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I can say that based on the searches I have done as a consumer, I like this index more than the old one. When I put in a city I get SERPs that have information about the city, not ten thousand affiliate sites waiting to send you to the exact same site. I just got done doing quite a bit of x-mas shopping and guess what, I found what I was looking for without having to go to page two of the SERPs.
I realize this place is full of the SEOs who’s #1 (if not only) concern is their own sites ranking highly and in most people opinion on here their site is always the most relevant site for whatever keyword you are looking up. But, what reasons other than “my site was optimized for Google and ranked #1 for a year but now it’s not ranked THIS IS GOING TO RUIN MY BUSINESS!” are there for the condemnations of this new index?
Thanks,
Today, MSN is beating G on my strongest site's stats for the first time since it was indexed.
A search for 'city state big widgets' doesn't return a single competitor in over 100 results, where there once were many, clean & spammy, big & small. It's all directories or sites that link; by the time I'm near 100 results, Google's showing other cities & states in the results. At least they too have been wiped off the planet for the money words.
Nope, everything looks just fine from here woop01. ;)
[edited by: Chndru at 7:58 pm (utc) on Nov. 28, 2003]
I was blown away! I must say that I have NEVER seen ANYTHING like the quality of those results! They are comparable to, and perhaps even better than, my own list: which I had personally hand-culled from hundreds of hand-reviewed search results from multiple search engines for the Open Directory category. I found more excellent resources in the first ten sites than I usually find in the first hundred.
This is the next generation of search engines; this is the millenium! I'm going to have to go repeat some of the searches for obscure historical persons for whom I built ODP categories last year.
Countless posts, hundreds of examples here and many other forums about Florida and the problems it's brought. This ain't like every other update. It's different, very different.
No conspiracy theory is needed to guess why Google did it at this time of year and why so many e-commerce index pages have taken a dive. I know I'm spending more on Adwords now...although as many others are too since hurricane Florida, the ROI isn't proving to be great.
Maybe I live in hope they will remove the "filter" so I don't have to keep going to (censored..Mmmm) to see what's missing ;)
Everyone on this thread knows Google returns good results on "obscure historical" subjects.
The problem is with highly competitive search terms that happen to be the ones that provide income for Google.
You have defined the problem as well as the solution.
As per your definition, it is HIGHLY competitive. That implies, the seperation (of PR or total score or whatever) between the top 1% of the total results would be so closely spaced, that whatever way you turn the knob, someone is going to be thrown out the top 100 or however many.
The question is: In those competitive results, do the top 10 results provide the information the query (keyword) is intended to give? Or is it full of spam sites?
Not even in the top 100, there is a site that provides fresh listings for the end user.
Again, everyone on this thread knows the NEW Google returns good results on "obscure historical" subjects.
The problem is with highly competitive search terms that happen to be the ones that provide income for Google.
The problem is with highly competitive search terms that happen to be the ones that provide income for Google.
Maybe this is true. However, since most webmasters are interested in commercial searches and because these are the most competitive searches, perhaps it is simply the case that poor results are more obvious in some categories than others.
I for one doubt very much that Google is targetting certain keywords to produce poor results and thereby increase adword revenues. From a post in another thread, this is probably illegal and even if it is not, were a disgruntled employee ever to escape with proof, the publicity would be absolutely horrendous - in one instant Google's white- hat image would be destroyed.
If I were forced to guess between cockup and conspiracy, I would say Florida, etc. is a cockup.
If Google vanished tomorrow, neither I nor my web site would miss it. My site does ok on the other search engines and I would simply use ATW for my own searches - often do anyway.
Kaled.
And for all the conspiracy stuff - it was fun for a while to live in the fantasy land. don't push it
Google employees deserve to have a nice Christmas like the rest of us.
What's needed to enjoy a nice Christmas especially in the US?
The answer is MONEY!
Also, Google employees with stock options deserve to have a nice profit some months after the IPO.
What's needed to have a nice profit on stock options?
A lot of clients paying for AdWords.
OK.
