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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
My new website PR was raised from PR1 to PR5 in the last PR update, still I haven't noticed any improvement in serps!
Perhaps your site was already a PR5 and just the PR shown in the toolbar was updated.
By the way, recently, there was a similar thread: Will Increased PR Lead to Increased Traffic? [webmasterworld.com] (see especially msg #4).
Yet when I do a search like "blue widgets +a" My site is back up at #1. why would adding the word "a" make sucha huge difference, all sites use the word "a". Has there been any discussions on this, if so what do you guys think.
Yet when I do a search like "blue widgets +a" My site is back up at #1. why would adding the word "a" make such a huge difference
If anyone understands the logic in this I would be very grateful for an explanation.
My take on it - and I see no evidence to suggest that this has changed with update Austin - is that Google is attempting to distinguish between lay-searchers and "initiated" searchers.
When confronted by a search which employs boolean terms like '+' or '-', Google assumes that the searcher has a clear idea of what they're looking for and provides more narrowly defined results.
When the search appears to be a 'lay' search, Google provides broadmatched results in an attempt to cover all eventualities.
The reason why adding boolean determiners doesn't have much of an effect on three or four word searches, is probably because Google has already assumed that the searcher knows what they're looking for and is providing narrowly defined results.
[edited by: idoc at 7:33 pm (utc) on Jan. 29, 2004]
I own a network of sites, they are highly regarded in the industries they are in. They have excellent content and thousands of backlinks from people that simpily link to the site because of it's great content.
Now my pagerank for many of my sites went from a 5-6 and in one case from a 6-7.
I have subpages that are PR6
My SERP went down from #2 to #102 after Austin. They did however replace #2 with a guy that has a picture of a monkey, 2 backlinks from a FFA site, PR 1 and no text.
#4 and #8 are both are PDF files and #7 is a text file.
What I am trying to say is pretty simple. That PR doesn't matter at all. I had 30 people today go though 102 listings to find the site. At least for my keyword Google Results are irrelvent.
For the first time in my life I have actually seen a massive increase from Altavista and MSN.
My SERP went down from #2 to #102 after Austin. They did however replace #2 with a guy that has a picture of a monkey, 2 backlinks from a FFA site, PR 1 and no text.
Alteast you got a picture of a monkey, I have a site in all Japanese that is out ranking me, I don't see any english keywords.
That is the most logical, rational explanation yet for the -afeadfs or +a nonsense.
Alas, i'm dumbfounded.
my site is mountable-widgets.com. info on, and sales of, mountable widgets. nothing else, it's what we specialize in. for two years, the site was dance proof, always on the first page for searches on mountable widgets. it was created before i had any clue about SEO, and it got to the first page on its own. added a few things to the site (a year ago) that i learned here, like key word in title tag and description, etc. it's nothing fancy, and nothing spammy. 100 or so inbound links, yahoo listing, etc. i was smug and happy, thinking i'd done a good job. suddenly google decides that this site should be on the 10th page, below some, to put it kindly, "irrational" results.
what smacked me recently was my own use of google. If people searching for mountable widgets can't find me, then when i search for bluetooth widgets, what relevant sites am i missing that are buried on page 10?
for two years i have been ultra brand-loyal to google, singing their praises from the mountaintop. now, i'm just an annoyed surfer. annoyed because i distincly dislike when companies treat people like idiots.... "Oh, you aren't searching for mountable widgets, you REALLY want information on the rock band WIDGETS TOIL". (yes, this is for real, a rock band fan site shows up on the first page of the search.)
i need a drink.
My site's homepage is nowhere to be found, some of my sub-pages rank top 10, ones that don't are nowhere to be found.
I just want to scream bloody murder.
Funny that we are now seeing pre florida sites coming back in. Weird, we thought those sites were gone!
Thanks
in fact, can't find any results on first two pages getting where they are due to any obvious spamming. just seems the sites on the first two pages have some random association to one of the two words. and mine, absolutely relevant and targeted to the two word key phrase, languishes on the 10th page.... alas....
Are there other regional centres showing the same?
That pretty much sums up broad matching. It isn't any good.
Agreed - I think this is much closer to the mark than theming/filter/penalty speculation. If this is the case, it is not a bad thing at all.
kw1 kw2: nowhere to be found (after 1st page pre-austin)
"kw1 kw2": right where I should be, 1st page.
Problem is, NOBODY uses quotes when searching for my keyphrases.
