179 replies to this topic

[Jill]

I BELIEVE that Google may be trying to emphasize natural linkage,

Well, duh. Of course they are! They always have been. They're probably just getting better at it.

About time too.

GO GOOGLE!

[Michael Martinez]

I try to be objective and non-threatening when collecting data. The benefit I gain from these analyses is that I can see a lot more going on than with just my own sites.

And people eventually find me anyway. I don't need to pitch myself in the forums.

This is all about being part of the community, for me.

[Jill]

This is all about being part of the community, for me.

You be da man, Michael!

[Michael Martinez]

[RyanBlank]

Not me! You're the one telling everyone else not to speculate.

aint that the TRUTH! and i think the root of Michael's dissatisfaction with other people's speculation on this is clear..

A lot of what I have posted in this discussion is actually related to the topic in the subject line: My notes on the October 2005 Google update.

notice the MY NOTES part.. lo siento Miguel. i did not mean to crash your party G Money. i thought this was a public forum. But thanks anyway for re-iterating the whole 'linking theory' that Dan mentioned last week. as i said then, i think he was on to something.. and now you are too.

[energybalance]

Michael, I love the speculation and theorising so keep it coming.

Im still trying to find a pattern in the small group of sites that have dropped either a little or a lot. Luckily its only a handful.

[mal4mac]

... regular weekly updates.

Are you on the slow train? I'm getting updated daily. If you go to "Google Video" you can take the full factory tour and hear Google Guys saying they are updating daily. I didn't believe them, until I looked closely at the date in my recent search listings. Yup daily!

Personally, my rankings sky-rocketed in October - so keep doing whatever you're doing Google!

P.S. get in plenty of popcorn for the factory tour, it's five hours long.

[Michael Martinez]

Are you on the slow train? I'm getting updated daily. If you go to "Google Video" you can take the full factory tour and hear Google Guys saying they are updating daily. I didn't believe them, until I looked closely at the date in my recent search listings. Yup daily!

Google has been updating daily for years. The weekly updates are different from the daily cache updates.

Search results on Google change on a weekly basis. I have yet to see any consistent daily changes (except in the news and blog sections, which update on an hourly basis).

Your mileage may vary.

[Michael Martinez]

...But thanks anyway for re-iterating the whole 'linking theory' that Dan mentioned last week.  as i said then, i think he was on to something.. and now you are too.

Wrong again. Dan actually wrote:

So far, through each round of this update, we've consistently seen the same pattern, across every "market basket" of search terms we have analyzed. The trend is in favor of sites with a more diverse population of incoming links (links coming in from more unique web hosts) and against internal pages which rely heavily on internal links.

I have found no indication that internal linkage has been identified by Google, much less impacted in anyway.

I took Dan's comments (and a few other top-notch SEO's comments) into consideration, though. I agree that link homogeneity is probably being filtered in some way by Google.

But internal linkage still works fine for me and other sites that I monitor. It's not about internal linkage.

Reciprocal links probably still work for some people, for that matter. As do directory links.

Variety will, I think, become the cornerstone of link building campaigns (or, at least, of the philosophies that reputable SEOs like Dan will be advocating henceforth).

Nonetheless, I stand by what I wrote. Intra-update analysis is not valid because it assumes that intra-update results are indicative of post-update results, and to date that has never been the case.

[RyanBlank]

I have found no indication that internal linkage has been identified by Google, much less impacted in anyway.

to be honest, i didn't even see the whole internal linkage part of Dan's comment. if you read my post, i was focused solely on external/incoming links.

Dan's Quote from last week:
The trend is in favor of sites with a more diverse population of incoming links

This was Dan's point.. that i agreed with, stated i noticed the same thing and you so abruptly discredited..

which ironically you are now re-iterating.. in your own words of course to make it sound unique..

Michael's quote today:
Variety will, I think, become the cornerstone of link building campaigns

Wrong again.

wrong again my . One can not be wrong AGAIN had they not been wrong a first time. you are now stating the exact same theory you felt the need to discredit last week, and that's all there is to it.

<edit>
my point is: stop jumping down other people's throats when they state their own observations.. just read along and shut the heck up.

writing this:

All intraupdate analysis is pretty much invalid, though.

each time anyone other than you has something to contribute is pointless and rude. if all intraupdate analysis is pretty much invalid, as you so commonly state, then why did you create your own intraupdate analysis thread?
</edit>

Edited by RyanBlank, 15 November 2005 - 11:24 AM.

[Michael Martinez]

which ironically you are now re-iterating..  in your own words of course to make it sound unique..

