Google have lost the plot completely!

[Clinton]

Blekko and Duckduckgo have for months being giving me better results for some searches. Maybe someone should compile an SE guide to show which SEs are best on what type of searches.

I link out all the time, not just to info sites.

So do I. However, if you want Google traffic in future it might be worth stopping now.

Google's reliance on PR (links) skewed how webmasters linked to each other on the net. Each successive wave of Google actions to protect against their core reliance getting contaminated resulted in the eco system of links getting further skewed - from PR buying to nofollow to PR sculpting to everything in-between. Over the years there has been a noticeable shift towards webmasters being reluctant to link out for fear of losing PR (using the logic that PR flowing out of a site leaves less PR to spread around internal links). Now, with negative SEO and more FUD from the the Googleplex, new paranoias about linking are bound to develop.

Google's given the world a great deal. Screwing up how linking works on the entire visible online spectrum, however unintentional that was, isn't one of their big achievements.

[JJMcClure]

So do I. However, if you want Google traffic in future it might be worth stopping now.

But links out have always been clearly understood, it's not the same as your IBL profile. As long as you don't link out to 'bad neighbourhoods' or get caught selling links that pass on SEO benefits, how could links out hurt you?

. Over the years there has been a noticeable shift towards webmasters being reluctant to link out for fear of losing PR (using the logic that PR flowing out of a site leaves less PR to spread around internal links).

Which makes the links that are created more trustworthy, you'd think.

Google's given the world a great deal. Screwing up how linking works on the entire visible online spectrum, however unintentional that was, isn't one of their big achievements.

'given the world'? It's just a search engine and you don't have to use it. In fact, if you don't use it, you're not affected at all by what's happened over the last ten years, are you. If you only visited sites that you knew about from other sources, you'd never even see the SERP and have to deal with any crap. Google may have caused the spam content of the surface web to increase but it actually has no effect on anyone who doesn't sue search engines. Google aren't the internet.

The idea was a good one, no one's come up with a better idea in the last 10 years have they. Maybe what they got wrong was just how spammy and manipulative people are. If Google screwed up then every search engine since then has emulated that screw up including Bing and Yahoo. AND, there may not have even been an internet in the form that we know it Google hadn't figured out a way to index it and present those results so that we could do searches in the first place. Maybe the internet would still be the domain of scientists and the military.

Imagine a world where the internet didn't evolve the way it has, that'd be an interesting thought exercise.

[monty]

Of course Google cannot muck up the search results too much or people might not use their search engine. However what's the alternative? I don't see Google's dominance disappearing any time soon.

I keep going through contortions to get Google to return decent results, as a searcher. I really dislike the instant search interface for one and its not easy to turn off completely AFAIK, without being always logged in.

Also the one size fits all approach doesn't work for me - for example Google often brings back old (and presumably trusted) pages for me as I do a lot of technology related queries for which the older information is often out of date, so I often have to resort to additional clicks to narrow the search results down by time.

On the other hand, having tried out Bing , Blekko and Duckduckgo as alternative search engines over the last year they each have plenty of their own flaws. The situation is reminiscent of the late 90s when the last batch of search engines were dominant, only to be superseded in quick order by the advent of Googles superior technology.

[mikeb]

If that's true it won't be hard for you to come up with several examples.

Several examples of what precisely?

Screwed up searches everywhere?

Or google being less than forthright, as is always the case ? Tackle that first - take their evasiveness in the page rank scultping debate. Google have always argued in terms of what "they would like to matter (lgreat content and natural links)" despite their inability to measure such things algorithmically, so they been economical with the truth. Does anyone really question that?

As regards winners and losers - I am not going to put them in public view! -certainly not the spam sites, that are now going better because of penguin, but since we are all grown up here, I presume we can rely on the fact that we are reporting what we see: indeed you can see for yourself!!

Take for example the phrase "cot bedding" - there are specialist suppliers and manufacturers out there who used to rank for those terms, and so did I.

But if you look at the listings now , what you see is big brands that do not focus. Amazon, ebay, argos, tesco, woolthworths, notonthehighstreet. How has that list helped the user?

The user is searching precisely because they DO NOT KNOW who the SPECIALIST suppliers, are. Everyone already knows argos!!If google always gives big brands priority , then people will go direct to the brand sites leaving google out of the loop, since they failed to tell the user anything they did not already know.

If google always gives big brands priority , then people will go direct to the brand sites leaving google out of the loop, since they failed to tell the user anything they did not already know.

That tesco sells cot bedding (cor wow) and is NOT a specialist, and knows little about it is common knowledge.. I am seeing even american sites like wallmart coming up in the rankings! Google in violation of their own premise. Give the user something useful and unique, not a whose who of big brands like a paid directory!

It has certainly hurt and probably killed a lot of small businesses badly.

The other phenomenon I am seeing is weak exact matches appearing.

SO here is part of what I think is going on.

Two issues - The war is fought on anchor text. And more than ever google is ranking websites not pages, which was largely untrue until panda. so number of pages is mattering more again, with only "non unique" snippet pages counting, to get round duplicates. Google still cant pick the originator of content, so this is flawed too.

