Forum Moderators: open
I have been posting in favour of the Sandbox's existence and I have 2 sites firmly stuck in the sand!
However...
2 weeks ago I registered a brand new domain and started to build a new site. I knew it would be at least 6 months before anything happened but..
This morning it entered the index for the first time - straight on page one for a one word search (a town, granted only 194,000 matches) but none the less the last 2 sites still cannot achieve similar results after 6 months.
Also preliminary early pages ranking very well
The site has only one incoming link, no adsense, banners or anything, vanilla html etc.
Built as per my last 2 sites so clearly something has changed!
Regards and hope to all
Rod
Truth is Google is an ad firm and the organic side is turning to spammy fluff more and more in my opinion. Maybe it can't be a perfect system. Possibly clustering or filtered metasearch is the ultimate answer. I don't need Google to live so ultimately I don't give a damn.
I completely disagree with this statement. What changed as far as I can see is the level of spam over-optimization filtering, which can account for some old sites dropping. I have absolutely no doubt that google is currently assigning a massive over-valuing of site age, this is very obvious in some searches I do where year after year the same sites appear in the top 5, even though for that search term they simply are not the answer to the very specific search. But what these sites all share is the following:
Old, well established domain names
Old, well established web page file names (urls).
There is nothing else I can see that adequately explains this problem.
By the way, Google is still unable to deliver me a product manual for a product, a scanner in this case, when I type in product name + product number + manual.
Just shopping sites. Google is starting to make me laugh, it's so obvious that it's f#$#$ed up that I can't take it seriously anymore. 2^32 bit index magically grows to 2*2^32, which means, dugh, there was in fact a 2^32 bit index, there was a secondary 2^32 bit index, filled with junk and sandboxed urls and dead abandoned urls. This shows me who understood this problem over the last year and who didn't.
Maybe one day math and logic will be taught well again, but if my logic teacher was right in his assessment, that day will come when parents stop using the television as a nanny... [mhes, this wasn't you by any chance was it? every time I read your stuff, it almost but not quite makes sense, like the logic motor is not quite right...]
See this example:
There is a site, launched on 16 August 2004, currently featured on Alexa's homepage, showing 6100% growth.
This site can also be found in Google SERPS for it's search terms, including single word terms.
It's possible that those were made by members here, who know perfectly well that if you're starting a new site, the very first thing you do is register the domain name, point some links to it, optimized of course for keyword phrases, then start building the site. Given at least 3 months to create a real site, often much more, these sites could very well have been linked to over 6 months ago. That method was explicitly discussed here over the last year, as was the success of it.
Since google indexes the links whether or not there is a site in existence, this could easily explain what you're seeing. Marcia commented on this quite a bit if I remember right, back when I was still lurking.
Google is way in over their head handling all the data and trying to leave out the spammers. They are afraid of the SERPS deteriorating more (probably did some search quality check with the new sites included) so they're banning all new sites regardless, until they catch up with the technology. They can't leave them out forever. CNET, NYT or someone will eventually write an article about this and Google will be embarrassed.
They can't leave them out forever. CNET, NYT or someone will eventually write an article about this and Google will be embarrassed.
I think this is the biggest thing that has me scratching my head about google...why on earth hasn't the press been crawling all over this? They love bad news, don't they?
All it takes is one solid article in the NYT or similar to get the ball rolling (anyone remember what started the atkins craze?)
If anyone has the private email of an investigative (tech) reporter....now would be a good time to point them here ;-)
