Google search updates and traffic

[Steven]

I think Google must have updated its search engine algorithm a few days ago.

My mini-sites got penalized big time and lost good chunk of traffic.

For all those who are developing mini-sites, how are you faring with traffic and ad conversions?

 

[alien51]

I guess they did.

I think Big G got ticked by recent high-profile gaming of its algorithm.

Read this:
http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/money/51308357-79/google-search-com-overstock.html.csp

Personally, it's a mixed bag of results in my end. I got 3 minisites that shot up to No.1 position coming from the 2nd page last month.

Perhaps my competitors were shot down, i dunno. I'll probably wait some more time, maybe this bubonic plague is still busy sifting through the pile. lol.

 

[whitebark]

Their push towards local search results ala MSN is creating some funny results across the board. Personally I don't much care for the results they are showing as of late. It's getting hard to find what I am looking for. Just because a result can be construed to be local for me - that doesn't mean it has what I want.

Anyone else not liking this push towards local results?

 

[enlytend]

Anyone else not liking this push towards local results?

As a searcher it's annoying - they have too many false positives in trying to determine "local intent." My sites are "non local" so it hasn't affected me personally. As someone who does local search optimization, it's good for business .

Re the recent algo changes: They're going after thin content sites - scraped content, low value content, spammy keyword-stuffed content. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/finding-more-high-quality-sites-in.html Fatten it up, add value, you may bounce back.

The JCPenny and Overstock slapdowns were another issue (one or both may have been brought to Google's attention by a pissed-off competitor - and in O's case, the discount links are believed to be only part of the story), but they send a strong message that they don't like and won't tolerate certain link building tactics.

 

[alien51]

Come to think of it, these JCPenny and Overstock black hats might be a bit old school textbook tactics. And yet Google only acted on it after somebody blowed the whistle on them. Conspiracy on the side of Google? If big names always come up first on search results, it follows that ad revenue for Google will rise just the same (granting some Google ads are splattered on these sites).

So in the end, it might be justice to punish sites that don't contribute to Google revenue. After all, if your site has crap content, people won't be motivated to click on your ads because they'll exit your site as soon as they got in.

BTW:

I think having an "exact search term" domain, still helps keep your website afloat. I have an exact search term domain for an end-user client who is into manufacturing business. The website is just one-page with the company profile and business description and nothing much else, but it still remains on top of search results on that exact search term, beating out more than 1 mil search results.

 

[enlytend]

If big names always come up first on search results, it follows that ad revenue for Google will rise just the same (granting some Google ads are splattered on these sites).

None on either site. Overstock runs some Yahoo (or are they Bing?) ads as a catch-all way down the bottom of their product pages.

Both get so many legit links, what they were doing didn't stand out as suspicious.

I think having an "exact search term" domain, still helps keep your website afloat.

It does, but there have been rumblings and Google seems to be carrying out their threats lately.

 

[alien51]

I got an issue when it comes to E-Commerce websites. Will they get punished just as much?

What if you have an e-commerce online store. There's not much "content" in it in terms of "contextual substance". Your main intention is to sell stuffs to people. You didn't build the website to "educate" or contribute to the holistic well-being of society. You're just a freakin salesman who is lucky to have an exact search term domain that perfectly "matches" what people are looking for online. Can these e-commerce sites be considered "thin" too?

I see a lot of Affiliate websites around, and they post a lot of blabber talk like an entire 3 pages worth of repeating sales talk just to offer you to buy a DVD or single merchandise.

The blabber talk is there to either brainwash you into paying for the product, or get enough text into the webpages to feed the spiders. Sort of like dual-purpose.

But some sites are just plain shopping sites: Designer Jeans - $75 ... ok, down you go in the Google rank, you're not contributing anything informative and heavy research original content. What to do??

 

[enlytend]

Just speculation:

Actual stores with addresses, employees and ecommerce sites selling their own merchandise should be OK for transactional searches (user intent = purchase). If I want to buy a pair of jeans, a store selling jeans would be highly relevant.

An affiliate site selling jeans for that same store ... not so much. UNLESS they add "enough" value.

May drop for informational searches if the supporting content is really bad. (Store selling jeans may not be the best result to tell me everything I want to know about the history of denim fabric.)

I see a lot of Affiliate websites around, and they post a lot of blabber talk like an entire 3 pages worth of repeating sales talk just to offer you to buy a DVD or single merchandise.

