There is much speculation in regard to Google’s latest update which for many of us has resulted in reduced website traffic, and index ranking.
What’s it all about?
In a nutshell, search engine spam
Search engine spam is basically any attempt to manipulate the search engine rankings, this includes
- Too much SEO
- Domain names being used as high traffic keyword phrases
When this first happened to some of my sites I was livid, how dare they do this to me, but once I had time to think about it, yes it is a shame, but to be honest I really had it coming, I knew some of the stuff I was doing was a little suspect, and Google had been warning us about the approaching update.
We can scream or moan or try understanding why this has happened and fix it.
Too much SEO
What is too much SEO? Does your SEO limit or restrict the way you write your articles? Meaning you have to write in a creative and push the limits of its grammar?
According to Google the quality of your article is now what’s important, not the SEO
If you’re writing articles around keywords you could be in for a tough time especially if other search engines follow suit.
If you create an article based on a keyword in terms of its name, and you add the keyword to your Meta tags, (keywords, title and description) Add it to your heading, sprinkle it throughout your content, add a link with the keyword phrase in it as well this is a lot of SEO for a single page.
I’ve see pages getting 400 hits per day reduced to less than 50
Domain names
Another point about the latest Google update is domain name penalties.
If you buy a domain name which is a good keyword phrase that would attract high traffic if on Google’s first page and you target all your SEO efforts towards this domain name as a keyword phrase this will probably be classed as to much SEO, for which it would then get penalized and have it ranking reduced due to this.
With newer domains/sites they may never reach any high ranking within Google, for older sites a big drop in rankings may well occur.
Damage limitation
If the worst has happened or your worried it may happen it may be better to try writing content without all the SEO and see what happens, it’s still early days and everyone is waiting to see the state of things once the dust has settled, but if you have content/pages that have already been hit what’s the worst that can happen if you change one or two around removing much of the blatant SEO.
I’ve tried this on a couple of pages so time will tell, I’m not submitting anything to Google I’ll just let the spiders check this in their own time, I guess they are pretty busy at the moment.
As for new articles and content I am trying to write without any direct on page SEO, this does feel odd to have so much freedom and not have to worry about fitting in particular keywords and phrases.
I’m still using keywords and Meta tags, but I am making them relevant to the content/document with no attempt to write for the search engines.
I think your being to kind to google, this penguin update has literally killed all kinds of websites with a small income while leaving large websites alone, i consider google to be a bunch of hypocrites who seem to apply one rule for small websites and another for larger websites regardless of what practices they employ.
I have seen my websites and pages from sites which have not been changed in around a year suddenly get hit.
My income has gone from around $20 per day to $2 so i am pissed off, might not seem a lot, but for a stay at home mum it was my independence.
Its impossible to contact this big faceless money making machine, the reason for this is they simply don’t care, i can honestly say how much i hate what they are doing to the future of the web,they are changing the state of the internet to serve the needs of the bigger sites, smaller sites will never be able to compete with larger sites, google states that they want good pure content which i think smells as larger sites can still get away with doing whatever they want.
The sooner this bunch get taken down a peg or two the better.
I personally wont be using them for anything going forward including even simple searches which are actually pretty crap.
And if they think i’ll be their adwords service which i’m sure is one of the motives behing this harsh update they can take a running jump.
Just wanted to add thanks google, long time fan, but no more.
I love your words Google being a faceless money making machine, it is possible to contact them, but it can be like pulling teeth, and then you need to actually get a response.
If it makes you feel any happier it seems Google is having a pretty hard time with search engine traffic being down since the end of last year (funny enough when Panda was released)
But whatever happens you have to think the web is bigger than Google, there are many other ways to get traffic to your site.
Although i dont bear any malice towards them I certainly would not sing their praises any more as i feel i don’t know where i stand with them in light of this.
Google is teaching us all a valuable lesson about being too reliant on one search engine, I think that this latest update will lost them a lot of respect with site owners and it will come back to bite them big time.
I think the whole thing stinks, if you have A very very popular site that Googles allows to go outside of the usual Adsense rules you probably cannot compete with this, they will outrank you as they are in Googles favour regardless of what they do.
I’ve sent an email to Google about this, no reply so far, no surprise here then.
Will they change this, probably not, will they anwer my email, probably not, will they admit anything detrimental to what they are doing and have done, probably not.
I really think Google are just a bunch of bullies, they dare not pick on some of the really big sites just the smaller fry, then they hide behind this faceless uncontactable facade they have in place.
Next they’ll be building a death star, and Matt Cutts will be wearing black (oops one of these has already happened)
This update, indeed any update that manipulates search results and penalizes sites based on so called webspam and other factors regardless of how good the content it is surely going against what Googles stands for, or used to stand for.
So regardless of how good an article is if it does not fit into Googles criteria then will never rank well.
On the other hand a terrible piece of content could rank really well.
So if Google is doing all this to give the people searching better search results i’m really Matt Cutts..
Search results should be based on good content regardless of how many backlinks or other SEO facters are involved, and nothing else.
If Google was really such a caring company it would have done this and not simply penalized and doctored search results.
Dear Site Owner or Webmaster of http://www.computer-adviser.com/,
We’ve received a request from a site owner to reconsider http://www.computer-adviser.com/ for compliance with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
We’ve reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the web spam team that might affect your site’s ranking in Google. There’s no need to file a reconsideration request for your site because any ranking issues that you may be experiencing are not related to a manual action taken by the web spam team.
Of course, there may be other issues with your site that affect your site’s ranking. Google’s computers determine the order of our search results using a series of formulas known as algorithms. We make hundreds of changes to our search algorithms each year and we employ more than 200 different signals when ranking pages. As our algorithms change and as the web (including your site) changes, some fluctuation in ranking can occur as we make updates to present the best results to our users.
If you’ve experienced a change in ranking which you suspect may be more than a simple algorithm change, there are other things that you may want to investigate as possible causes, such as a major change to your site’s content, content management system or server architecture. For example, a site may not rank well if your server stops serving pages to Googlebot or if you’ve changed the URLs for a large portion of your site’s pages. This article has a list of other potential reasons why your site may not be doing well in search.
If you’re still unable to resolve your issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.
Yours sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team
I guess we could think and think about this, but nothing will change, i’d recommend just creating content, but do it in different ways such as written and video, comment on forums other than Google’s, i have noticed video results are now ranking much higher,
but does google own youtube?, hmmm
Kayo