On the anchor issue I think that google has now decided that "brand" in anchor text is all powerful, and that is what people do when they link naturally. So if you get a high proportion of links for "ebay" and your site is "ebay" then your site gains authority: and to reward brand even more, the authority that gets is in proportion to how many people actually search the term of your brand. I suspect one problem that they have had to fight is that would gives exact match domains a big hoist, because algorithmically they are seen as the same as the brand, and links and search are inevitably in the name of the search. So to keep it all stable they have had to look at the form of anchor. So cotbedding may be better than www dot cotbedding dot or cot space bedding which are the links they deplore.

They have decided that some empirical ratio of "brand links" to "keyword links" is "natural" despite the fact the more niche a site gets, the more likely links are to reflect keywords not brand. The more focussed my niche sites ( without exact domains) , the worse they have done,

All they have ended up with a different suboptimal selection favouring big brands, and in doing it killed off a lot of small companies.

And in doing so they have eroded their own usefulness as a place to find specialists you do not know...

[akirk]

Firstly, anyone who builds an entire business on a Google ranking, which they have no control over, is an idiot.

Secondly, why should Google 'care'? They're not a charity nor do you or anyone else have the 'right' to rank on Google, it's just a search engine and sometimes people forget that. Why you even use the phrase 'honest crust' is beyond me, are you trying to elicit sympathy and make Google look evil? Make an 'honest crust', but don't expect that Google owe you that honest crust, they don't.

If there's one thing that posting on this forum has hammered home to me time and time again, it's that you should be diversifying your traffic sources and never ever be reliant on a particular source, particularly such a public one like Google which is fighting a constant battle with spammers and so has to make endless changes to the SERP. I've never bought a website (yet) but I can tell you that I wouldn't touch one that had more than 40% of it's traffic coming from Google unless I was prepared to risk losing that investment overnight.

I really agree with this...
I am beginning to get this bizarre feeling that everyone is being brainwashed into thinking that the only way of finding a website is throguh Google
I hear people talk about links from other sites being important to Google - that is inside out thinking - Google is (in theory!) meant to be a reflection of the web - inbound links are important because they send you people - nothing to do with Google in that!

it is rather like building a business in London and saying that you are not being suitably highlighted in the A2Z and because that is the main 'map of London' your business can't survive...
hello?! in that scenario - get out there - tell people / advertise / talk / give your customers incentives to recommend you / etc. etc. - i.e. all the things a business should be doing...

is it any different on the internet...
yes I appreciate that there are folks with websites with auto-spun content making money off google traffic - but are they really businesses? is that not just a lucky moment in time which they are exploiting...
build a business on the internet using traditional methods (but with an understanding of how they work online) and Google becomes much less relevant...
does Google affect the reputation you build in a forum such as this? / does it affect how people see you on facebook? / does it affect your twitter followers / does it affect... etc.
of course not - it is one small element of the internet...

the problem is that folks have got used to lazy marketing - getting Google to do the work in sending them traffic...
sometimes you have to get up and run the business

Alasdair

[mikeb]

I really agree with this...
I am beginning to get this bizarre feeling that everyone is being brainwashed into thinking that the only way of finding a website is throguh Google
I hear people talk about links from other sites being important to Google - that is inside out thinking - Google is (in theory!) meant to be a reflection of the web - inbound links are important because they send you people - nothing to do with Google in that!

it is rather like building a business in London and saying that you are not being suitably highlighted in the A2Z and because that is the main 'map of London' your business can't survive...
hello?! in that scenario - get out there - tell people / advertise / talk / give your customers incentives to recommend you / etc. etc. - i.e. all the things a business should be doing...

is it any different on the internet...
yes I appreciate that there are folks with websites with auto-spun content making money off google traffic - but are they really businesses? is that not just a lucky moment in time which they are exploiting...
build a business on the internet using traditional methods (but with an understanding of how they work online) and Google becomes much less relevant...
does Google affect the reputation you build in a forum such as this? / does it affect how people see you on facebook? / does it affect your twitter followers / does it affect... etc.
of course not - it is one small element of the internet...

the problem is that folks have got used to lazy marketing - getting Google to do the work in sending them traffic...
sometimes you have to get up and run the business

Alasdair

I agree with one sentiment - that a busienss is more , and has to be more than google - as an occasional marketing consultant ( who pushes the price up to get rid of customers because I hate doing it) - I preach more than anything liist building ( used to be email and mailing, now twitter and facebook). And in that google is a traffic source. Just one.

There is of course the responsibility of monopoly, and it will be insteresting to see if any anti trust suits arise out of the abuse of that monopoly.

I cannot agree with the other sentiment. The presumption that those suffering are guilty of any misdoing or autospun content. Not So at ALL. Indeed - two of my sites just playthings of that form is going great guns! - Many good sites have tanked. By and large the ones hurting are niche suppliers of specific items. I gave a concrete example above. A lot of specialist suppliers of cot bedding who knew far more about it than amazon ever will, with content and products reflecting that have been kicked out! nothing to do with spun content at all. Marketplaces are figuring too, like notonthehigshstreet,etsy and so on. Presumably because of brand links. That are giving authority in niches in which they simply do not belong.