Will probably take a fall unless they have a LOT of other quality signals.

This latest change is also very new - I'd wait a couple of days until the dust settles to assess the damage. (Sites could bounce around a lot initially.)

 

[alien51]

Actual stores with addresses, employees and ecommerce sites selling their own merchandise should be OK ...... An affiliate site selling jeans for that same store ... not so much. UNLESS they add "enough" value.

I don't think software algorithms can figure out which ecommerce sites have employees and selling their own merchandise, or which ecommerce sites are just one-man operation. I don't even think this kind of distinction should even matter.

An "affiliate" is simply a distributor of a product, which is a legitimate business. It doesn't make it "less" credible just because it is not offering its own "original" products.

Walmart is a multi-billion dollar "affiliate" shop. It doesn't sell it's own Walmart TVs or Walmart peanut butter jellys, or Walmart jeans. What difference does it make from a one-man operation affiliate website "re-selling" electronic goods?

If i search for "flat screen tv" on Google, the top results are the "review sites", followed by "appliance distributors". Nowhere in the top results turn up websites from Sony, Samsung, or Panasonic which are incidentally the "original" makers of these flat screen tvs.

What kind of "contextual" content does Amazon.com have to "describe" a flat screen tv it is selling, that a less-popular independent affiliate website is unable to write about? Is there something else "original" that you can write about flat screen tvs that no one else has figured out yet?

 

[enlytend]

I take back "employees".

Walmart provides customer service, ships the items themselves, carries them in their store ...affiliate sites send you to some other site which does all that. Affiliates are middlemen. Google's stance on that is what's the point unless they have something additional to offer? "Thin affiliate" sites have been in their radar for a long time. I'm wondering if they're going to stretch the definition with this update.

If i search for "flat screen tv" on Google, the top results are the "review sites", followed by "appliance distributors". Nowhere in the top results turn up websites from Sony, Samsung, or Panasonic which are incidentally the "original" makers of these flat screen tvs.

But you wouldn't GO to Sony to purchase a TV. Reviews and retailers are what you would logically look for if you wanted to buy one.

What kind of "contextual" content does Amazon.com have to "describe" a flat screen tv it is selling, that a less-popular independent affiliate website is unable to write about?

None. And that's where the opportunity to add value comes in.

 

[Sparhawke]

But the thing with adding value for Google is that no one has a clue what they actually want.

Their algorithm is just numbers, it does not know that you have added value at all.

All it will be is a wide sweep of the arm that many will get killed off simply because Google disagrees with them, when it is the same affiliate sites that have been Googles bread and butter for so many years.

I have been a chef in a past life and a bloody good one if I say so myself and if I make the most wonderful meal I know how to charm the guests and make their evening special so that they get a great night and come away happy...if my little restaurant is tiny though and known to only a few people it will not be featured in the Michelin guide so it does not matter how much my patrons love me, Google is essentially penalising people for not providing a complete vaporware service they could dream up on a whim.

"Value" is a very broad term, when I want information on a recipe I just want it and I don't really much care where it comes from so long as it is accurate.

 

[JB Lions]

Just some random thoughts.

For a product search, merchants are generally going to be more relevant than an affiliate site. If someone is searching for "buy specific product online" an affiliate site is usually an extra click to get where that searcher is wanting to go. So for those type of searches, merchants have 1 up on the affiliate. Also, many merchants, especially the bigger brands that have been around for awhile, have more "authority" and usually have many more 1 way links in. So they're tough to beat. There are other types of searches where an affiliate will have better luck. Like Merchant X + coupon, it should be mostly affiliate sites. Sites that do offer more value than a lot of affiliate sites, coupon sites, price comparison, review type sites etc.

Them wanting to cut down on spam, thin affiliate sites, junk, weak content etc. is nothing new. This is just another update trying to do that. They're talking about this one a little more publicly, more so to try to get people not to make those type of sites. The reality is, when there is money to be made, people will find a way and there is no way to completely ever get rid of these types of sites. It's an impossible task.

Besides talking about this one more publicly it's why in the past they want people to label links nofollow and that's just them trying to get people to help them, doing their job. Because if I have a site, let's say a blog and links to other sites. There really is no way to tell if I'm linking to them because I think they're a quality site or somebody paid me to put a link there. To a search engine, it's a link. But you help Google out if you tell them via nofollow. I'm really not for helping them out so I've never used it.

