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Does it take time for serps to improve or I should lose hope?
Does it worth it to achieve PR5, PR6 or PR7 when people find you in serps by a five words keyword?
Who said that websites that have PR4 get around 300 hit/day and PR6 websites get around 3000 hit/day and so on?
Hoax! My PR5 website barely gets 100 hit/day while another PR5 website gets 17000 hit/day!
And yes, I am very newbie regarding SEO world if you were wondering.
--mOftary
Still, "authority" sites that link out to dozens of other sites are dominating the SERPs. This includes one-page sites with very little content. Also, some spammy sites are filtering back in to certain SERPs.
While I approve of Google making good-faith efforts to get rid of the spammy sites, I agree that there has to be a better way to identify them. I hate this optimization penalty idea, or the fact that sites that don't provide directories of links to external sites are pushed down to the bottom. My sites need to use certain 2 word key phrases repeatedly... they are almost impossible to avoid.
There has got to be a better way to give a score to the quality of unique content on a page. This whole idea of backlinks and PageRank being a spam-proof way of identifying the quality and relevance of a page is nonsense these days... thanks to thousands of spammy webmasters who work on generating top results as a full-time job. What about the quality of the content on the page?
Just a thought... but what if you could raise the quality score of a page every time someone added it to their bookmarks? Now THAT would be a great scoring algorithm! Of course, you would have to be Microsoft or AOL (Netscape) to do this... or have a toolbar installed.
Dear big G its not currently working
PS i lost a bi and gained a bit in last 2 algos so no axe to grind
steve
What has happened since mid-November is that we have *all* gone off the front page, spammers and non-spammers alike, to be replaced by a new sort of spam, a sort of Google generated spam: directory pages, redirects, endless listings, links to books at Amazon about your subject rather than html pages about the subject itself.
I'd rather have the spammers back, but then I'm biased, because I'm a professional.
:q
lol. This is the greatest irony, IMO.
The problem is that everything combined together, given the size, age, theme, content, potential adwords revenue and commercial score of the page combined with the above factors results in the filter being applied.
The reason - Google doesn't want to be thought of as beatable.
The only problem - there is no "common sense" weighting of the results now. If they literally reverse everything that produced the extremely relevant results they had 2+ months ago, they're gonna end up with *irrelevant* results now, mixed in with a few very relevant and a few very irrelevant ones but who cares... they can no longer be gamed.
Conclusion:
Google’s ego driven mission has resulted in hundreds of thousands of manipulated results being filtered but also hundreds of thousands of *innocents* being filtered too. I personally believe they should have spent more time figuring a way to stop the innocents getting absolutely slaughtered in all this.
What has happened since mid-November is that we have *all* gone off the front page, spammers and non-spammers to be replaced by a new sort of spam, a sort of Google generated spam: directory pages, redirects, endless listings, links to books at Amazon about your subject rather than pages about the subject itself.
Hi,
I agree on this one. Google has created a new class of Spam and given the right resources a form of Spam which is relatively easy to create and impossible to legislate against. Previously in my market the Spam was a bit annoying but it didn't completely ruin a users experience of trying to find our class of product via Google. The current results massively devalue Google and, unless tweaks in the algo lead to relevant (direct) information or service provider sites then I honestly think that Google is going to go through a period of decline.
the folks at Google must know that many SERPs are bad and I can only assume that they are persevering because they need to for strategic reasons. I've said this before and repeat it here I think that DomainPark is part of the reason for this mess. In order for DomainPark to work Google is going to have to create automatically generated content to surround its Adsense Ads. Outbound links will be important in these sites because no serious authority site is going to link to a site that is simple a glorified advertising poster. Google could not algoritmically penalise large autogenerated sites which cross link because that's exactly what it is proposing to do itself.
Go and read about DomainPark.
Best wishes
Sid
edit: apologies in advance to custard pie retailers - WW may well be in the top ten in the G serps in the morning on this search term ;)
[edited by: Chelsea at 6:00 pm (utc) on Feb. 2, 2004]
However, as a short term glitch.....
On 3 sites, G has always provided in excess of 95 % of traffic. Have just checked for the month of Jan and find that MSN was 31% and ASK Jeeves, whatever that might be, was 47%.
A temporary blimp in the ALGO development I am sure.
Also, did anyone else notice the Update Austin/Steve Austin analogy..."he is broken but we can rebuild him". Sure, things are messy now but I don't think Google is going to do a "Howard Dean"...there is a method to this madness--we don't know what it is yet--we just see the madness now. Some time in the future, (hopefully), we'll look back on this as a means to an end.
I have seen in my category that the primary reason for the increase in directories is that those that have been the most aggressive in our industry have advertised on these sites--thus they have links from many sites with high PR.
I dont know though--I just wish there could be one data set to study so we could all fine tune our observations
The travel industry has been hit hard as have other competitive ones like real estate etc.
Guess why :-D
The travel industry has been hit hard as have other competitive ones like real estate etc.
Is this back to the theory that the results
are somehow tied to the Google Adwords?
Has anyone word heard anything official from Google, like, are they going to keeps things as they are?