So, what, you're just going to resort to personal attacks at every post? I don't "make it sound unique" in the least.

wrong again my .  One can not be wrong AGAIN had they not been wrong a first time.  you are now stating the exact same theory you felt the need to discredit last week, and that's all there is to it.

And you're wrong again. If you quit trying to make this personal, I think you'll find you make fewer mistakes.

My point is: I started this thread and I am following through on it, and if you don't like that, no one is forcing you to read through and respond.

I took Dan's comments and other people's comments and put them together into a concise summary of what is being reported. You're just needlessly bickering for no reason whatsoever.

[pemburung]

After thinking about this, especially the new postings about linkage, I returned to the basics. Google's searches are about finding pages on the web that are relevant to the enquirer's search. It's not the other way round - that pages on the web are created to be relevant to Google's searches, at least in theory, in Google's stated guidelines, and Jill's oft-referred to mantra - create and write the pages for the reader, not for search engines. dbmasters' Minnesota fighting site is clearly extremely relevant for anyone looking to find out about that style of fighting in Minnesota; and I know my site is clearly relevant for anyone interested in nature travel, especially to Australia. There are endless other examples. We're not talking about a drop in rankings, but about relegation to somewhere far below sites that are clearly far less relevant to the enquirer's needs. That these sites are now not being brought to the attention of the enquirer is not a problem caused by the site, but a problem caused by Google's search engine failing to identify these sites as relevant. Regardless of the nature of the links, or in fact any other specific element of the site, the information provided by the site is very relevant to the enqurier's search, and Google is not bringing this information to the attenton of the enquirer.

According to Google, links are a vote, and these votes count towards ranking a site for importance. But, there are supposed to be about 100 separate aspects of a site's postion on a SERP, and links are but one of them. Surely a change in one part of a 100-term algorithm shouldn't make that much of a difference, especially if a site was considered very relevant prior to this change. The implication would be that links far outweighed, to the point of total domination, all other aspects of the algorithm. The only reason the site ranked highly before was due to its links. However, we see sites with few or no links - natural or otherwise - high on the SERPs. And, we know at least some of these disappearing sites did not have thousands of directory of other largely irrelevant links. So logically any link weight change would be out of consideration for these major changes.

So we are left with the original thought - Google's search engine is simply not finding some sites of extremely high relevance, sites that it knows about and has indexed for quite some time. In addition, it is elevating sites that are pretty clearly not particularly relevant to the search. As most site owners do not subscribe to High Rankings, WPW or other SEO forums, but on these forums the disappearances have been a hot topic for a month, it's reasonable to believe that there are a lot of affected sites across the web. The only reasonable conclusion - the current Google SE is not very good at its job. We come up #1 or 2, depending on word order, for <australia nature travel> on yahoo, and dbmasters' site comes up #2 for <minnesota kenpo> on Yahoo. In each instance I would suggest that the sites found were extremely relevant to the search term, so it would appear that Yahoo got it right, and Google got it wrong, on these two very different searches. A year ago, the reverse was the case.

[Randy]

Okay guys, that's enough. Both of you have made your points and both are getting too personal, so stop before the whole thread disappears.

Opinion is opinion. Let's leave it at that.

[lisety]

Thanks Randy, the personal attacks were getting a bit much.
Lise

[Michael Martinez]

According to Google, links are a vote, and these votes count towards ranking a site for importance. But, there are supposed to be about 100 separate aspects of a site's postion on a SERP, and links are but one of them. Surely a change in one part of a 100-term algorithm shouldn't make that much of a difference, especially if a site was considered very relevant prior to this change. The implication would be that links far outweighed, to the point of total domination, all other aspects of the algorithm. The only reason the site ranked highly before was due to its links. However, we see sites with few or no links - natural or otherwise - high on the SERPs. And, we know at least some of these disappearing sites did not have thousands of directory of other largely irrelevant links. So logically any link weight change would be out of consideration for these major changes.

Sites can rank highly because of link anchor text. You get enough link anchor text to point to a site and you can push it to the top for any phrase.

The change in Google's algorithm could be indicative of many things.

I think that maybe Google felt too many irrelevant sites were bombing their ways to the top of search results, and one way of filtering those sites would be to qualify their link variety.

But they also caught some innocent sites in the process, which happens.

Although there are a couple of sites I have yet to look at, so far I haven't seen any sites that rely on blog links. The Sploggers haven't asked me for any feedback. I should probably sneak over to a certain forum and see what they make of the current update, now that it's over. Their ideas a couple of weeks ago were kind of off the wall.

Nor have I found many forum links in the backlinks of the sites that have returned to good standing. Forums and blogs have long been subjects of criticism, with respect to link spam.

Take that for what it's worth.