And with this update, as with other updates they've had. I've heard good sites benefit and some good sites take a hit. I've seen people I know have weak type sites take a hit and I've seen some where it's actually helped them. So you just roll with it.

Wanted to add something about this:

"I think having an "exact search term" domain, still helps keep your website afloat."

It does, but there have been rumblings and Google seems to be carrying out their threats lately."

Exact match domain is always going to help, provided the content on the site matches that domain. Anybody saying that exact match isn't good for whatever reason, simply doesn't know what they're talking about. It's a silly thing I've seen posted from time to time. Do you need an exact match domain to rank for whatever you're looking to rank for? No. I have sites where that's the case. Does it help? Of course. I have sites where that's the case as well and I think it was a lot easier ranking by having that exact match domain.

 

[alien51]

"Value" is a very broad term, when I want information on a recipe I just want it and I don't really much care where it comes from so long as it is accurate.

That's exactly the point. How many "original" ways are there to stroke a chicken?

So in my cooking website, do i need to reverse the order of the listed ingredients on how to make a potato salad? Probably i'll tell people to mix the mayo and lettuce first, before chopping the potatoes - unless the Google spider accuses me of duplicate content because everyone else makes potato salad exactly the same way.

The internet is a "writer's market". Here you have a geek who works at NASA, comes up with a technical paper on the latest in rocket science. His paper gets picked up by an article writer for the New York Times newspaper -- tried to reword the geeky stuffs into common language, add the credibility points of having to work for a respected newspaper company, and voila -- original content! His article ranks on top of Google search.

Can software algorithm really differentiate between "original content" versus "creative writing based on scraped material"???

What makes Ehow.com on Google's cross-hair, is that it is "identified", and therefore it is easy to punish, because the domain name is now cursed. But if Domain Media scatters its army of 13,000 paid writers to various domains, can spiders really tell the difference?

---------- Post added at 09:38 PM ---------- Previous post was at 09:16 PM ----------

Exact match domain is always going to help, provided the content on the site matches that domain...... I have sites where that's the case as well and I think it was a lot easier ranking by having that exact match domain.

Since "exact matches" are just 1 in existence, perhaps it's a valid point that it would be unfair if you got the name first, and you keep ranking well simply because your domain is an exact match.

The other side of the coin is that if you are offering a "service" (for example, you are a law firm or a massage therapist), why should you be obliged to "beef up" your website with tons of text just to make the Google algos happy? Simply adding a lot of "text" in a website no matter how "deep" the research is, is not always necessary to run an online presence. In fact, if you are a good lawyer, all you need to display is your phone number and perhaps your history of past court wins. You don't need 3 pages of text narrating what is meant by "copyright infringment" just to make you look like an encyclopaedia and make Google happy because your website is "heavy" and appears to be "educational".

But then again, on the internet, it is always presumed that people want to be entertained first, before cutting the chase. So if your writing skills suck, you would most likely be labeled as a "thin crappy" site.

 

[JB Lions]

"Since "exact matches" are just 1 in existence, perhaps it's a valid point that it would be unfair if you got the name first, and you keep ranking well simply because your domain is an exact match."

Not just that alone, you left out the other part I posted "provided the content on the site matches that domain".

As an example, the term shoes or hotels. If you check Google, other sites rank #1 for those terms but hotels.com and shoes.com are on page 1 Google. In Bing/Yahoo hotels.com is #1 for hotels, shoes.com is #1 for shoes.

Exact match no doubt helps, but you need the content to match.

I have some niche type sites and it's pretty easy to rank with not much work. Also, when you have exact match domain for the keyword(s) you're targetting, the links in to your site are hitting that keyword.

Back in the day I used to rank #2 in Google for the term coupon codes, and my site didn't have those words in it. The #1 at the time was coupon-codes.net because every link in was coupon codes. My links in were coupon codes, other shopping terms, mostly my site name. So that's another benefit, links in using your targetted text.

