Google's Penguin - Consequences for Domainers

[GiftedDomains]

Google just flushed many keyword domains down the toilett. At least here in Germany its a disaster, From those websites who really lost a lot of positions or simply vanished, were nearly all keyword domains. Nearly no brands were punished.

Consequence: prices for keyword domain names will go down and domainers will have a hard time. Google is simply giving up his bonus for keyword domains.

Google already indirectly warned us last year,
(check out 2:23)

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAWFv43qubI"]How important is it to have keywords in a domain name? - YouTube[/ame]

and now its happening slowly but surely.

---------- Post added at 05:47 AM ---------- Previous post was at 05:38 AM ----------




[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0St9B1kmJ2g"]Hitler's Reaction to the recent Google Penguin update (04-24-2012) - YouTube[/ame]

 

[Fonzie]

The reason this is so puzzling to 'domainers' is because essentially none of you are involved in relevant, front side eCommerce.

You're involved with splogs, sham development, "minisites", affiliate networking, Wordpress.

How you know if you fall into this category: If your main concern is "traffic and clicks" rather than "clients and relationships"...

 

[DU]

Hey fonzie, your an idiot with a big mouth. I agree you probably were a member that got banned, previously.But ya your a goof, if you think namepros is a toilet why dont you find another forum to act immature in. The fonz was cool,your not

His contribution to this thread includes explaining the difference between typical domainer "Search Engine Manipulation" and real business need "Search Engine Optimization". It talks about the conflict of Google. It explains why the changes are made.
Your contribution is a post that adds name calling. Which do you think is more valuable to NP?

It looks like that there is not much changing and this update is sticking, not much bouncing around, rather than argueing with each other lets find out what this all means. It does look like that sites even small ammounts of bulk (spammy) links are being hit, as well as ones with the same anchor text or only keyword anchor texts in the links. The low content bad content issue should have been hit by the update panda 2.0 around the 19th so if you got hit then it was a panda issue, if you got hit around the 24th then spam links and too many keyword anchor texts and maybe some other things seem to be what got you in trouble. So just dump those projects and move on ,or try to fix them if possible?

But most (not all) self-professed SEO Professionals don't want to fix or change or understand what the marketplace really needs. Those that actually understand SEO don't potentially destroy their clients rankings. Most (not all, maybe I should say some) SEO experts here at NP are peddling link wheeling, keyword stuffing, traffic arbitrage and craptastic mini-sites with no real content which is exactly the type of site that SHOULD get de-indexed.

Look around this place with all the "Quality 500 hundreds from College Graduates for $5". How many well researched, non-source, articles can really be written in an hour? Not much of salary. Offers for quality backlinks offered everywhere.

And we wonder why your sites are losing position?

Some of this work is done with NO / ZERO consideration for the users of the internet. Do you think, as an example, that someone searching for "Stage 4 Cancer Cure Rates" really wants to his search to return sites on Stage4CancerInfoMinisite.biz that contains such gems of information like (example):

"Cancer is bad. When it gets to stage 4 it means that the cancer has progresed beyond stage 3 which is another of the 4 stages. After stage 4 you can be cured or be dead. Not everyone dead."

Domainers do not consider in the slightest what or why people are looking for things or what might happen when people find their sites. Medical misinformation is a problem - and a liability - people need to think about these things but they don't because it's $1 a click, baby.

No need for the personal attacks.

That is true. We shouldn't get personal

Anyway:

It seems to me that the Fonz will make a great argument for a position and end with something along the lines of "and you're ugly". I'm interested to know why people think Fonz might be wrong or need some correction but all we get is "it's mean to call me ugly, especially when you're smelly".

Way to focus on the points. Says to me that you don't have anything.

But wait:

Well on a positive note, got a mini site performing good and with CTR @ 11.11% and CPC 0.50

That just proves Fonzies point. You're just not willing to see past your clicks.

 

[Fonzie]

That's all? Is your insult suppose to be intimidating ? Since you could not explain what front side eCommerce is, you went with a mom joke, and nationalism. Say is all semantic and call it a day. I don't know what front side eCommerce is, never heard of it. I know about front end, and back end. Those are terminologies. I see your kind. You just a wannabe sweet talker. Why you angry? Did your girl left you for another girl? Or maybe your boyfriend left you for a girl. So sad. You give nothing to this community, why you don't delete your account? NP'ers behold in front of you a :great:

I am dumb, too !@#$%^&* dumb. 16 years ago your mom told me to use a condom, I say no. It doesn't feel the same. Look at you, what came out of that. !@#$%^&* it!!

