Has your web site lost its Google pagerank?

[Guest PhilC]

That is odd IF what others here are saying here is true. That is, Google has less pages now that before. You would think pages that are still in the index would all move up

 

Even so, there’s no IF about it. People aren’t saying that Google has less pages now than before. They (we) are saying that Google is dumping pages either out of the index altogether, or into Supplemental. If you aren’t aware of that, you should get out more and read it in every seo forum. Those are the places where you’ll find soooooooooo many people that it has happened to. Also, whether or not there are fewer pages currently in the index, rankings do change.

 

If you want an on-topic article, try this one:-

 

http://www.webworkshop.net/google-madness.html

[Guest JaneSays]

This what I got in an email sent to me. Hope it helps.

 

Recent Advances

 

The result of some of the most recent changes has seen the impetus move away from optimizing websites for search engines and instead the algorithms are now geared to promote websites that give true value to visitors. They're not only changing, they are evolving into more intelligent and accurate algorithms. While the use of keywords based around the relevant topic is still important, it is also important to ensure that visitors are your main priority.

 

Keyword Optimization

 

Keyword optimization is now more heavily guarded. Those who include keywords too often will have their sites labeled as spam, whereas not enough instances of the appropriate keyword means you won't receive the desired results. However, the algorithms have become particularly smart and as well as the keywords you want to target you should include other relevant keywords. Including inflexions of keywords is one excellent way to ensure that your site is deemed to be relevant. Inflexions are slight changes to your keyword. For example, inflexions of the keyword "advertising" include advertise, advertised, advertisement, etc...

 

Keyword Inclusion

 

Weight is also given to keywords that are included in certain sections of a page. These sections include the title tag, meta tags (only relevant to smaller search engines now), header tags, image alt tags and formatting tags (e.g. keywords in bold or italicized) of your text. With image alt tags and hyperlink title tags it is important that you don't simply fill these with keywords because this will be ignored at best, and penalized at worst.

 

Natural Content Writing

 

One of the most effective ways to ensure that your site is keyword optimized properly is to write the content naturally first. Once you have done this, go through and ensure that any relevant keywords are included throughout the text. Only place them where they would appear naturally and remove them from anywhere where they appear awkward. Once you've written the content you should also check the remaining factors to ensure everything is ok.

 

SEO Keyword Checklist

 

Below is a keyword checklist to ensure that you have fully optimized your web pages to the current, generally accepted search engine algorithm rules.

 

URL: Get your primary keyword as close to the beginning of the URL as possible.

 

Title Tag: The title should be between 10 and 50 characters and include one or more keywords while still being descriptive.

 

Description Meta Tag: The description meta tag should be insightful and useful but it should also contain one or two of your more important keywords.

 

Keyword Meta Tag: It makes sense that you should include all of your keywords in the keyword meta tag. Do not include any words that don't appear in the body of your text.

 

Keyword Density: Your content should be made up of all of your keywords and other text. A total keyword density (all keywords) of around 15% to 20% is the maximum you should aim for and anything less than 5% is unlikely to yield good results.Density for a single keyword should be between 1% and 7%. 1% seems too low, and 7% a little too high. Wherever possible aim for approx 5% with the primary keyword and 3% with secondary and subsequent keywords.

[Guest BlackSun_*]

Cheer up Luke. I just checked submit express. You may have a case against Google.

 

Total links for www.dcpages.com are 389635 - Alexa traffic rank - Wayback machine go way back

[Guest malcolm pugh]

i am from england. i only got onto blog at mr cutts because i lost 9 of 12 websites to just an index page since march 8th. one www.stiffsteiffs.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk has been on there for four years and has no commercial base at all, its just a self help for alcoholics/drugs/obeisity etc with a few funny teddy bear adventures thrown in. then it goes from 200 odd pages page one of google to zilch. then alll pages back but about page 9. the other 11 websites are down to 2 working ok and 9 with just an index page where typically they have between 10 and forty pages indexable.

i wrote to google - no dice. i got what luke got - a "there is nothing wrong with your site".

i putt on the cutts webblog that we need a viable email or support team line to fully investigate what they have done to perfectly viable and real content sites.

 

there is no doubt in my mind that google have penalised to death perfectly valid sites with perfectly valid and original, constantly refreshed, content. these sites are often many years old and figured page one google - yet now if they exist at all are in Davy Jones locker.

