Sem, I have posted 3 times to this board and it appears you have posted over a 1,000 times. This seems a bit excessive. I was looking for constructive information from Ken. Your intrusion tells me that your more interested in touting your vast knowledge to anyone who will listen. You don't seem to hesitate critizing anyone. Now let's take a look at you. A $1,000 a month on Adsense is what beginners make. People should critize you for passing out advice and producing such miniscule results. If your site content and visibility matched your knowledge then you should be making many times what we do. Not relying on search results is most likely why your site or sites languish. You should spend less time consulting and more time adding quality content. If you go to the front page of www.calcruising.com and spend less than 10 seconds you will see internal links to all of our directories. These are laid out in a very simple easy to view directory style. Until July 27 thousands a day navigated through without complaint. I feel bad for all the guys like Ken that struggle with understanding what happened to his site. It is a shame that guys like you only add to his frustration.
Cal Only problem is I am not crying You are and who says $1,000.00 is accurate....again I could be understating things.....momma didnt raise a fool. Now lets both be grown ups and get to the point that really matters and that is how business is built. Are you paying for advertising?? Or do you rely on the SERPs?
Ken I want to hang out with you...love the bot trap things...odd that others dont use it great stuff to say the least and I loved that you have tracked it so well...I envy that... The part of your quote above I want to touch on to give you some food for thought. We know that 33% of people will click on paid ads... So if you are say a major search engine and you want to improve your CTR on the paid ad listings on the top of the page and over to the right....how would you go about doing this while still keeping what's worked in the past working exactly the same way??? You DO NOT IMPROVE YOUR ORGANIC Listings..... Why would one not improve organic listings?? Well those 33% of the population that click on the paid ads are often buy minded consumers.... buy minded consumers buy from paying advertisers Paying advertisers pay Google to buy ads..... Google sees how to make people click on paid ads by having spammed sites in the front pages and watching as traffic spikes in clicks on the paid ads.. Googles not stupid.. it know that the organic side makes no money...by making goof ups and errors and having built in excuses prepared...(remember Matt Cutts did forewarn us of Big Daddy) and allowing spam sites and various other P.O.C. sites they can increase the CTR rate 1%...... Imagine what a 1% increase in CTR% does for Googles revenues?? Id like that 1% I know that...... Another issue is the ads displayed in the SERPs earn Google 100% income...no Adsense revenues to pay out... Anyway Google is in no hurry to fix anything anytime soon..... Dont forget A 1% decrease in CTR% is not a good thing either Peace
Sorry for my slow response to this thread, I'm bogged down in a political thread that is taking hours upon hours of research. Zero... I've never found a paid advertising method that paid off. If I could find one that was cost effective I'd use it. My site is an old school content site. My product is information, not selling goods or services. Traditionally I get around 7,000,000 page views per year with my busiest season being middle Sept thru middle November. This year I had been expanding into regularly publishing news articles, but this month that is jeopardized as I can't afford to pay writers for articles. My goal was to build up a regular flow of new articles so that I could get people into the habit of coming back to my site on a regular basis to see what is new. Initially a ban is temporary and IP address AND user agent dependant. Once a certain threshold is passed the ban becomes strictly IP based and permanent (until I manually remove the IP from my block list). I also get an email alert every time an IP address is added to my ban list with a link such that I can do a quick WHOIS on the IP address to make sure there are no mistakes. My site currently has around 18,000 – 20,000 pages. One renegade bot that disobeys my robots.txt file can literally cripple my site and bring my database server to its knees. If I didn't aggressively go after bad bots my hosting costs would go up considerably due to the need to lease more database resources. The bad bot trap you found is only one of the many countermeasures I deploy to detect bad bots. I have around a dozen different and mostly automated means of detecting and blocking renegade bots that I don't care to discuss so as not to tip my hand to spammers. The part of your quote above I want to touch on to give you some food for thought. We know that 33% of people will click on paid ads... If your site is uses a tableless design (as mine does) you can control the entire layout via CSS. If you look at my site with CSS turned off you will discover that the first thing that shows up on my page is content (middle column) followed by the menus (right column) followed by ads (left column). If I wanted to swap my menu column and my ad column I could do so with about fifteen minutes of tweaks to my style sheets and wouldn't need to touch any of my HTML code. You lost me on this question. Please reference back to what you are referring to (I can't find the reference). Does one no good if one is a content site NOT an ecommerce site. Not everyone one the web is in the business of selling stuff. Some of us specialize in providing information. Also the CTR on content sites is MUCH, MUCH lower than 33%. The fallacy to this theory is that it is only good for short term profits and would come at the expense of long term profitability due to lost search market share due to users migrating to other search engines that have better search results.