Ladies and gentleman, may I introduce the intellect of a typical "SEO Professional".

I mean, seriously dude. Sparring and arguing can be fun, but you just flat suck at comprehending written words. It's hilarious. Like, I'll say "look at this idiot who just fell off the turnip truck", then you respond with "Haha you're so dumb I drive a CAR not a truck! It's YOU who drive the truck and eat turnips!!"

0% chance you're a successful SEO practitioner, or you're just flogging the "Local SEO" scam where you convince hairdressers and tow truck drivers that getting them to rank Page 1 for their specific business name + city is a a rare skill worth paying for.

Anyway, I'm not angry, but people like you are typical of why namepros is a toilet, these days. It's kind of obnoxious. It's a lot of half retarded, "tech professionals" who drive 8 year old Honda Civics and still have roommates.

The names you're trying to sell for thousands of dollars really tells the tale of the tape.
You need STFU and do less talking, more listening, holmes. You're still playing the domain game at Level 1.0 and the sooner you 'get that', the sooner you can move up.

 

[enlytend]

I can only speculate about SEO and how Google really operates, but keyword domains will always benefit if people create links to the domain containing the keyword string.

Not any more - having exact-match anchor text in all your backlinks has become a huge red flag.

As for the name-calling: Some people like to stir the pot, if you've been here for any length of time you know who they are. YOU can always choose not to take the bait. Just stick to the topic and ignore the personal s*** and it will go away.* Not having to wade through post after post of "am not" "are too" makes for a much more constructive discussion, and makes reading the thread much easier for the rest of us!

(ducking back out the door before I get pelted with flying debris !)

*(Responding reinforces the behavior. Behavior which is not reinforced extinguishes.)

 

[Peter]

Why is this change such a surprise to people?

For years Google have been releasing articles and videos advising that content is King. They have made it abundantly clear that they don’t with to promote sites they do not believe are beneficial to an end user.

A domain with keywords can still be beneficial but mainly if your site is comparable to a site that has no keyword in the domain but the sites have similar scores.

I am not personally a fan of Google and do not like a lot of their business practices however I do fully agree with this update. A parking page or a mini site will rarely be of interest to an end user who uses a search engine therefore why should a search engine point people in that direction?

Most people rely on parked pages and mini sites to earn revenue from click through on ads. If that ad was more what the end user was looking for wouldn’t it actually be more beneficial for Google to actually have the sort of sites that are in the ads at the top of the results?

If you truly want to keep your domain names and are not interested in reselling them then I strongly suggest you carry out some proper development and put a good informational page on the domain. Seriously, do not expect Google or any other search engine to continue to direct traffic your way. If they believe you are relevant they will still do it, if they do not they will drop you like a rock in an ocean at any time.

 

[Domainace]

He sure was and many people jumped on the bandwagon (Me included), but I think these are the sites that maybe hit the hardest by the update and are going to eat away at Googles profits.

His game with Google was ending before he even gave that interview. Several of his sites were deindexed at the time (I checked), and he did mention that he was looking at alternative and paid traffic sources.

Generally, you can be fairly sure that when someone goes public with a great way to game Google, the window of opportunity has already passed.

I am also sure that Google has opened countless new opportunities for clever web spammers, and that there are people profiting hugely from Penguin as we speak. A year or two down the road, when they are being interviewed on Domain Sherpa, you can be equally sure that they've already made their gains and are moving on to the next step.

Google's updates are like a butcher using a chain saw to cut up a side of beef. A lot of good product gets lost, and the stuff that remains isn't very pretty.

---------- Post added at 09:02 AM ---------- Previous post was at 08:50 AM ----------

Think about it: If you're linking to another site, how likely is it you'll use carefully optimized anchor text to make that link? Maybe you would, but what if there are 20,50,200,500 different sites linking to that same site (or page)?

That has always been one of the SEO advantages of targeted keyword domains. People often use the URL as anchor text, and Google picks up on the keywords in it. In fact, with a keyword domain, it would be odd to not have the keywords used frequently in anchors.

 

[ecalc]

Consequence: prices for keyword domain names will go down and domainers will have a hard time.

Disagree. Search engines and their tweaks have little effect on true domainers aka type-in traffic operators whose names are parked and already invisible to search. Type-in names have the added bonus of strong inherent meaning/resonance/sales bait. Non-type-in keyword speculators and mini-site operators are more dependent on search engines and their property values carry associated risk. A flight to quality could raise the $ premium on type-in names.