 

my own belief is that google ran out of space and in doing so had to dump huge swathes of search data, just at the time it rolled out a new algoritm. logically, as it fits more space it should reindex those who disappeared. this does not help those of us who have been penalised since march 8th ongoing, and is a poor and offhand way to treat loyal users.

 

malcolm pugh

 

stiffsteiffs teddy bears

 

rubery

 

england

[Luke_Wilbur]

Here is some feedback I have been receiving to give you some ideas:

 

The Adam That Doesn't Belong To Matt Said,

June 9, 2006 @ 8:33 am

 

I agree with you, Luke. I think it is important for everyone to understand what has changed in Google. The problem is that if they tell people who have legit sites, they also tell those who have illegit sites and that's what imo this was all about in the first place. There are some things that should be left to secrecy and speculation, and this is probably one of those things.

 

As far as the results you're seeing goes, I don't see those at all. I see 10 resources in the city of Washington (Smithsonian, their National Zoo, a sightseeing map). It isn't until about the third page where I see something that I would consider to be irrelevant (germany.info).

 

Buuuuuuuuuuuuut (since I'm about to get flak on this)

 

Different datacenters return different results at different times, and what you see won't be what I see won't be what Dave sees won't be what you get the idea.

 

I wouldn't necessarily agree that Google is the best tool to use for sites that promote city tourism. One thing that tends to piss me off sometimes about big G is the inability to find certain entertainment-related things in my hometown of Toronto. I even have this bizarre ability to find gay-and-lesbian-related sites looking up innocuous things. (Side note: I have nothing at all against gay people, and if that's your orientation I'm cool with that. I just don't want to know about your unclothed Men's Club when I'm trying to find a bowling alley near me, that's all.)

 

In other words, the traffic you get from Google is a bonus, but it's not something that can and should be relied upon. Google is a free resource, and subject to change pretty well whenever it wants. If you’re relying on so much traffic from a resource like big G that a change in the algo is hurting you so badly that you need to ask why your site isn't ranking, then you may well have a much deeper issue.

 

You may also want to consider that your site bears certain similarities to the portal pages offered by all 3 major engines (in Google's case, you have to be logged in and have a Personalized home. Theirs is the least similar, but there are commonalities). To a small extent, you're a competitor. If you were a major search engine/portal, and a competitor came along with a more specialized regional portal, what would you do? “Hello, ant. Let me just get my brand-new wingtip and go SQUASH!

 

I'm not saying any SE does do that. I'm saying it's a possibility

 

PhilC Said,

June 10, 2006 @ 2:42 am

 

Hi Luke,

 

I didn't look at your site before, but since it's become the topic of a few posts, I had a look, and to be honest, I can't really find much in it except empty frameset pages that pull other sites into the main frame. The site seems to be mostly a directory. I was looking for articles, information, etc. about DC, and I couldn't find any. I'm not saying that the stuff isn't there - just that I couldn't find any of it, and almost everything I found was a directory - and all the listings link to empty frameset pages.

 

I.e. most topics go to a directory structure. Every directory listing page has several listings, each of which links to an empty frameset page, which links (src) to a virtually empty top frame page - all of which are identical. So every listing page leads to several empty frameset pages, plus several virtually empty and identical top frame pages. That would make the site consist of predomonantly 'nothing' pages.

 

Without studying the site is great detail, I would estimate that most of the pages that the engines have of the site are empty frameset pages and virtually empty, and identical, top frame source pages. A person might find the site to be very useful, but how would a programme view it?

 

Have I misunderstood the site?

 

From the feedback, I am seeing that our content is way to buried for people and search engines to notice.

I will start looking into that.

[Guest jimclark]

If people think Google is omiting sites or changing rankings for it's own benefit, I would bet everyone would desert the search engine like a sinking ship

[Guest Harman]

Google recognizes vertical sites pose a substantial treat to the company's dominance in search advertising. Google's new mission is to starve the competition of critical search traffic necessary to compete in search advertising market.

 

The only alternative for advertising is vertical search sites to find results more quickly, because they are catered to certain audiences and, as a result, are attractive to certain groups of search advertisers seeking highly-valued traffic a self-selected audience brings.

 

In November 2008, the Department of Justice was three hours away from filing a complaint against Google alleging, among other things, that Google has a monopoly in search advertising and that its conduct surrounding its search advertising pact with Yahoo! would have furthered its monopoly.

