Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
In further research last night I (think I) came to the conclusion that the pages that we lost were over optimizised. But in what way and where are the questions. I could only compare who is listed, and who is not.
On one of my main search terms, where last week I was numbers 2 & 3, I am now # 59. (other sections are worse, but sticking to this problem for my research)The result should be one of my deeper pages, to the actual related page of the site. But what appears here is my main index page. The page that should be here I have not found yet.
So if i am thinking i am over optimized, i want to see what others on the google results page are having success with. Guess what? They are way over optimized. But this is the difference that I can see so far. In the unlinked content on the page, they repeat the search term over and over - key phrase density probably twice as much as i have, maybe more.
But I think the difference is that where I repeat the term, it is anchor text internal links. I think I repeat the phrase in the anchor text equal to or more than I do in the content on the page itself. It does not appear spammy, it is basically the navigation links that I speak of.
So, is it possible that google is looking at the anchor text links and weighing those phrases more than what is in the content itself and considering repeating phrases within the link as spam? Could it be the anchor text density verses the density of the content itself?
Am I making any sense to anyone?
[edited by: tedster at 9:20 pm (utc) on Feb. 27, 2008]
I am struggling mightly with my industry's main keyword. Baically this keyword can literally make or break your business.
I rank extremely well on hundreds of my others keywords, but if I can get this main keyword top 10 would mean hundreds of more visitors a day.
The problem I am having is my main keyword tries to creep into the top 100, as soon as it gets close it drops like a rock, seemingly out of the index. Then a few days later it (main keyword) makes another attempt at the top 100 and drops again out of the top 1000.
This process is repeating over and over again, and has been for about a year now.
Is this a classic case of the 950 penalty?
Because my other keywords do well the only thing I can think of is that the age of the domain (about 18 months old) is preventing this main keyword to crack the top 10.
Any thoughts and assistance would be appreciated.
Here's what I keep coming back to: Why would the "widget" search get such a serious and heavy-duty penalty, but not "widgets"? And by what mechanism could that happen?
The difference is usually about 10,000% more searches per month.
I am sorry, I have continually tried to ignore the fact that the terms I am getting nailed on are the terms that make me the big bucks, but the pages of my site not making the big bucks and that do not have nearly the amount of searches are sitting pretty on page one.
If you think Google can't tell who is making a ton of money and who isn't, you netter wake up to reality.
Enough venting... now what can I change. Yeah right. I am done with this BS.
A lot of SEO's are stuck on things such as links, keywords density and other SEO terms. SEO's tend to forget the simple unique content wrote for visitors.
Does query time filtering by using a "pre-processed" list make any sense at all?
That's where I'm leaning.
If you think Google can't tell who is making a ton of money and who isn't, you netter wake up to reality.
The examples I've seen still have sites in the top ten that look quite well monetized. The top ten just doesn't include a particular url that has been there for years. The idea that Google is trying to purge their SERPs of sites that make money doesn't make sense to me.
a complex layering of different causes and effects.
Possibly a complex cause, but the effect seems simple enough, no?
If the cause is on-page factors, I would highly doubt the H1 and title element idea. But anchor text is a much more ticklish on-page factor than those other two.
If the cause involves off-page factors, they can be harder to see -- but I do have one idea that I'm poking around. I'm wondering about backlink "profiles" and how they differ between the urls (or domains) that are affected by the -950 and the urls that are still sticking in the top ten for the same search.
Especially I wonder if the affected urls/domains have lots fewer links from other domains anywhere in the same result set. I don't have a handy tool for this kind of analysis, but I may roll up my sleeves and dive in anyway. I'm thinking about a sort of penalty vote -- it sort of says "a jury of your peers doesn't like you" and could be related to the Local Rank patent from a few years back.
Where can I find the patent you mentioned? I'd like to look at it. I've been wading through the one on phrases and it's just so much fun I want more. ;)
Where can I find the patent you mentioned? I'd like to look at it.
This is a good primer...
Google's 2 rankings & you
New patent means new way of ranking
[webmasterworld.com...]
Agreed, or it could be a bug in the way Google treats semantic use of keywords?
*-It’s targeting well searched key words (phrases); ones you must have optimized for, at some point, in some way.
Agreed.
*-It’s targeting terms you traditionally have ranked well for. (probably from optimizing)
Agreed.
*-Its hitting the site, it seems to drag down the entire site, not all of it, all the way to the 900’s for sure, but overall rankings for interior pages are not doing as well.
As if it wants to zero the trust factor (possibly from overoptimizationn), but not penalize, a little slap on the hand
*-For us, it happened to a handful of sites, all at the same time, exactly on the night of January 1st.
But not others. In my case, a single web provider (partner) linked to me using a keyword variation of the keyword that I got 995ed for. Still not sure if that is what tipped the scales.
