Google seems to be dancing

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&c2coff=1&q="bird-houses"&btnG=Search
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&c2coff=1&q="bird+houses"&btnG=Search
"bird houses"
and
"bird-houses"
google and most search engines see hypen as a space, I believe mcdar has written about this. Same results.

 

Just to clarify, when I say title I mean <title>nice drawings</title> not the name of the file.

 

I'm still struggling, but just found one of my keyword phrases at #82 (previously #3 for the past few months) so at least that's out the hundreds. Gives me hope!

Regarding the comment about page titles, all my page titles are relevant to the page content - that is, the title is just the product being sold on that page.

Traffic is non-existent; now down 75% compared with an average day

 

When I do side-by searches in the Datacenter Watch Tool for...
sleeping bags
sleeping-bags
"sleeping bags"

I get totaly different results for each.

BUT if you look at Googles results for allinurl:sleeping bags, ONLY sites with sleeping-bags somewhere in the url are returned.

THE number one solid site of sleepingbagsandtents is nowhere to be found. Nor are sites with sleeping_bags in the url.

Why Google is treating the search for keywords sleeping bags and sleeping-bags differently, I don't know. Unfortunately I have no historic documentation on this (that I can remember).

Caryl

 

I remember seeing different results for '-' searches even though the standard belief is that a '-' is treated as a space.

My real question is, how many search terms use a hyphen in them that actually have a substantial amount of traffic? I can see things like e-commerce, web-hosting, and some others, but for the most part, I don't think people add hyphens to words in a phrase without some reason to do so. Maybe there are more hyphenated words than I know of, but I rarely use any at all.

 

very true!

The question of using hyphens or underscores was always focused toward page naming and the value of having discernable keywords in your page url.

 

mcdar and others, I have an interesting (frightening, depressing) thing happening regarding my serps that makes no sense to me at all.

My site disappeared during this update. Always been on top for tons of KW - now nowhere to be found - not even for my own name.

5 Star Affiliate Programs (my root domain - main site, does not come up on page 1 or anywhere near the top. It varies from #30 - 1,000. It's my title tag too.)

5star Affiliate Programs (if you type 5star together - all one word THEN I come up #1 - but no one ever types it that way)

5 star Affiliates (I come up #2 here, but not for my full name which has always been #1 and should be.)

In August I got 6400 hits from Google. This month only 100. The only ones that come through are PHANTOM listings. They are weird terms that people would not normally find my site with and when I go check the serps I'm not really there for those terms at all.

"Google SEEM to be dancing????? Everytime I read this subject line I want to scream. What an understatement. Myself and many others have taken a HUGE hit from this fubar update, glitch or whatever the heck it is!

What the heck is going on??? Update Jagger? I need some Jagermeister!

 

Sure others read my other post, not jumping to conclusions just yet but my effected site is DEFINITELY seeing a back link update via google right now. Not sure if it's a bad or good thing yet, but it's definitely happening.

 

This is the exact reason that there 67 pages of nonsense discussion about this update. Nobody can make any sense of it...

 

Ok now I am seeing some cool things. I wont post the URL but one of my sites that is about a year old has been getting an average of only about 65 unique a day from Google.

Today I have already seen 234 (as of 5 minutes ago). Looks like I got bumped from the 5th page to #3 on the first page for one of the bigger keyword phrases.

The funny thing is, the site is full of syndicated columns from authors that submit to MANY different websites. That is really all it has.

The site is not SEO'd and to be quite honest is really a glorified blog.


Bad news is...

I've lost 50% of my traffic on most of my other sites. Some of my strongest travel related rankings have completely dissapeared. I've been wiped back to page 87 on what was my biggest source of traffic.

This sucks.

 

Nope just theories, I've got a few as to why, the timing, and possibly the underlying cause and solution. If I'm correct which I'll admit I may not be, but I expect my site to come back a bit possibly this weekend into next. Crossing my fingers at least, hope is all I've got at the moment

 

Other than ebay and amazon, the sites that have crept up to the top have the least amount of the links. Its almost as if backlinks havent been factored in yet and rankings are relying solely upon overall site PR.

 

At the moment, my sites appear to have settled down.
I'm seeing good allin' results (as per before), I'm seeing decent results for primary keywords.
All other keywords are acting as if the site is back in the sandbox. Odd, never had that happen without it affecting primary keywords aswell.

 

I'm seeing the same things, duplicate content sites getting good results while others are getting yanked. Leads me to believe it trully is temporary, and for some reason google is pulling solid sites to update them while leaving the trash temporarily in good favor. Not ripping on those sites not pulled, but some of the results are just so off it's not even a fricken joke

 

Seeing that as well. My sites with less than 100 backlinks have jumped countless pages in rank while all the ones with more than 400 backlinks are sinking fast.

 

one site that ranks ahead of me is a site full of rss feeds from other sites. No real original content at all.

 

I'm very tempted to waltz on over to text-link-ads and buy up a ton of sitewide radio station links. LOL PR5 for $25/month can't beat that

 

our new Xbox 360 News site which has very cfew backlinks is ranking realy well for some fairly competitive terms....

 

The thing I'm noticing most in top 10's are a) hundreds of thousands of backlinks, , b) tens of thousands of pages, or c) thousands of internal links to the landing page

If, and I doubt this is true, it stays like this - we don't have a hope in hell as a small manufacturer! But as said earlier by many, I don't it's a true reflection of how it will all end up

I've also noticed that this observation isn't nearly as obvious in the non-competitve KW searches BUT my site still is missing from those searches.

 

that sounds like one of my sites