Google is Goood

positive things about Google.

[RFranzen]

I am an amateur webmaster who has no commercial content or links. My sites tend to be of a specialized, informational nature. Instead of acquiring dedicated URL's, I use the free web hosting provided by my ISP's (ATT Worldnet and Road Runner). Until I found WebmasterWorld yesterday, I did not know so many people worked so hard at optimizing the search engine placement of their sites.

My pages have a Google PR from 6 to 4. I didn't even know that until last week when someone told me the only way to see PR was to use Internet Explorer with the Google Toolbar (I prefer Netscape or Mozilla). The recent Google update did not seem to affect me much. Somehow my sites tend to be near the top of relavant searches.

I track a few of my pages with a third-party tracker (Extreme). Google is clearly the best at letting searchers find good content. MSN search is just about the worst. I say that knowing that MSN ranks me higher on some things than Google -- too high, and uselessly. I feel bad when someone looking for information about fire insurance finds a page of mine talking about life insurance.

If my livelihood depended on search results, then I would probably be more sympathetic to the complaints about shifting rules concerning PR and SEO. From my actual vantage point as webmaster and user, I feel they are doing a great job. (Their image search should include PNG images, though.)

-- Rich Franzen

[NFFC]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld RFranzen, glad to have you aboard.

[GoogleGuy]

Hi RFranzen, glad to hear that as a non-SEO webmaster and user, Google's results are working well for you!

[jtoddv]

RFrazen,

Have you checked out All the Web? They are better than Google now, just not as popular. The results used to be precise on Google, but after this last update, they went sour. All the Web is better now. Your searching time will be cut by 75% for precision searches with All the Web.

[Beachboy]

Alltheweb is better? Oy vey. I think Google needs stiff competition, and I would like to think alltheweb is a capable competitor. However, on those rare occasions I use it, I find the results not at all very focused and often out of date. They have a lot of work to do over there. At this moment, I find the Lycos version of alltheweb to provide superior results to atw itself. And the new WiseNut is looking good, too. Even on those occasions when Google is running down the freeway on three wheels, it's still ahead of atw and everybody else.

[dcheney]

RFranzen,

Welcome! I am also a "hobby" webmaster of non-commercial sites. My main site qualifies as a medium site I suppose (15-20k pages). I have also had amazingly good results with Google. Most of the individual pages on the site are for a specific proper name (person or group). Incredibly my site shows up toward the top of many of these proper names!

All in all, I have to say my experiences with Google, both as a webmaster and just as a researcher, have been very good.

[nutsandbolts]

Yeah, guess what - I think Google is good too. I didn't for a few months at the start of the year when all my sites got dumped. But after the months of dispair and the support of everyone here, I made it back in.

Google is THE number one search engine for a simple reason - It delivers the best results. And let's face it, GoogleGuy goes above and beyond the call of duty helping people and offering bits of advice too.

Sure, I can understand why people are attacking Google in the other forum - but it's only when you take the Webmaster shoes off and look at the results as a user that you really see how good things are...

Of course, one site of mine that fell of the index with this update should really be in Google on the front page - as I'm sure many visitors are missing out on some superb deals... Tsk.... ;)

[kfander]

So far, it looks that my sites have changed very little. One has come up one point in PR, but still maintains its place on searches of the most common keyword phrase, behind a Geocities site that has been defunct for more than a month now. My other sites seem to have not changed at all, or at least not significantly. No complaints here.

[startup]

I am going to have to disagree with you "RFranzen". Google is alot more than just good, they are Great :). The results are relevant to the search terms even if the sites returned are different.
Good to see you back GG.

[GoogleGuy]

RFranzen, as you can tell--one of the great things about this forum is that you can get viewpoints from across the entire spectrum. And every user should try lots of search engines to find which works best for them. :)

jtoddv/Helpmebe1, if you think specific searches have gotten worse, or that a site doesn't deserve to show up for a search, I encourage you to use the spam report form at
[google.com...]
I don't mention the form too often, because some people on this forum disagree with the idea of reporting spam, but that's the best way to contact Google to highlight a specific search or site.

The web form is anonymous, so it doesn't hurt to fill it out. Someone will read the report; you might want to mention that GoogleGuy suggested you write in on webmasterworld.

[Abrexa_UK]

Here is my list of the most positive aspects of Google:

1. Generally high quality search results
2. Comparitively very fast crawling/update speeds
3. Excellent depth of site crawls
4. Massive amounts of free traffic

[GoogleGuy]

Helpmebe1, if you want to use the spam report form I'd be happy to see if there's anything going on. In general, we judge a page by its links and content. It shouldn't matter if a site is hosted on Ebay.

