Forum Moderators: open
"Any clue as to the possible role greater reliance on semantics is playing in your never ending quest for more relevant results?"
I'd say that's inevitable over time. The goal of a good search engine should be both to understand what a document is really about, and to understand (from a very short query) what a user really wants. And then match those things as well as possible. :) Better semantic understanding helps with both those prerequisites and makes the matching easier.
So a good example is stemming. Stemming is basically SEO-neutral, because spammers can create doorway pages with word variants almost as easily as they can to optimize for a single phrase (maybe it's a bit harder to fake realistic doorways now, come to think of it). But webmasters who never think about search engines don't bother to include word variants--they just write whatever natural text they would normally write. Stemming allows us to pull in more good documents that are near-matches. The example I like is [cert advisory]. We can give more weight to www.cert.org/advisories/ because the page has both "advisory" and "advisories" on the page, and "advisories" in the url. Standard stemming isn't necessarily a win for quality, so we took a while and found a way to do it better.
So yes, I think semantics and document/query understanding will be more important in the future. pavlin, I hope that partly answers the second of the two questions that you posted way up near the start of this thread. If not, please ask it again in case I didn't understand it correctly the first time. :)
People post around here about filters, blocking, penalties, etc. etc. A far better explanation is 'things which used to work before don't receive the same amount of credit now.'
GG,
Not sure if you can answer, but I will ask a question anyway.
I search for keyword1 keyword2, a site of mine is nowhere to be found; I search for keyword1 keyword2 +a, the site is #1 (BTW, the domain is keyword1-keyword2.com). How can one interpret this behavior, if not by thinking of some kind of filter?
I see you made mention to a *far better* explanation (and I am not disputing about it), but it doesn't seem to be exhaustive.
a "low quality" site can get great results if it uses certain optimization techniques that Google happens to value
But its not so hard to just do the high quality things - even for very commercial sites - and then its a doddle to signal the high quality that is there.
And there are no worries about getting "found out". Florida, austin... you can just sit out the bad months and be confident (well, reasonably confident) that what you have is good and that it WILL be recognized when things get back on track.
That's kind of like the dilemma always there with commerce sites... The bots like the informational pages... people buy however from the "buy it now" pages. Though they are not the same, we link to the "buy it now" pages from the informational ones or otherwise minimize the commercial look of the buy it now pages to the bots. I agree 100% the bots like information... trouble is the most informative pages attracts for the most part purely information gatherers who more times than not use your site for information, then buy locally offline. The best converting pages are usually not the most informative pages in other words. The guaranteed outcome from having the most informative site in your arena is that it will be the most copied site for the people who spoof the bots. I am not saying it is googles problem... they have just made it that much harder for seo's who honestly try to balance information with commerce in their sites and who use seo to drive legitimate user traffic to their sites... unless you plan on buying the clicks of course... which have suddenly become more valuable. ;)
You are not alone. I have the same thing for my Kw1 Kw2.
If I put +a I’m on the #1.
It's definitely a filter and the only thing is to find out how this filter work
"People post around here about filters, blocking, penalties, etc. etc. A far better explanation is 'things which used to work before don't receive the same amount of credit now.'"
'things which used to work before don't receive the same amount of credit now and can void out the credit you get from having words on your page, in your titles, in your alt text, and in link text pointing at your page. '
or when we add 64.xx into the equation we could perhaps say.
'things which used to work before don't receive the same amount of credit now, but they will again by Tuesday.';)
Please take this with a bit of levity, as it was intended.
*Please use the most generic definition possible for 'penalty', i.e.- a bad thing
64 Rulz!:)
If I put +a I’m on the #1
It's the same for me too alexdo.
How can one interpret this behavior, if not by thinking of some kind of filter?
julinho, I hope GG answers your question as I'd like to see what could cause such results.
My site also has kw1-kw2 in it.
Here's another interesting point to ponder, one that makes absolutely no sense to me at all in light of GG's assertion that there is no filter:
A search for "personalized widgets in mycountry" does not bring up my site at all, yet a search for "widgets in my country" brings it to the top of the SERPs.
In my domain there is an authority (directory) for the domain related web sites.
This directory built in an interesting way:
it collects query phrases like "red widgets". After this it generates pages with the "red widgets" as a name - red-widgets.html.
In a few month number of such pages reached 5000.
This pages filled out with the links to different com sites.
In a few month this directory had PR6 (after PR0) with no any external link to it. There is more that 1500 self backlinks.
There is links to my site too at this directory
After Florida this directory had a lot of top rankings. But after Austin it disappears from the serps.
After some time I'm noted that my site have good rank only for the keywords I'm can't be found in this directory. So As I understand it's some kind of penalty?
Is it possible to get penalty because of the links from such directory?
The bad thing is that I didn't want to be there and they ignore all my messages where I ask them to remove my site form their pages.
