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A couple of minor sites I maintain on other themes, on which I did not yet make any serious effort have gone down with the Brandy SERPS as far ast it goes. It sems natural to me and they deserve the loss. Not that they are spammy but for the effort I put in them I shouldn't expect more. They went up though in Yahoo and my main site had losses, which is not natural. But yahoo only gave me 15% of my traffic so no worries there.
In overall, my traffic almost doubled and I am very happy with Brandy and Google's new approach. Not just because my main site did well but also because I find the new SERPS more reasonable and helpful to the user. No doubt there may still be a few spammy results, but it's nothing like before. Hope it stays that way :)
My thanks to GG and Brett (and all other contributors) for spending so much time to make things better on the Net.
The SERPs for certain queries/keywords show sites, such as amazon.com, which are totally irrevelant and do not provide any services/products/information that correspond to the keywords. What is up with that? It has been going on even before any updates were being made.
Any input is greately appreciated.
Thanks.
Here is a fascinating one. 1st and 17th for my main $ word phrase with 10 result search, then for 20 result search upwards, all the indented results start to work - I'm back to 1st and 2nd. Why they can't fix it for the 10 result search is beyond me.That is fixed. If the two results would show up anywhere on the same page the lower gets indented under the higher. At 10 results per page they are on different pages. At 20 results per page, they are on the same page. By the way, you realize you are complaining about only getting the first listing, and not the first two?
I think there is a penalty for too much anchor text containing a kw - not "widget", but on "blue" - or too many internal links - or both. Hope I now solved this one.
Back in msg #22 GG said:
The production folks get the final say about when a binary is switched
Interesting. The term "binary" usually refers to executables.
Which would imply that Brandy - and by extension Austin - isn't just about changing the weighting given to different parts of the algo. That would presumably be held in some sort of parameter file.
Nor is it just about updating some sort of dictionary, be it a commercial term hit list or an ontology.
The term binary suggests some fundamental logic changes in the code. Presumably the semantic bit since (if it exists) this is the newest part.
Then in #77:
Hey, I believe that the 64 changes should be at pretty much all data centers. There may be a restart needed later tonight though.
Why should a simple restart be significant enough to mention? Even a reboot should mean little more than a few minutes service outage for one DC.
It suggests that after a new binary is installed the SERPs take some time to "get up to speed". Why? Some form of caching? A self-learning algo?
Or - my preferred hypothesis - a background process pre-packaging more in-depth and computationally expensive versions of popular queries?
Well, I found it all interesting. Maybe everyone else thinks it's too obvious to mention.
Yeah, like that's gonna happen.Here, you can have mine, I'm not using it.
Steveb
LOL very funny Steve. I thought Americans didn't do irony ;)
General note to the thread.
Re spam reports, dodgy SERPs reports et al.
I'm getting the very strong feeling that the technology Google is using to provide the new bit of the algo requires some hand tweaking to get it just right. It is almost certainly term based, ie the way the algo performs is different for different terms, and as a result can lead to unpredicted results in SERPs.
The fact that GoogleGuy is repeatedly requesting spam and bad SERPs reports that he can filter out from the marass of email Google receives indicates that he and Google are commited to doing the tweaks to get this thing working right. I think that we should all get stuck in and help in this regard.
I wonder if someone has or could put up somewhere a "SERPs bug report template" so that folks send in meaningful feedabck that they can actually act on. A kind of unofficial bug reporting form, just a suggestion.
Best wishes
Sid
I have noticed that some SERPS are receiving unwarranted authority. My search terms are typically non commercial and can cross over into hobby/interest sites. I find that the top SERPS come usually from sub-domains of larger sites, typically Major Universities or .Gov sites that have a club or group page, this usally single page site seems to get way to much weighting simply because it's linked to a big TLD.
I'm now seeing fairly consistent results across all data centres. It seems that there is certainly specific search terms that G likes and regards as authoritive. Looser terms that I previously did well on now contain poor results. Specific generic phrases seem to produce good results, nothing new in that except the phrases are still generic and not esoteric in any way.
Eg. When searching for pictures. images, photos, etc
Specific term + Pictures = produces art sites, used to be a mix of results
Specific term + photos = produces a mix, used to be photo sites
Specific + photography = Pretty much Photography sites, used to be a mix.
G prefers precision and thus is encouraging site optimisation to be very precise and not to employ a generic approach ie G thinks Pictures are art...not photography.
G also thinks photos is to Generic a term and prefers photography.
How does this in with LSI, stemming in a word, photography might be reduced by stemming to photo or something similar and the term photo may not really exist authoritatively to G. Perhaps it derives everything photographic from the word photography.