[Helpmebe1]

thanks googleguy.... Well I just have never seen an ebay store rank like that.. in my opinion it is someones hobby and isnt what people want to see when they are searching for a product..? Maybe thats my opinion and not the same as the majority of people? I guess I will hold on the spam form then until I do more searches and see if I find more of these doorway pages, Well I want to fill out the form and ask why my 950 or so products dont rank better.. haah.. a bit of humor, but my content is totally kicking.. perhaps I just dont have enough links pointing yet... how do enough links point to a website of 2340 pages though to carry enough weight to travel to individual product pages, ya know. I dont have a simple phrase to the site such as "Florida vacation hotel and resort in Orlando" to get links pointing like that. Well I have the content, that is for sure.. I am just waiting..

Thanks for your help...

[Sasquatch]

Helpmebe1,

After looking around her, it has become clear that for deep crawling you either need to improve your PR (get more links) or get some deep links from the outside.

I have a similar problem in that the content at my site is buried from 3 to 5 levels down in the tree. As this was the frist time I got any PR, on my site, the only 2 reports that were indexed were pointed to by their manufacturer directly. You might try getting some of your outside links to point to a specific section of your catalog.

On a non-google note, I thought I would mention that I no longer shop at any Yahoo stores since they decided to opt everyone in to their program to sell personal data, and I know I am not the only one. It is just something you might want to consider about where you run your site.

[steveb]

I'll try this again...
GoogleGuy wrote: "I encourage you to use the spam report form at
[google.com...]
I don't mention the form too often, because some people on this forum disagree with the idea of reporting spam, but that's the best way to contact Google to highlight a specific search or site."

This is simply one of the best things about Google. If you are a good netizen and accept your *responsibility* to help Google, they do deal with/punish spam far better than any other search engine, despite the fact that because they are soooo dominant that cheaters take direct aim specifically at tricking/fooling them.

[RFranzen]

I wrote:

For some reason my user profile doesn't show my home page. Maybe it's because I just joined a little while ago. If anyone is interested, a search on my name should suffice.

Wow, at least 6 of you actually did look me up. Cool. :) I hope you liked the color wheel!

Just checked -- my home page is now shown with my User Profile. Probably the moderators wanted to verify it wasn't a link to illegal content before making it available.

In response to another message, I am not impressed at all with AllTheWeb. Right now they should consider changing its name to AllThatsUseless. I experimented with a word I made up and have on one of my pages, "opissary". AllTheWeb found 16 false hits, and it didn't even find the real hit. (Google had only 1 hit, the right one.) It did a better job on "interactive color wheel", but the third hit had to do with guitars and the SE result for it contained 100 lines of cr*p. That engine has some growing up to do.

-- Rich

[tmott]

Despite all the wailing and gnashing of teeth, I think Google treated my sites fairly. In the biggest two search strings, we dropped one spot each, but still on the first page.

In all fairness, the sites that are ahead of me experience significantly more traffic than mine and I am wondering if Google is using the toolbar to monitor traffic and perhaps let that factor into the rankings. Going out on a limb here, but I'll bet Ebay stores will pick up points for that (for sure).

I did notice that a lot of our sub-pages picked up significantly. They were pages with a lot of content, not really selling anything.

Maybe Google isn't broken after all.

BTW . . . I looked at ATW and it was seriously out of date on the things I saw. No minty freshness there.

[WebRookie]

The small business websites I do SEM for are really benefiting from Google. They have so little budget to spend on paid submissions/PPC, but Google gives them a step up on their ranking.

[Napoleon]

Some interesting views here.

>> Have you checked out All the Web? They are better than Google now, just not as popular<<

Pre-update I would have laughed. Post-update... hmmm... try a few searches in a few different areas on the pair of them. I found that there's not a great deal of difference in quality anymore.

>> I encourage you to use the spam report form at
[google.com...] <<

Is it a great idea to start pointing fingers at each other? Could it be that Google has just raised quite a bit of poor quality to the top... and now they want webmasters to help them identify it?

Believe me, I take no pleasure whatsoever in what has happened (and by the way, my sites haven't been hit too badly). I just think that if the change was not forced by the possible loss of Yahoo, Google has dropped a clanger.

[startup]

Napoleon,
If the changes we are seeing hold it has nothing to do with Yahoo. We have publicly debugged the algo, it had to change. We here at WW did it.
From now on, at what point do we decide to go private?

[Visit Thailand]

As this thread is about Google is Good I just want to say that it is the only search engine I use (and I suspect most people here) when searching for something, I could not be bothered with the rest. While it can take a while to find what I am specifically looking for, I know it is in there somewhere it is just a matter of finding the right search term.