Also noted that for the Kw1 kw2 +a directory are in 3 positions below my site at the top 10……
I guess I can find solace in the words... its not just a filter... it's LSI. its not just a filter... it's LSI. its not just a filter... it's LSI. :)
People post around here about filters, blocking, penalties, etc. etc. A far better explanation is 'things which used to work before don't receive the same amount of credit now.'"A far better explanation from whose point of view. When pages that previously ranked number 1 drop to below 500 (450 results past anything remotely relevant to the search query) as happened to thousands during Florida and Austin, the ONLY explanation is a penalty* of some sort. Unless you were to change the sentence to read
'things which used to work before don't receive the same amount of credit now and can void out the credit you get from having words on your page, in your titles, in your alt text, and in link text pointing at your page. '
I remember reading once a suggestion that Google multiplied different factor weightings to get a final page weighting. If that's right then simply devaluing some algo elements could effectively eliminate other factors without any need for a "penalty".
So if (for example) your score for "relevant links" received less credit and was reduced to zero then your "on page factors" score becomes irrelevant. Zero times anything is zero. No need for an explicit penalty.
Not saying that's correct. Not saying that's Good or Bad. Just floating a thought.
I'm not sure on this word 'semantics' and the ideas being mentioned here.
Anybody care to write a quick paragraph explaining it, or point me to a recent thread.
BobbyN,
Here's a recent thread on Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI). Maybe it will help.
[webmasterworld.com...]
Beth
Such sites came to WW's attention about a year ago and continue to do very well.
I have been a lurker here for over 6 months now and found a lot of great information here to learn from. Just want to say thanks to all great brains around...
Now it is really starting to get interesting so I can't resist making my voice (fingers?) heard at last...
My 5 cents:
One of my sites, just like those of Bobby, alexdo & julinho, has kw1-kw2 in the title. I ranked number one before Florida for these particular words. (I still rank number one if I use the +a technique.)
Now the site is sent on a rover to Mars. It is nowhere to be seen on the first 500.
I would describe my SEO tactics as fairly mild. Yes, I have optimized the page, but I do try to keep a naturally flowing language, which includes synonyms and other semantically "close" words. I try to write for humans first, spiders later. And the content is definitely relevant for may main kw1-kw2 term.
The interesting part is that for almost all my other target kw's I haven't moved very much. It is only for my title kw1-kw2 and a few other words that Google sent me to this Mars excursion. All words that I disappeared for have one thing in common - they have been used both in the url and in the anchor texts.
I think we have two distinct events - (and many with me seem to have concluded the same thing here).
The first happened during Florida - and in some way or another addressed over-optimization. My guess (as many others') is that this has more to do with anchor text and/or url words than any other optimization techniques. The Mars rovers are now full of anchor texts and kw1-kw2 titles that used to sit in Google serps.
Austin just tweaked and extended this a bit?
Then came our friend Brandy and introduced (or exteded) the semantic theme that we will undoubtedly see more of in the future. This is good.
So, to conclude this: I believe that Brandy is doing great things for the world. However, I think that Google took the Florida anti-optimization a bit too far. Many informative kw1-kw2 websites have been more hurt than they should for that singular term. Hopefully they have more terms in their basket.
Now I'll go back to lurking mode for a while :-).
GG - People post around here about filters, blocking, penalties, etc. etc. A far better explanation is 'things which used to work before don't receive the same amount of credit now.'
filter to SEO = -weighting or NO weighting to page elements in algo to GG. (imo)
My read into Widget Marketing is to market many many widgets like bizrate, amazon, etc. I am seeing AFFiliate product Directories with other true listings scalped from SE listings(my guess) to create relevance. Isn't it great you can auto-generate thousands of pages now to create such informative and useful content(haha).
I do admit Brandy seems to be better so far.
<edit>speeling</edit>
Good question. I think both can qualify as good content. It's easier for me to think of it as a user though. If I want to buy a diamond for someone, I might go on the web and just search for a place to buy a diamond. But a typical user is also going to want to know about their purchase. Things like color, carats, clarity, and so on that people want to find out about. I probably would want to know about the different organizations that certify diamonds, along with some believable opinions about the organizations themselves and their value.
If you have a "buy it now" site, you're definitely going to attract a certain type of visitor (maybe the most valuable single type, by the way). But the more unique information you can provide to distinguish your site, the better off you'll be. A buy-it-now site with nothing but boilerplate or affiliate links doesn't add a lot of value for a searcher who is looking for context, comparison-shopping, or more background.
This is all just my personal take of course, but I'd recommend building the sort of resource site that people can use to read and research, the sort of site that people bookmark and return to. That can come from original content: a good newsletter, for example, or a forum where people have a good community and discuss the pros and cons of different types of widgets. It can come from honest, unbiased reviews. It can come from providing more information than anyone else about a product. But if there's nothing that makes a site stand out--if a user perceives it as a cookie cutter site with little additional reason to use it versus another site--then you can see where it's not of as much use to a searcher.
Again, this is all just my two cents. :) We want quality sites to do well--ideally without worrying too much about SEO. And if you know of sites that are doing well but appear to be doing it against our guidelines, drop an email to webmaster [at] google.com or do a spamreport and mention the keyword brandyupdate. I'd like to make sure that we keep looking at any issues with our scoring, so that people with good sites can keep working on making their sites better, without worrying about the people trying to take shortcuts. Feedback helped in our last iteration of algorithms, and we appreciate getting it.
<added>By the way, the front page is talking about "The Semantic Web". I was talking about plain old semantics--understanding documents better, for example. The "Semantic Web" is a different topic altogether--more about RDF and XML and (OWL?) and lots of other things.</added>
Is this the same old GoogleGuy? LOL J/K...
The new serps look good so far.
