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Anyone else noticing any major changes?
As stated earlier, Google seems to be trying to filter out ecommerce sites and concentrating on information sites
Seems like people are starting to see the wood and the trees.....
which is a bad thing
I've said this a hundred times lately - Google need to monetise their product.
Whether or not it's a bad thing depends on your point of view, but it doesn't change facts.
TJ
If Google didn't want us to use the link command, they would have withdrawn it. Turning it into a junk command simply makes them look stupid and amateurish - not something they would do intentionally.
The link command as always been flawed ..it never showed links from sites pr3 and below
DaveN
Personally, rather than putting content into a commerce site, I prefer a model of two sites, one content, one store.
The content site is SEO'd to do well in google free SERPS, then driving traffic through to the store.
The store site doesn't require any SEO at all (beyond the basics) and is rounded off with an AdWords campaign.
TJ
So why should all ecoimmerce sites be filtered out.
For any remotely e-commerce based search I do I get back a variety of e-commerce results on the first page - some good, some bad - most with something to do with the search.
Google is monetising its product - its called Adwords - and it requires good (as in relevent) first page results to ensure that people keep coming back.
Infact, the people most likely to click through an Adword advert are those looking to buy product - if those people thought that Google was not going to return product type pages for a product type search they wouldn't use Google - Adwords revenue would suffer.
I don't know why there should be a distinction between e-commerce and information sites
Google doesn't index sites. It indexes pages. So, even if it were filtering e-commerce results, it wouldn't be filtering out all widgets.com pages--it would be filtering out widgets.com/order.htm or widgets.com/duplicate-content-catalog-page.htm. Pages like widgets.com/how-to-buy-a-widget.htm or widgets.com/how-our-widgets-are-built.htm would almost certainly remain.
For that matter, Google might not even filter out such pages--it just might give them less weight in the SERPs, so that (for example) a search on "hotel widget plaza" wouldn't yield 50 nearly identical affiliate pages in the first five pages of search results.
Also, I suspect that a lot of the e-commerce pages that allegedly are being "filtered" out of Google's search results now are really being hurt because of aggressive SEO techniques. As Google becomes better at distinguishing between "organic" and artificial keyword patterns, linking patterns, etc., it may well seek to neutralize the effects of any artificial search-engine optimization by making compensatory adjustments with its algorithm. Such adjustments wouldn't be penalties; they'd merely attempt to level the playing field so that search results wouldn't be influenced unduly by SEO techniques that aren't specifically encouraged by the Google Webmaster Guidelines.
Google is monetising its product - its called Adwords - and it requires good (as in relevent) first page results to ensure that people keep coming back.
Precisely, and that's why the clutter of boilerplate product pages or affiliate pages needs to be removed from the top search results--especially for "information" searches ("widgetville travel") and searches that can be either "information" or "commercial," depending on the user's intent ("widgetville hotels"). IMHO, if Google can do a better job of ranking pages with boilerplate content and artificial SEO patterns lower in the SERPs, search quality will improve for information and commercial searches.
So why should all ecommerce sites be filtered out.
$$
TJ
