Do a search for free chat rooms. Now look at the top ranking sites and tell me a 12 year old couldn't build these sites lol, seriously. I mean they suck, they really really suck. No real thought or talent seems to have went into these sites at all. I guess these sites would have been cutting edge in 1995. Now go all the way down to page 3 and find OohYa Chat and compare the quality to the top ranking sites. Unlike my competition I've put hundreds of hours into putting this site together and integrating everything. My site has a FULLY integrated custom profile system with the ability to make connections with other members, a personal photo gallery, a personal video gallery, and personal blogs all integrated into the profiles. A personal inbox is also integrated for members to send and receive private messages from each other. Profiles also have a commenting section for member to leave comments. I've also integrated a groups feature that is also integrated with the forums so that each group gets it's own private forum for it's members. Groups are also integrated in with the profiles. I've also integrated what I think is a pretty decent video sharing section where members can either add videos from other sites like youtube or upload their own videos to my site. Also integrated with their profiles. My chat offers webcams, voice chat, custom backgrounds and flash emotions. Several different rooms, and again the profiles are 100% fully integrated into chat. The sites beating me can't come close to the features my site offers. Most of them use a generic chat app called digichat that is pretty crappy imo. It also resets your color settings in vista causing your browser to crash in Vista. My site has over 35,000 registered members, a 23% bounce rate, nearly 70% of new visitors return to the site again, an average of 10 minutes spent on the site per visit, and an average of 9 pages viewed per visit. I would almost guarantee that the sites beating the hell out of me in the serps can't come close to claiming those kinds of stats. Sure my site is only a year and a half old and these other junk sites are a little older. Sure the sites beating me build junk "directory" sites and mirror sites to give themselves some related links. Sure the other sites are mainly HTML which seems to give them a huge edge against a dynamic site using php like mine. Bottom line is whatever Google's algo is, it doesn't have anything in it to gauge quality. We do about 1,500 uniques per day from direct traffic and only about 500 uniques from search engines on a good day. And 90% of search traffic is from people searching the site name. Ok, I'm done ranting. Everyone start your flaming engines and tell me how wrong I am and how great the outranking sites are compared to mine lol.
WOW. Indeed.. click click click.. OohYa Chat - Free Chat Rooms horrible design, fix it.. more web 2.0 : 2008-2009
Google is an automated system, it has no perception of what is "nice" or "quality" besides what their algorithm entails. There will be flaws with all systems, but Google's is the best so far. Since it sounds like you're advocating for a human edited Search Engine -- I suggest you look at Mahalo
Its most frustrating but that is sometimes how it works,i have 2 sites nearly identical but differant subject and one is flying with many backlinks and the other has a reasonable amount but is stationary.
Most sites that are any good anymore use Google analytics, and I know the Google toolbar that many people use can gather data on how real people surf sites. Why not use that info to create better serps? Obviously when you have 10 sites competing for a keyword, the bounce rate is going to be lower, the time spent on the site is going to be higher, and the return visits will be higher for the better quality more relevant sites. They already have the info, why not just use it? Rumor has it that Yahoo recently applied for a patent on a system that would do what I just stated. If Yahoo can successfully implement it they will blow Google away. I hope they do it, maybe Google will have to wake up and stop relying on a backlink system that you HAVE to manipulate if you want to rank anywhere close to page 1. I mean really, how many people visiting a website runs a high PR site that puts a link to all of the websites they like? My guess is around .00001%. So using this logic you either have to design a website for webmasters and not your niche market, or manipulate the system by buying backlinks. Or I guess you could build a good quality site built for your actual visitors and follow Google's "rules" and never rank anywhere at all ever. Seems like an obvious choice really.
I build sites with quality content and do on site and off site SEO.. Even if Yahoo picks up some system I am good to go.. cover all your bases.
Actually we were on page 1 of Yahoo for a couple of months but a few weeks ago Yahoo's slurp had a melt down and for some reason thought it was being redirected to a blank flash video player on my site. Because of this Yahoo began using my non-preferred domain without the www even though there is a 301 redirect on that. And on top of that started replacing my titles with things like "oohya login" instead of the actual title. A yahoo employee told me in the feedback forum that it was only a temporary glitch and all was corrected the next day but a few weeks later I'm still sitting here with messed up url's and titles and they don't have a good reason or solution for it now other than wait for the error to pass through the system. Who knows how long that will be but we are slowly making our way back. We were on page 10 after that issue and have made our way back to page 5 now for free chat rooms. We were on page 6 for the keyword chat right before the problem but now we're still no where to be found for that keyword. So about the only search traffic that we are getting now is from MSN which basically amounts to not much. We are number 4 there for free chat rooms, and on page 3 or 4 for both chat rooms and chat.
You are using your example to show that Google doesn't care about quality. This is one single example out of billions of pages. Quality of search is the lifeblood of Google. They do not care about your SEO or whoever's SEO. What they care for is how accurate their search can be to satisfy their users, most of whom are not webmasters or have never heard of SEO. For Google to continue to grow and prosper, it needs to give the users the best search that they can get. Are they successful? Their market share of the search engine pie speaks for itself.
They're not successful as a lot of searches return crap results full of directories, spam, and junk. My girlfriend was searching for a name brand clothing store last night and the actual official site was on the bottom of page 2 while page 1 was full of affiliate spam sites and directories. Just because they're less crappy than the other guys doesn't make them successful, just less crappy. Until someone starts gauging how real people surf sites then search is always going to be full of crap. Don't tell me it can't be done, they already have the info they need to do it. Hopefully Yahoo is able to release an algo based on their new patent they applied for and prove that it can be done.
How many is a lot? What is your definition of successful or unsuccessful? What is the qualitative gauge on that? As you said they may be crappy, but they are still the best among the craps. Of course, I would love to have another search engine coming out that is less crapper, I am sure a lot of us would love that too. But at the moment, because they are the least crappiest, they are the most successful.
umm, good luck.. it's hard to say the machine sucks, obviously, some of the old sites get better SERPs that's for sure... as we all know google changed their algorithms and variations in past 3-4 months significantly. maybe it's a good thing, maybe NOT.
Well, this is ALSO true for directories and such. Look at what joeant.com rates as 3star and what they rate as 1 star. Large sites seem to have advantage with ranks and submissions even though they are still stuck in the 90s.
Do you know what was the best advice in this thread ? Well it was written by 'Nystul'... And i totally agree with him, if you want high ranking, get more links
sfraise i think the same thing, google has tried to improve its algo but has made it so hard for new sites to rank high. goolge changed their algo so that links are only recognized from authority websites or high P rank sites, now this is a real problem for people who upload new websites and dont have any high Page rank sites themselfs. now if i try to get a high pr website to link to me they will check my pagerank and will see that its low and wont bother with the link exchange, but for old websites that have already cheated google and have been on top positions in google for years are just going to keep getting stronger while the weak get weaker and weaker. it now seems that google favours the rich and not the poor. i think google should have an algorthm that randomises positions based on groups, so the top 10 websites shared all positions, so positions 1 website will rank 8 next day ect. you know spread the love. anyway i have spent hours building link through writing up really good article's but google does not pick up these links, yahoo and msn recognise all links.
Dumb days at Google SE. They are the biggest, most used SE? Yes they are. Are they running it like a bag of potatoes? Yes they are. Are we simply forced to get hands dirty to rank high? Bet we are.
With such good rewards on offer, everyone is playing the system. If you're not playing the system then you're going to be the one that's left out.
they say, eventually search engine algorithms will take into consideration more quality in the future, for example, people have to like your site, for you to be able to rank higher, instead of relying on SEO tricks to boost your rankings.