I'm really losing my faith in Google - on January I was looking for help on this forum, because I've rebuilt site and optimized it for Google and after 2 months of waiting Google have finally indexed it right and... site have dropped two pages down despite that most of the pages above her weren't optimized at all (some of them even built in frames)...

well, no one could tell me why and I've started to improve link popularity - now it has 3 times more links and week ago my site went down another 2 pages...

I'm really getting angry because so far I've optimized about 120-150 sites and every time I've put them to top pages or second page and in this one from the beginning everything goes wrong and I can't find any logical reason why

- site is fully optimized (checked on few meta tag analyzers)
- domain is 3 years old
- has about 1500 linkbacks
- robots have found most of the content

and still f.e. some other site started about 2 months ago with about 200 linkbacks and rather poorly optimized is few pages higher...

could anyone tell me what the f*** is goin on???????

this thread may help

http://www.highrankings.com/forum/in...howtopic=22570

thanx, I've missed that post - most of it doesn't apply to my problem, but certainly produces some more problems to think of

you're also not the only one with that problem. check this thread and a lot of other ones here too.

google has done something wrong i think..

Why has Google done something wrong? The recent changes were designed to eliminate pages from the index that manipulated links in order to get better ranking. I assume before long if it isn't already happening those same changes will be applied to the ranking algorithm.

Only time will tell if search results become more relevant to the query, but eliminating sites that use spammy tecniques seems like a good thing.

Remember that for every webmaster/site owner who complains that Google screwed up because their pages don't rank as well or because some pages of their site are no longer in the index there's another webmaster/site owner jumping for joy as their pages rank better and they get more traffic.


freyutd can you post a link to the site you're having problems with? Without knowing the site no one here can really help with what might be causing the problem.

Why has Google done something wrong? The recent changes were designed to eliminate pages from the index that manipulated links in order to get better ranking. I assume before long if it isn't already happening those same changes will be applied to the ranking algorithm.

Because there is a Craven among blackhats to get their Phil of top rankings for things that don't deserve it. That's why it's wrong.

Matt Cutts' blog is just a mess that way, and most people simply refuse to see the forest for the trees.

Anyway, from the sounds of it you're making one of the common mistakes that webmasters are making with this, frey: you're assuming that your site deserves to over all others. And there are only so many positions to go around, as vangogh pointed out.

If it's that Polish site, you're gonna have a tough time getting an answer in an English forum as it is...I can't speak Polish, so I can't see why you'd be getting burned myself.

Because there is a Craven among blackhats to get their Phil of top rankings for things that don't deserve it.

ROFL

Adam you always find a way to crack me up. I think that sense of entitlement goes far beyond blackhatters though.

Don't you just hate Matt for actually giving us some ideas of how we might actually build Google friendly sites.

freyutd is the site in question the one Adam mentioned. If it is I'll be at a bit of a loss too given my lack of understanding the language. What I did notice though was the site uses frames which probably isn't going to help you with search engines. The site does seem to be indexed.

I am seeing the links back to the site, but without understanding the language I can't really tell how relevant those links might be. Did you get all the links in a very short time? Are they all from sites related to your site?

Can you give us a few more details about the site? I'm not seeing anything obvious.

Don't you just hate Matt for actually giving us some ideas of how we might actually build Google friendly sites.

He's such an ***! Actually giving us information on how to build things for both search engines AND the end users. I HATE HIM!

(For those of you who don't know what vangogh and I are referring to, www.mattcutts.com/blog is the blog of Google engineer Matt Cutts. Lots of good stuff there.)

And yeah, that sense of entitlement definitely extends to the vast majority of us. The problem is that it's not immediately clear where Google is going with this. The way I see it, SERP ranking in the future will be a lot like trying to achieve perfection...the harder you try at it specifically, the worse you're gonna miss the mark.

I agree with your last statement. I think Google's ultimate goal is to take seo completely out of the equation. It's not necessarily a bad idea either. Instead we'll all just have to build quality sites that people might actually want to visit and then promote them like we would any offline business.

The we could just all consider what the value of a link will be in regards to it bringing traffic directly instead of wondering which link will Google like more.

Take something like article writing. In the future we may write articles becasue we have something we want to contribute. We'll just write a good article that people want to read and consequently websites will want to have as a page on their site. Since our articles are so good they will get downloaded often and in time many people will see them on one site or another. Perhaps they'll even come across many of our articles and like them to the point where they even remember our names. They may even decide after seeing the 3rd or 4th good article that we might even know something more so they click on the link to our site and we now have not only a visitor, but one who will probably become a loyal visitor. And all because we just produced something of quality instead of worrying about to get that one visitor to our site.

Who knows where these latests changes will go and chances are by the time we all start to figure it out they'll make another change we can all start debating.

Originally Posted by vangogh

The we could just all consider what the value of a link will be in regards to it bringing traffic directly instead of wondering which link will Google like more.

IMO google engine needed slight improvements to fight the spam, not revolution like that - I really can't see any link between those changes and site content since outside links may completely ruin your efforts no matter whas is inside your articles...

and now we are back to silly link-exchange-above-all rules

I think for the changes Google has recently made and those they'll inevitably make in the future only time will tell how successful they are or aren't. It always takes a little while to see how the changes will sort out and I prefer to wait and see instead of just jumping into some conclusions.

