Google’s Penguin update to its algorithm, has a lot of people on the WebmasterWorld.com Forum chatting about its effect
Most comments are detecting changes to their own sites and pages.
As usually it was one comment that started off the conversation that is currently over 30 pages and here it is:
“””After over 10 years of consistently ranking between position #1 and #3 on page one for a single four letter word search term, the month of March (starting on the 10th) has resulted in falling to below the fold, then to page 2, then page 3 and today I have been completely removed for that term.
In place is nothing but garbage. Branding obviously has lost traction. I’m thinking whatever they have done is meant to stick. I checked to see if I had been over optimized for the term, but with a mere 4 occurrences on my page and my need to use that term to describe my product, I really don’t know what they want from us anymore…
The effect of lost traffic has set off all the “Big Traffic change for URL” warnings and the anayltics charts have nose dived. Anyone else seeing this type of situation on their long established sites?
Lost income from March updates is just about $1000 / week.
I’d almost guess that Google is just removing older authority sites in favor of nothing but news articles and blogs.””
Here are some other comments I found interesting off the forum:
1.
”
Matt Cutts and his team are geniuses and have finally figured out a way to combat SPAM on the internet. This update had a ton of collateral damage and he will be fixing it in the coming weeks and/or months.
or
Matt Cutts and his team have over-engineered the Google algorithm and this cluster-f@*$ of an update will solve nothing. Thousands of honest webmasters who were only trying to follow the rules will get dinged……and yes, some spammers will, however the spammers will come right back with a new set of tricks, once they figure out how to take advantage of the new loopholes created by the algorithm.
Meanwhile, thousands of honest webmasters will still pay the price and never get their rankings back…..thereby creating a void in the search results that will be filled with even more spammy looking sites.
I think Cutts and Co. unfairly targeted sites with affiliate links and made “catch-all” filters for sites that do have affiliate links, regardless of whether they were spam or not.
Just my .02
Meanwhile, (and I’m not going to “out” anyone) but one website I know has continued to rank #1 for a medium competition (organic) keyword, despite all of Panda’s best efforts.
“Build your site for your visitors” is a crock of #*$! for this particular query, as he is merely promoting an affiliate program. His entire backlink profile consists of paid links, multiple aged domains that he most likely purchased (totally non-relevant) and a few other tricks which I won’t disseminate due to the fact I might have to follow suit.
This whole “build your site for your visitors” is a crock of b.s. We build our sites for the Google algorithm and whatever they seem to think is “right”.
For you see, many many many honest webmasters got dinged by this update on April 24th 2012. They were “following the rules” and look where it got them.
This update has taught me a very valuable lesson: Don’t listen to the propaganda coming out of Cutts mouth. Instead, pay attention to the sites who continually survive draconian algorithm update after update…..then copy what they are doing.
Here’s your quality site, Cutts. Exactly as the algorithm you engineered wants it to look/feel like. Screw the visitor.”
2.
“”Ok, so after a few seconds of research it’s apparent that this is indeed part of the 40 Venice updates. This is going to absolutely KILL any businesses that rely on nationwide customers when the business operates from a single location.
Correct me if I’m wrong (I usually am) but are they trying to make me a local business ONLY now? It sounds to me that after the dust settles, the only people who will find me are local customers. I have customers around the entire globe!
The way the new strategy sounds is that you need to create a separate page for each location your business covers….ARE YOU KIDDING ME? That would require hundreds if not THOUSANDS of landing pages! Oh wait! Google frowns on landing (doorway) pages!
How about just a site tag that tells Google that your site is regional, nationwide or global?
It’s as if they want you to open an office in every city that you intend to do business in, then provide a geographical physical address and site for each business. Who came up with this half baked concept?
Again, it seems Google wants to paint us into a tiny corner. That’s not just evil, it’s inept!”””
3.
“”My apologies for another editorial, but here’s my take on what has so far amounted to be one of the most devastation “quality updates” Google has released to date.
Looking at this entire issue from the “Google Love” perspective that Larry Page seems to be craving….IF they want love, then let’s open the black box a little bit for honest users. Since This April thread started, we’ve seen endless complaints and speculation on what is happening. That right there is the problem and the basis for hating on Google.
Google recently added a feature to WMT to notify you if your CMS scripts are out of date and to update them. I thought that feature was pretty much useless and a crutch for lazy webmasters. However, maybe it’s not so bad, but let’s expand on that…if they are going to drop you for some reason, at least TELL US what metric we are being drop for! If its keyword loaded, let us know. If its excessive back links, let us know. A little feedback will buy a lot of user love.
It’s doesn’t have to be a detailed report, just send us a message saying “page abc is being de-ranked for xyz issue”. You know they have the horsepower to do this, but sadly I believe their fear is that it opens up the “gaming the system” by black hatters. There’s always a few bad apples.
So how do you get around the gaming issue?
I suggest they begin a small business verification program. Remember is the old days when you could pay Google (or was it Yahoo) $299 for organic inclusion? Why not bring that back but let’s make it an annual $599 or an even $1000 to register your LEGITIMATE business with Google.
Then, once you’ve registered, you will need to verify your business, tax ids and all the other details. You know they have most of this info anyway and if you’re a decent taxpaying business owner, you have nothing to fear. Your site should be secure and conform to a certain quality standard. In a roundabout way, that’s what they are trying to force us into right now.
