and they have no de-optimized. So why should I?
Not at all.
I have been increasingly uneasy about the dominance of Google : it's bad business to have all your eggs in one basket, but that's the way that mainstream Internet business was being forced.
The news about the alternatives to be offered by Yahoo -- and even M$ -- was (by increasing competition) a good thing.
Google's behaviour this past week has destroyed much of the goodwill it has built up, which will make the advance of alternatives much easier.
Don't give up. Every setback creates opportunities. Tell your clients that the smaller alternatives actually provide them with stability, that a lesser flow of steady traffic is preferable to a fluctuating flow of highs and lows. Think of your own things to add to this : you are their Internet advisor and can base what you say on experience they don't have.
Give up? I'm looking forward to the next phase, and if we really don't matter to Google, then we will build our strategies where they won't matter to us.