[Guest BlackSun]

Looks like people are seeing Google's "Do No Evil" through a different lens.

 

Particularly insidious is Google’s alleged treatment of niche competitors, such as specialty search and shopping sites where consumers can compare product prices and features. Such sites, at least in the aggregate, threaten Google’s core search franchise. Most Google users return to that site after exploring links provided in response to a search query. But once directed to a comparison shopping site by Google, users more often remain on that comparison site and use it to formulate additional search queries, instead of returning to google.com for additional searches.

 

Google’s own product comparison site, first introduced in 2002, fared poorly until 2007, when Google gave it preferential placement over competing comparison sites in general search results from google.com. Google’s comparison site quickly became the largest specialty shopping site despite “inferior usability and presentation,” according to one well-respected industry publication.

 

And this time, Google did not stop with just a ranking preference. Rather, the company met the new strategic challenge by imposing secret penalties on competing specialty search sites, making them literally disappear from user search results. In addition, by discriminatory targeting, Google raised the price for advertising placement to prohibitive levels for these competitive sites, meaning that they could not reach consumers even by paying for ads on google.com. These tactics, according to critics, enabled Google to illegally maintain a monopoly that would otherwise have eroded from free market competition.

 

Securing market dominance by inducing the reliance of Web publishers and advertisers through representations of neutral treatment — and then changing “the rules” (or lying about neutrality from the beginning) in order to maintain market control once dominance is achieved — constitutes a serious antitrust offense. U.S. antitrust authorities have brought charges against other companies for this type of conduct many times in a wide variety of situations.

 

http://www.rollcall.com/news/46266-1.html?type=printer_friendly

[Luke_Wilbur]

Looks like this happens every three years for DCpages. We dropped again from the top to page five. I asked Google's Matt Cutts what is the problem.

 

Luke Wilbur May 13, 2010 at 9:49 am Hi Matt,

For the past 10 years DCpages.com has been on the first page for Washington DC. In February, we migrated to a more robust server and dropped down to page 5. Our programming has remained the same. Does Google temporarily drop web sites page rankings when an ip associated with a a domain name changes?

 

http://www.google.co...i&start=50&sa=N

 

Thanks for your help

 

 

http://webcache.goog...lient=firefox-a

 

Unfortunately, he just removed the post. I currently do not know the answer.

Edited May 20, 2010 by Luke_Wilbur

[Guest August]

This is quite interesting...

 

Google's latest moves in the ad-serving space smell more monopolistic than anything else it's doing or has done. The powerful, context-based AdSense business is now about to be backed up by Google's $3.1 billion purchase of DoubleClick, a company that serves a huge portion of all unsold online display ad inventory online. Now Google will control text-based and banner ads for a significant portion of the Web's major sites and thousands of smaller ones, too. Google also recently moved into newspaper, magazine, television, and radio advertising (it just made a deal with Clear Channel). Microsoft and AT&T are none too happy about the Google-DoubleClick merger, and they are raising some antitrust alarms. But no one at the Department of Justice is biting, for now.

 

I wonder if Google search is now working with AdSense? They have the power to easily corner the market anytime they wish.

 

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2127308,00.asp

[Guest Richard in Liverpool]

I just read an article the Atlantic that stated that Google was changing their algorithm to benefit mainstream news publications. This is an effort by the world's biggest search engine to get publications a boost in getting more viewers to come to their web site. It mentioned the Washington Post and New York Times. There you have it.

[Guest SF INDY]

This is sad news for Internet freedom. I thought Google mantra was to "Do No Evil" and put the best websites up on top. News organizations should earn their place. Where is my Pepsi alternative.

[Guest greenzen]

What happened to the old Google that protected the netizens of the world? Your right about this. All the news is buzzing about how BP has purchased the Google's search algorithm. I wonder how long they will allow this YOUTUBE video to stay up.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_kCTayo9Sc

[Guest Googler]

I think this might explain alot for everyone.

 

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html

 

Today, we're announcing the completion of a new web indexing system called Caffeine. Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index, and it's the largest collection of web content we've offered. Whether it's a news story, a blog or a forum post, you can now find links to relevant content much sooner after it is published than was possible ever before.

 

Some background for those of you who don't build search engines for a living like us: when you search Google, you're not searching the live web. Instead you're searching Google's index of the web which, like the list in the back of a book, helps you pinpoint exactly the information you need. (Here's a good explanation of how it all works.)