If you’re a web spammer from a foreign country or tying to apply with false credentials, you’re out of business. Perhaps inclusion in this program would improve transparency and a modicum of love between Google and their legitimate small business owner users and hopefully mitigate some of the financial pain we are felling every month.
If you’re a blogger making money solely on Adsense, well, then perhaps it’s time to re-think your business strategy and stop polluting the web with re-hash. In many cases this is the space junk we all abhor.
Agree with it or not, but the overseer’s are upon us and here to stay. If I have to partner in with Google and BUY their trust (like the bigs boys do already) to avoid these financial disasters called “quality updates” that are basically as costly, useless and ineffective as the “war on drugs”, then so be it.
You may now continue your speculation.””
4.
“”””The best indicator that the results are woefully unstable:
In the last month our days to transaction has dropped to near zero. Gone are the 28+, 14 day and 7-14 day transactions. Everything is 0 or 1 days and searches for the company name have gone up 4x.
I thought the results were great 18 months ago. Good 12 months ago. Unstable 6 months ago, bad 3 months ago and so bad now I’m beginning to wonder about the future of the search engines. I wish I could post examples from the last year or two showing the degradation of searches. Bing is not much better currently. What’s happened?
It doesnt matter what I type in the box most of the time I cannot find what I want. If I’m doing a medical search I don’t want a yahoo answers page. If I’m buying a product I don’t always want amazon. Gone are the small .edu’s returning for searches. Somewhere the knob for big sites considered authorities in one topic is turned to high for other topics.
This started a few months ago and is getting worse. Sites authority is being misunderstood. Our site is an authority in the wrong areas and we are getting the wrong traffic as a result and my own searches yield the same thing in all other areas. My guess is the problem is with a semantic misunderstanding of page wording.”””
5.
“”I broadly agree with you, semantic analysis is clearly at work, but I think it was switched on or “turned up” before Penguin. I noticed a sudden change in Google’s behaviour a few weeks ago, when search for “how to stop x” (where x is a personal problem) started producing search results full of how to avoid x, how to overcome x, how to control x, how to prevent x (and vice versa).
Nonetheless, the degree to which search results now produce irrelevant but indirectly related meanings suggests to me that this algo has introduced much greater use of semantic analysis.
At the same time I see no clear patterns, and see little opportunity to anlayze what is happening, which might imply that they have introduced a whole raft of changes in the Penguin update – I don’t think that is news.
My sense is that the following factors are implicated in Penguin:
There is a big attack on sites with affiliate links; some EMD and small sites which have survived appear to be ones without affiliate links
The top ten results seem somehow different in quality and nature to the ones on page 2 and further down, leading me to wonder if they are being treated differently in the final stages of ranking….and yes, I know that doesn’t quite make sense, since they obviously are, or they wouldn’t be in the top 10, but I can’t articulate what it is that I am sensing.
most of the sites I see in the top 10 results that have blog comment spam as their backlinks are relatively new sites
The sites which have hundreds or thousands of spammy backlinks from blog link networks, the ones that are still in the top 10 results, seem to be older sites which have recently risen to the top of the search results
Keyword stuffing does not seem to have affected sites’ position in the search engine rankings as far as I can see””
7.
“What has changed in the algo? No doubt many things have but my sense is strong around:
linked websites – in networks with a clear footprint – got demoted (ho hum!), not just in their own right but also in their ability to pass PR
a narrowing of the acceptable frequency of anchor text which would cause a target URL to feature in the search results for a particular phrase; too low – no chance of appearing, unsurprisingly, but go a smidgen over the acceptable upper limit (IMJ around 40%) – and the website plummets for that and all other searches
great sensitivity to link churn – changing, adding, or removing links too quickly (and that may be not very quickly at all) causes a penalty
I’m not so sure that thin content has really had much to do with this….
As always, though, massive link span can still keep you there, till it’s detected..”””
8.
“I’m still in shock. Some of the newly ranked top 10 sites across numerous queries are fairly new, and in fact seem to show a rapid increase in backlinks just since February. Removed from the serps were established, trusted websites that have been around a long time and are expected to have some strange links. If I need to get a loan or make a purchase of any kind online, I would certainly prefer to do business with someone who has been in the business for 10 years than a fly-by-night site that gets a free pass because no one links to them. They haven’t been around long enough to ever get a blogroll link. The entire update makes no sense. It’s just not right.”
9.
“I’m at a total loss. Traffic is way up from google, 50% since the 20th. But the traffic is wrong. I cannot say exactly how or why. I think we are getting people looking for something somewhat related so they hang around for a bit but not the laser sharp customers bing sends us. Brand widget pole is the product we may get searches for telephone poles, or political polls if the name of the product brand is even remotely close.
To me it seems the more they reduce exact matches the less targeted the traffic is and indeed my personal searches return mostly trash. Searching for medical conditions I’m suddenly getting sites that require me to sign up so they can email me videos? Major medical sites are down the page beyond irrelevant YouTube videos?
It seems to me that googles algorithm is like windows nt. it’s gotten so big with so many fixes on top of fixes changes are having unintended consequences. Mr Cutts indicates this influences 3% of searches but I find it hard to believe they can calculate that figure. Every search I do seems to be changed right now so what are the other 97% people searching for the color yellow?”