Hi Ken Thank you for the response. You make some valid points and a clearer understanding of your business as well. My post was leaning to Google keeping the organic results just good enough to get by to appease us..... yet junky enough to make people want to click the paid ads when they are looking to buy things. Yes I agree information websites do not earn revenues the same as many other websites. But lets go back to your website. When searching on Google for your site it has most of your pages in the Supplemental Results and I feel this is due to the <title> tag used on a majority of the website pages. <title>Periodic Table of Elements (EnvironmentalChemistry.com)</title> This title tag is repeated what appears to be for 80% of your website pages and as such Google seems to think the pages should all fall under the same theme and not the individual chemical elements themselves. Another issue I see is your keywords tag.....while not being used by the search engines to help boost your sites rankings you could be filtered for them being spammy somewhat. <META NAME="KEYWORDS" CONTENT="periodic table of elements, chemical elements, periodic chart, periodic table, chemistry, nuclides, isotopes, chemical properties, chemical compounds, atom, atomic mass, atomic radius, atomic volume, boiling point, covalent radius, cross section, crystal structure, electrical conductivity, electrochemical equivalent, electron configuration, electron work function, electronegativity, freezing point, ionic radius, ionization potentials, oxidation states, specific heat, valence electrons, , teacher resources, free teacher resources, educational resources, teaching resources, teacher lesson plans, science lesson plans, science articles, science experiments, environmental issues, environmental science, environmental education, environmental articles, recycling, ecology, science articles"> In the very front you have repeated keywords Italizied Underlined and repeated keywords (bolded) Google did pay attention to them at one time and your site has been around long enough for those to have been an issue at one time. Yahoo uses the keywords meta to match against page content as a way of combatting spam. Anyhow the keywords are a minor issue perhaps but I think the commonality of your page titles in the periodic charts section is whats hurting you. I dont see any penalty being applied to your site. No reason for it... Peace
Good decision, Sem. This thread is just not going well for you. You'll thank me for this later. By the way, DP frowns on double and triple posts - you might want to start consolidating your replies to avoid infractions.
The last time I checked, which was yesterday, the only pages I found showing up in the supplemental search results. Were bogus versions of my pages that included query strings that were added to my URLs by others. I rectified this issue about three or four weeks ago by forcing 301 redirects of requests to my pages containing query strings. Eventually these duplicate pages should disappear from all SE search engines. This URL concatenation issue should not have an impact on my site as it is an issue that almost all websites face as almost all websites will respond to requests for pages even when they contain bogus query strings and these bogus query strings get created by third parties on a regular basis for all kinds of silly reasons. SEs should be smart enough to realize that there is a high probability that if foo.html and foo.html?stupid=query are essentially the same than the odds are they are the same page and that the query string version the page should be ignored. If entire websites can be penalized for duplicate content because of bogus query strings, this would open up a very easy vector people could use to sabotage their competitors' websites. Technically speaking the periodic table of elements section of my website only makes up around 1.5% of my entire site. However, every single one of my pages is given a relevant, accurate and different title. Adding the overall site title to every pages is a standard practice on most websites so my adding "(EnvironmentalChemistry.com)" to the end of all of my title is not unusual and it is done for branding purposes. My standard practice for generating titles is {Title}: {Sub-title} ({Site title}) so the title for my periodic table of elements page on oxygen is "Periodic Table of Elements: Oxygen - O (EnvironmentalChemistry.com)". The idea is that users are provided accurate information about my pages in search results based on their titles. By including "EnvironmentalChemistry.com" at the end of my titles as users conduct repeated searches on similar topics, over time they will start to associate pages to my site and thus branding will take place. If for instance you routinely do search for a chemical and visit my page and find it is relevant and useful for what you needed to know, the next time you do a search for a chemical or related topic and see one of my pages in your search results you are more likely to click on my pages again, as a certain amount of trust has been built up. Again this is a standard practice done by many websites and it should have little to no impact of sites being hit with site wide penalties by Google. First Google and most major SEs have pretty much ignored META KEYWORDS since the late 1990s because they were always spammed very heavily. Second, the standard practice with key words/phrases was to separate them with a comma. Thus SEs that did rely on keywords would often times treat "blue widgets, pink widgets, purple widgets" as