Not for me. My site seems to be affected for alomst every keyword. It is a page from an artist with a unique domain-name. It is not optimized neither for the domain-name nor for the name of the artist, because it always was on pos 1 here by itself.
Searching for the name of the domain and the name of the artist delivers 18 results, and guess: With now my page on pos 18 as the last result. The name of the artist and the name of the domain are not used in anchor-text at all.
So for me the possible "over-optimization" (which I'm still trying to find) also affect the position of other keywords. Seems like everyone got his personal gift from google here.
they repeat the search term over and over - key phrase density probably twice as much as i have, maybe more
This is what I have observed on my counterparts who used to be behind me before this penalty. The keywords presence on their site exceeds more than 20.
I have been on top 1 for this words/phrase for more than a year because I am the original and the first one to upload it on the web. Now, the one's who copied their contents on my site have replaced me on that spot.
I do think you have a point here, the way google treats semantic use of keywords is a problem, they just havent got this right at all - its an absolute mess.
Prior to the infastructure change and if you watch one of vanessas old Video Clips about duplicate content, if you had say a section about blue widgets google would pick the most relevent page and display that, the others would be at the back of the serps.
Now what we are seeing is that if your site is dedicated to widgets a lot of pages are at the back of the serps where google "thinks" they are related and duplicate. So you can have pages absolutely specific to something that dont rank anywhere because another page on your site either carries a "keyword anchor link" to that page or is content about another aspect of the "blue widget" and google is simply bunching the lot up as duplicate and filtering it.
Doesnt anyone think its odd that when you do a search now in google the results are just not as relevent? It delivers pages that are sort of in the ball park but not 100% relevent?. Im finding that what ever search i do, i am not taken to the most specific page on that site any longer in most cases.
I remember a time when google was famous for being the most acurate search engine, you could use it as a research tool - Now its not. I think its semantic keyword associations have damaged the quality of its serps.
They have gone too far with the roll out of it which has been slowly phased in hence why the serps are slowly geting worse.
I have also seen drops in placement for many sites of "authority" -- referral logs from google.* also show that visitors are coming from results that are likely to be several pages into a result set. Moreover, it appears these visitors are still finding the site by looking deeper into the results than I have seen. In the past, I would consider that only a crawler or bot would go that far into results, but as a searcher myself, I have also seen that some fairly fundamental searches require a deeper dig into the results.
We tend to search and hang our hopes on words -- better searching requires context -- I have a feeling that Google may be trying to add or apply context to what has traditionally been a word search "engine" -- there are just too many like "words" out there to be reliable. It's incredibly common for words to be misused in language as well as in code -- better search results probably require some way of being able to imply usage and context over keywording.
It's kind of crazy that some webmasters are considering trashing user-friendliness, templates, and interface design quality to get better SEO to rank higher in searches -- I think this is exactly what Google may want to curtail ("don't tell me what you think I want to hear").
I wouldn't want to say anything as to the "why" this is, but there could be a method to this madness.
An example of what I'm talking about:
GM was mentioned early in this thread, so -- I'm looking for a real tiny somewhat obscure part (say, a bolt) that my local parts guy does not have -- So I find Google -- Obviously, I am not going to want results from the major parts players (because I've already been there), and GM or a dealer is the last place I want to go because I know they're the most expensive -- What will be the most effective search result for me is a forum post (a super-redundant self-referencing template) where someone was looking for that same part, and found an answer (with links of course) from someone else who had the same issue and found the part on their own, hopefully a recommendation as to the service they recieved from the site. Moreover, I may not even know what the part I need is -- but by searching the problem I have, I find the part.
While the referenced site may not rank highly, if un-authenticating (or non-archived) forums are now SEO verbotten -- I'll probably never find that part even if I found the parts site first -- at least on Google, because the forum puts the part in a context that's far more useful than any of the words that could possibly describe the part in and of itself.
Sometimes we all have to think carefully about why we use a search engine, and how people find us. Hard links are important, but people are too.
The site is not using Google Sitemaps, and it appears that to do a reinclusion request the site needs to use Sitemaps.
Plus, the reinclusion request requires me to admit to doing something against Google Webmaster Guidelines - but I have no idea what it could be. The site is totally white-hat, semi-authority, PR6 homepage, 100% unique content, etc.
Strange that the phrases I still rank for are optimized the exact same way as the ones penalized: keyword is in the title, H1, and url. I thought this is what Google wants as stated in their Guidlines which state: "Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it." and "Make sure that your TITLE and ALT tags are descriptive and accurate."
Is there a way to submit a reinclusion request without using Sitemaps?
I'd bet it's a new sweep to get rid of spam pages. Since we don't know exactly what the algo is and never will it seems sensible to to avoid drastic changes but to look over the pages and see if we have overdone individual phrases or words. Think about what could possibly be simular to a scraper page?