As for Google this is how they described the change and what they are seeking to do with it:
- Categorize paginated documents. [launch codename “Xirtam3”, project codename “CategorizePaginatedDocuments”] Sometimes, search results can be dominated by documents from a paginated series. This change helps surface more diverse results in such cases.
- More language-relevant navigational results. [launch codename “Raquel”] For navigational searches when the user types in a web address, such as [bol.com], we generally try to rank that web address at the top. However, this isn’t always the best answer. For example, bol.com is a Dutch page, but many users are actually searching in Portuguese and are looking for the Brazilian email service, http://www.bol.uol.com.br/. This change takes into account language to help return the most relevant navigational results.
- Country identification for webpages. [launch codename “sudoku”] Location is an important signal we use to surface content more relevant to a particular country. For a while we’ve had systems designed to detect when a website, subdomain, or directory is relevant to a set of countries. This change extends the granularity of those systems to the page level for sites that host user generated content, meaning that some pages on a particular site can be considered relevant to France, while others might be considered relevant to Spain.
- Anchors bug fix. [launch codename “Organochloride”, project codename “Anchors”] This change fixed a bug related to our handling of anchors.
- More domain diversity. [launch codename “Horde”, project codename “Domain Crowding”] Sometimes search returns too many results from the same domain. This change helps surface content from a more diverse set of domains.
- More local sites from organizations. [project codename “ImpOrgMap2”] This change makes it more likely you’ll find an organization website from your country (e.g. mexico.cnn.com for Mexico rather than cnn.com).
- Improvements to local navigational searches. [launch codename “onebar-l”] For searches that include location terms, e.g. [dunston mint seattle] or [Vaso Azzurro Restaurant 94043], we are more likely to rank the local navigational homepages in the top position, even in cases where the navigational page does not mention the location.
- Improvements to how search terms are scored in ranking. [launch codename “Bi02sw41”] One of the most fundamental signals used in search is whether and how your search terms appear on the pages you’re searching. This change improves the way those terms are scored.
- Disable salience in snippets. [launch codename “DSS”, project codename “Snippets”] This change updates our system for generating snippets to keep it consistent with other infrastructure improvements. It also simplifies and increases consistency in the snippet generation process.
- More text from the beginning of the page in snippets. [launch codename “solar”, project codename “Snippets”] This change makes it more likely we’ll show text from the beginning of a page in snippets when that text is particularly relevant.
- Smoother ranking changes for fresh results. [launch codename “sep”, project codename “Freshness”] We want to help you find the freshest results, particularly for searches with important new web content, such as breaking news topics. We try to promote content that appears to be fresh. This change applies a more granular classifier, leading to more nuanced changes in ranking based on freshness.
- Improvement in a freshness signal. [launch codename “citron”, project codename “Freshness”] This change is a minor improvement to one of the freshness signals which helps to better identify fresh documents.
- No freshness boost for low-quality content. [launch codename “NoRot”, project codename “Freshness”] We have modified a classifier we use to promote fresh content to exclude fresh content identified as particularly low-quality.
- Tweak to trigger behavior for Instant Previews. This change narrows the trigger area for Instant Previews so that you won’t see a preview until you hover and pause over the icon to the right of each search result. In the past the feature would trigger if you moused into a larger button area.
- Sunrise and sunset search feature internationalization. [project codename “sunrise-i18n”] We’ve internationalized the sunrise and sunset search feature to 33 new languages, so now you can more easily plan an evening jog before dusk or set your alarm clock to watch the sunrise with a friend.
- Improvements to currency conversion search feature in Turkish. [launch codename “kur”, project codename “kur”] We launched improvements to the currency conversion search feature in Turkish. Try searching for [dolar kuru], [euro ne kadar], or [avro kaç para].
- Improvements to news clustering for Serbian. [launch codename “serbian-5”] For news results, we generally try to cluster articles about the same story into groups. This change improves clustering in Serbian by better grouping articles written in Cyrillic and Latin. We also improved our use of “stemming” — a technique that relies on the “stem” or root of a word.
- Better query interpretation. This launch helps us better interpret the likely intention of your search query as suggested by your last few searches.
- News universal results serving improvements. [launch codename “inhale”] This change streamlines the serving of news results on Google by shifting to a more unified system architecture.
- UI improvements for breaking news topics. [launch codename “Smoothie”, project codename “Smoothie”] We’ve improved the user interface for news results when you’re searching for a breaking news topic. You’ll often see a large image thumbnail alongside two fresh news results.
- More comprehensive predictions for local queries. [project codename “Autocomplete”] This change improves the comprehensiveness of autocomplete predictions by expanding coverage for long-tail U.S. local search queries such as addresses or small businesses.
- Improvements to triggering of public data search feature. [launch codename “Plunge_Local”, project codename “DIVE”] This launch improves triggering for the public data search feature, broadening the range of queries that will return helpful population and unemployment data.
- Adding Japanese and Korean to error page classifier. [launch codename “maniac4jars”, project codename “Soft404”] We have signals designed to detect crypto 404 pages (also known as “soft 404s”), pages that return valid text to a browser, but the text only contains error messages, such as “Page not found.” It’s rare that a user will be looking for such a page, so it’s important we be able to detect them. This change extends a particular classifier to Japanese and Korean.