I get a feel that this might be correct in my recent logs where I'm seeing a big increase in the variation and number of search terms that people are finding my sites on. Traffic from generic phrase searches has dropped off markedly and been replaced by hits from highly specific and completley unoptimised search terms. My conversions are up and my traffic is down. Am I alone in seeing this?
In the end it won't have much impact on my sites but the current results in no way resemble what was running on 64 up until about 48 hours ago. There was nearly a full flip from the 64 results that I was viewing to the 216 results that were/are not very targeted in my "area" (meaning topic).
I wonder if GG can comment on what appears to be a near final rollout of entirely different serps than the 64 which were discussed in detail in another thread by GG and others - of which the consensus seemed to be near unanimous glee over the returns.
I'm at a bit of a loss as to why the end product is so different than those results that were being discussed. Perhaps it's just me.
I did not use my nick here although I did put brandyupdate in the subject.
However, I notice not a peep from GoogleGuy as to why the results are so drastically different from the original 64 results. Back quite a while he commented that it may be because of new data, but I think collective we have all poked a huge hole in that explaination. So how about a real explaination?
Can somebody confirm or contradict this?
nearer 216 tha 64, but newer than the old 216 from this chair...
I see the same from 216.239.33.102 and it must be what many are seeing from their browser because my traffic is down since yesterday. Appears G is have serious problems stabalizing 64 on other datacenters. During the time I believe the 64 results were widespread this week, my conversions set records. Unfortunately that was only 2 of the last 6 days.
It should be noted that the Google algo, with an emphasis on link popularity, tends to favor these "living fossil" sites. The longer a site is around, the more inbound links it tends to pick up.
(Yippee!)
Then I disappeared too
(Oh dear)
Then we had 4 months of stupid serps
(Good show - ahem! according to some. It was blamed on over optimisation - ahem!)
Then we had 64.*
(Good)
And then GG said this was the way ahead
(Brilliant)
Now we have 64 release ver 2
(spammer back with redesigned site, but same spam techniques)
Should I file a spam report? (done it 6 times now) Or should I finally admit that the Internet is corrupt, and controlled by a monopolistic search engine that twiddles desperately with new and dodgy algos, but ultimately doesn't care?
Your shout.
[edited by: SyntheticUpper at 7:40 pm (utc) on Feb. 21, 2004]
As much as I do appreciate GGs participation. I do find it odd that he was so quick to post about the 64 index when everyone was praising it, and state it was going to be rolled out, but since this new development, he has yet to answer any direct questions about the VAST difference in comparison to what we were told was going to be rolled out.
My site has been pushed from #1 on its secondary keywords (already gone from its primary SERPs) to the bottom of the second page, in part by pages whose only relevance is that they link to it. One is a broken "rate this link" page for rating my site.
If a link to an informative site is enough to get you listed in the top 10, then shouldn't that informative site itself be considered relevant enough to make it?
[edited by: metablue at 7:56 pm (utc) on Feb. 21, 2004]
These are the old results so hopefully they don't stick.
My site has been pushed from #1 on its secondary keywords (already gone from its primary SERPs) to the bottom of the second page, in part by pages whose only relevance is that they link to me. One is a broken "rate this link" page for rating my site.
I would evolve your site a bit to suit the new environment. Dropped to second page is something you can reverse with tweaks the big problem is when you are dropped completely.
I'd also file a Brandy report to GG via the instructions given earlier.
Best wishes
Sid
I think I said earlier in their thread to someone who felt the results were not what they expected to send us an email/spam report with brandyupdate. I'm happy to read about searches where the results weren't as expected after seeing data from 64. Ledfish, include your nickname this time, and maybe the keyword changefrom64 so I can get right to any direct feedback on it.
Should I file a spam report? (done it 6 times now) Or should I finally admit that the Internet is corrupt, and controlled by a monopolistic search engine that twiddles desperately with new and dodgy algos, but ultimately doesn't care?
Welcome to WebmasterWorld, SyntheticUpper. I just checked both our spamreport database and our email queue and didn't find any matches with your nickname? I'm happy to spend part o' my Saturday looking for changes to 64 data or reading a spam report, but if you really want me to be able to help, I'll need to be able to read your specific feedback. Right now I won't be able to locate info for either you or Ledfish without something like a nickname or some other way to check out your report. I'll check spamreports/email again in a while for Ledfish,SyntheticUpper, and the keyword changefrom64 if you want to provide feedback. The few searches I tried right now gave back 64 results, but I'm happy to get specifics.
There is a FAQ for you in the thread. To make life easy, have a template reply ready and paste it whenever the FAQ appear.
then how comes GG cant see that this serps is not the 64 we all saw?
