Google have lost the plot completely!

[JJMcClure]

Someone has lost the top ranking site for that term - who has lost an employer business overnicght.
Lost over 90% of his traffic, and in the last 3 years all the links to his site have been organic links in from his client base.


Matt cutts should lose his job over this.
But that is the problem with google. They probably put 100000 people out of business this week, minnows in the poind, but for all that reliant on google to make an honest crust, and google could not care less.

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.

[Clinton]

experienced-people.co.uk is showing a drop in traffic despite it having what I think is quality content. OTOH, a finance site of mine that's been neglected for a couple of years and that has nothing, I mean nothing, but autoblog type incoming links has shot up the SERPs and showing an increase in traffic of about 300%.

[JJMcClure]

experienced-people.co.uk is showing a drop in traffic despite it having what I think is quality content. OTOH, a finance site of mine that's been neglected for a couple of years and that has nothing, I mean nothing, but autoblog type incoming links has shot up the SERPs and showing an increase in traffic of about 300%.

If anyone can supply even the most basic logic that would support the idea that a company as successful as Google would deliberately fill their main product (main, because it monitises most of their other products) with crap at the expense of genuine quality, of course I'm prepared to entertain the possibility because I'm open minded. Until a theory surfaces that's even vaguely reasonable, I'm going to continue to consider highly unlikely. So far all we have is invective, tiny samples of data presented as representative of the entire SERP, bandwagon jumping, unsupported conclusion making and bias.

Whatever is happening here, it's highly improbable that Google have either accidentally screwed up the SERP or that they're deliberately lowering it's quality. Surely even people who have strong anti-google sentiments must be prepared to consider that something else is happening here and we just don't know what it is yet?

Also, if anything reinforces the 'don't rely on Google for traffic' message, this has to be it.

[bwelford]

Google makes its money from the Adwords that appear around all 4 edges of the SERPs. So if any of those ads look better than the 'editorial content' they have created for the keyword query, then the reader clicks the ad and Google wins.

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.

[David S]

Whatever is happening here, it's highly improbable that Google have either accidentally screwed up the SERP or that they're deliberately lowering it's quality. Surely even people who have strong anti-google sentiments must be prepared to consider that something else is happening here and we just don't know what it is yet?

I agree that it is highly improbable that Google is deliberately lowering its quality. That would be suicide, gaining short term advertising revenues at the expense of long term relevance.

I don't see any reason to think that Google is capable of making a significant blunder. Most companies do, at some point.

Even though the sample size is very small compared to Google's index, I see every sign that Google has, in fact, rolled out a defective algorithm. Like Clinton, I have seen my well-performing authority site with no significant spammy links in its backlink profile suffer a substantial drop in visitors this past week while some other sites with minimal content and almost no backlinks have experienced increased visits.

[mikeb]

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.

There are several issues you raise.
(1) " honest crust " . Matt cutts implies that he is a white knighr making war on whole sale spammers, and that he or they are clever enough to do so. Wrong on both counts. By far the biggest victims of this are snall businesses whose well targetted sites have been replaced by low quality pages on big brands, ( which seems to be the main theme - and thin sites and even domain holding pages for exact domains.
The results are worse than they have been for searchers, as demonstrated by the fact that on many of my sites at least bing viewer pages and time on site are higher, indicating better search to site match. If google fails to tell people the rules, then it is not surprising people cannot oblige them.

(2) since google cannot do search well , in any absolute sense, nobody can, they only replace one approximation with another, so they owe it to those who rely on them not to change so quickly they put large numbers out of work. Private enterprise can and should act responsibly and ethically, and take responsibilty for those who rely on them. The advantage matt cutts has is that he never has to look the people he makes redundant in the eye. If he did - he would not do what he has done the way he has done it. The fundamental premise of the change is that focussesd anchor text is now arbitrarily disliked. As a site visitor i would like to know the topic of what i will see if i click a link. Nit the name of the person orBusiness. Google would rather cloak that with a brand name now. If they had given small business clear instruction most would oblige.


(3) i tell people to build lists, and that google is just a traffic source but most small companies are not that sophisticated. The only saleable sites are list or loyalty based or search based. Ppc or advert based is too easily cloned to sell.


My experience is the same as clintons. My autogeneratef scraped content sites with many pages aee back
Trebled in traffic proving serps are now different not better. My high traffic diverse blogs are similar but my niche sites for the most part have tanked in favour of unfocussed pages on big brand sites.