- More efficient generation of alternative titles. [launch codename “HalfMarathon”] We use a variety of signals to generate titles in search results. This change makes the process more efficient, saving tremendous CPU resources without degrading quality.
- More concise and/or informative titles. [launch codename “kebmo”] We look at a number of factors when deciding what to show for the title of a search result. This change means you’ll find more informative titles and/or more concise titles with the same information.
- Fewer bad spell corrections internationally. [launch codename “Potage”, project codename “Spelling”] When you search for [mango tea], we don’t want to show spelling predictions like “Did you mean ‘mint tea’?” We have algorithms designed to prevent these “bad spell corrections” and this change internationalizes one of those algorithms.
- More spelling corrections globally and in more languages. [launch codename “pita”, project codename “Autocomplete”] Sometimes autocomplete will correct your spelling before you’ve finished typing. We’ve been offering advanced spelling corrections in English, and recently we extended the comprehensiveness of this feature to cover more than 60 languages.
- More spell corrections for long queries. [launch codename “caterpillar_new”, project codename “Spelling”] We rolled out a change making it more likely that your query will get a spell correction even if it’s longer than ten terms. You can watch uncut footage of when we decided to launch this from our past blog post.
- More comprehensive triggering of “showing results for” goes international. [launch codename “ifprdym”, project codename “Spelling”] In some cases when you’ve misspelled a search, say [pnumatic], the results you find will actually be results for the corrected query, “pneumatic.” In the past, we haven’t always provided the explicit user interface to say, “Showing results for pneumatic” and the option to “Search instead for pnumatic.” We recently started showing the explicit “Showing results for” interface more often in these cases in English, and now we’re expanding that to new languages.
- “Did you mean” suppression goes international. [launch codename “idymsup”, project codename “Spelling”] Sometimes the “Did you mean?” spelling feature predicts spelling corrections that are accurate, but wouldn’t actually be helpful if clicked. For example, the results for the predicted correction of your search may be nearly identical to the results for your original search. In these cases, inviting you to refine your search isn’t helpful. This change first checks a spell prediction to see if it’s useful before presenting it to the user. This algorithm was already rolled out in English, but now we’ve expanded to new languages.
- Spelling model refresh and quality improvements. We’ve refreshed spelling models and launched quality improvements in 27 languages.
- Fewer autocomplete predictions leading to low-quality results. [launch codename “Queens5”, project codename “Autocomplete”] We’ve rolled out a change designed to show fewer autocomplete predictions leading to low-quality results.
- Improvements to SafeSearch for videos and images. [project codename “SafeSearch”] We’ve made improvements to our SafeSearch signals in videos and images mode, making it less likely you’ll see adult content when you aren’t looking for it.
- Improved SafeSearch models. [launch codename “Squeezie”, project codename “SafeSearch”] This change improves our classifier used to categorize pages for SafeSearch in 40+ languages.
- Improvements to SafeSearch signals in Russian. [project codename “SafeSearch”] This change makes it less likely that you’ll see adult content in Russian when you aren’t looking for it.
- Increase base index size by 15%. [project codename “Indexing”] The base search index is our main index for serving search results and every query that comes into Google is matched against this index. This change increases the number of documents served by that index by 15%. *Note: We’re constantly tuning the size of our different indexes and changes may not always appear in these blog posts.
- New index tier. [launch codename “cantina”, project codename “Indexing”] We keep our index in “tiers” where different documents are indexed at different rates depending on how relevant they are likely to be to users. This month we introduced an additional indexing tier to support continued comprehensiveness in search results.
- Backend improvements in serving. [launch codename “Hedges”, project codename “Benson”] We’ve rolled out some improvements to our serving systems making them less computationally expensive and massively simplifying code.
- “Sub-sitelinks” in expanded sitelinks. [launch codename “thanksgiving”] This improvement digs deeper into megasitelinks by showing sub-sitelinks instead of the normal snippet.
- Better ranking of expanded sitelinks. [project codename “Megasitelinks”] This change improves the ranking of megasitelinks by providing a minimum score for the sitelink based on a score for the same URL used in general ranking.
- Sitelinks data refresh. [launch codename “Saralee-76”] Sitelinks (the links that appear beneath some search results and link deeper into the site) are generated in part by an offline process that analyzes site structure and other data to determine the most relevant links to show users. We’ve recently updated the data through our offline process. These updates happen frequently (on the order of weeks).
- Less snippet duplication in expanded sitelinks. [project codename “Megasitelinks”] We’ve adopted a new technique to reduce duplication in the snippets of expanded sitelinks.
- Movie showtimes search feature for mobile in China, Korea and Japan. We’ve expanded our movie showtimes feature for mobile to China, Korea and Japan.
- No freshness boost for low quality sites. [launch codename “NoRot”, project codename “Freshness”] We’ve modified a classifier we use to promote fresh content to exclude sites identified as particularly low-quality.
- MLB search feature. [launch codename “BallFour”, project codename “Live Results”] As the MLB season began, we rolled out a new MLB search feature. Try searching for [sf giants score] or [mlb scores].
- Spanish football (La Liga) search feature. This feature provides scores and information about teams playing in La Liga. Try searching for [barcelona fc] or [la liga].