When searchers type in keyphrase, they really mean "keyphrase", I know this because I read minds and there's not many other interpretations, so I'm curious as to why I'm good for one, but not the other.
It's making me batty. Which is a nice change from the everyday ;)
Google computers can't read minds. They are unable to know if the person is thinking keyphrase, or pages with just those words on them somewhere. There are a good reasons why if people want keyphrase, they have to use quotes. An obvious example. If I were to search for sites about Jim Morisson's band, the Doors, I might enter *without quotes* "doors music" "music doors", "doors band", "band doors", etc. The sequence is irrelevant. I'm just trying to filter out sites about those things people use to enter rooms. Another reason is that Google can't even know what language the person is looking for. Lots of words that have the same spelling, but different meanings, in various languages.
what smacked me recently was my own use of google. If people searching for mountable widgets can't find me, then when i search for bluetooth widgets, what relevant sites am i missing that are buried on page 10?
Yes. This is the real issue, lost by short-sighted people who care only about where they're ranking for a particular keyword.
I'm angry. My site is doing OK - down a fraction, missing for a few keywords, who cares? That's not why I'm angry.
I've always liked Google. More than the relevance of their results, I liked the COMPREHENSIVENESS of their results, and that they seemed dedicated to keeping issues of money away from the results they served. That no longer seems to be the case.
For the first time ever, Google seems to be removing a TYPE of result from their SERPS - namely, commercial results.
If they were simply counter-acting what they perceived as an unfair advantage through the use of SEO techniques, who could complain (many people, I suppose, but that's not the point). If you think my use of keywords in URL is giving me an unfair advantage, then by all means COMPENSATE the results to allow for that. Knock me down the appropriate number of pegs, equivalent to the results I have gained from the use of these techniques. That's fine.
But when you systematically remove results from the index, either by "filtering" them or "penalizing" them to the point where they can no longer be reasonably expected to be found, you have moved from ranking sites to censoring them.
Google is NOT just a "privately owned company that can do whatever they want", as some around here like to insist. There is such a principle as corporate responsibility. Google is the card catalogue for the entire internet, and when they start removing commercial serps because they don't like them, or want to sell AdWords, then it becomes an issue that goes well beyond the world of search engine optimization and becomes an issue for all of humanity.
At the least, Google could release information on what they are trying to accomplish, but GoogleGuy is gone and their official statements have been opaque, to say the least.
The following questions NEED to be answered - not to me as a webmaster, but to me as a member of the human race.
1. Does google believe that the results that are being filtered are "spam", or is it google's belief that the web is so comprehensive that it is "better to be safe than sorry" by removing all possibly tainted results?
2. Does google believe that commercial search results do not belong in their "ordinary" serps?
3. Are google's reccomendations for webmasters still valid? If I rely on these, can I be confident that my results will not be filtered?
4. What connection, if any, is there between AdWords, Google's public float, and the Florida/Austin updates?
5. What is the motivation behind Google "filtering" results from their listings, rather than just applying corrective weightings to pages that use SEO?
I want Google to answer these questions. I'm really angry about this.
GOOGLE DOES NOT HAVE THE MORAL RIGHT TO "FILTER" RESULTS WITHOUT ME ASKING IT TO.
google.de results are so drastically different, looking at the overall picture. Those *big* sites and directories don't seem to be a problem where I've looked.
My own keyphrases that I've checked so so far look like they'd be expected to, pretty much like before Austin with a Jan. 27 date on them. Regular Google looks like an additional component was factored in that wiped some of them out.
With a couple of older more established sites I looked at there's only a difference of ten spots down or less on the new compared to .de; it's a couple of new ones that got slaughtered and what those have in common is that they don't have any inbound links at all yet from topically related independent sites.
I'm not saying it's got any significance beyond those, it just happens to be a very obvious flaw with them.
Or alternatively a strength. I learned how to use quotes in search engines back in the 1990s.
Then, and this is the key thing for me, in my broad niche (including my narrower one), most super-competitive one word search are exactly the same, while others are fairly different (though not drastically).
Maybe it is time to introduce all of our friends to ATW, Teoma etc or should we wait until Yahoo goes live with Inktomi and gat on the back of the hype when that happens?
This will be the turning point, and until this happens Google will carry on adding more and more filters as right now there's no reason to stop these changes.
However when the competition starts and Google starts to lose ground, its only then will see any reversals in the latest changes in a desperate bid to claw back what they are gonna lose if the carry on making such changes
