10 replies to this topic

[Jill]

For all of you like me who've been saying that the words in the URL are not as heavily weighted as many would like them to believe, it's time to rethink things.

[qwerty]

Interesting. My first thought was that maybe a lot of sites are linking to this one with the URL as the anchor text, but I checked a few, and found that almost all of the ones I looked at used the name of the blog as the anchor text. On top of that, some of those links point to the root domain (which 301s to the blog subdomain) and quite a few are actually linking to a copy of the site at ideasinfood.typepad.com/ideas_in_food/ -- no redirect, not even a rel-canonical link, so the link juice is actually being split between the two sites.

I don't know... it's just one example. I've always believed that URLs matter, but certainly not that they matter this much. For what it's worth, it's standard operating procedure at my company to care a lot about the URL (which I've come out against a number of times) to the point where some of our articles have crazy long URLs that I believe exist just to throw keywords in.

[Jill]

It's just a bad algo, IMO. That site should not show up that highly for that phrase just because it's part of the domain. Pretty pathetic.

[Michael Martinez]

I still don't get it. According to the INANCHOR query operator there are links pointing to that site with the anchor text of "blog ideas".

[chrishirst]

I agree with Michael, there are links with "blog ideas" in the anchor text, so just another case where is cannot be categorically shown that words in the URL are the ONLY reason for the page(s) to be in the search results.

Certainly it doesn't really warrant appearing for that particular query, but it's another indicator that anchor text is still a highly weighted foctor in the Google algo.

[Jill]

Either way...Google sucks for showing that

[Michael Martinez]

The SERPs do seem to be showing more low quality results lately. It's kind of hit and miss.

[Mikl]

The SERPs do seem to be showing more low quality results lately.

I'm finding that, for certain types of searches, the results (in Google) are much less relevant than before.

For some of my own searches, I have switched to Bing.

[torka]

Maybe this will help with Google's relevancy issues. (Or not, who knows?)

Link to Wall Street Journal article dated 14-March-2012. Excerpt follows:

Google Inc. is giving its tried-and-true Web-search formula a makeover as it tries to fix the shortcomings of today's technology and maintain its dominant market share.

Over the next few months, Google's search engine will begin spitting out more than a list of blue Web links. It will also present more facts and direct answers to queries at the top of the search-results page.

--Torka

[qwerty]

Did you see Danny Sullivan's reply to the WSJ piece?

[Jill]

Ha! Insightful take on things from Danny.