Minstrel, those dilbert toons are great! had a good laugh Need to start developing my space defence shield.
As I'm using Google as an average searcher right now I've been pretty shocked at how poor and how SMALL the result sets are. I'm searching specifically for names of buildings in Vancouver -- addresses or development names -- in quotes. One example, "star of kitsilano" 4 results in Google... 17 in Yahoo! -- accurate, unique, and useful listings too. I've seen the same sort of discrepancies all evening long. Yahoo! has been showing many times more results for quoted search terms in competitve arenas. This is a painfully obvious butt-kicking by Yahoo! or simple failure by Google that would be noticable to an average user if they bothered to check another engine for more results (and who wouldn't with only 4 to look at).
Yahoo! will show 17 results with the other 40 in their "supplemental" -- appropriate since they are repeats of the previous 17. Of those 17, I'd say 10 are from different domains and represent different pages... so after filtering the results that is Google 3 vs. Yahoo!'s 10. I've seen similar results with other quoted real estate searches the past few days with Yahoo having many times more pertinent pages.
One thing I discovered the other day is that when I submit a sitemap, my pages in Google goes down and so does the hits and here is my try to an explanation. Correct me if I am wrong! When I submit my sitemap Google takes the content of the site map and says, all these pages belong to the root domain so we don't have to show them in our index anymore. All we need to show is the root and it doesn't matter what people are searching for as long as there are pages below the main page that will cover the search. MSN, on the other hand, have decided to show the page that is most relevant for the search, which I think is a far batter solution. People don't have to search a site for what they want to find, like in Google. I deleted my sitemap a week ago (again) and my hits are going up again. Coincidence? Don't think so!
Truthfully, that sounds like illogical nonsense to me. Sadly, I'm at the point trying to figure out what Google is doing where I have to admit that, illogical or not, it could be true.
I have been waiting for too long, but what can one do? Ignore Google? Sure..I could do that? Yell at Google? Does not good.. All we CAN do is WAIT.
FORGET the site: command, and check your traffic and earnings. It doesn't matter a fig what a search engine says it has about you on record. ALL that matters is the bottom line, traffic and conversions,EVERYTHING else is a means to this end
Right said. But I cant forget the site: command . It affects my Co-Op weight which in turn affects my traffic and earnings
I need to be more proactive than that. Here's what I've decided to do to force Google into action: I sent an email to with a cc to Matt Cutts, AdSense, and Google Sitemaps warning them that I'm going to hold my breath and turn blue until it's fixed. That should work. Starting... now...
We should all do that and we'll look like the cartoon (animated) where evrybody is blue Guess that one way to see who makes ito Google and stays there. If you're not blue then you've made it into Google's index!
*gasp* *wheeze* *cough* Is it fixed yet? This is tougher than I thought. Now I know how that guy in the water tank felt...
Yea its tough outside the water aswell... I am going thru your website for some help....hope it helps
I thought the co-op uses the google APi to get its stats, not a live search. If this is the case, then the pages indexed on Shawns keyword checker will tell you that. Am I wrong here with this?