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This particular client is also spending over a million dollars a year through Google and their AdWords pay per click program. Here's where it gets interesting. Like many other web sites my client also felt the affect of the recent Google changes mainly through the Florida and Austin updates.
After the updates occured I worked extensively on recovering a vast number of quality keywords that were recently dropped. I was successful in a reasonable amount of time in getting around 90% of all the keywords that were dropped.
What's been the most frustrating is were now getting dropped again for the identical keywords it took months to recover. These of course are all words that we're also paying a cost per click through ad words. This client has a page rank of 7, has an Alexa reading within the top 5 k sites...and has thousands of spam free links pointing to him.
Yet, he is now getting dropped for keywords with sites that have very little if not any page rank, optimized html, meta tags, page copy, etc. They are mainly informational sites that are all of a sudden popping up above him. The vast majority of these rankings show old pages that have not been cached for months, yet my clients site is crwaled almost daily.
I have also witnessed constant flucuations with his rankings. Over these past few months I have conducted searches simotaneously with different results. In other words...I can process a search on my lap top, then do the identical search on my desk top and get 2 totally different search results.
I don't want to hear the crap about well that's simply a matter of different data centers updating themselves. I'm well aware of how that works. That does in fact happen and cause rankings to be slightly different on occassion, but what I'm talking about is searching for a keyword, then seeing its result, THEN searching again a second later (on the same machine)and it being totally gone from existence.
So what I'm saying is that in some cases when a user searches for keywords associated with my clients business there is a 50% hnace they will see the results with my clients page ranked. But again, one out of every 2 searches would never even get to see his site? Strange? Yes. Is it evil? I would say so.
This past 2 weeks Google has decided in addition to alreay screwing us for months to now also drop us for 2 more premium keywords that were in the top 10 out of the top 100. These keywords are keywords that according to wordtraclker are searched 600 times and 3,000 times respectively. They are obviously both of extreme quality, and they are now both gone.
How is it that Google can drop these keywords so significantly? I mean come on....out of the top 100? They were in the top 10? If there process is supposively automated....then how could we be dropped so severely, while coincidentally the same day we were dropped Realtor.com (The #1 real estate site in the world) was immediately placed in the top 5 for both these keywords even though they were previouly out of the top 30? Makes no sense. I would also like to mention that regardless of Realtor.com's impressive link poularity count, there lack of on page optimization SHOULD make it extremely difficult for them to rank under these particular keywords.
Moreover, they don't even mention either one of these keywords with their meta tags, title, page copy, or on page links. But I'm sure Google will make the claim that it's because of their high link poularity right? Sure. Tell that to someone that doesn't know any better.
This is only a small porition of what I've seen happen in recent months. I have a lot more to reveal...but before I do I'd like to hear from more people tht are getting screwed.
I'm thinking of calling up Yahoo's PR company and starting a war. Wait till you hear and see the evidence to back up the fact that Google is not only filtering its results...it also is manually undermining its results as well.
I've also seen sites drop out of the known world, while their one single page at the local MLS ranks first page.
First issue is that it can get maddening when it seems like there's a rotation between databases - first you see it then you don't, and you wonder if what you saw first was really there!
Second is WHY? The main thing I can come up with that could possibly explain why those huge sites are ranking when by all logic they shouldn't, being less relevant to the search, is that they're part of larger "collections" of documents, both within their own site and by extension, to include their network of inbound and outbound links as part of the collection. I think academically they call it a "corpus" of documents.
Related to that, since the collection is larger there's more variance in terminology used than in any one individual site because of the scope, so that percentage wise, that specific search term appears less frequently within the collection and at a lower occurrence rate on the particular page itself relative to the collection as a whole.
[edited by: Marcia at 8:57 pm (utc) on April 21, 2004]
THEN searching again a second later (on the same machine)and it being totally gone from existence
Tony
I've tried many different things including more inbound and outbound links and greater variation of semantics, all to no avail.
I am believing more and more that this filter is something that sticks to your site on an indefinite basis once your site has been flagged for whatever reason. A few people have reported that their sites have reappeared, but I have not seen this for either real estate or location type searches.
since the collection is larger there's more variance in terminology
The current volitility of the SERPs might be linked to G playing w/ the semantic knob. I'm seeing some of the pages I'm using to test "stemming" jump dramatically.
I would also think that that Google's semantic dictionary for the real estate industry would be huge. As such, they're are probably a million different signals for G that the page is about real estate, besides on page optimization for the term "real estate".
I see that sometimes for my own site and one from the competition and if I make a search about 30 min. later im back in the ranking, I have noticed that when that happen the page count for that search has also gone down.
About your bad rankings, I have seen for about 5 month ago that rankings for products, travel service our like you keywords has gone mad, if you search for a product in Google you get realy crap results, like .gov, org site university, amazon php sites and so on.
I talked with a person who said that if you talk with the Google people, then its only about adsense and adwords they dont want to talk about anything els and the last updates has something to do with adwords and product searches I think.
Just wait till they get on NASDAQ then you can forget the good SE, then its realy gonna be about money.
zeus
I don't want to hear the crap about well that's simply a matter of different data centers updating themselves. I'm well aware of how that works. That does in fact happen and cause rankings to be slightly different on occassion, but what I'm talking about is searching for a keyword, then seeing its result, THEN searching again a second later (on the same machine)and it being totally gone from existence.
Anyone who is interested...
Open the MS-DOS prompt window on your computer.
type in: ping www.google.com and hit enter.
You will see that a call to www.google.com goes directly to www.google.akadns.net which then redirects to one of several (~8 different datacenters) IP address for Google.
Hit the up arrow on your keyboard then enter to repeat and see what datacenter replies next.
If you repeat several times you will see which datacenters Google is serving you up at the time.
From universities?
From thousands of websites?
What is your definition of spam free?
They are mainly informational sites that are all of a sudden popping up above him.
I'm trying to read between the lines here. Is your client's site NOT informational? I get a sense of disdain from your tone of voice when you wrote that. Can you clarify?
Take a close look at the cookies that are being set..try disabling your cookie settings and then do your process again...you might see some interesting things
I think the best way to rank better is to make a site that people want to link to. Have some great feature or something that would compel people to link to you. If you can’t do that on your main site create new sites that do this. Real estate is one of the top areas to compete in. Expect a battle with Google they are watching that area for sure.
A. being replaced by local agent sites
B. being replaced by other psuedo directory sites
c. being replaced by the #1 real estate site on the net
d. all of the above
During Florida, the agents (probably the informational sites you mentioned) were screaming about being replaced by the likes of your site when many of them actually did provide more relevant information about 'my city real estate'.
With b), well complaining about directories is a little like the pot calling the kettle black.
With c) google is just correcting a mistake. The #1 real estate site with the most property listings and list of agents is certainly relevant to a search for just about any "area real estate" in the US.
My own opinion is that Google is starting to thin out the directories (non-informational lead generators in many cases) and return sites that do provide actual information for a given area instead of just lead forms for the user to fill out. The fact that Google isnt swayed by the SEO alone and could weed this out and keep the local site that is chaulk full of local info and the #1 realtor site isnt a bad thing.
If Im completely missing the mark as to the kind of site this is, then I apologize in advance.