And that is what gets up my nose. If true niche authority sites had pushed passed me, It would be clear what I needed to do to compete. Right now, the message is "we only like big brands" and big and diverse marketplaces.

They are preferring a mile wide one inch deep, and what should work on the web is one inch wide and one mile deep. True specialist rising up the pile. They are not!

If you are not seeing that alastair, I suspect you cannot have many previously high ranked sites competing with big brands except for very minor terms.

[mikeb]

But links out have always been clearly understood, it's not the same as your IBL profile. As long as you don't link out to 'bad neighbourhoods' or get caught selling links that pass on SEO benefits, how could links out hurt you?.

Because of the page rank model for one, as enshrined in googles patent!!

Each page of yours links to internal and external pages, and the page rank divides out betwen them.

If you use up page rank on links going out, then there is less going back to your own site. A leaking bucket. You have to conserve.

So conventional wisdom goes - ever since page rank sculpting was killed , the fact of nofollow of links still loses link juice into the ether whether or not it is passed on to others, so that you cannot use nofollow to sculpt rank around the site.

Of course things change. I think I see at least one radical change of the PR link model.. too early to see if I am right on that, but I will be experimenting with it!

[JJMcClure]

Because of the page rank model for one, as enshrined in googles patent!!

Each page of yours links to internal and external pages, and the page rank divides out betwen them.

So what, you don't rank because of your PR and the way PR is shared between outgoing links was changed by Google over a year before they made the info public and during that year all the PR sculpting snake oil salesmen had been peddling their BS and didn't even notice it was having zero effect.

PR is now shared equally between the number of outgoing links but you can't sculpt it anymore, not for nearly two years. So, who you link out to only matters from the perspective of it being a 'vote' for them and you should be careful who you vote for.

[bwelford]

By now the PageRank concept is completely flawed since the underlying data is highly suspect given how everyone has reacted to PageRank's existence. Google cannot clean up the data by any of its FUD initiatives. However as a marketing concept it keeps them on everyone's radar so it cannot be abandoned. Google spends a large amount of human resources to try to beat this dead horse. I imagine at the highest level in Google it's a real dilemma.

[akirk]

I think this is to misunderstand the point I was making...

I totally understand and agree with your comment:

They are preferring a mile wide one inch deep, and what should work on the web is one inch wide and one mile deep. True specialist rising up the pile. They are not!

of course that is logical... (to us as business owners - but is it for Google?)
the point I was making though is that if Google changes make a business suffer to the extent implied...

Many good sites have tanked. By and large the ones hurting are niche suppliers of specific items. I gave a concrete example above. A lot of specialist suppliers of cot bedding who knew far more about it than amazon ever will, with content and products reflecting that have been kicked out!

that their changes are killing a business - then that is a business which is not operating correctly on the internet...
the internet is a tool - that is all
the internet should be seen in the context of offline / online balance
Google is useful - but is not the internet
so if Google plays that high a level of influence on their business - they have core business issues... and those are not Google - but their ability to attract custom / understand their market / get business / sell / etc.

to take your example of cot bedding...

are they advertising on / known on mumsnet / netmums / 100 other forums?
are they providing samples to broadsheets / magazines to write articles
are they working with bloggers to review products
do they have the leading channels on youtube / vimeo on all issues relating to cot bedding
do they have an active twitter feed / facebook area
are they actively mailing people
are they working offline with maternity wards / health visitors
are they targetting their market offline through advertising
are they selling on / reviewing on / working with Amazon
are they on ebay
are they attending fairs / shows
are they working with pre-schools / nurseries across the country

are they.....
i.e. all they things they need to do regardless of Google...
if Google kicks them out - do they still have a business, or have they just done some SEO - and sat back letting Google sending them their market without taking any measures to maintain / grow / protect their customers - leaving it all in the hands of a 3rd party whose ultimate purpose is not to build their cot bedding business but to line their own pockets...

??? I know very little about Cot Bedding other than that it comes with Teddy Bears embroidered on it but any business has certain things in common - and one of them is the need to be in control of how they are attracting their market...

sorry - I understand that a lot of people have made money out of gaming Google and working the system, that for many other businesses they have been very lucky, but... to rely on google and then claim that they have been damaged by Google is to misunderstand how to run a business...

yes, I agree that ideally the search results would be lest generalist and more specific - but... I suspect that over the years Google has been monitoring where people go against results presented... it wouldn't surprise me to find that when presented with specialist results higher up the rankings, searchers still are drawn by the brands - e.g. Amazon / Etsy / etc. - and therefore these results in the mindset of Google make sense - to provide their users with the results they want - not to provide the results the businesses want...

does the average person searching for cot bedding want detailed / specialist knowledge, or do they just want to visit the store they trust and buy some?

Alasdair