In my case a subdirectory contents page seems to be the cause. It was never optimized as I really didn't care about it, I wanted the root homepage to do well in the serps along with the individual articles. But I was sloppy, I did repeat some phrases a lot simply because that's what the articles were about. For example "red widget technology", "green widget technology" and so on. Since the topic is "widget technology" there was no need to repeat the phrase. I'll go back and change the titles in the anchor text linking to the articles. I don't know if it will help but the linking titles will be more interesting.
So in conclusion you wish to change your pages to suit google rather than keep pages as they are for the end user?.
This is my point. A spade is a spade. If your page is about blue widgets, has H1, metta description and title tags containing the keywords "blue widgets" and has inbounds and outbounds with anchor keywords "Blue Widgets" it could be that...as a pure guess the page is dedicated to and an authority on Blue widgets.
Meanwhile google thinks, it could be spam or it could be that it wants you to buy adwords for "blue widgets" so its going to list a less relevent site where you should be and drop youre authority site to 950+.
Frankly if your site has good links to it, has reasonable page rank then its obviously popular and of interest. If your users get the detailed info they want why should any webmaster change their site infastructure to suit Google?
Sorry but this is a total farse imo
Google is trying to keep searchers at their site longer by "training" searchers to look deeper into search results.
Who knows at this point what the aswer is so you may be right. But no one, and I mean no one, other than someone looking for a lost site, diggs to position # 997.
A search for unique text on two of the sites that suffer this penalty currently for me show only one result in more than one DC - my own page.
This may eliminate the possibility in my mind that scraped sites can or have caused this issue, unless the issue is an amalgamation of many factors.
My take on this is that it is one of two things -
Internal issues (a bug) with the way Google currently handles semantics (because of all of the posts, most of us have only suffered this issue with some and not all keywords)
A new type of filtering or penalization which throws any given page to the back of the line based on a threshold of factors including on page, new link building etc. This also might explain why some pages are getting hit and others arent.
Any thoughts?
I mean, like anyone here I will do what it takes to get out of the 950 ghetto.
But something is wrong if google is treating authority sites as spam...why would multiple respected .gov and .edu sites, as well as many others, be linking to my "spam" site?
I dont see what purpose is served by getting us to rewrite our anchor text links so that they are just off target enough to get past this filter.
I dont see what purpose is served by putting exact matches for search results on the last page.
Things are so screwed up that I cant believe that it is intentional or permanent.
So for now I am going to make some minor changes, but the basic plan is still wait and see.
Is comic! Many webmasters are asking at Matt blog about this BIG problem, and he say, what? what? I did not see anything in webmasterworld, #*$!, about this problem...
Jakomo
In my case a subdirectory contents page seems to be the cause. It was never optimized as I really didn't care about it, I wanted the root homepage to do well in the serps along with the individual articles. But I was sloppy, I did repeat some phrases a lot simply because that's what the articles were about. For example "red widget technology", "green widget technology" and so on. Since the topic is "widget technology" there was no need to repeat the phrase. I'll go back and change the titles in the anchor text linking to the articles. I don't know if it will help but the linking titles will be more interesting.
Yeah I can see how this can effect you. We did the same thing really. Used the title of the article and a description - which is the same title and description of the actual metadata of the article. If you think about it though...If you use a drill down categorized structure the BEST thing to use as anchor text is...ta da...the article title. Well of course the article is about widgets and you would want to use the term widgets in the title. But take a mass of these articles and list them on a page and you can get a whole lot of keyword/anchor keyword repeat and when you add in a description a whole lot more.
RichTC raises an interesting question -- "So in conclusion you wish to change your pages to suit google rather than keep pages as they are for the end user?"
On the same token...If a site isn't, for some reason purposefully or incidentally, not what GOOGLE THINKS the end user wants then you can get knocked back, de-indexed, not listed at all, etc. In other words a site owner can design for end users all they want. It really doesn't matter. In the end it is GOOGLE'S PERCEPTION of what their searchers want is what really matters. Right now many people are confused on exactly what that perception is.
The bottom line is that if you want good placement in the Google serps you HAVE to fall under their perception of a site that should be there. This is done either by accident, such as designing for end users and just happen to use the right ingredients, or through being aware of certain factors that can help or harm you in the results. Either way you still HAVE to be designed for Google as well as your users. (Chances are much better if you are as natural as possible - this is what Google is looking for as they have stated this -- repeatedly)
Here is a question to RichTC. If you design for end users and something is perceived wrong in Google's eyes and you knew what was wrong (and the fix does not take away from user experience)...Would you fix it?
The reason I ask is that you first question leads people to believe that the "design for users only" is the absolute correct way of doing things and anything other is wrong and manipulative.
