Forum Moderators: open
My guess is after the results of the current deep-type crawl get to fruition. Of course, mine is a business in sort of limbo this time of year so I can afford to wait.
What do I do and when?
Nothing.
I've seen people say <Hx> are bad. I left mine in.
I've seen people say two keywords are bad. Mine are still number one.
I've seen people say Google is broken. I'm doing marginally better in most searches.
That looks a bit arrogant, and that's not my intention. From where I stand, I've improved a few percent, and there's no spam showing in my SERPS.
I know my sites adhere to HTML and CSS rules - I validate them - and I believe they adhere to the suggestions GoogleGuy made about content, maps and links.
You might argue that my post is therefore adding nothing to the discussion, but I believe that things aren't in as big a mess as has been suggestion. Sure, if your own site is invisible it's a big problem to you, but I rather suspect Google has hit one end-stop, and next update a different one will be hit. But like a ball in a pin-ball machine, it's converging, update on update, on something we can understand.
As someone who (touch wood) has never had a real upset after an update, I may not be qualified to talk about how it feels, but I am definitely qualified to report on what I see - which is that at every update, a percentage of the people here think their world has ended. And then, mysteriously, they go quiet until next update.
What am I saying?
Maybe some of you are sailing too close to the wind - as a result, you're out of sight for two weeks after every update.
I don't sail close to the wind, I potter along, and that's where all my sites seem to stay - completely stable in the SERPS, and number one for many of the terms I wanted.
This forum works hard to try to understand where certain sites vanish. All I'm saying is that the lateral thought says we should try to understand why other sites don't...
DerekH
Is your site an ecommerce site may i ask?
Bek
I dont want to build directory sites, I want to build specific information and services sites. In my industry, if we all have to build directories to be found, it's going to become an ugly collection of broad, useless junk.
To answer the question, I'm still not switching anything. I built the sites I like for myself and users - Google can pound sand, change things back or whatever.
Google advises to not build for search engines, so I wont start now (no fundamental changes in 3 years - just a focus on anchor text since January). They still show up #1 in INK, so the only thing I'm doing differently is praying that Yahoo's New Year's resolution is to only use pure INK starting Jan 01, 2004.
To answer the question, I'm still not switching anything. I built the sites I like for myself and users - Google can pound sand, change things back or whatever.Were there ever things you wanted to do but didn't because of Google. Was there ever a form of navigation you shyed away from because you were worried about whether Googlebot could read it.
seriously, there is a lot of blustering (myself included) about how we don't build our sites for Google, but in reality we do, and that's not a bad thing.
If the internet is the information superhighway, consider links to be roadsigns and search engines the bus drivers. To help the bus drivers we put up a sign (link) that says 'yellow widgets left lane' and then a 1/4 mile down the left lane put a big sign up that says 'Yellow and Purple Widgets Here' (title), inside we have a large display that says yellow widgets (h1) and lots of actual yellow widgets in the box (content), the widgets all have tags that say 'yellow widgets from widget world' (alt text). For this is what the drivers have told us they need to keep from getting lost. But now the new Google bus driver ignores all that and takes you to a place called "All things Yellow" or it just drops you off at the yellow widgets road sign. And thus ends the symbiotic relationship between webmaster and search engine (at least as we have come to know it).
Do a search for "website design" or any other of the searches that used to bring up all the edu and gov sites and tell my if you think google has changed back to the pre-florida update results. Searching for "website design" -ddfdfd no longer brings up radically different results.
[edited by: Marcia at 4:51 am (utc) on Dec. 3, 2003]
For starters, more Flash
Powdork, I think you should convert your site to *all* flash. It won't help you much, but the rest of us will move one slot higher.
Is it just me or has google suddenly switched back to pre-florida results?
Hallelujah! Somebody else noticed. Mods, will you please open up the thread I started on this topic 24hrs ago? I'm seeing this all over the place - it's certainly worth discussing.
<snip>
It's begining to roll, people!
[edited by: Marcia at 4:50 am (utc) on Dec. 3, 2003]
[edit reason] Let's stay with principles, please. [/edit]
Hallelujah! Somebody else noticed.
[edited by: Elijah at 4:48 am (utc) on Dec. 3, 2003]
If they did, then it would be 1) a religious experience and 2) a real reason to rejoice ;-))
My bet is, it is just the index updating.
Notice that KWs are again prominant in the titles & snippets too.
Plus, my sites are reappearing
[edited by: oodlum at 4:55 am (utc) on Dec. 3, 2003]
Only de-junking what needed to be cleaned up anyway. Looking at the other engines and where all's well there nothing much will change except adding pages to sites.
Yup. Like it or not, gotta deal with it :)
But there are some good old honest commercial sites re-appearing. Interesting.
Powdork, I think you should convert your site to *all* flash. It won't help you much, but the rest of us will move one slot higher.
Yup. Like it or not, gotta deal with it
Keep in mind the next great search engine may be the one most successful at indexing flash. Anyway, its not gonna happen for me yet on account of at this point I can only make make things fade in and out and spent 12 hours last week trying to figure out how to make the file into a link. But I do love the creative opportunities I see out there. I took my first small file to flash kit and jim world to do a site check type thing and they both involved checking other's sites. There were some very impressive offerings.
Additionally, I'm rather certain I can learn here on WW how to present enough relevant spiderfood with flash to beat the sites that are currently ranking for my searches* with the new bus driver.
*I hate saying 'my' searches, but I couldn't think of another way of putting it there.
Even if SEs index the flash content in future, flash a page keeps visitor away, imo :-).
SEs are just a way of getting people know your site. Ultimately, it's the users who's paying the $$