I certainly wouldn't get any shares in google, they'll be worthless soon enough at this rate!
"Google is clearly broken, does anyone know is this state of affairs is permanent?"This is the most important issue. When will they fix it, if at all.
Our site is the authority on the topic in the human world. It sells nothing, just holding academic papers on the topic. Yet it has gone as of Saturday.
Searchers are now provided with a variety of deep deep pages that are not even related to the topic.
We remain #1 on every other search engine, side by side with other academic topic related sites. Google has gone from useful to useless for our topic in one day. Surely they can reverse this in a day as well?
This to me is the most alarming. If non-commercial sites which aren't spam, are not getting a look in, the whole thing is a farce. Most alarming if people haven't conciously being trying to do SEO tricks, and just building sites (see Bretts 12 month plan) the recommended way, and then next thing you know your're off the radar.
As spock would say, "This is illogical".
It isn't funny for us. Our smallest published paper is 200k, and this is killing for bandwidth costs. To stop it I've put something in the robots tag which I found on this site to stop Google crawling and indexing. We would rather not have any visitors from Google than hundreds who just turn around again and increase our hosting bill. I would rename the page to stop it, but that would annoy legitimate visitors from other search engines.
It got worse since I posted that as well. We have noticed that traffic has gone through the roof on some of our pages. Those pages have a word on them which when put together with a different word is pornographic. We are getting hundreds of visitors who are destined to be very disappointed.It isn't funny for us. Our smallest published paper is 200k, and this is killing for bandwidth costs. To stop it I've put something in the robots tag which I found on this site to stop Google crawling and indexing. We would rather not have any visitors from Google than hundreds who just turn around again and increase our hosting bill. I would rename the page to stop it, but that would annoy legitimate visitors from other search engines.
Bring whole new meaning to the early SEO trick of putting sex words in your pages to get traffic!
Ah, does that mean it's a good Idea to get
the refferer strings in your page, so you know what keywords they used to arrive at your site, then scan the keywords, if the porn ones are there, re-direct them to a more relevant porn site?
In other words, do google's job for it?
I still don't understand how the hell Google can confuse a academic research site, to porn one, this new localrank,Page context lark, sounds as if it doesn't work if it makes such glaring errors.
Ive spoken to various webmasters with several sites on different subjects. Now I know that most of their reasons are plain wrong - none of them seem to make any sense at all.
'Cos if the did no site would be listed.
My own problem, a page with red widgets ranked 3 over 50thous other pages.
So we sell red widgets in a variety of sizes and designs. Interestingly my site is the ONLY site on that page to sell red widgets the rest are mumbo jumbo aff links and reviews. I also used adwords for this page pre November.
So the page is on topic, accurate and to the point - page size 38K HTML with exception to the tracking codes in java. Converts at around 1%.
Gone as of Sunday. Now if Google was trying to get rid of spam and aff sites, why oh why are the two sites above me still there then?
No other listing on that page has been deleted.
So, am I using the term red widgets to often?
Nope, im around 1% less density than any other listing.
I have another site droped by Google (yeah fancy that eh!) in May 2003 all traffic comes from odd and old engines. Traffic is up 27 % since November. telling or what?
Google, your not to big to knock down you know the young pretenders are champing at the bit now.
I have a similar example. Several of my websites mention historic courthouses.
Since Austin I've been receiving several e-mails and phone calls PER DAY from people asking for help with finding zoning information, copies of marriage certificates, etc., because the official city pages are nowhere to be found on Google. I believe these people must be pretty desperate if they are e-mailing or calling me.
I already received such e-mails before Austin (since Florida) but never that many.
PLEASE, Google, take another look at what comes up for general searches on smaller cities and towns. The search results are chock full of spammy directories.
The top positions are often niche directories like "find xyz jobs" or "zyx therapists". And when you click on the link - very often, it doesn't even list a single xyz job or zyx therapist in town! It only has a register button! My own sites are buried down in the search results, on page 3 or lower, but they are often the first results with original, local content. I bet that in many cases, the webmasters of position 1-25 have never even heard of the town in question.
Why don't the official city pages show up?
I appreciate Google's efforts to cut spam but in the light of the facts, I would vote too, for it to revert to its old algorithm.
The official sites used to be easy to find but now even I have trouble finding them, when I'm looking for the link to add to my resources page.
This would be something to write home about.
This would be something to write home about.
It would also be something to write to the press about. I'm sure there must be a few freelance journalists lurking on this board!
I know most people who write this don't genuinely believe it, but it is actually pretty funny to know there are some people out there who think search engineering should begin and end with who has the most anchor text. Google could save tens of millions of dollars just being the simpleton search engine some folks seem to want.
'bout 3 weeks after Florida I saw many sites that had disappeared begin to return. Perhaps we are seeing something similar?
WBF
Maybe I haven't been paying close enough attention, but I haven't seen them differ in awhile.
one of the wierd things, I'm #1 for keyphrase
definition of very-popular-technology
but 3rd page for
definition very-popular-technology
even though 'of' is a fairly common word.. etc etc. Never understood that.
Btw, even though my page for the #1 spot is relevant and helpful, I have NO business being #1 for that first term.