Yes I noticed - rather than post the same there I left it for you to be our spokesman.
arubicus: we have pages with same design/format/link style in the top 10 as well as down in 950+ I don't think it is a page design problem, otherwise 100% of our pages would be dead.
Strange that the phrases I still rank for are optimized the exact same way as the ones penalized: keyword is in the title, H1, and url.
Exactly the same with my site. (Except I haven't used H1's.)
I am noticing that people are clicking on search links much deeper from Google. In the URL, where it says: &start=100 that does mean they are at result #100, right? I've seen them as high as 400-something. And I don't think it's a competitor. In my niche, my competition isn't anywhere near that competitive. In fact, most of them link to me and vice versa, as we all get along pretty well.
arubicus: we have pages with same design/format/link style in the top 10 as well as down in 950+ I don't think it is a page design problem, otherwise 100% of our pages would be dead.
Same here. There could be a number of factors at play along with it. Some pages could be affected and some not. A page by page basis. Also one page goes can effect another and another and another. Chain reaction.
BTW I didn't say this is the cause. I simply agreed that such a format can appear spammy similar to scraper directories (except internal links not external -- of course many scrapers use an internal redirect script).
The reason I ask is that you first question leads people to believe that the "design for users only" is the absolute correct way of doing things and anything other is wrong and manipulative.
I think the real question isn't whether "unnatural" design is wrong and manipulative, but whether it's risky and potentially counterproductive.
I think the real question isn't whether "unnatural" design is wrong and manipulative, but whether it's risky and potentially counterproductive.
Agreed...
Another question (which is my point) isn't there the likely possibility that designing just for users can be counterproductive just the same -- as well as the risk of ignorant occurrences of elements google considers/perceives as manipulation or other elements that can harm/mislead it's perception of a site? -- Such as the www non www PR split (Even you were ignorant of :) at one point EPV - yet took the "unnatural" risk anyway with a fix that delivers more PR to the non www version - while eliminating duplicates and whatnot).
We can talk, and talk and talk and talk... but we don't know what is the problem, new sites were affected, old sites were affected, websites with many pages were affected, websites with 10 pages were affected, etc etc. I will spent my time, working for MSN and Yahoo, some keywords of my site are #1 since around 7 months.
Other competitor of my site is using sitewide in a PR5 site, they are ranking #1 in a important keyword.
Yup, you are right, I don't get big traffic, but this is something, Google give me 0!
For example, I have to add around 800 pages with unique content.. Do I optimize for Google?......
Boys nothing happen, if you want to be first, easy, buy Adwords :)
Best regards,
Jakomo
I don't think Google is trying to penalize legit sites but as I've mentioned before when they try suppresses spammers in the serps some regular sites are bound to be caught in it.
we have pages with same design/format/link style in the top 10 as well as down in 950
After looking at the patent discussed at [webmasterworld.com...] I get the feeling there is a very fine line between a page that ranks well in the serps and one that is penalized. The line is calculated and your page is either above or below it. So it is not surprising this is happening. Of course the patent may have nothing to do with this algo but it's worth considering.
But something is wrong if google is treating authority sites as spam...why would multiple respected .gov and .edu sites, as well as many others, be linking to my "spam" site?
This is why I think there might be an adjustment down the road. Not that I'm going to sit and wait for it but there has been adjustments in situations like this before.
Strangely, a searcher probably spends less time on search sites than any other site they visit. Google, Yahoo, etc. have to know this, and they must be taking steps to keep visitors there [toolbar anyone?] -- Google in particular has the plainest, no nonsense, home page I have ever seen -- Yahoo is the exact opposite -- I spend more time on Yahoo because there is more to "read" than search results -- I'm a human being, so unlike a bot or crawler I'm literate -- words mean somethin' to me.
ie: MySpace -- Just a guess, but I would assume, in the near future, the MySpace search feature will be able to compete with Yahoo and Google for search "relevance" because it is totally user created, and people spend more time there "reading" on topic than looking for words -- I don't have a MySpace yet, but just about everyone I know, see on TV, or hear on radio has a presence there in one way or another -- everyone who doesn't, certainly knows about MySpace anyway -- how does this happen? It's natural more than anything else, MySpace is created and moderated somewhat by human beings instead of illiterate bots guided by a keyword- and link-hungry algo -- what I say once is never more important (to MySpace) than you saying the same thing 100 times or the other way around -- Just wondering out loud, but has anyone had success generating traffic from MySpace or other blog site? Maybe it's just me, but I get better (not necessarily more, bur repeat) visitors from forums and blogs than from search engines -- what this means to me in english is that it may be better to have people writing about you and your site, than to get "props" from the big search engines because the context is there, and the visitors are "there" intead of wandering the abyss of scientifically SEO-optimized search results.
Just my opinion, but something to think about.
I'll go back and change the titles in the anchor text linking to the articles. I don't know if it will help but the linking titles will be more interesting.