Maybe another glitch occured in Google's algorithnm just as the one reported by the Washington Post last October [washingtonpost.com...] . However, that glitch helps pretty well to have a nice Christmas and to have a nice profit via stock options.
<Gramatical error corrected/>
[edited by: zafile at 8:59 pm (utc) on Nov. 28, 2003]
My hosting company is once again having problems generating log files and I have nothing since Nov 25. Ususally, at least the index gets Google freshtags almost daily, but I haven't seen them for my site for a few days. No log files means no way of seeing if I'm getting a decent Google crawl lately.
Are others seeing googlebot being normal, slack or busy since Nov 25?
To get back on topic...
I don't really think there's much wrong with Google, it's as spammy as ever but if you refine searches intelligently and dig down deep enough you'll find what you're looking for. Just like Ink, ATW, AV and the rest. My hosting company on the other hand... they keep the site online 99.999% but are truly p*ssing me off with the lack of log files.
Now Google returns preternaturally fantastic results on obscure historical topics. And don't think those "obscure" topics hadn't gotten competitive. Hundreds of generic keyword-snarfing sites purporting to offer "books by and about Joe Blow" with Spamazon links, and other similar SE-scams were by no means constrained to the pop-teen-idol figures.
The question isn't "does Google bury some good site somewhere?" Of course it does. If there are 30,000 Viagra sales sites, all of them "good" in the sense that if you send them money they send you something in a Viagra-shaped capsule -- then 29,000 of them AREN'T going to appear in the first 100 pages of Google results. This is a fundamental law of mathematics that Bill Gates and Carl McBride together can't violate.
No, the proper question is, "how good a job does Google do of burying the BAD sites?" I'm sure there's a need for tweaking, and I'm sure the new algorithms have many little knobs and levers that the Google Grinches will be using to personally zap any sites belonging to anyone with webmaster posts (or anyone in the ODP, or anyone that's too politically correct for California tastes, or whatever the current conspiracty theory is. I suspect for a couple of months, some QA reports sent to Google may have quick effects as the GG's tweak away. If you see bad sites dominating particular searches, this is the best time in years to report it.
i wasn't getting but 1 to 2 hits if i was lucky for the last 5 days. yday and today i'm seeing about 25 hits daily for my highest PR sites. the others aren't seeing googlebot hits yet.
I'm sorry. That's not my job.
I already worked enough on building Web sites that are helpful for end users.
So far, since Google has had little competition in the search business, it has relied on technologically savvy people outside of Google to find glitches in its system.
That's gonna have to change because "white hat" Webmasters already contributed enough to the growth of Google by providing helpful sites.
I have made a few searches that are junk, but there have always been some searches that are junk. Floriday just seemed to cause some problems in some areas by fixing problems in others.
As for travel related searches, the sort that I am most likely to do have been improved. The spammers are out, and the good sites are in. But just as a research experiment, I have sone some searches for places that I have no interest in, but would be money results, and a *few* of them do look pretty bad.
Google has some adjusting to do, as they have to do every time they change their algo. But since the results are generally better than before, there will not be a mass exodus of users. They might lose a few that happen to search a lot in the affected areas, but that is an insignificant number.
I can clearly notice the top results floated with Govt, educational, amazon etc pages.
Dig down, you'll see there are sites which are though commercial but have good Content BUT killed becuz of google's rage to propt them for Adwords!
PS - I am majorly talking about travel industry.
And can anyone justfy the fact that the No. of impressions for KW i track have a nosedive of abt 500%?
.org sites are not being affected as .com ones.
Again, please read the title of this thread "What exactly is wrong with Google?"
Kaled.
PS
A pure spam site I reported 5 days ago still hasn't been removed.
My apologies for temporarily hijacking the thread. As you were... :-)
If I had the ability to write a spam filter here is how I might go about it.
- look at word combinations and identify those that have a higher probability of containg the most amounts of spam. It is almost never about getting rid of all spam but getting a statistically significant amount of it (let's for argument sake say 90-95 %). These word combinations would then be put into some database for rapid retrieval & for automatic re-weighting.