 

So why did we build a new search indexing system? Content on the web is blossoming. It's growing not just in size and numbers but with the advent of video, images, news and real-time updates, the average webpage is richer and more complex. In addition, people's expectations for search are higher than they used to be. Searchers want to find the latest relevant content and publishers expect to be found the instant they publish.

 

To keep up with the evolution of the web and to meet rising user expectations, we've built Caffeine. The image below illustrates how our old indexing system worked compared to Caffeine:

 

 

Our old index had several layers, some of which were refreshed at a faster rate than others; the main layer would update every couple of weeks. To refresh a layer of the old index, we would analyze the entire web, which meant there was a significant delay between when we found a page and made it available to you.

 

With Caffeine, we analyze the web in small portions and update our search index on a continuous basis, globally. As we find new pages, or new information on existing pages, we can add these straight to the index. That means you can find fresher information than ever before—no matter when or where it was published.

 

Caffeine lets us index web pages on an enormous scale. In fact, every second Caffeine processes hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel. If this were a pile of paper it would grow three miles taller every second. Caffeine takes up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database and adds new information at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day. You would need 625,000 of the largest iPods to store that much information; if these were stacked end-to-end they would go for more than 40 miles.

 

We've built Caffeine with the future in mind. Not only is it fresher, it's a robust foundation that makes it possible for us to build an even faster and comprehensive search engine that scales with the growth of information online, and delivers even more relevant search results to you. So stay tuned, and look for more improvements in the months to come.

 

Posted by Carrie Grimes, Software Engineer

[Guest SERP]

For newbies to SEO, Google personalizes search even when you're signed out. You need to turn personalization off to really understand where your web site is ranking.

 

Signed out searches

 

If you aren't signed in to a Google Account, your search experience will be customized based on past search information linked to a cookie on your browser. To disable history-based customizations, follow these steps:

 

1. In the top right corner of the search results page, click Web History.

2. On the resulting page, click Disable customizations.(Because this preference is stored in a cookie, it'll affect anyone else who uses the same browser and computer as you).

 

Or, if you'd rather just delete the current cookie storing searches from your browser and start fresh, clear your browser's cookies.

 

Note: If you've disabled search customizations, you'll need to disable it again after clearing your browser cookies; clearing your Google cookie turns on history-based customizations.

 

http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?answer=54048

[Guest John M. Simpson]

Consumer Watchdog's new study, now highlighted in a video, shows that Google — similar to Microsoft in the 90's — is leveraging its monopolistic strength in the search market to muscle into additional online business using anti-competitive measures. The new report details how these tactics ultimately limit consumer choice and are potentially bad business.

 

The study found that since adopting "Universal Search" in 2007, which favors Google's properties with prominent listings in its results, traffic to Google's affiliated sites has soared at the expense of competitors. See for your self in this video.

 

Google claims that its search is neutral but the study shows that it's not and demonstrates the damaging impact Google's unfair practices have had on competitors.

 

Make sure to check out the full report on our new Inside Google Website and join our new Inside Google Facebook page to participate in the conversation and get updates on Google's controversial privacy and "WiSpy" tactics. That's where Google's Street View vehicles snooped on private WiFi networks around the world. After our request, state attorneys general are investigating.

 

Check out the full report on InsideGoogle.com. We would love to hear from you about run-ins or experiences you've had with Google or please join the conversation on our new Inside Google Facebook page.

 

Sincerely,

 

 

Consumer Advocate

[Luke_Wilbur]

I just got this message from a top SEO expert.

 

If you use Webmaster Tools, your information is certainly not public. All you get to see is more information than usual: Google shows you, the site owner, certain things that it knows about your site. Only you can see this information, as only you can verify the site by changing a small piece of code on the site. See this guide as to how to use Webmaster Tools: we recommend that ever site owner use it. Again, it's completely private and is what Google sees anyway. It's not the same as Google Analytics.

 

From within Webmaster Tools, you can also submit a reconsideration request. If you truly believe that you've done nothing wrong and your site has been unfairly penalised or lowered in its rankings, you can request that a Google engineer take a look at it. If you've been penalised for something but it wasn't fair, the engineer will often take that penalty away.

 

 

 

 

 

[Guest Luke]

I have been watching AChristmasOrnament.com drop from page one to page 7 in the last month.

 

Any SEO ideas.