- Formula 1 racing search feature. [launch codename “CheckeredFlag”] This month we introduced a new search feature to help you find Formula 1 leaderboards and results. Try searching [formula 1] or [mark webber].
- Tweaks to NHL search feature. We’ve improved the NHL search feature so it’s more likely to appear when relevant. Try searching for [nhl scores] or [capitals score].
- Keyword stuffing classifier improvement. [project codename “Spam”] We have classifiers designed to detect when a website is keyword stuffing. This change made the keyword stuffing classifier better.
- More authoritative results. We’ve tweaked a signal we use to surface more authoritative content.
- Better HTML5 resource caching for mobile. We’ve improved caching of different components of the search results page, dramatically reducing latency in a number of cases.
“google is like windows nt.” great stuff.
of course no one can “compete” with google. google has created their own bizarre league where they are the only team.
only google can defeat google. and that’s what’s eventually going to happen.
everything got sucked into the google vortex. they acquired every possible competitor, hired every talented developer, new and old, localised every search to work best with their network of local datacenters, became gateway machine to the entire web. and then the whole thing imploded.
Its been a hilarious, predictable, hilarious, hilarious bloodbath.
‘Keywords Words’, in a culture’s language, need to be the gold standard for search results. Otherwise queries get sent down a transient algorithmic wormhole… and the results just get curisor and curisor.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, we/webmasters should be charging google to access our content. If they don’t want someone’s content then they don’t have to pay for it, and they won’t get it. Just doesn’t make sense that we are charged with the task of making all the content and give it to them for free so they can sell it. My answer to everyone that got screwed by google on SEO is, you are giving them your shit for free based on NO PROMISE that they will give you something in return for it. Bad business deal.
It would only take the Alexa top 1000 sites (excluding G itself) to stop giving G free access and things WOULD change.
and btw on a seperate tangent, let’s look at how stupid it is to look to SEO for traffic (in general). For any given keyword there are 100s of thousands if not millions of results. Only the first 10 even matter. Seriously people, better to buy lottery tickets, better long term outlook. Of just buy a good memorable domain and advertise it, and I guess you can HOPE for good seo position while your at it, and then hope your position lasts if you get it.
Kiss it all goodbye, Google is now pushing out geo targeting. You can own a premium domain but it’s worthless in the eyes of google because it’s all about Geo targeting now. You can have a garbage name and it will rank first page now.
Good thing I don’t make money based on all this. I make it the easy way!
Stupid question- who is google ? and why are you afraid?
at what point does it stop being “search” and simply consist of a directory, where only the first page gets looked at. if you wanna be on page one, irrespective of our arbitrary scoring factors, you gotta pay up. don’t worry we have lots of interesting ways for your to pay!
it’s true these changes probably only affect 3% of sites. those are the ones trying to get organic results without paying. the other 97% are paying customers. of course some might be trying for both.
this is not “search”. it’s a directory.
it’s an online yellow pages to rule them all. people just can’t see it coming.
and jp is spot on. people are letting google do this by letting googlebot scrape their sites over and over and over again, day after day, year after year. in return for what? exposure? you gotta pay for that.
it’s not truly search if you gotta pay.
google just takes advantage of its position as gateway machine to the web. they are the portal. but when results are being localised anyway, what’s the point of using a centralised portal that appears to represent the “worldwide” web? what is it you think you are “searching”?
why use google when you can use a local site that knows the area better? if google has its way, there will be no local competition.
it’s not rocket science to build a yp directory, even if you employ rocket scientists (or cs phd’s) to do it.
people just haven’t got a clue what google is doing.
Search results are ABSOLUTELY TERRIBLE when looking for businesses, services, or products. All I get is blogs and usless pages. FOr the first time, I am frustrated using Google’s search engine.
“Tux is a penguin character and the official mascot of the Linux kernel.[1] Originally created as an entry to a Linux logo competition, Tux is the most commonly used icon for Linux, although different Linux distributions depict Tux in various styles. In video games featuring the character, female counterparts, named Penny and Gown, accompany him. The character is used in many other Linux programs and as a general symbol of Linux. In some Linux distributions, Tux greets the user during booting, with multi-processor systems displaying multiple images of Tux, one for each processor-core. Tux appeared as a character during one arc in the webcomic User Friendly. TUX is the name of a Linux-based web server. In 1999, Corel Linux Deluxe included a free Linux Penguin (Tux).
One of the random names which is assigned to explorer’s dogs is ‘Tux the Conqueror’. hmmmm….
Ah, yes! One of my launched sites gained two pages, back to page 3. It’s page 1 of Bing, I’m good with page 3 on Google . . .
When a domain registered 3 days ago ranks # 2 for payday loans you know its a mess out there.
paydayloansttt.com
below wikipedia none the less .. just ridiculous.
Whoa! One of my sites went to page 1!!! It was already page 2, so I was okay with that . . . Let me just keep my little niche sites near the top of Google . . . 3600 local exacts, and $3.45 CPC – it has to be worth something!
direct navigation will only increase in value.
Stop using their services and support friendly online business. This company has exceeded the limits of tolerance and in my opinion has completed its cycle on the internet.
Some big domainer owned sites were hit hard.
Check out PalmSprings.com on the 4th page. Nashville.com not in the top ten.
