EzSEO Newsletter # 13
Andy Williams ez SEO
ezseonews.com
Apologies, but this issue is a day early. I want to take tomorrow off, but Sunday is my nessletter day. I decided that rather than leave it until Monday, I would do it today and send it a day early. I hope you enjoy it.
Issue 13. Bad luck? Hopefully not, though this last couple of weeks has turned the world of Google search engine optimization on its head. Many of you may have suffered sites dropping like lead in the Google results, or heard the horror stories of people who have suffered this fate. What is going on? I had wanted to talk about dynamic linking this week, but the recent events at Google must have priority.
Before we look at that though, I wanted to bring you up to speed on my latest project SEO Website Builder (http://seo-website-builder.com). I am still looking for an early December release. One of my beta testers has just completed his site (congrats Andy). His site is around 140 pages, and it took him six days to build after he had chosen his keywords. Once his site is live, if he gives me permission, I will let you see his monster.
A quick question before we move on. Do you like one newsletter per week, or would you prefer it every two weeks instead?
WHAT IS GOOGLE UP TO?
What follows are my own observations. I have no proof that this is happening, but I do have my own evidence which is building up.
I remember telling you in an earlier newsletter that Google did not like people to optimize their web pages. Google wants its search engine to find the most relevant web pages on the Internet for the searches people make at www.google.com. Optimization has prevented Google doing just that.
Webmasters have learnt to beat the Google system. By strategic placing of keywords in HTML documents, linking sites together and reciprocal link exchanges, webmasters have been able to get their pages to the top of Google, and make big profits in doing so.
As the years rolled on, more and more webmasters learnt to beat Google, and the quality of the results began to decline. It got to the stage where Google said:
"ENOUGH ALREADY! These results are not the most relevant pages anymore. Those pesky webmasters are pretty much deciding the results for us by beating our system. We must put a stop to this!"
At least this is what I imagine they said ;). Following that, I would imagine they would have sat at a table to discuss the problem. Perhaps it went something like this:
=========================GOOGLE HQ===========================
Google Boss - "OK guys & gals, what are we going to do about this?"
Google Gal - "Well boss, I reckon we need to identify the web pages that are not relevant, and dump them."
Google Boss - "Hmmm. Interesting thought Google Gal. But how do we do that?
Google Guy - "We need to approach this from the webmasters point of view. What are they doing to get their pages to the top? It is these webmasters beating our system that is screwing up the relevancy of our results. If we can spot their strategies, we can identify their pages. Then we can dump them."
Google Gal - "That's right boss, we need to have a look at the techniques webmasters use, and penalize over use of them. The pages that will be affected will mostly be those that were engineered to do well. Get rid of those and we may well be left with more relevant results - those pages that rank through their merits of relevancy to the search term in question."
Google Boss - "Great, we have a plan. What next?"
Google Gal - "Let's build in a new filter. An over-optimization filter that removes pages that are obviously engineered to do well. Lets look at things like keyword placement."
Google Guy - "Yes Google Gal. You are on to something. These webmasters always choose keyword rich domains. Lets penalise a web page if it has the exact search term in its domain name."
Google Gal - "Yes, and also if the exact keyword is in the title, and meta descriptions".
Google Guy - "Yes and lets look for the keyword in the meta keywords tag."
Google Gal - "I thought we didn't use that tag anyway Google Guy?"
Google Guy - "We don't, but we could. Most webmasters that engineer their pages to rank well at Google still include them just in case. There is a rumour Inktomi still uses them for ranking you know."
THEY ALL LAUGH
Google Boss - "OK, but if we penalize all those pages that had the exact keyword in any of those places, we wouldn't have many results left in Google."
Google Gal - "True. We need a penalty system. Maybe one penalty point for the keyword found in the meta description, 2 penalty points if the keyword is found in the domain name".
Google Guy - "Yes, and 5 penalty points if the keyword is found in the meta keywords tag". Google guy sniggers a long, evil snigger. "They won't know what hit them boss".
Google Boss - "OK, then we add up the penalty points, and if the web page goes over the penalty threshold, we drop the web page to something like page 100 of the search engine results."
THEY ALL LAUGH AGAIN.
Google Gal - "Yes, and the beauty of the system is that a web page that is dropped for keyword phrase one, can still rank well for keyword phrase two if there are no penalty points built up."
Google Boss - "Marvelous".
Google Guy - "Inspired"
Google Gal - "We Rule!"
==============THE END===============
Did this actually happen? Well, looking at the results, I would say something similar did.
I have been doing my research on a site called www.scroogle.org. This site mimics Google, but shows a list of all pages from the top 100 that were dropped, then the current top 100. Using my keyword DARTs tool (not available for sale) which can analyze batches of page for keyword density, prominence and the like, this is what I found.
For the search term "generic viagra", let's consider the domain name, title and meta tags.
For the top 4 pages that were dropped from Google, generic viagra was found in:
Page 1 - title, domain, meta keyword
Page 2 - title, meta keywords, meta description
Page 3 - title, keywords, description
Page 4 - title, domain name
All 4 pages had generic viagra in the usual places too - headers, alt tags and link text.
OK, the four pages that replaced them in the new Google had generic viagra in:
Page 1 - title, description
Page 2 - none (in fact this web page had 0% density for the term generic viagra!)
Page 3 - none
Page 4 - none
Three of these 4 did not have generic viagra in the headers of the pages. 2 of these pages did not have the phrase in the main body text, or alt tags. Only two of these pages had the phrase in link text.
I did some research on some of my own sites too. I compared two sites that contain keywords in the domain name.
Site 1 - keyword-phrase-one.com was dropped from Google for the phrase "keyword phrase one"
Site 2 - keyword-phrase-two.com was not dropped and retained it's #1 position at Google for the search term "keyword phrase two".
Both of these sites were optimized in a similar manner. Why was one dropped? I ran them through my DARTs software and found the answer.
Site number two did not have the keyword phrase in either the meta description or the meta keywords tags. Site 1 did.
Was site 1 dropped because of penalty points accrued after the keyword and description tags were flagged by Google?
Whether or not Google will keep this new filter, I don't know. Some of the search results have really been degraded by this filter in my opinion. If consumer confidence falls, people will go over to MSN, Altavista, Yahoo and other long forgotten search sites. As it stands, Yahoo results are mostly supplied by Google, but this is changing. Yahoo is expected to use Inktomi results sometime soon, and MSN are introducing their own search engine (they currently use Inktomi and others to provide their results).
We are most definitely in for an interesting trip in the months ahead of us. Hopefully you do not rely too much on Google for your income. Those who do are sweating it some.
Until next week...
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