[bobmark]

For those hobby webmasters, to make sense of the feeling here you have to realize that individual webmasters have no control over shifts in Google's algo and minor changes can have huge effects on traffic and, hence, revenue.
It is popular to say "don't put all your eggs in 1 basket" or similar, but the reality is that website traffic is primarily generated through searches unless you are Sears, Ford or another major corporation that has national/international and local presence and the attendant advertising budget. Since Google is the current dominant traffic provider, webmasters agonize over every twitch.
That said, Google does have a sort of internal checks and balance system. Because of the superiority of their deep crawl index over others, what at first appears to be a catastrophic drop on serp for a major keyphrase is mitigated by all the searchers who reach your sub-pages through very specific searches. In my case, while I have complained bitterly about my drop on a major keyphrase, I do still get a lot of Google traffic on other search terms. However, I would not want to be in the position where my site was primarily an index page with a few pages linked off it - and quite dominant sites can have this sort of structure if they sell a small number of products despite their volume - as these sites live and die by keyphrase serp.
As GG mentioned, the spamming report thing is always controversial. Webmasters fear their competitors will make unfounded charges against them to benefit their own position. Google does apparently investigate and does not penalize sites merely because they were reported, but the potential for abuse exists.
Hope this isn't too preachy :) (and I would not have called a thread "google is horrible")

[j_h_maccann]

I'd have to agree that this latest update was very good.

For the one-word vestigand which names the general subject
area, my site has just moved up from about number 40 to about
number 15 -- and I'd have to say that all of the sites above
are arguably better results. No spam, no junk, no dead sites.

For the three-word vestigand which names the narrow topic of
my own site, my site comes number 1, as was true before (it's
the only site so narrowly focused on just that specific topic,
and Google has always noticed).

A searcher would get the best broad information (including my
site) using the general vestigand, and would get the best
sharply-focused information using the specific vestigand.
Google produces exactly the right thing, out of two and a
half billion pages.

My site is a non-commercial amateur effort, which provides a
lot of historical information previously available only in
research libraries along with a lot of original material. It's
had no SEO attention at all, just content. It has about 15 links
from other sites, all similarly non-commercial efforts. It is
listed in DMOZ, as are most of the other sites that link to it.
The homepage has a toolbar PR of 5. The domain name is
hyphenated.

P.S. I don't see the word "vestigand" used enough, although the
concept comes up all the time here; the word means "that which is
searched for". "Vestigand" is the gerundive form of the Latin verb
"vestigare", meaning to track, to search for, or to investigate.
Latin verbs ending in "-are" form gerundives in "-andus, -a, -um"
(cf. analysand, multiplicand, operand, ordinand), always passive in
meaning; hence, "vestigand" means "that which is searched for".
Surely the Ph.D.s at the Googleplex must use this word all the time!

[bobmark]

and could I have found the definition of vestigand on your site?
You have more faith in the breadth of the educational system in specific disciplines than I do if you envision analysts bandying words like vestigand at the Googleplex (or did I miss the sarcasm?).

[j_h_maccann]

>
> could I have found the definition of vestigand on your site?
>
No, of course not! Search in Google--there is zero result
(until this Webmaster World page is indexed). "Vestigand" is
merely the precise word for a concept which comes up in almost
every post here.

[Sasquatch]

Instead of trying to convince us to use "Vestigand", perhaps you should try and convince the dictionaries. As it is not listed at dictionary.com.

In what fields would that word find common use? These aren't PhDs in searching, they are mostly CS, math, and linguisitcs would be my guess.

[j_h_maccann]

More surprising, "vestigand" is not listed in the
twenty-volume second edition of the great Oxford
English Dictionary, either. And how many words
have zero hits in Google? Clearly "vestigand"
is a very special word.

I first heard "vestigand" from professors of
Computer Science and of Linguistics at a leading
US research university. It was used to talk
about searching algorthithms in computational
linguistics. It's sort of the obvious quasi-mathematical
term, similar to "operand" and "multiplicand" and
others. It may well be in use at the Googleplex.
(And BTW, the Latin derivation is correct.)

As to who and which specialties use "vestigand",
I'd expect it is webmasters discussing search engine
optimization. Who else has greater need for a word
which means "that which is searched for"? That's
the context in which I use the word, and it comes
in very handy.

[Helpmebe1]

Sasquatch
Thanks for the info on Yahoo stores, I have not read their policy on that within a while. I know they are ok with us using your info for ourselves for mailings, etc.. but did not know they sold it..something to check into. I do have to say their are so many other benefits to it, including stable servers for one that make it worth it.. this is my second site actually, tore the first one down because of really horrible servers which were supposed to be the best of the best.. anyway.. check your mail.. I sticky noted you about some possible ideas for getting your deeper sections more visible.. curious to kick around a few ideas on how to do this...

[RFranzen]

6oogledown,

Since I have never been an MSN subscriber, I don't have any insights into what is on their side of Fairyland. What I do observe is that their discrimination is extremely weak between appropriate search results and misleading results.

-- Rich

[Hagstrom]

More surprising, "vestigand" is not listed in the twenty-volume second edition of the great Oxford English Dictionary, either.

Great! I'll hurry up and reserve vestigand.com.

Just kidding :)