Most sites owned buy Boulevards Media went from bottom of the first page to 3-4 pages back. That is going to seriously impact their income.
Candy.com went from #1 to the 5th page.
I’m not posting this to gloat at all. My major site was seriously dinged as well. I just find it interesting that such well known sites were completely thrown under the bus.
Guys, if this update stays its the end of domains for Search Engine related purposes. Sure, they still have branding and marketing value, but Google just gave the idea of domains helping with their search engine rankings the big middle finger.
Never build a site with Google in mind. Simple.
“Never build a site with Google in mind. Simple.”
What the hell does that have to do with ANYTHING? Thousands of sites that did not build with Google in mind were dropped from Google. Whats your point?
Do you mean “don’t expect to get traffic from Google”?
Stop fueling their growth.
VOTE WITH YOUR FEET !
Use Bing or Yahoo instead.
And if you know where you want to go, stop typing a domain name in Google, type it in your browser’s address bar (direct navigation).
What a dumb comment Leo. Are you like 5? Ever drive a car without the wheels?
This is disturbingly interesting. Our friendly overweight preeminent search engine has ‘intelligently’ followed the bottom line and now finds itself algorithmed into a corner.
Haha! Burbank.com is still on page 1!!! It’s untouchable!
Derek … You sound like the kid. Engaging the keyboard before engaging the brain. Dead giveaway
Think about Leo’s post, his point and what he means and if you’re able, maybe you’ll get it.
the search results are terrible and lack of supports for real sites impacted by this should be considered criminal, considering googles clear monopoly of the industry..they have made it easier to spam and use negative seo to take competiors down
check out these spam filled results
personal loan bad credit
payday loan online
payday loan
you would think before the big G grandstanded their results they would go after the easiest to find spammers
I have mypaydayloan.com #1 wikipedia #2 and yellowpages #3, I see paydayloanttt.com on first page though after some local listings and two other sites.
it is clearly an attempt to make everyone who used to be on the front page now pay cash. a clear violation of the sherman antitrust act which is basically never enforced. all any presidential candidate would need to do is promise to wait thirty days to let people move their stuff off google and then pull google out of the nameserver and they would gain 6 points in the polls. and when they win i could set up an internet gambling site on who would be the first to die… Larry Page or Sergey Brin with like a triple payoff if they both died on the same day. only accidents or suicides would count. this should in no way be interpreted as an incitement to violence. i’ll leave murdering u.s. citizens who’ve never been convicted of anything to obama.
leo, technically you are “right” but what you suggest is wholly unrealistic. at this point in time.
google is running the game. and people seem content to play. and pay. not just for adwords but also for “seo consulting”.
google is embracing seo.
will they shoot themselves in the foot? we shall see.
google is abandoning search. if we define search as asking for something specific and getting it, without google and advertisers intervening.
does anyone want real search? google doesn’t think so. we shall see.
Life goes on, regardless of what Google does. The Sun will shine again and the birds will sing. There’s no point in getting upset about updates.
The search results on google.co.uk after the penguin update are ridiculous. The website in #1 position for this search term
‘tree surgeon wimbledon’
doesn’t even have any text on it! It’s an image. Do we need a search engine to fins a keyword url?
This is laughable. For the first time in 10 years or so, I am going to start searching with a different engine. http://www.blekko.com is my first port of call.
Thank-you for the accurate headline and the fantastic article and comments that follow it. Please allow me to post my plea to Google here since there is no way to reach Google directly:
Dear Google,
I feel like my life is ending because I am about to lose my life’s work. All because of you. All because of Penguin. Before my site and I disappear, I want you to know about me and my site (http://www.youthchg.com), and to show you the human destruction and damage that your Penguin update is inadvertently causing.
I am not a spammer. I teach teachers how to work with troubled and abused children. My work can save children’s lives or prevent a school shooting. It has been my life’s work since 1989, but I may soon lose it all because of you. While I still rank highly on Bing and Yahoo, since Penguin, my traffic is off as much as 80%, and sales are off by a staggering 100%. I was in the top few listings for words like “teacher workshop,” “school posters,” and “classroom management articles”, but since Penguin, many spam sites featuring content stolen from my site, rank far higher on many of my keywords than I do. My site keywords have gone from first page to >100.
Prior to Penguin, my business was thriving. Now, when my family and friends express shock when they hear I am contemplating closing my business. I tell them about Penguin, and they say “Well, just ask Google what you’ve done wrong so you can fix it.” They don’t understand that you control our online lives and livelihoods, and there is no way to ask Google anything. It seems to me, Google, that you are a mean, arrogant bully that gets to decide my fate, and I have no say in it.
Repeated posts on this forum have yielded dozens and dozens of guesses at what I have done to deserve the Penguin death penalty. I have no idea how or what to fix as there are apparently so many choices. I don’t just want to rip apart a perfectly well-functioning site and then have guessed wrong about what was the problem. Google, I wish you would just tell me exatly what I’ve done wrong, and I would immediately fix it. I can think of no other entity that wields such great power yet isn’t accountable to anyone, and doesn’t even have to explain itself. It’s like the electric company suddenly cutting off my electricity, even though the electric company is the only electricity provider around. Even worse, I can’t get my power restored because the electric company won’t tell me precisely what I did wrong or how to fix it. I’m just cut off– potentially forever. Does that seem right or fair to you?