 

[GiftedDomains]

come on guys, don't you say fuck or shit or suck, when you are out with your friends in a bar or something? these words describe situations better than any other word sometimes.

for instance when your website losed its first page position and your income drops from 100$ a day to 1$ a day, you say "fuck!!!!!!!",
you don't say "oh this is very bad, google you are bad"

don't exaggerate now with the dos and don'ts

---------- Post added at 01:03 AM ---------- Previous post was at 12:52 AM ----------

Once upon a time, a wise man told me that one of the greatest skills any person can have is the ability to objectively think like his competition. Most people think in terms of their own experiences, their own narratives, then make assessments on how their competition might react on those terms. Really, it's the opposite. You have to figure out your competitions experience, your competitions narrative and figure out what conclusions they will draw on the basis of their own internal dialog, then react to it before they can.

I think more important is to "obejctively think like your customer or potential customer". For instance my main job is trading with steel products and exporting it to other countries. I don't think much about my competition. Of course i check their prices and their presence, But what i do much more is to put myself in the position of the potential customer and think about what i would like to have from a supplier and under which circumstances i would place an order with a supplier, if i was that customer. Then i try to offer all those conditions to the customer.

This worked good for me.

 

[Fonzie]

Some Google SEO hack sat in meeting room somewhere and thought, hey all these popular websites aren't keywords so lets change the algo to favor those domains which aren't necessarily keywords!

Those times didn't last, these times won't either. Enjoy the ride.

It's more like "Hey, the correlation between keyword in a domain and a premier user experience isn't as strong as we had thought..."

Domainers and sham developers (often coming from the SEO camp) have competing interests with G. Their goal is to "rank content". Google is trying to serve the needs of both their users/searchers and the businesses who pay for clicks.

Businesses want customers, clients, sales. Users want relevance. Hoax developers don't care about the same things that businesses (who buy their traffic), users (who search their content) or Google (who provides the whole show) care about.

This is why Google has to determine which relevancy signals are most consistent across the types of content that users actually want. They learned that the domain itself can be used to manipulate SERP by implying a degree of relevance that the ultimate user experience doesn't live up to.

As far as domainers go, so few even begin to understand what 'users want', mostly because the domainer business model isn't about building a relationship with that user. It's about "traffic and clicks".

 

[Theo Goodman]

wow, lets not get too personal here.

It looks like that there is not much changing and this update is sticking, not much bouncing around, rather than argueing with each other lets find out what this all means. It does look like that sites even small ammounts of bulk (spammy) links are being hit, as well as ones with the same anchor text or only keyword anchor texts in the links. The low content bad content issue should have been hit by the update panda 2.0 around the 19th so if you got hit then it was a panda issue, if you got hit around the 24th then spam links and too many keyword anchor texts and maybe some other things seem to be what got you in trouble. So just dump those projects and move on ,or try to fix them if possible?

 

[Tia Wood]

No need for the personal attacks.

 

[lennco]

Even though the topic of this thread has gotten away from the original subject there is a valuable lesson that has been made here.

And that is to stay on Point.
You can make the best point for your argument in you post but once you lace it with Hate and name calling you not only direct attention away from your point but you then create a whole knew discussion as we are now having.
In today's society with everything going on people have little tolerance for hate and any type of bullying.

A master debater doesn't need to reach that low

 

[firefly]

Anyone who tells you they know how it is working is simply talking out their ass. It's all theory at the moment. legitimate sites had been hammered along with the less than legitimate sites. Sites that offer noting are sitting at number one in some cases. The only people that actually have a clue are the bent engineers at Google, and even then, until they released it, they didn't know how it would react.

People that say this is dead or that is dead, or this won't work anymore are just guessing.

I track all my sites everyday and I am not panicked - I'll wait until the dust settles. I've had one site drop 70 spots one day, just to come up 83 spots the next. If you can tell me why you should probably be working for Google.

Not any more - having exact-match anchor text in all your backlinks has become a huge red flag.

Diversify your anchor texts and do other things to avoid leaving to much of a footprint.

 

[DU]

Why are you so angry?
You act more like Archie Bunker then Fonzie.

I think he's roughly the same age as me.

The older generation are robbing us blind with their "I got Mine" attitude and the younger generation are just a bunch of whiny complaining know-it-allers who are going to do their best to follow their baby-boomer parents' "I'm all right jack" mantra.

That's part of anger, I'm sure. But don't confuse the use of the word "fuck" with anger. The internet used to suck, it fucking sucked. Really.

He's also a little wrong because before Google was AltaVista which was a good search engine. Alltheweb was also around and was the quickest by far.

Google lucked onto some decent ideas but were more dependent on the failure of Digital to realize the long term profitability that it could have brought them (selling instead to Yahoo, I believe).

