Google Manually Alters SERPs if Sites are Too Popular

Some SEOs have suspected this, but it has been verified by two different Google Chief Engineers.

This also explains why some SERPs have lines drawn on the first page to seperate different TYPES of results.

 

Thanks for the post. The O'Reilly thing is interesting.

I was wondering when they'd do something about subdomain flooding. For a while, this was in November I think, we had a site totally dominating quite a number of keywords. it's a big multinational site, with a subdomain each for 5 countries - and it would take up 8 of the 10 slots on the serps page one, two slots per subdomain it was almost embarrassing to be that dominant.

 

this might also explain a portion of the massive de-indexing thats being reported

 

Its evident that they are doing it but I'm sure they haven't done it to the many people that are complaining.....now this will some people even more of a reason to bitch and moan and blame google for their rankings..

 

true, expect plenty of threads like - Google is picking on me, and possibly a thread of the year - Google edits my serps, my legal team says take action, advice please?

 

Your thread title is a but misleading, though. It's not about punishing "popularity", really. It's about dampening "over-optimization".

 

This doesnt surprise me in the slightest. Id suspected this for years!

 

Since their algorithm isn't perfect they have to alter the SERPs manually to fix this and that

 

I do not see what you are talking about. All it says is that they may even the playing field. I think it is much better for both Google and the searcher not to have the first pages point to the same site. If this happened too much, I for one would search elsewhere. I see nothing they are doing wrong.

Just another thing people can whine about.

 

They always do deindex or ban the sites that have followed their rules

 

I couldn't care less what Google did to their SERP's as long as the searches stay relevant, that's all I care. The thread title, while not being wrong could be worded differently, from what I read their algorithm changes the SERP's from preventing one domain from flooding them.

But definitely an interesting read, thanks for pulling it up .

 

Of course it has some manual tweaking because without that the reported links cannot be automatically delisted.

 

With G manually dampening SEO, it might start giving Mahalo and Sproose some competition.

 

An interview discussing how Google analyses their SERPs by Peter

 

Nice article youve got there... By the way Google has the power to alter SERPs...

 

This should be common sense I'd think. Of course google will allow occasional human intervention. However good an algorithm is, it can't be perfect.

I think google would love to not have to employ humans to occasionally correct results and are working towards not having to do that, but until we have true A.I. there's always going to be a need for human review.

 

Yes, but I bet the engineers at Google are deeply upset about it. Any program you have to tweak manually makes your code look inelegant. A purist, and most of the best programmers to come out of academia like the ones at Google are purists, will see it as a frustrating blemish.

That's why I was surprised by the O'Reilly thing. It's so... hardcoded. Yuck!!!

 

nice article, thanks!! is good to know about it..

Jakomo

 

emm.its maybe true..

 

I'm sure your suspicions were wrong, look at the example they gave, it deals with multi-billion dollar corporations