I am a just counselor and educator in Oregon. I am not an SEO expert. I built my site almost completely by myself beginning in 1996, and I try to keep up with your guidelines. I never asked low quality sites (like sites on hemorrhoids) to post hundreds of links to my site. I never wanted anyone to steal my content and rank higher than I do for my keywords. I never meant to do anything to break your rules and I fixed every rule violation that is in my power to readily fix, yet you leave me at >100 on all my keywords that my site used to rank on Page 1.
Google, if you could see me in my little office, you would see a broken woman, a woman fighting back tears at the thought of turning off phones that no longer ring. You’d see a woman close to sobbing at the prospect of closing a website that since Penguin, no one can find to visit. You’d see a frightened, desperate woman who wonders what she will do without her mission, her income, her life’s work. And, I am just one of thousands and thousands of people who are not spammers but people whose life work you are accidently destroying.
Google, please rescind the Penguin update today before sites like mine cease to exist any longer. At the very least, you must offer webmasters precise specifics on how to immediately correct identifiable (not cross-myfingers-hope-I-guess-right) violations. You have so much power over the lives of people like me. Please use that power properly. You must recind or adjust Penguin. If you fail to make a correction, then you must realize that when resources and sites like mine disappear forever, you are ruining the very fabric of the internet.
I hope other people from will post to show you how your automated Penguin update is leaving a trail of ruined human lives and devastating human destruction.
so what are the key words/search terms one would use to find this site on google?
how about before google? sounds like this site was around long before google existed.
people really need to think carefully about what google is doing to web navigation. their “search engine” is built around power laws, not searching through text.
it’s not enough to be in the google cache. the user is not searching through text (except text inside tags, and what user cares about html? get real.).
to be found, you need a “listing” on “page 1”.
that’s not search. that’s a directory.
google is fine with seo. they’ll just keep “changing their algo” (none of the changes have to make sense- just keep mixing things up) and stringing everyone along. it’s a game at this point. and people just keep playing.
@ RuthWells, you used invisible text to spam google:
We’ve amassed the best answers that exist for nearly any “kid problem.” We have attention-grabbing
solutions to stop or manage youth violence, school failure, truancy, and dropping out, and we specialize in
providing more effective strategies for even the most serious classroom management problems. We also have practical, use-now interventions
for students who refuse to work in school, have behavior problems from autism or Asperger’s Syndrome, and those who face significant family problems.
We also have resources to help turnaround or manage poor motivation, conduct disorder, oppositional defiance (O.D.D.), bad attitudes, ADHD, anger control issues and
delinquency. We even offer intervention strategies for severe emotional problems (S.E.D.),
independent living issues, and even "girl’s problems" like teen
pregnancy. It’s information that no contemporary teacher, counselor, special educator, social worker,
principal or youth professional can
safely be without.
Regroup, and optimize your site right!
There is NO hidden text. Show it to me. I am scared you saw our many READ MORE buttons that allow users to click open long passages of text and close them when done, but I can assure you if you go to the site you won’t find hidden text. Did you go to the site or rely on some tool to view it? I would hate to see allegations being made without even viewing the actual site. If you have found a problem, I will happily fix it but show me where it is.
Site was on Page 1 for terms like classroom management articles, teacher workshop, school posters. Had been on top since 1996 through all Google algo changes, but now sales off 100% and our days are numbered. What some considered the premier site for help for troubled children and youth will probably soon be gone. Until Penguin, we had been having a fantastic year and now are facing closure. However, the many spam sites that are almost 100% our content, are having a great year because they are ranking higher than we are. Why doesn’t anyone focus on that?! What a sad, screwed-up world we live in, where we blame the victim and don’t say a word about the perpetrators.
there’s no such thing as a “tool to view the site”. the web, html, is just text.
browsers are interpreters. they take text and interpret it.
so is the googlebot, to some extent. it makes interpretations based on plain old text. and it’s not very smart.
but there’s no rule that says anyone has to interpret the text. they may just read it for what it is. text. humans are smarter than machines.
it’s information. plain and simple.
game the dumb googlebot. it’s what everyone is doing.
hurray for google.
drop the silly javascript and see what happens.
@ Ruth, You’re like the patient who spits on the emergency room workers. Fix your attitude, and then come back!
Louise’s sites (mostly aimed at catching Google searches for never searched for and convoluted terms) move up and Ruth Wells’ ( a site serving a legitimate purpose) falls. We now have incontrovertible evidence that the Penguin update stinks.
No, anyone can SEO. The webmaster guidelines are right here: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769#1 But the rest of you are too lazy to do the work, and check and make the specs are done properly: no spamming; optimize for blind surfers. Youthchg is thin content, stuffed keywords, and with text that appears as “hidden.” The nephew that created it may have meant well, but he planted a landmine which finally went off with the Penguin update.
Blame yourselves, you silly complainers!
Louise, you have to be pretty heartless to kick someone who is losing their life’s work. I hope it made you feel better to beat up on someone who is at rock bottom. I bet you like to tell jokes about cancer patients in your spare time. 3D: Thank-you for having the nerve to say what many fear to put in print.
No problem, Ruth. Louise is only concerned with one thing and that is pimping her garbage names all over these boards.
