It's helping to pull me out of the sandbox. First 11 months ZERO G. searches in the log. For the last 5 months, maybe 1-3 G. searches per day in the log. Today, more are coming in... not a flood, but more...
Compar emailed me regarding the artical mentioned above and here are my thoughts... http://www.searchenginejournal.com/index.php?p=2563 (for those who missed it) My first impression is - where did he get all of this inside info? He claimed that Google went after "manipulative link-network schemes" yet many folks that participate in the co-op ad network said that their sites were not effected.(?) I agree that the experiment page is vulnerable because all of the links pointing to it are from unrealted sites. However, I also monitor other sites that use the co-op as the only source for links and those pages were not thrown into the 400s because of those links. It also bothers me that he constantly refers to "sites" - First of all, the above statement is incorrect! The experiment page had nothing but "irrelevent" links pointed to it and ranked in the top ten prior to Jagger. PLUS - I thought that Google ranked pages, not sites. Have we been wrong here? The below makes no sense to me... At what point does Google throw out the linking and historical information to include new sites like Wikipedia and blogs. For today's results, there are 3 new players in the top ten for sleeping bags- pricegrabber.com, nunatakusa.com, and hotproducts.alibaba.com. Consider www.nunatulusa.com: Position #9 Allinanchor #7 - Link:www.nunatakusa.com returns 43 links ALL internal to the site! If you look at any of the pages containing the links, you may be surprised at the anchor text. Is anchor text dead? Consider hotproducts.alibaba.com (a directory) Position #10 Allinanchor #not in top 100 - link:hotproducts.alibaba.com/manufacturers-exporters/Sleeping_Bag.html returns 6 internal links only. I can accept that the experiment page is not THE most relevent in Google's eyes BUT how do these two examples above become SO relevent? Why should the experiment page end up in the 400s? Huge sites are listed at the top like epinions, amazon, dmoz, and are listed two and three times! Also, it makes no sense to me to have a search engine constantly change results and display very different results from day to day like some random rotation. I was really taken back when talking to my brother-in-law the other day, when out of the blue he said he stopped using Google because he couldn't find anything anymore. (I have no Idea what he uses or used Google for, I just went speechless and the topic changed) The results for the sleeping bag page just don't make any logical sense to me right now. I am very perplexed. It still seems to me that Google is missing some information regarding the page and it is being sort of left out. ???????? Three days ago Shawn move the "nice tool thread" (our experiment) from the All Other Tools section of the DP Forum to the General Marketing area. He also renamed the thread as "Sleeping Bag Experiment". This morning THAT THREAD ranks #162 for a search on Google for sleeping bags while the page that that thread is tracking is ranked in the 400s for that same search. This makes NO SENSE! Certainly, links to that thread are not relevent links from sites relative to camping equiptment? I still maintain that Google has lost information regarding the experiment page and therefore it is not being ranked properly. PS - for any of you that were checking in on that experiment thread it can now be found here... http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=256&page=246 Under the General Marketing forum. Caryl
My main income site was slowly recovering from "Jagger", today it is almost out of the index for every search term exept our product name! Very bad. I hope whatever is going on wont stick.
I don't think anchor text is dead, I think that links are working on a bell curve right now. They don't matter for a while, then they matter for a long time, then they fall off again. This experiment is very controlled, as you said, and I don't think new links have been added for a long time - possibly those links have lost their punch? Google is full of BS when it comes to finding link schemes. I emailed them a blatant scheme during jagger and the site that still used it is #1 for its keyword. I've been noticing that google seems like to link links from unique IP's (or domains I can't tell) more now; so if your site has a lot of links from a lot of unique IP's (or domains), its internal pages are easier to rank too - even if they aren't totally relevant. DP gets a lot of links all the time (no doubt), so it probably helps the page rank for this term, although sleeping bags isn't hugely competitive (102,000 results for inanchor). It could also be a function of where those sleeping bag links are (ie unrelated sites, in the footer of most page) combined with their age.
I have two pages, called subject-1.htm subject-2.htm subject-2.htm now outranks subject-1.htm for the term 'subject-1.htm' and subject-1.htm now outranks subject-2.htm for therm 'subject-2.htm'. The only place the other term appears on each page is via link text to the other pages. These pages used to rank top 10 on page content alone, now, they're nowhere. This also makes absolutely no sense. In, fact, there are at least 20 other pages on my site that are in a similar situation. Very niche, easy to rank top 10 on content alone, all unique. All are gone.
I agree there is no way he could have all of this information. I am willing to bet that come January alot of things change again.. My own feeling not facts but I am feeling that it will stay f**ed up until after Christmas.
Ya know, i think i might know whats going on here... I just browsed through the thread, and it struck me: Google is trying to avoid spam sites by just sticking with the "big boys" 100%. If a big, legitimate site mentions "sleeping bags" - in googles eyes, odds are its real content, not spam. So even if the mention of sleeping bags is in regards to another site, itll still rank the linking site highest, because its a "safer" choice. If a person ends up on that page in their search for sleeping bags, then they can just click that link themselves. Kind of a weird solution... but i guess it works?