I am It seems google keeps setting these arbitrary rules and penalties. TOo many links? Penalty. Duplicate content? Pentalty? Directory site? Penalty. It has become almost impossible keeping up with google
They like it that way. I hate the fact they went after affiliate sites in adwords and still pay publishers cents per click on some sites. They do not tell you how they rate sites and keep redoing it. If you try to make site more Seo sometimes your site gets killed with new update.
Ive observed 6 new sites of mine that were done 1 month ago. 3 undergone basic on/off-site SEO - has been indexed, now cannot be found. other 3 had basic on-page SEO with 1 incoming link - all pages indexed with SE traffic.
Yahoo is even worse though impossible to rank in yahoo no matter what Google wants people to just buy adwords but im not falling into that trap
I'm getting very annoyed really. I think it's about time Google get their sh*t straight and inform us webmasters what exactly is going on with our website(s). Info such as if our website is penalyzed or not is valuable info that google should tell us. Now we are all left in the dark. We don't even now if a SERP drop is caused because of a penalty or because of an algo update or because of something else. This guess-work has got to stop!! So G if you're reading this, change your communication method with webmasters ASAP!
Still it won't harm if google would tell in the webmaster central if your site is either penalyzed or lost rankings because of an internal algo update
You have to look at it from google's perspective - anything SEO-related is about changing the natural order of the index. They want results to fall naturally - we want our sites to come up tops. So they keep changing the algorithm and we keep catching up! If nothing else - it keeps the SEO firms in business - because if the process was transparent everyone could do it themselves Dylan
People, we have got to remember: Google's job is not to make us money. It's to show the best results in their serps so they Google can make money. Honestly, most seoed sites are probably not the ideal top sites, from a user's point of view (Not saying a legit site can't be seoed, but the amount of spam sites, mfas and splogs VASTLY outnumber the 'good' sites.) The thing is, if they gave us information, the 'bad' sites would use it to their advantage. The bad sites outnumber the good ones 100000 to one. You really think you can compete with that? Until Google can make a Googlebot that can act as a USER: Does this site have what I want?, then Google will never be perfect and seo will exist. Once that does happen, SEO will be making the best site for users. An utopia, if you will.
they have no obligation to tell you anything, they want webmasters to build good websites for users and they try and rank those sites high.
It sucks when spam or spammish sites still rank so well. Google makes a ton of moeny cause the site is full of adsense ads, but the quality suffers. It is hard to believe google necessarily wants to eliminate spam when they profit so much form it.
Google is the most successful search engine for a reason - they have quality results. If they allowed link farms, content scraping and directories to rank well their search results would become crap...
Yeah, but where are these filters when you need them? I just ran SERP check for top 1000 Online Book Store...My online book store was nowhere to be found, no surprise, but over half the links were for gambling/porn. One thing think is unfair is the weight given to older pages...I am always coming up on outdated articles and software, not to mention news. Wouldn't it be just as logical to give priority to new content?
They are forced to do these to keep their results relavent. They want to satisfy users, not webmasters and thats a good thing.