Visit EmergingDomains and read how you too can “Feed the Google Monster” with BS sites.
I’m sorry. As soon as I wrote it, I emailed @MHB, and asked him to not publish it.
How do you think it feels to be someone like me, and see the shortcut people make all the $$ all the time, when I trouble myself to be above-board? All the silly spammers and SEO professionals who pull the wool and turn their high “knowledge” into a billion dollar industry?
Don’t lose hope, but it will take a good night’s sleep, so you can concentrate. Visit the link I posted, and make a list and apply them, one-by-one. And Matt Cutts says to “be interesting.”
That’s gold I just gave you. It’s free. You took a dump on me, though I posted the “hidden text” which loses your site points with the Google engine.
Again, I’m sorry. Hope you get it sorted.
i don’t understand how people can become so dependent on google. people build *businesses* around google results. or youtube channels. this is pure lunacy. it’s not just small proprietors. this is what companies like demand media do, too. this is crazy.
while the going’s good, enjoy it. but if things change (and they will change), and your business tanks, you can’t cry foul. google owes you nothing.
if you look over the numersous lawsuits that get filed against google over the past 5 years you will see more than a few where someone is suing google because “google destroyed their business”. no, google made your business, inadvertently. and you were foolish enough to believe it was a sure thing, and would last forever.
if you wanna play the google game, you need thick skin. seo, at it’s core, is pure sleaze. it’s jockeying for position in a directory that is being portrayed as “search”. google is ok with this practice, but they owe seo “consultants” and businesses built around seo nothing. you pay for adwords. that’s how it works. if you get onto page 1 some other way, you are on your own.
castles made of sand…
sorry if this sounds harsh but it’s really silly, and dangerous, to pretend this isn’t how things are. and to rely on google to feed your family. trying to appeal to google’s “compassion” is a bit naive. they are engineers. in the early days larry and sergei just plain ignored feedback. that includes people complaining about their site getting crawled at some insane rate from ip addresses at stanford. there’s no “customer service” dept at google for “incorrect organic search results”.
the best we can hope fo is an end to the google madness and a return to more objective, real search.
i did searches for the terms ruth mentioned.
and among the results i looked for the word “youth.” does the business have a name? youth chg?
the first one, classroom mgmt articles has a result in the top 5 from “vimeo” on youth change. videos. go figure. does youthchg have any video channels on the video sites? i’d look into that. google is showing images as first page search results, for searches about entirely non-visual things. what does that tell you? they are appealing to base instincts.
the second one, teacher workshop, had no mentions of youth in the results. but the top 5 spots were dominated by the direct match domainname teacherworkshop.com no explanation needed here. if you are a domainer you know all about this phenomenon.
the third one, school posters, did have a result from prlog.com that was a press release for… youthchg. alright! but this is far cry from a direct links to youthchg.
i wouldn’t be surprised if youthchg offers more pertinent and high quality material than many of the top results in these searches, for the specific services in question. and that’s why google search is becoming worthless. unless of course you are searching for videos or some other mindless garbage.
google is probably a contributor to the very problems youthchg is aimed at solving.
just keep feeding kids more youtube videos.
maybe it’s worth taking a hard look at the html and javascript of the sites in the page 1 results for those terms above and comparing it to youthchg’s. those sites are likely to be putting lots of effort into seo.
your most important audience is not necessarily the end user. it’s the googlebot.
stupid, but true.
actually, they (cutts) do claim you can contact them about “incorrect results”. maybe look into that. but i think it’s more for the situation where someone searches “youthchg.com” and youthchg.com is not the first result. arguably “that’s an error!” as the google engineers would say.
Further, I don’t know it all, and am ignorant of many things, like being a judge of character.
It’s hard to feel sorry for people who had the easy money for years, that it took sacrifice to avoid the easy course, in order to conduct business right. But I slow and myopic. Someone on here said I am the female Forrest Gump. I’ll take that – hope I have his success!
Ive been holding back commenting about this update because I wanted to the effects some time to work through before making observations.
One of my main sites seems to have been hit quite hard, with traffic down around 50%.
Sales are down over 50% which indicates that it is some of the ‘higher quality’ traffic which has been lost.
The site has not been agressively ‘SEO’d, it has a few dozen backlinks which have grown organically over the years. Its a simple ecommerce shopping cart, we source, stock and ship 100% of our orders and there is not an advert or affiliate link anywhere.
I can’t actually be bothered to try and find whatever about it is offending Google. More likely I will abandon this site and work now on gaming the system with a series of temporary websites instead of playing for the longterm as clearly that is not an option these days. Sad.
Contrast this with another of my sites – in a similar niche but geo-targetted both in content and cctld. This one uses Adsense ™ , has been somewhat dodgily SEOd, sells text links to anyone who pays and generally breaks the rules. Since last week we have enjoyed an increase in traffic, sales and conversions. Cheers G.
The main material difference I can see between the sites that could cause the good to go down and the not-so-good to go up is that not-so-good.biz uses Adwords ™ as part of its marketing 🙂
This is the major change of Google, however, if we look at opportunity, we will see that some of the big site also being hit hard by this shift and so it is our great chance to build quality site, use white hat SEO and marketing to dominate the keyword which seem to be impossible in the past.