-The next thing might be to look at sites that are in the index using a separate process and again scoring them for the probability of the site being spam.
- so when a search term is entered, it is quickly compared to the word combinations and then compared to the site probability and if the rank of the two exceeds a statistically significant threshold then sites are filtered.
Ok , big deal that still doesn't explain the funny results that are coming up for SOME search terms. Again it is important to understand this has hit some industries much harder than others. The easy explanation here is that, the particular industry really doesn't have many sites with good content for that term. So what rises to the top is the left overs.
Now I would anticipate that Google foresaw that this might happen. (This also gets into the will it change back concepts). Given all of the above it strikes me that webmasters, especially in some of these very competitive areas, will realize the truth of it and work very hard to produce pages & sites that are 1. relevant and 2 do not overuse SEO in order to avoid tripping the spam filters. With the rolling update feature in place, these new highly relevant pages will quickly rise up to the top and replace the so-so results we are seeing now. In hindsight it is obvious that Google needed to have the rolling update in place before it attacked the spam problem.
Yeah but I can disprove that. Keep in mind Google has always favoured automated methods and so that forces the process to use statistics and so the exceptions will always exist but be statistically irrelevant.
Bottom line here is that the results are good for many searches and as webmasters come back in line (with re-built sites) the results will improve drastically for those ultra competitive categories.
As an aside, when I took a really hard look at my own site and asked myself about whether or not it would trip a spam filter, the answer was---YES!
I invite you to do the same.
They are performing very well on SERP still.
Wrong with Google - It cant decide upon its objectives!
It started with an aim to serve best and freshest search results, and reached to a point where it play a game to care for Christmas and IPO.
That said, I can see where a whole lot of webmasters probably got nuked on their home pages - ending up as collateral damage to this new algorithim. I've seen a couple of home pages of good quality sites (not mine) removed for no explicable reason - and these are not on money search terms by any stretch - but informational searches. Because of this, I'm not so sure I can buy into the whole Google conspiracy thing about Adwords and "select phrases" that people are saying get special attention now.
Just my two cents.
Jim
The argument that Google is still good for information searches is interesting but irrelevant. Let me put it this way - if Google develops a reputation for being good only for obscure info searches then people won't use it for the majority of their (big money) searches.
If Google want to make big bucks the public must be confident that they are getting good results in commercial searches. If the results in commercial searches are perceived by the public to be poor they will use other search engines and adword revenues will fall.
It is clear to me that Google's algos for eliminating spam are very poor. There are pure spam sites (no useful content) doing well in the SERPS. If their algos were any good, these sites would be nowhere. As for duplicate content, their algos are clearly diabolical.
Google is wrongly filtering some sites, failing to filter others and serving masses of duplicate results. That is not a satisfactory performance for a search engine.
The results for some searches may be marvellous, but the results for others are not and the reason is quite simple - poor algos.
Kaled.
Then you'd be seriously wrong. This is just a very small percent of total searches. Likely most people who use the Internet never buy things on it. And, of those that do, as most aren't very wealthy this limits the amount of commercial searches they do compared to info ones.
We have a Client base of over 250 - WE DONT DO SEO work only development, but we do follow SEO patterns and the TOS of the engines. Still can not find any method to the maddness both as a consumer and as a professional.
P.S. Anyone else notice that doing searches for REAL ESTATE in your local area do not return ANY individual realtor sites as they used to? Now the results are Wunderground and other directories. Hey if I am looking for a new home, Wunderground isnt going to help much!
It is clear to me that Google's algos for eliminating spam are very poor. There are pure spam sites (no useful content) doing well in the SERPS. If their algos were any good, these sites would be nowhere. As for duplicate content, their algos are clearly diabolical.
Yes I agree. Whatever is happening it has not reduced spam. many of the sites that have risen to the top are using tactics such as link farms, meaningless text with keywords repeated over and over(keyword stuffing), and other tricks.
[edited by: Goanna1 at 11:11 pm (utc) on Nov. 28, 2003]
