92 replies to this topic

[qwerty]

Welcome, kyrasdad

I really want to believe that the results you wrote of are going to become more rare as Google figures out what's wrong with this new algo. I've been seeing more and more results that I would consider to be relevant in the past week, but clearly there's a long way to go.

FWIW, I filled in their "dissatisfied with your results" form on the query you specified.

[Jill]

Welcome, kyrasdad!

Google certainly still has a whole lot of tweaking to do. Don't give up yet!

Jill

[peter_d]

Nice post, kyrasdad. I think there are many webmasters who feel the same way.

The problem lies in thinking that the search engines will always support the webmaster if the webmaster follows published guidelines. That obviously isn't the case.

Winning the search engine marketing game is about differentiation.

[Jill]

Winning the search engine wars is about differentiation. 

Exactly!

[projectphp]

The real problem is that no one understands that content is marketing on teh web. More content = more chances to attract users. If you have X pages that are SEO'd for an exact phrase, stemming and whatever else it is will get you. So now we are back to square one: trying to build a site rich in information that converts. Quite simply, if you don't have a site like that, PPC has always been a safer bet.

[yuccadude]

Many of my sites lost their rankings that came from their home page. Mainly due to the "Keywords" in the anchor text of the backlinks.

But......most of them are experiencing a 50% to 200% increase in traffic overall. (Most of them are new clients so I bet that has alot to do with basic SEO updates)

Here are my My thoughts on the Google Update!

[Jill]

Projectphp, the thing about content is that even those that think they get it, really don't. I get emails all the time from people who tell me they DID develop content and yet they're missing. But their idea of content is really not content, imo. It's just stuff they slapped up for the search engines.

More than ever, Alan's mantra of would you do it if the search engines didn't exist? is the key in all of this.

I know for a fact that the good people at Google very much believe in that way of thinking. Obviously, they're trying to figure out a way to reward pages that work that way. (They're not there yet.)

Is this the end of SEO? Absolutely not!

It might very well be the end of quick-fixes, however. But that's not a bad thing. It just means you gotta do some real work now.

Keywords in domain names, reciprocal linking, and all that fun stuff was always building a foundation in sand for any Web site. Just cuz it worked, never meant that it was the way to go.

So many people vehemently disagreed with me when I would say forget about keywords in your domain names and file names. Yes, I knew that it worked and could sometimes help, but it's not really a strategy. It's a foundation built in sand...

Jill

[kyrasdad]

But......most of them are experiencing a 50% to 200% increase in traffic overall.  (Most of them are new clients so I bet that has alot to do with basic SEO updates)

You know, this is the paradox. The Florida disaster, er, "update" hit on, what, Nov. 15th? We actually had a record month for unique visitors in November, and had great sales, even with Google deciding a Japanese language PDF was more relevant for conveyor than our 500+ pages of content.

My thought is that at least in our case, we never relied solely on our good search results. We have done PPC hand in hand with that for years. In the case of several of our terms, we actually understand that it seems a PPC visitor is more likely to convert than a natural results visitor.

I take that in my own case. If I'm looking to buy something online, I visit the PPC sites as often as I do the natural results ones. My mindset has been that the PPC ads gain credibility to someone who is in a buying mood. He knows that companies who paid to be there may be somehow more serious.

So, we see a decline in our listings due to Google's folly, but our PPC ads are picking up more customers. That may be due to the fact that the natural search results are used cat litter, and the buyers are having to look at PPC ads to find anything useful.

[BobetteKyle]

Hi all. Not a professional SEO here, but a frustrated webmaster. <snip>we got them through content, with on-page SEO that never compromised what the viewer saw. (Stuff like doing H1 tags, conservative keyword density, accurate, descriptive title tags). We never stuffed keywords, did doorway pages, or linked to a farm. <snip>
I realize that Google is trying to turn out the best results. I don't buy the conspiracy theories about cutting costs or trying to up AdWords spending as the IPO draws near. <snip>
they have damaged not just us (we can PPC it and get back there), but their users, with information-free results. <snip>
This isn't altruistic at all, I want my rankings back, but I can't see how Google or its users win in this situation at all. I'm playing wait & seek.

Kyrasdad, much of what you've written about how you approach your Web site management sounds exactly like what I've done over the past 22 months or so...Focus on content, no tricks, keep up with the basics. My site also jumps to #1 without the filter. In another post, you mentioned you had a record number of unique visitors in November even though you lost significant Google referrals - same here. Like you, I'm trying to remain objective and wait (as BrianR also - wisely, I think - recommended a few posts earlier in this thread.).

Anyway, my reason for posting this is to supply more data / observations for the good SEOs trying to piece together the big picture...

The keyphrase I have been monitoring since mid-October - marketing plan - has acted a bit differently than some others. I have no conclusions or answers to offer, so take these for what they are - simply observations on my part that might provide a piece or two in the "big picture" puzzle:

1) As I mentioned above, my site is #1 without the filter (i.e. when excluding a nonsense character string... -eoiwe ... or whatever). Interestingly, it's *never* been #1 before. Before the shenanigans started, it hung out at 4, 5, or 6 with one breathtaking and temporary rise to #2.

