Forum Moderators: open
Wonderful. It's just like a great big sandbox.
Bob
Come on G drop the filter
I see that my earlier prediction that "either something is going to happen, or nothing at all is going to happen" has been proved absolutely spot on ;)
I still have a problem in that, whatver the algo is doing to some sites it is completely missing in others. Some of the major spammers have remained and if not remained are now going back in whereas quality, 'clean' sites remain out.
In our sector one company has had the top of all major search terms for the past 3 weeks since florida. This site has all major backlinks from a few domains where they have been bought and the site has no unique content and the keywords and content make no sense to a consumer. Gateway pages with content that is stuffed also features highly to about 15% of the sites pages! I have seen many examples of this in the travel industry.
It just makes no sense, -in is better but still doesnt address the imbalance. Things needed to change but if it does change it needs to be fair for all and not just the small!
anyone else seen anything like this?
Time to react again?
I see that my earlier prediction that "either something is going to happen, or nothing at all is going to happen" has been proved absolutely spot on ;)
Well that made me laugh in the face of adversity. Thanks SuperScript!
Best wishes
Sid
My "take out the keyword stuffing" site disappears on -in
Fascinating, the general consensus has been a cautious -'leave things alone.' But I guess if folks need to get stuffing again, X-mas is the perfect time of year :)
WBF
I predict that by tomorrow morning there will be either howls of joy, or not, or some very mixed feelings: it all depends on the outcome ;)
Our less ethical sites - i.e. those with lots of silly anchor text stuffed incoming links from link swap partners (which we were forced to get after Dominik) are still out, though there are much badder boys than us in the index who do real spam like sneaky redirects. Obviously you won't be getting a spam report.
Hint - they've found a way of getting around the "cannot pass on pagerank" penalty. Pretty obvious now I see how. I won't be doing it though because I'm sure they will get PR0 when they get caught.
-squared
Just more window dressing as far as I'm concerned. For the most part, commercial searches are weak at best and in some cases are down right brutal. Information searches look pretty damn good though I must say.
I am in agreement with you, for the serps I watch couple of good general broad information sites seem to remain the rest is now a joke if anything it has got worse with each change no commercial sites left now except adwords.
Brutal is being generous, surfers will have to change their style of search or click adwords!
>We've been having fun playing with it
Wonderful. It's just like a great big sandbox.
Are there cats at the plex playing in this sandbox? That may explain a few of the things that have popped up instead of relevant results in a few industries. Perhaps instead of a filter, they could use a scooper.
Update? Not ready to 'call it' just yet, but it is sure looking like -in is the new one.
finally there is a .com in the top 100.
Its not relative to the keyword search catagory except in the most general of terms however it is a .com in the top 100. So I guess keywords and answering searches shouldnt lead to a homepage only interior pages from authority sites or auctions in texas or lets not forget about ebay they buy what we buy also? I have found my .com site after a month of not being in the top 1000 from #2 or so for years except for last november finally in the #600's. That is an improvement because its better that not in the top#1000
This has happened before and I'm not surprised but I have read posts and articles saying this has effected millions of sites.
Have just pointed my toolbar to -in and all sites have a greyed out PR.
-in results are no improvement, a search that used to produce 75,000 results now gives 200,000 results and this is not because they have increased the number of web sites in their database.
It is very clear that sites with 500 pages of content with 1 page relative to a search query is doing better then sites that have 100 pages and 99 pages relative to a search query.
I know this as one of my sites has 3500 pages with only 2 pages related to a keyword these 2 pages are out ranking sites that are dedicated to a keyword. Other sites have more information and content to read however Google prefers my 2 pages against a whole web site.
Seems to me that Google has tried to implement a new super filter that will do wonders in the future but has far too many holes to be classed as ready for the big wide world.
Those in development understand that you can test things over and over again with perfect results, however the real test is when things go live for the world to use.
No doubt one day things will be back to normal, until then their is not a lot I or we can do about it. Their is no way I am changing the way I make web sites seen as I have followed all the Google Guidelines.
Never Mind :)
Those sites were heavily affected by florida update, and our turnover has decreased dramatically. This isn't such a big deal, I understand that we were pushing the boundaries of what was acceptable, and we expected this to happen sooner or later.
So, now on to the interesting bit. We decided about a year ago to set up a completely new site which was significantly cleaner and full of useful content. We thought that over the long term this would be a better prospect than throw away domains. There were a couple of links from our old sites, but nothing significant, and no links back from the new site. This new site had the biggest drop in the florida update, when to my mind, it should have had the smallest, as we didn't have multiple domains cross linking, over optimisation of html, and we did have a good number of links from reputable sources.
Now looking at the -in set of results, our 'bad' sites have fallen slightly further, but our genuine site has come back (not quite to where it was, but at least it's visible). I'd have to say -in has the better results from what I've seen.
So, here's my question. I'm not happy with the throw away domains I have, and would like to consolidate them into the one useful site. The general concensus would be that using a 301 redirect from the sites I'm removing to the one I'm going to keep would be one option. Is anyone aware of any pitfalls this may incurr?
The other question is whether or not google will allow sites to 'clean up their act'. Is there going to be some kind of lasting problems with affected sites, or once cleaned and cleared up, will those sites be allowed back into the index at a sensible place.
To be honest, I think google is doing the right thing here, and hopefully now we will be able to focus on building the site we always wanted to, rather than spending time pushing policies that were inadvertantly encouraged by google.