three different key phrases. Now a days there is no sure idea how SEs look at keywords to the best practice is to limit the repetition of key words. For example while I use the word "chemical" three times, each usage is in completely different (and accurate) contexts. Now if I placed the word chemical a half dozen times in this metatag and right next to each other that would absolutely be keyword spamming. The easiest way for SEs to combat keyword spamming is to just ignore the keywords metatag. There are; however, still a subset of SEs that use these metatags so they still need to be used correctly as originally intended. Thus I have stuck with my practice of separating key phrases with commas. It has never been an issue with search results. My site traditionally has done very good in search results and even new pages would climb to the first or second page or relevant search phrases within weeks or months of being posted. It was not uncommon to find my pages at the number one position of relevant search phrases. It has been this way since the 1990s. For the most part all search engines treated my site very well because it contains lots and lots of quality content and information. Again traditionally I have had no problems with Yahoo. Again unlikely because this is a standard practice employed by other websites especially those on this topic. BINGO!!! This is the point many of us are making about the June 27th and July 27th updates. There seems to be no rhyme or reason for what happened and it has happened to many legitimate websites that have been around for years, have countless high quality organic back links and really good content. From everything I have seen in discussions here, at Webmaster World and the other forums I participate in the problem seems to be bad/incomplete data in Google databases. This all started around the time when the billion page sub-domain spammers appeared on the scenes and there were rumblings that Google was complaining about running out of disk space. My suspicion is that Google inadvertently or intentionally started purging sections of their datasets and/or ended up falling back to legacy data for parts of their search database.
Yea! Glad we are getting back on topic here. I had several sites hit June 27th. One of them popped back up at it's pre-June 27th ranking in a few data centers a couple of days ago. Hasn't spread to any other centers. The interesting thing is: a competitor of mine also popped back up for that same keyword. I'm not sure if they were hit June 27th also, I don't follow them that closely, but I did notice they were gone and then popped back up to the number one position (where they should be) at the same time my site for that keyword came back up. None of the other sites I had hit in June 27th have recovered, just this one site for this particular keyword. Which makes me wonder, are we looking at a keyword by keyword 'fix' in the works? Or perhaps a small fraction of the database has been... a)fixed, b)recovered,c)thrown back into a pre-June 27th time.
Dave You know if you wish to add something that others could find useful then by all means let your fingers hit the keypad Otherwise your armchair critiquing or how I am faring is rather lame... Goint to see how many "infractions" I've run up Ohh and Dave...when do I get detention???? All that gray hair you have and still acting 14??? Peace
Thanks Mintsrel, I think most guys on this board are smart enough to ignore Sem. I just wish someone from Google would actually comment on the July 27 problem so we could all move on and not have to listen to Sem's ramblings.
Google twice has commented on the June 27, July 27, and August 17 "data refreshes". Unfortunately the comments were quite vague and didn't really provide any direction for webmasters to fix the problem. In case you missed the comments. From the Google Terminology video: And from the Data center video: Again, I'm not really sure how we are supposed to do anything with that information, however that is what has been said from Google about the June 27, July 27, and August 17 data refreshes in case anyone missed it.
You have no point...thats it to a T Cal See you in the front pages...you got a new friend.. Ignorant fool .....
The problem is with that way of thinking, was Matt's site was effected by it... I posted a screen shot (somewhere on DP) after the July 27th blow, and his site wasn't even coming up. Matt is a nice guy, but I don't think he understands all of whats going on.
Yeah but the cool thing is when he retires, he'll have a nice pagerank 7 (or greater by the time he retires) website he can throw adsense on, and live off of. Talk about a retirement plan. Note to self: get job at Google ASAP.
If he doesn't start increasing useful content and cutting down on the "I'm back from my vacation now", "here's another lovely picture of my cat", "how do you like my latest pirate costume?", and "my wife and I have bronchitis" posts, he won't keep that PR7 for very long, will he?
Probably not, but then again for everyone of us who've been around the block, there's that gullible first timer who thinks he can make a million dollars the first years. Although I've got to admit if I see one more M&M demonstration, I might just crack and stab myself with a usb cable.
Are you kidding... Matt Cutts doesn't need a website with adsense or any other way to make money (small change for him). He can retire today if he wishes with the $Billons$ from his Google stock options.
It was always pointless. Filled with ass kissers and vacuous statements like 'content is good' and such.