92 replies to this topic

[Jill]

Jill, have your sites suffered significantly?

Some home pages have suffered. The more competitive phrases. For a few days, inner pages of my client's sites were showing up, where once home pages were, and the results overall appeared more relevant than they had at first.

Now, the results are looking much less relevant again, and more home pages are MIA.

I'm sure they're still tuning the dial, so to speak. Right up until they think they have the relevancy issues fixed. It can't be a great thing to only show pages that only peripherally have anything to do with the search query. They might as well be AltaVista or Excite or whatever if they're gonna stick with that. I'm sure they don't want that!

Jill

[mcanerin]

Unfortunately, Mike, your company name is descriptive rather than unique. While this is good in many ways and easy to remember, it can be abused. All three parts are potential generic search terms.

Imagine that I'm Joe Spammer (or even Joe businessman who wants to be number 1). I want to rank well for "Airline Tickets". So I call my company Airline Tickets Inc. and have airline-tickets.com as a URL.

Sounds good? Logical? Yep. But there is a problem. Think of what you could do as a spammer with this tactic. If you could rank number one for a popular, non-unique keyword phrase just by changing your name and website URL every spammer on the planet would be doing it. Many are, and it's worked, a bit.

It works because it naturally increases the keyword density for the phrase in question. The problem is that many people feel that high levels of this have been targeted for tweaking and that otherwise reputable sites are getting hit, as well.

That doesn't mean there's no hope, but it does mean that you may find it's a bit of effort to make sure you don't get lumped in with the "bad guys".

Step one is to *wait* until they finish messing with the dials at G head office. You may find out that you go back to where you were (or close) just because someone turns a dial to 1.234 instead of 1.243, or whatever. If necessary, take out an Ad-words ad in the meantime.

And check your rankings on other phrases you used to rank well on, it's possible you may be pleasantly surprised.

Ian

[Mike Boxall]

Thanks for your reply Ian - I found the other topic thats running on this at the moment (that was almost 2 hours ago!) I don't feel so bad now but I do hope they're still changing things

[Mommy34120]

Hi
I have been lurking here for a while and I just wanted to come out of the shadows and say I love this forum and find it very imformative. I also wanted to comment on the relevency. For the past couple of days, I, like some of you have been staring at the SERPs that relate to me and my clients grumbling about the relevency. I've heard some say that only those affected are complaining and the results are better now.

Well today I needed to buy a product on the web and I did the search on G and had to resort to another search engine to find it because the results were terrible. So as a user not just an SEO these results just plain suck. I'm sure I'm not saying anything new but I needed to get that out I feel better now.

[Jill]

Welcome, Melanie!

Can you tell us what your search was for so we can see just how irrelevant the results were? I'm sure Google would be interested too.

Jill

[BrianR]

Welcome to the melee, Melanie - join in the fun!

Now what I'm about to explain could be:

(A) A side effect/ glitch from the Florida update.
( Or it could be caused by my ignorance.

Periodically, I manually check Google for certain Keyword phrases that are important to my clients and, at the same time, check the backlinks for their major competitors.

So, earlier today, I pumped a certain keyword phrase into G and it returns 8500+ results, which is more than I'd been used to getting. And then I search within those results to find out how many times this particular competitor appears for that keyword phrase and the count is 403, several of which are from their own website.

So then I go to G's search box and enter the domain name for this competitor so I can check their backlinks and, to my astonishment, G says: 'Sorry, no information is available for this URL'.

Why? - when I have just seem several dozen in my previous search??

I'm happy to supply further details by PM, but it's certainly left me scratching my head a bit!

Thanks,

BrianR

[Mommy34120]

Hi Jill:
Its gonna sound kinda bad but I was looking for software that would download a whole website. I need to put a database driven site I built my client on a CD business card and its ASP...anyway No I'm not stealing websites. Anyway I tried a couple of phrases like "copy website software" and their weren't really any commercial sites. I did find one on MSN I think.

[Mommy34120]

Actually I take that back. I think I clicked an Adwords hmmm.

[samt]

BrianR - I top the serps for a lot of my keyword phrases, but none of my backlinks show anyhow I think because I have low PR (3 on my home page, I can't remember what on my internal pages that are doing well). I have dozens of links to my site out there, all over various industry sites, but these links don't 'count' in google because a lot of these sites are fancy with the script and the frames and all. Obviously google knows of some links I have, they found me somehow, but they're not telling. Anyhow I don't know if it matters, but these keyword phrases I'm talking about doing well in vary anywhere from 5000 results to about 300K. There are plenty of sites below me with higher PR, but I theorize that I've 'beaten' them because of my original content.

[Mommy34120]

One observation I can offer about SERPs I care about though. "Naples Florida Real Estate"...the vast majority of real estate companies are gone. What is left are mostly directories. I've noticed that most of the sites that remain ranked well either have the word "guide" or "directory" in the title or are in that category in the google directory. Also my site disappeared for "Florida Web Design". It was #4 but remains for "Florida Web Designer" in the top 20. I observed that my site is in the Web Designer category for Florida but not in the Web Design Company category. So I wonder if there is some kind of factor for the category.

[BrianR]

Ok, samt, but I think I'm saying something different.

I wanted to check the backlinks on this particular domain that is showing in the relevant SERPS. But when I ask G to search for the domain name, it says: 'Sorry, no information is available for this URL'.

I can't even get to check the backlinks! Because G says it can't find the domain that is appearing in its SERPS - very confusing!

BrianR

[samt]

Oh yep I was thinking totally different. That is odd.

[Mel]

How we adapt to the changes at Google will depend on what those changes are, and as of now I don't think anyone knows the why of the new results (but MMT seems to be closing in) so the only logical thing to my way of thinking is to first let the dust settle, second find out what that changes are then adapt to them.

[SearchRank]

After reading Barry Loyd's article published yesterday in Search Engine Guide, it seems that SEOs will have optimize sites for Google on a case by case basis. Performing the standard set of optimization techniques will no longer do if he is correct in his analysis. We can optimize in the same manner we normally would but if it is not effective, we will then have to take a close look at who is appearing at the top in the SERPs for the key phrases we are targeting and try to discover why they are there. Then we will have to formulate a strategic plan for that specific site.

[acdc]

I've noticed that most of the sites that remain ranked well either have the word "guide" or "directory" in the title or are in that category in the google directory.

i've noticed this a lot as well. i'm a marketing director at an e-commerce consulting firm. most of our clients got hit hard with this new algorithm, but i also noticed that our competition did as well. over this past year, we've been duking it out for the top spots on highly competitive words such as "paper shredder" or "tile wet saws". now all e-commerce sites have been replaced by directories or shopping sites like shopping.com or epinions. does anyone think that this is the wave of the future? that all e-commerce sites will be driven to ad words, rather than doing well in the natural rankings? did any other ecommerce owners suffer as well?