The other side of the coin is that if you are offering a "service" (for example, you are a law firm or a massage therapist), why should you be obliged to "beef up" your website with tons of text just to make the Google algos happy? Simply adding a lot of "text" in a website no matter how "deep" the research is, is not always necessary to run an online presence. In fact, if you are a good lawyer, all you need to display is your phone number and perhaps your history of past court wins. You don't need 3 pages of text narrating what is meant by "copyright infringment" just to make you look like an encyclopaedia and make Google happy because your website is "heavy" and appears to be "educational".

You don't have to and I think people worry about that too much. Using your example massage therapist. This site shows up #1 for massage orlando - http://www.bodyscapemt.com/

There's not much to it, there shouldn't be and there doesn't need to be. Basic rundown of the services, some benefits of getting this or that massage etc.

 

[alien51]

you left out the other part I posted "provided the content on the site matches that domain".

Yes, i forgot. I was supposed to comment on that.

I'm not an authority on SEO. But just based on my owned domains experience, I have exact search domains that have nothing in it except the name of my company, and the domain ranked well. Based on observation alone, I could tell how much factor 'exact search term matches' affect search rankings.

Meta search tags - they're useless. You don't even need to fill them up. I have domains that don't have meta tags, and they rank well.

 

[JB Lions]

Yep, it helps. It also depends how competitive the terms are. It doesn't take much for niche type stuff. I have no problem ranking for those kind of things but I do make decent sites because I want to make money with them. But for other things, you can't merely hang your hat on that, you need to do a little more. Good quality site, good domain, better chances at being successful and surviving updates.

---------- Post added at 01:45 AM ---------- Previous post was at 01:08 AM ----------

Here's a pretty good article on hit, who got hit, who it seems to help, at this point

http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/110226-184951

 

[whitebark]

Well there is one type of website that will always do better regardless how google looks at the site - ones with large amounts of direct type-in traffic.

 

[enlytend]

Exact match domain is always going to help, provided the content on the site matches that domain. Anybody saying that exact match isn't good for whatever reason, simply doesn't know what they're talking about.

JB, I was referring to sites where exact match is the ONLY thing that is/was putting them ahead of the competing sites. Specifically, the MFA's. There's been a lot of discussion of this from the SEO industry and at Pubcon last fall Matt Cutts came right out and said that they were looking into it.

It will always HELP, but it shouldn't be a way to spam your way to the top and in many cases that's been the case. If that's the ONLY thing putting your site at the top (meant to say that - was writing in a hurry) you may be on shaky ground.

If anyone wants more insight into Google's definition of "thin affiliate" vs "added value", search for a copy of the Google Quality Raters Guidelines.

 

[JB Lions]

JB, I was referring to sites where exact match is the ONLY thing that is/was putting them ahead of the competing sites. Specifically, the MFA's. There's been a lot of discussion of this from the SEO industry and at Pubcon last fall Matt Cutts came right out and said that they were looking into it.

It will always HELP, but it shouldn't be a way to spam your way to the top and in many cases that's been the case. If that's the ONLY thing putting your site at the top (meant to say that - was writing in a hurry) you may be on shaky ground.

If anyone wants more insight into Google's definition of "thin affiliate" vs "added value", search for a copy of the Google Quality Raters Guidelines.

Agree with all of that. It was a comment in another thread from somebody else that I had in mind when I wrote that.

That Google Quality Raters Guideline pdf is a good read for anybody that's never checked it out. Had to find a new link since the one I had bookmarked has this up:

"I was requested to put offline that content, since I was informed that it poses a legal breach of a contract on the authors side. The questioned content is no longer accessible from this site, and I am waiting for news about the issue."

But other sites have it still.

 

[alien51]

I guess those are the reasons why you should NEVER post your minisites in public.

It's like calling out the G-cops saying, "hey, here i am. Arrest me!" lol

 

[enlytend]

Just a follow up on this -

Interview with Matt Cutts and Amit Singhal regarding this update - http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/03/the-panda-that-hates-farms/all/1

Lots of takeways, if you look at the data and read between the lines.

 

[DNabc]

Most of the times "mini-sites" is all a company needs. Why does a small store or company need 30, 50 or more pages of text???

And this local thing... when I want to order something online I don't need it to be from my city... that is why mail delivery exists...

If I'm looking for a spa or something, I'll add the name of my city, I don't need search engines to do the thinking for me...

 

[enlytend]

Most of the times "mini-sites" is all a company needs. Why does a small store or company need 30, 50 or more pages of text???

They don't. And # of pages isn't a factor in the update.