Other than that minor point, his post is very good.

 

[alien51]

I don't know how old you are, but if you're over 30 and were a reasonably early adopter of the internet, you too remember search before G came along.
It sucked.
It fucking, fucking, fucking sucked.

"reasonably early adopter of the internet"? Back then, i was searching the internet by sending FTP commands to an FTP server via email. Then the server replies to me via email with the directory list. I had to send another email again just to issue a "chdir" command. And that was on Simtel.

How old am i? Back then i had to use uudecode to view my porn.. which was a nude pic of Phoebe Cates from Blue Lagoon.

 

[lennco]

This is so wrong, it was Paradise or Fast Times At Ridgemont High. It was a Brook Shield's body double in Blue Lagoon.

Mmmmmmmm.....Phoebe Cates in Fast Times At Ridgemont High :P :hearts:

It's almost like it's 1982 and I am 18 all over again.

 

[Ben42]

Yeah, And by the time the image finished downloading you really didn't need to see it anymore!

 

[novatheory]

That might explain why one of my websites took a dump in rankings 4 days ago.
Went from page 1 and 2 on many keywords to page 5 and lower.

:td:

Is still going trough changes. I am seen new sites moving to top 20, I see old sites jumping down and up. I see old sites moving to top 3. I am seen top 3 moving to below 6. IS CRAXY!!

 

[Blake]

"Consequence: prices for keyword domain names will go down and domainers will have a hard time."

Have to disagree. You have a nice 1 word/2 word generic .com, those are still going to be great for the reasons Matt gave in the video at the beginning. If you have some keyword-keyword-keyword.info/us/biz etc. maybe more those types. Those domains are more likely to be of the crapola variety. Depends on what you're talking about.

Just did a quick check - art, hotels, shoes, fabric all .com all #1 or #2 position on page 1 Google

2 word .coms - gift baskets, pet supplies those .coms all #1 or #2

Just checked my sites with targetted keywords in domains, still ranking fine.

Those good generic .coms besides having the targetted keywords, can be brands as well.

Will check again next few days/week.

JB,

I have to disagree with you and say my .info domains are doing fine if not better then before the algo change. I find that keyword stuffing goes on with .com far more often then .info and as such .com will soon see a fall as well. Personally if you do your development properly and such it shouldn't matter what extension your using. I'm happy with the new update it has knocked a lot of my competition into the abyss.

Blake

 

[Steven]

This update boosted some of my websites' traffic by 100% - 800%.

 

[novatheory]

The reason this is so puzzling to 'domainers' is because essentially none of you are involved in relevant, front side eCommerce.

You're involved with splogs, sham development, "minisites", affiliate networking, Wordpress.

How you know if you fall into this category: If your main concern is "traffic and clicks" rather than "clients and relationships"...

:lol:

You give so much to this community, is just amazing.

First you generalize your comment saying and I quote - "none of you", then a few lines later you write the conditions that would qualify some one as?

Why someone with your experience and knowledge, don't explain to us what front side eCommerce means. Is that even a term? I have heard of front end eCommerce, but haven't head of front side. Are you trying to imply of user experience? I guess that would be a different topic, as well "clients and relationships".

 

[Sparhawke]

PANIC!!!

*Runs around and around the room and jumps out of the window*

I wasn't around domaining back when the crash of 2001 happened, but I heard many great domains were dumped because people thought it was dead, it could just be that we may see more of that, but a great memorable domain like exact match will still have value because it is not just a random jumble of letters, numbers and dashes shoved infront of an extension no one recognises

 

[GF]

I also love those who claim link-wheels aren't "black hat".

wat

If you think link-wheels are black hat, you don't know what black hat is...

 

[GiftedDomains]

Actually i agree with Fonzie.
Lets face it. Most Domainers want to be on first page of Google with a crappy minisite full of adsense and affili links and worthless content nobody needs. And many SEOs played games with Google they shouldn't play. A game they can't win. The time of lazy money making is going to end very soon.


Also i am pretty sure Google knows about all this Domain business and this Penguin was the first step to take away a piece of Domainbiz cake,
because Google doesn't gain anything from the money paid from someone to a Domainer. Or by organic results. By making generic domains more and more worthless, people will spend their money somewhere else (i.e Adwords) to show up on better positions.

I think many SEOs and Domainers ruined the bonus of keyword domains in the past and now we get the answer. Plus Google is getting more and more crappy as a search engine (with no serious competition) and simply wants to make more money.

I am not saying all keyowrd domains will become worthless, but many will.

We should be prepared for a new battlefield.