After Jagger are Google results better for the common man.

Hi Friends,
I think and hope that all is over for the Jagger update, bar the shouting. The results are more or less settled for the keywords. Let us analyze from a common man's view point if and how has Google emerged as a better SE after all this. We sholuld not let personal gains or losses interfere with our opinion. I run various travel websites pertaining to India and have lost some ground after JAgger, but I still feel that search results for most travel related keywords have become more relavant (though with a bias towards bigger websites). So if you are searching for not so common destinations in India you do come up with the required information.
Please give your valued opinion , specially related to your field of work.
R.Anand

 

I have seen a ton of spam removed from the results as a part of the various stages of the Jagger update. So from first impressions, I would say that yes, these results will be better for the common man.

 

Jagger gets a thumbs up from me. I think overall it was a "good" update.

 

The only people I know who get bad results in Google are SEO experts who can't find their own sites. The results are better then ever.

 

I must say.... 2 months ago I would have definately said MSN had the best search engine. Atleast from what I see so far... Google has made its come back. The thing I noticed the most is that Google seems to be now handling the meta-refresh tags that are set to zero as 301 redirects... I really like that.

There was no doubt in my mind Google was broken from the bourbon update. I really thought Bill Gates had finally did them in.... but they are back. I still think MSN is doing a really great job too... but Yahoo? My goodness, thats the worst search engine I've ever seen....

 

Before Jagger, Ebay listings and craigslist posts were never in the serps. Now they are all over the place, and not implying that an ebay listing cant be relevant, but ones that have been expired for a while aren't relevant.

Coincidentally i found a bunch of my own ebay listings which was humorous, but they had already been expired for a few days so I don't think I got much out of their ranking.

Besides the ebay and craigslist crap, I would say that relevance is good, but not any better than before the update.

 

The only problem I have with this update is the fact that sites like about dot com and other big sites seem to have more relevance. Whenever I get results from them I do take a look and see what they have to offer and rarely do they answer my questions or provide the info that I'm actually looking for. So it's not the fact that they are behemoths, it's that useless information they provide should not be relevant solely because they have tens of thousands of pages about every conceivable topic.

 

I completely agree with this. I rarely, if ever find anything useful from these mega info sites. It seems like their only real purpose is to make enough pages to rank for just about anything, and then make revenue from their own paid listings. Blatant affiliate site concept, with enough class to make themselves seem relevant.

 

Thats a good thing. I know we all SEO our sites, but in the end everyone wins if the most relevant sites (regaurdless of seo) float their way to the top.

 

I have a sneaking suspicion that when Jagger is finally done these out of date listings will be handled by the usual monthly update. Alot of old data is on Google at the moment, and I don't think the true end result is yet to be seen until google returns to its normal cycle for awhile.

 

Just sucks that this happened near Xmas, my best time of year.

 

Hi,
Well I also feel that some of the results are still irrelevant but their numbers have decreased, also as I said a bias towards sites with larger number of pages even if a smaller site has a more relaevant page it still comes lower. May be we will see further improvements slowly or in the next update.
R.Anand

 

What to do if you get an undeserved penalty? (WE, a dutch company > www.optimalisatie-website.com) have been penalized and we don’t know why. We didn’t use hidden techniques or spam. All our content is VISIBLE!!! We used to have pagerank 4, now we have 0. We think one of our competitors filled in a spam report and that Google just banned our site, without checking it properly.

Does anyone have good tips what to do in this case? Wich department of Google is best to contact? We already sent an e-mail and we had phone contact, but no answers on our questions! (Why did you penalize us?)

Greetz, Wouter

 

So you tried reinclusion already then?

 

My searches are for products rather than information so my take might be a little different, I'm not sure. I'm noticing that results are relevant but in some searches the top 10 & top 20 appears to be full of comparison shopping sites or mega large sites all offering exactly the same brands, which IMO is a shame - people are having to jump a couple of pages to find something different than what's commonly available in every mainstream store like Target or online at Amazon.

 

no offence, but what is jagger?

 

It's the name for the latest google re-hash which has had a lot of people on pins and needles for at least 4 weeks. It got rid of lots of spam pages but what's left has mixed results for many people. It's not done yet. Look at matt cutt's blog for a summary.

 

OK...thanks

 

I think results are pretty good now, but it is clear to me that some people I know are experiencing difficulty finding stuff they want now. Just today I had my father-in-law say that he just couldn't find what he wanted.