My ecperience is









Wrong.

[Slowdive]

The saddest thing and I do mean legitimately sad about this update is small sites have been milled under by it.
I have a few sites in a collectable niche and its a small niche largely full of good folks, so I actually know some of my competitors by name and have watched their websites grow over years next to my own. Mr X who is 60 was not employing SEO in fact his only SEO crime was likely using old software and not understanding what CSS is. I have no idea what about his site made google think it should be relegated to SERP purgatory. It seems web builders like wix have been smacked hard and a lot of older sites got squelched for still absuing meta-tags, which had been left there from when meta tag loading was the way.
Old sites that had fallen behind in the SEO race are climbing and I have some company on page one I had forgotten were even in business. So its an interesting change but its definitely true been a lot of friendly fire in googles war on SEO.

Interestingly enough most of my sites that have enjoyed this update are ones I have done for clients. As I have never had the guts to play around with a clients potential ranking and so have always limited SEO to just doing what google said. Big old ruler across the knuckles as google bellows you will do as I say it seems. Content, SEO, Links all seemingly secondary to how well you have been doing things G-way.

[crabfoot]

that single page of exact match crud, most of it adsense above the fold... I did not think such stuff could pass adsense quality tests. I was wrong...

This might help somebody else explain the conundrum -

Something I've noticed in the great elsewhere is that some parking systems appear to be working better now than they were this time last year.

I'm not talking about parking that is available for anyone to use, I'm talking about parking systems operated by registrars/catchers and major league domainers, and the only evidence I have is that they appear to have increased their catching and buying activity over the last few months. They are behaving like they can't lose by buying, and the rational conclusion is that their parking systems are at least paying the registration fees.

Only constructive comment I can make on what they are doing is that the parking pages in question seem to involve using a "frame" associated with a parked site, but the content displayed in the "frame" is actually a page on another site.

[mikeb]

The saddest thing and I do mean legitimately sad about this update is small sites have been milled under by it.

There is a clear preference for big brand sites, with only low quality pages for specific terms. (ie unfocussed)

and so have always limited SEO to just doing what google said. Big old ruler across the knuckles as google bellows you will do as I say it seems. Content, SEO, Links all seemingly secondary to how well you have been doing things G-way.

Except that google do not say, so you cannot keep to a formula.. a lot of what cutts has said in the past has been deliberately misleadiing, and the guidelines in as far as they go are not precise enough for anyone to follow.

Google live in cloud cuckoo land. The "content people want to link to" is a myth borne of an ideology based on information niches. Not the real world. If you sell mundane things to mundane customers, googles utopia does not exist. The only links are the ones they say they do not like.
So what happens is massive unfocussed brands who get links for the brand, then rank for things which they know little about.

Sure you can write good content. But if your niche is focussed, 1 inch wide and 1 mile deep that is a lot of articles on related parts of similar subjects, then you are bound to have focussed, titles pages and inevitably links. Also because your site is about "belt buckles for saddles " , it will be about the subject not a brand, so your links will be like that too.

Google now has a word for focussed it is "over seod". Thats why an amazon, ebay, wallmart or tesco or argos page now comes up for those terms where used to be useful content and sites.

And what about links? google deprecate articles, blog comments, forums , directories, paid ads and the rest.
So if you are not in a niche people talk about you are stuffed.

Google screwed up big time. Bing is more useful for searching answers now.

[JJMcClure]

Except that google do not say, so you cannot keep to a formula.. a lot of what cutts has said in the past has been deliberately misleadiing,

If that's true it won't be hard for you to come up with several examples. I wait with baited breath for them.

Google live in cloud cuckoo land. The "content people want to link to" is a myth borne of an ideology based on information niches. Not the real world. If you sell mundane things to mundane customers, googles utopia does not exist.

True but you're actually describing how it works. I link out all the time, not just to info sites. 'Mundane' stuff is the reason they invented local and personalised search isn't it, so they'd have a way to rank plumbers and hairdressers in a meaningful way.

Google now has a word for focussed it is "over seod".

Not true. Is that a deliberately misleading comment Matt, I mean crabfoot? 'Over SEO'd' is the term for sites that have been over SEO'd, focus doesn't even come into it.

Google screwed up big time. Bing is more useful for searching answers now.

I was waiting for Bing to get mentioned, the only source I've seen that I trust has actually said that Bing isn't doing that great either and no one else in this thread has been quick to mention how much better Bing is, I wonder why not?