I think given Ninetendo is king of whackos his links page was probably extensive and spread among many different resources while yours and I our very small and relevant, janet We have to remember because Google spanks one person does not mean everyone else is going to get a spanking too. Google will single out those things it takes issue with.
I don't see Google ever going back to trying to give the best organic results, seems like they are burning out and going commercial all the way. Yahoo! has long been making more money than Google. It seems Google is now concerned with cashing in on their popularity only. Their payment system, the 900 Million deal with MySpace etc. There just isn't that much commercial value in giving great organic results anymore.
It's especially frustrating when you try to pay attention to all the G webmaster guidelines, then get thousands of pages supped. Happened to me.
Ahhh so very true... it would be cool if someone could break down Googles allocation of resources to their diverse set of offerings. Adwords / New Biz 40% Adsense 30% Labs 20% Blogs Groups 7.5% Organic SERPs 2.5% Basically Google keeps the free results due to the fact without all those pages of spam junk MFA and a few quality sites they would lose a large chunk of real estate where they can place their ads and control all aspects of them.. With them now chasing after myspace like foolish idiots, who do not realize fads come and go, quicker than my ex's ...there is even less of a reason for them to have any concern over the organic results. The Myspace landscape offers a plethora of ad space to them and thats the name of the game ....where can Goog earn revenues in the best manner and with the least effort available. With the deal with Myspace the burden is on myspace to maintain their site allowing Google to care even less about the organic serps than ever before.. Okay well I rambled enough Remember live by google, fail by google...
It is not just that the search results are less relevant, the whole index has become unstable. One day my site A is all in 'supplementary results' . After few days it comes out of that and site B goes into "supplementary results". Again after few days site B would normalize and Site C will disappear. It becomes difficult for a webmaster to decide which site to focus on. Google doesn't seem to make up its mind about what is "good" and what it not. In words of Nintendo - "Now there also on pot, LSD, heroin, methamphetamine..."
Well....not exactly!!! I updated the link page on a few sites to see if making them all related would help at all.
Google's been sucking since at least 2004. http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=3228 http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=14249 http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=3224 http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=91377
They've been going downhill for quite some time I guess, but it's never been as bad as in the recent months.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=14249... don't get me started! He is a member here now... brags about the crap. And then there was this little bug called the 302 hijack exploit...
Maybe the results are sucking on purpose so that we all turn to Adwords to drive traffic to our sites
Thats most likely a very good idea...however I like the thoughts and opinions of others here at DP even if we disagree on somethings (NetMidWest ) and by letting others give some thoughts and ideas I can write articles with more than my own limited viewpoint. Google to me looks like they want to have everything under control...but it reminds me of the I love Lucy shows where she was working in the candy factory and things were going well then it got bad...candy started churnging out faster and faster and Lucy got buried in a ton of candy..... Googles also cut back on Matt Cutts posting in reference to SEO and it seems pushing him back into his role as an engineer looking at spam. This also seems to be seen by the pushing they do to Google groups and building a group for every problem or issue they have and they want others to work out those issues for each other.... In those groups I never see a Google employee respond with an answer.......which tells me Google could careless about that part of business other than its real estate value for displaying their own ads. To me it appears they have no way to control outside influences from effecting their SERPs and as hard as they try (if they do try hard) they fail each time.
To be honest, I wouldn't worry too much about Google's algorithm being "farked" up. If it really is and other search engines are able to deliver more relevant results, end users will move to Yahoo/MSN (or whatever other search engine). And IMO that would be great because MSN/Yahoo are a piece of cake to manipulate... so more eye balls on the search engines that are easy to mess with means more traffic for SEOs. {shrug} It's all supply and demand. Simple as that.
While everyone is bitching about the serps, they still continue to give google private data via email and so called, free apps. The big picture is not that google is broke. The big picture is that getting in bed with google and using the data storage services they provide, will come back to haunt you. That is way more of an issue then the broken serps. They are collecting data like no one else before and have proved they can't manage it. (ie. broken serps cited) Wake up!
Every time I hear the statement "We want to collect and organize all the information in the world" it sends chills up my spine... Simply because they want to do so...