2) Before October, the listings seemed to remain fairly stable.

3) There wasn't the huge shake up in rankings some other phrases are seeing. In early October, things started to change a bit...

a. Two government sites - SBA.gov page about marketing plans and an ancient FTC page about MLM - began showing up on the first page of results.
b. Amazon made an appearance, a book with "marketing plan" in the title.
c. The results have remained fairly relevant.

4) In November up to present time, the same behavior continues, with ranks shuffling at least once a week, sometimes daily (That is my general perception, I haven't been recording them.).

a. The top three seem to be stable (unless I remove the filter as explained above).
b. Two or three sites on the front page sometimes have two entries, sometimes only one.
c. Occasionally the FTC and/or Amazon listing temporarily drops out.

5) My own site is ping-ponging...early October, it dropped from #5 to #9. I made some adjustments and it went to #4 for a bit. Recently - in the past 2 1/2 weeks or so - it has been mostly on the second page somewhere, with an occasional appearance as the last entry on page 1 (Yesterday, for example, it was somewhere in the middle of page 2. This morning, bottom of page 1.). I think we must take these fluctuations with a grain of salt, however. I have been making structural changes to the site that could also be affecting rankings.

As I go back and read this, I'm not sure this has really been any help...maybe just muddles the waters more, don't know.

Anyway, will be totally happy when things settle down.

[bwelford]

You know, this is the paradox. The Florida disaster, er, "update" hit on, what, Nov. 15th? We actually had a record month for unique visitors in November, and had great sales, even with Google deciding a Japanese language PDF was more relevant for conveyor than our 500+ pages of content.

I wonder whether you're seeing what Randy mentioned in another thread here.

[kyrasdad]

bwelford,

That may be. I did some digging and we did see a drop-off in average daily users, post-11/15. It was not a killer drop off, but 7% is substantial enough to notice. In practical terms, for niche sites like ours, that doesn't amount to a ton of people.

What I haven't dug into is the sales figures over the same time.

We are definitely seeing some benefit from longer phrases as well. If we can maintain our sales, I'll be happy -- but I'd love to have those high rankings back to boot. I think it is possible users are seeing the worm-gruel results on more general search terms and either (1) Going to the PPC ads, or (2) Refining their searches to find relevant content.

For Google the question is why should their user base have to do either of those things?

[yuccadude]

One of my sites is a seasonal site and this is the S-L-O-W part of the year. Right now his traffic is up 250% and sales are similar to what it is during the busy season. He joked, with some real concern, that if this is a precursor to sales during the busy season, he will need to hire/train more personnel.

The paradox for him was that his budget for Adwords decreased by over 85%. Since his secondary pages were now Top 10, he didn't have the need to PPC.

Which leads us to the next thought. Since only 10 out of 2000 or 10 out of 1,200,000 pages can be top 10, the need to advertise with Adwords basically stays the same. Only 10 can be in the top 10 and on page 1 for free! The only real difference is there are now new payors for the PPC. I doubt that Google's real income from Adwords will really change all that much.

[kyrasdad]

Well, I hadn't looked since Friday, but it appears that Google has improved its results in terms of the "conveyor system" query that we so loved to have. We moved from the netherworld to #10 overall, and on page two for the plural.

The results are still...not great for the user. That Japanese school PDF actually moved up to #3 on the update, and there is lots of useless directory stuff from various nations, but I appear to have regained about 300 spots in each query. It should be of interest now how the rest of it shakes out. It looks like to me that they are clearing out at least some of the damage they did to their results.

Are any site owners seeing similar improvements?

(And Hi all! Thanks for the various hello's & such).

[Irony]

Hi everyone!

I'm quite new to SEO, and I still can see all this a bit from a programmer's point of view (I actually developed something in the earlier days). Google algo is just a huge prog, and, as such, it will always contain bugs. Florida was a very significant algo update, so it introduced lots of new bugs. That's inevitable. And it always takes time to fix bugs.

As for Florida, our site greatly benefited from it. And PPC has nothing to do with it. After the algo shift, Google 'fell in love' with one of our quite ordinary technical articles. It ranks incredibly well (#1-#5) for any sequence of keywords one might imagine in connection with the theme, and people readily click on it. And it has never even been optimized.

So, we come again to a good, non-commercial content. When we educate the world, we benefit from it. This is a good idea, no matter how much time Google team will need to eliminate all absurd search results and restore its usual elevancy.

INSTRUCTIONS FOR LIFE that I quote in my signature also state:

'Share your knowledge. It's a way to achieve immortality.'

[bwelford]

A simple picture I now have of Google SERP's is the following:

Google has formally stated that the Search side is run independently of the Advertising side. So a SERP has similarities with a newspaper.

The body of the SERP, i.e. the search results, is like the editorial content of a newspaper. The top banner and the top right hand side vertical group of ads are just that. So if you want information look in the body of the SERP. If you like reading ads, look at the top right hand corner.