I'd like to know how anything Cutts said in that blog article can account for the fact that one of my forums dropped from several thousand to 2 pages while another that no longer exists has 2300 pages in Supplemental even though those pages haven't existed for several months now. So we have existing pages not listed and nonexistent pages listed. I think I'd call that broken.
Altavista was at the top when there was no competetion. Google today is on top with so much of competetion around. Winning the 2nd best award in a race of 2 dosent make sense. You need to be a winner with quite a competetion and that too a quality one. Google has done that and its difficult to beat them. This update by Google is known to us webmasters and maybe a few who are bothered/interested. We are not paying attention to millions and trillions of common people who have Google as their homepage. People nowadays say "Google it" rather than say "Search for it on the Internet". There are people who dont even know that Yahoo search exists. Its always chat and email when we say Yahoo. With Google its 'SEARCH'. I guess even if today Google stops indexing pages there will be people 5 years from now still searching on Google. Its kinda funny but such ppl dont know who is the Big Daddy nor are they aware of stuff like data centers, supplemental results etc.
I don't think msn has realy started to compete yet, not saying that it will win or anything, but they play real dirty and all the have done so far in a run a couple television ads
Mini, my rugby forum went from 30,000 pages listed to 700 overnight this week. I have NEVER bought links, never used the co-op, never used Lv or ANY artificial link scheme. Links are 100% natural (OK there are forum posts included) I have links from the BBC sport website, and a lot of other on topic NATURAL backlinks that are non reciprocal (As I don't have a directory to reciprocate with LOL). Here is the thing though. Traffic is UP BY TONS? Go figure. Here is another odd thing as well, (because as this is my hobby site and I have done everything it is perfect for a control and can be 100% certain on the history etc). I am getting lots of traffic from google for pages that are not in the index according to site:ww.domain.com . I appreciate that it might be a datacentre thing, but as it is UK based mainly, and I have had a few of my friends around the UK run the site: check for me, then traffic being up while pages indexed being down, and traffic from pages that apparently are not indexed, is ludicrous isn't it. One thing though, last week I did add a link to two sites in the footer. One is a holiday site, and one is a new directory for the UK I have been playing with. That said, for the last month or so, site: checks have been bouncing from 30,000 to 700 all the time.
Altavista, Hotbot, Lycos, Yahoo. There were four dominant players back then just like there are now. Altavista had plenty of competition... the size of the audience was relative, but Google dethroned all four existing players. It happened before and can happen again. This same line is trotted out each time Google has problems. Except this time it isn't true... Eric Schmidt was interviewed in the Wall Street Journal saying that Google has a crisis. That is not small news for any large multinational corporation. Google has dominant market share right now but it is very short-sighted to say this is how things will be in 2, 4 or 10 years from now when we don't even know what the Internet will look like in that timeframe. >>People nowadays say "Google it" rather than say "Search for it on the Internet". And people used to say "put another record on the turntable"
yeah personally I am doing pretty good off msn and yahoo, but its got to kind of suck for small real businesses, that only can cover a few terms, and need the google traffic Yeah I think I am going to trade thousands of spammy links today, in celebration of Matt Cutts blog post.
It has been this way for quite some time. Google has the lowest sales conversion rate of the serch engines. http://www.websidestory.com/news-events/press-releases/view-release.html?id=319
>>yeah personally I am doing pretty good off msn and yahoo I've lost some ground in MSN. They used to love me but it seems they've gotten better at devaluing LV? Or maybe I'm just slacking. >>Yeah I think I am going to trade thousands of spammy links today, in celebration of Matt Cutts blog post. hahahah I'll trade you 10,000 sitewide footer links for 5,000 of your forum signatures.
Seems to me like Google are deciding that is a large site has what appears to be 'sold or traded' links in the footer, then they simply remove it from the index. All of this guff does sound far better than 'Google is full, so we have had to dump out some stuff to make room for other stuff'. I mentioned this last week when Eric Shit <SP> mentioned 'we have a machine crisis', google is full. Take a glass of water and fill it to the top, take another glass of water then pour it into the first glass. The original water will spill out all over the place to make way for the new stuff. The problem here though is that water flows, and you can not control fully what water stays in and what spills out
My b2b site gets the best conversion rate from Google. The message from Big G is, "Don't buy links...unless they're Adwords!" Yes, this means less commercial results in the non-paid positions. And honestly, from their prospective (and the end-user's), it's not a bad policy. It also makes good SEO's more valuable.
That analogy is as good an explanation for what's happening as any I've seen. It's certainly better than what Cutts had to say, which is bordering on a DMOZ response: "What problem? It's all fixed now."
Beating up on msn and yahoo feels sort of hollow though doesn't it, when using recips, lv, coop or whatever kills you chances to rank in google FOREVER Part of me just feels damned if I do damned if I don't, if you don't use recip, lv, coop, or buy links there is no gaurentee that you will rank in google in 2 or 3 years or whatever yeah msn seems to devalued lv and coop a little, either that or the blog spammers have just mass generated so many sites and blog links that they bury "legitimate" sites. Using the term "legitimate" loosely.
Yes! MSN and Yahoo! combined are now bringing me almost half the traffic I get from search engines, despite the fact that I have eleven pretty good KWs on page one in Google. Google brings the other half (52%), which is well down from Google's earlier percentages.
That's the theory that has seemed to fit closest to what's happening for me as well. On most sites, for the last several months it looks like they have been using old backlink data to rank sites - roughly from the update that happened around October 16th or so. I've seen newer pages than that rank - but it seems like they are doing so off of the P.R. from older links. Sites using the same link patterns started after that date don't do well at all, whereas sites started a month or so before get good rankings for pages that had specific links to them built before that date and can rank at least somewhat for new pages built afterward. I saw at least one outlier for awhile not explained by this, so I'm not 100% sure. But all the rankings I've seen other than that one so far have been explained pretty well by On Page Factors + October 16th links. Of course, all these were hit by this week's new loss of pages. My guess is they are gradually rebuilding the entire index from the ground up using BigDaddy - the sites that are losing pages this week are ones where BigDaddy crawl data is replacing older crawls in its entirety. I still don't see any evidence that this is actually being used to RANK sites, but I've just got my little snapshot. It is kind of aggravating, though, to keep hearing "All is well, and stop spamming." I've still got nonexistent pages being indexed, so all is probably not well. There are also still vast differences in the datacenters, with some datacenters desandboxing sites and others refusing to.
The solution is obvious and I'm sure we all know it... start with aged sites instead of new domains. The problem being the short supply of properly aged sites-- anything that has been parked or down for any length of time has had its birthday reset. You can dump as much LV as you want on to an aged site (ex. the "charity" experiment) with nothing but positive results. I'm still not sure LV can be detected anyway; my most profitable site that does well on Yahoo! also does OK on G. It certainly isn't banned, just has the new site penalty for ultra-competitive terms still. It has LV going both in and out in major quantities with > 100k pages indexed. Nothing bad happened to it at all; infact it has improved to pre-Jagger days throughout this last mess of an update.