I wasn't referring to site content with the articles. True an article is content, but I was talking about articles you let other sites use as content. All I'm saying is that instead of thinking about the article in terms of what a search engine will think about it, just write a good article. I think if you do people will visit your site through the links in the articles. I happen to think the search engines will like it too, but I consider that secondary and really more a happy by product of producing something of value.

and now we are back to silly link-exchange-above-all rules

Actually, we're at the opposite point now. What we appear to be at, and it makes a buttload of sense, is "get as many one-way links of as high quality you can". Reciprocal links and network link farming appear to be becoming dinosauric, and it's about time they did.

vangogh is absolutely right. It's a content revolution...people will be building sites about content and trying to help others. And that's what this whole web thing is supposed to be about...content.

I kinda like what the one poster Dave on Matt's blog said about the whole situation though...if you don't like it, ask for a refund.

I wasn't referring to site content with the articles. True an article is content, but I was talking about articles you let other sites use as content. All I'm saying is that instead of thinking about the article in terms of what a search engine will think about it, just write a good article. I think if you do people will visit your site through the links in the articles. I happen to think the search engines will like it too, but I consider that secondary and really more a happy by product of producing something of value.

I'm all for this too. Article submission has become so diluted in terms of concept that it's almost not worth it to write anything of real value anymore (almost impossible to come up with something unique too). I always hated the idea that my Assertivenet article (see the SEFL site) has its value diminished to a certain degree because of the large numbers of crappy articles like "submit to DMOZ" or "you should sign up for my fifteen affiliate programs because they all work and I know that they work because I was stupid enough to fall for the scams so you should too, okay?"

When I first started my blog I wanted to have some content so it would start out so empty. I figured I would grab a few free articles to fill some of the emptyness. It was amazing to me how many were so bad and even had completely wrong advice about so many things.

If I had just grabbed a few or used a feed I would have had some pretty crappy articles. I tried to at least spend a few days reading through what I saw to find ones that I at least considered to be of quality.

I agree completely about the linking situation. I think Google wants us all to just get links because we think they are from quality sites and that the links themselves will prove beneficial regardless of what Google thinks of them. Whether or not they got it right or still have work to do we'll just have to wait and see.

The whole point of what they are trying to do is stop all the artificial linking. Yes it can be argued that all seo is somewhat artificial, but if for example Adam and myself linked our sites it would make sense to our site visitors since we both offer similar things that the same group of people would find useful. We may not want to be sending customers to each other, but that's another point. Maybe a better example is that we'd both want to get links to our sites from similar sites.

It wouldn't make sense to me or Adam to get links from an auto parts site since it's unlikely that anyone on an autoparts site will be looking for web design related things while on a site about car parts. That doesn't mean we shouldn't get a link from that site. Some people might still visit, but from Google's perspective the links we're getting from the auto part site don't really make sense as something that would naturally happen if it weren't for the existence of a search engine. So they're deciding not to put as much weight into those links. Even less weight if I also link back to the auto part sites.

Originally Posted by vangogh

The whole point of what they are trying to do is stop all the artificial linking. Yes it can be argued that all seo is somewhat artificial, but if for example Adam and myself linked our sites it would make sense to our site visitors since we both offer similar things that the same group of people would find useful.

that's what I was referring to - I used to work on hotel reservation project and I had to exchange links with other sites like that - when you would look on f.e. hotel sites in Turkey or Indonesia you would find that they have FEW TOUSANDS split into 100-120 pages of links to other hotel sites and it was pretty usual that their answers were like "ok, link to my 25 sites and get back to me"

maybe I'm missing the point of current changes, but it looks like the bad old days are back - what's the point of creating good sites when better result will be from clones of same site content linked together...

The changes from what I could tell were saying that the kind of link exchanges you're describing aren't going to work as well anymore. I'm not sure why you're thinking that will be coming back (has it ever left actually) From what I'm reading the latest changes at Google are designed to reduce the wieght of just the kind of links you're describing.

Assuming the changes work the way they want we'll all need to rethink these kind f links and instead just get links because we think people might actually click the link.

The changes sound like they're trying to prevent those cloned interlinked sites from ranking well. They might still be ranking fine, but it will probably take a little time for the changes to sort themseleves out.

The changes sound like they're trying to prevent those cloned interlinked sites from ranking well. They might still be ranking fine, but it will probably take a little time for the changes to sort themseleves out.

God I hope so. I know of at least one person who has a site that ranks extremely well for a highly competitive keyphrase that does exactly that.

I hope so too. I don't think any of the 'big daddy' changes are applying to the ranking algorithm at the moment. At least I didn't see where it said that on Matt Cutts blog. He just mentioned it as being used for indexing at the moment. It just seems logical to me to think it will get incorporated into the algorith in some way at some point.

With the hotel example though all those links are related to each other. Kind of make sense for hotel reservations and hotels to link to each other. Maybe if I was a hotel I wouldn't link to another hotel since I want people to stay at my hotel and not theirs, but the content of the sites will all be relevant.

I think any kind of relevant link will help in general when it comes to a search engine.