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Google Hell is for children
Posted on May 2, 2007 - Filed Under Google News |
Andy Greenberg from Forbes called me looking for information on Google’s supplemental results. When I said that I believed that SEOs exaggerate what supplemental results are all about he wasn’t interested in discussing the issue further with me. Anyhow, Matt attempts to demistify supplementals with an angry mob of link builders at his door, looks like Matt will never get a real vacation.
Andy Greenberg’s article
Matt Cutts response
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May 2nd, 2007 at 5:11 am
I saw your response on Matt’s blog. I also talked to Andy, and had a very similar reaction. I recently did a write-up on my long battle with supplemental for a client. In their case, being in supplemental had very real consequences, but I also learned, mostly through diligence and hard work, how all of the little bad practices we had engaged in over the years had got us there (not black-hat stuff, just lazy coding and bad structure). Unfortunately, because I wasn’t willing to inflate that incident into a horror story, it apparently wasn’t sensational enough for the article.
May 2nd, 2007 at 5:26 am
So true. :)
May 2nd, 2007 at 11:49 am
“When I said that I believed that SEOs exaggerate what supplemental results are all about he wasn’t interested in discussing the issue further with me.”
Lol, why am I not surprised? Can’t let facts get in the way of a good story, now can we?
May 2nd, 2007 at 5:58 pm
Dammit, he hasn’t called me yet! I feel left out!
(Then again, he wouldn’t like my answer if he did. :) )
May 28th, 2007 at 1:03 am
Every spring on or around either April 16th or May 15th, Google drops every single page of my very highly ranked site (including the homepage) to Google Hell–you know, like Page 87 under the most important keyword phrases for my business? The bot usually also removes any pages from my site it has in its index so that I have no pages in its index. Last year, after pleading emails to the Google Team, my site and rankings were somewhat reinstated. I’ve been suspicious that it might be a competitor/enemy submitting one of my old pages long since removed from the internet. None of my competitors were dumped.
Two Mondays ago, on May 14th, Googlebot dropped my entire site to Google Hell–but this time, it left all my site’s pages in its index. I had just submitted my most popular pages to Google on their Add A Site page a few days before. THAT was suspicious to then get dumped! Even my least popular pages were banished to Google Hell this time. The difference? After two weeks since the dump, not any movement of any of these pages from their Google Hell. None of my competitors were dumped.
My web man sent me Andy’s article at Forbes. But I wasn’t satisfied, so I found this site and a few others. This is the best one, I think. Anyway, I’m a very small business and my business has gone into the shredder. Business has dropped 99%. The only saving grace is a small hedge of expensive paid listings on other sites and these listings are quite highly ranked. But they don’t stay up on Google 24 hours, in what must be a battle of the servers. Plus, even if folks go to these paid sites, they then have to clink on my small site link, and not everyone’s gonna do that.
Although my web man denied there were any problems with the html, I found four of the same word in my “keywords” setion of one of the site’s important pages. I had him remove one of those words, making it three of the same word. Although he insists Googlebot doesn’t check html/keywords, I wanted the change to be made. Then I redid the first sentence of one of my site’s most popular pages (after realizing it began with precisely the same first 4 words as the other page). Repetition of phrases/words?
Regarding the first 200 words of text on these two important pages, because the pages describe many of the same subcontractors, I need to keep the keywird phrases the same, just put them in a different order. That’s the best I can do short of removing one set of one page’s paragraph of text. And anyway, why would Googlebot suddenly, after 11 months of finding no problems woth my site, suddenly banish all my pages?
Other than repetition of keyword phrases in different order, nothing else you discuss on the previous page apply to my situation. My web man maintains that there are no errors in my html. My site is very user-friendly with lots of navigation at the top and bottom of almost every page.
If any of you have any suggestions, I’d love to hear them. Thanks!
May 28th, 2007 at 1:08 am
One other thing I forgot to mention. I know it’s a last resort, but I’m coning to that point now. I guess I’d be willing to have my web man change the urls of two of the pages. These were new urls last summer after the dump then, and what they are are repetitions of the page title separated by underscores. I asked him if Googlebot would consider repetition of keywords in a url to be spam, and he said “No”.
???
May 28th, 2007 at 5:18 pm
* blinks *
David, I will give you one seemingly simple piece of advice, but it will cover at least 75% of your search engine problems, and more importanttly than that a large percentage of your business problems.
Look at your site from the eyes of an objective party (or find an objective party to look at it for you). Would you, as a customer, do business with you, as a businessperson selling entertainment acts? If it were me personally, I’d say no, and here’s why:
1) Inconsistent navigation and page layout. One page has a blue starry background thing with menu items going down the left and right, the next page is on a white background with menus on the top and bottom in a very tiny font.
2) Your copy reads like it’s search engine optimized without any user thought (either fore or after). Write so a user can understand it first, then SEO the copy without losing the user focus.
3) There are too many ways “out” of your site. Between your designer leeching off of you in the form of the link (something I seriously wish most web designers would stop doing, because it’s incredibly tacky and costs website owners) and the link exchanges/site rings, there are too many ways for a user to leave.
The link exchanges also don’t have any real Google benefit, either. Google has a way of cracking down on those types of things.
4) Your designer isn’t telling you the truth about the HTML:
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.davidlevinent.com
There are a number of validation errors. In addition, the coding standard being used (HTML 4.01 Transitional) isn’t the best available and will be slowly phased out at some point (not anytime soon, but it’s always good to be prepared).
Adjusting these four things alone will not only help the usability of your site, but take care of many SEO issues such as crawlability and site architecture.
Simply put, your site has grown stale to some extent and a redesign, if done properly, would help both your SEO and more importantly your user-friendliness and conversions.
If you post on http://www.webmaster-talk.com under the Freelance Jobs section, you’ll find a number of qualified web types who are more than capable of helping you. Alternatively, contact Steve over at http://www.yellowhousehosting.com (tell him Adam sent you…he’ll treat you right.)
I’m sorry I had to be the messenger here, David, but I think you suspected something was wrong and that it was on your end of things.
As far as why Google “banished your site” after 11 months, consider that search engines continue to evolve and continually grow in ability to detect sites that deserve to be highly ranked vs. those that are trying to cheat. What worked last year may not work this year, and what works this year may not work next year.
Basically, as long as you understand that SEO is becoming more and more about the user experience (contrary to what the spin doctors will tell you), you’ll be fine.
May 29th, 2007 at 8:30 am
Just to add to Adams advice about Davids site (www.davidlevinent.com), I would say your SEO problem also lies with the title of your site, which is 32 words (209 characters) long…
The title is perhaps one of the single the biggest factors when it comes to ranking a website, wouldn’t that also mean that apparent abuse of a title could be it’s biggest downfall?
Your title reads more like a list of Keywords (Google will probably see this as SPAM) so I would suggest making it short and descriptive - no more than 10 words long perhaps. This would also mean people can read your title when they visit your site.. even at 1600×1200 resolution the title would not fit on my browser window.
May 29th, 2007 at 11:00 am
And I just wanted to say that even though Tom is absolutely right, I hate him because his screen resolution is bigger than mine (1440 x 900, 19″ widescreen). :D
May 30th, 2007 at 5:31 pm
Add no 301 to a preferred domain, low PR and the canonical thing and you got a real mess there. Google does have issues with these things still, it is the smart admin who implements all the stuff mentioned above. If you are blessed with BIG pagerank and human interest in the form of natural, relevant incoming links… the bugs work themselves out. If not you suffer or adapt.