From what I see the old Google is dead from self inflicted wounds. In an effort to destroy spam they removed lots of good sites and changed things for the future webmasters and users.
sadly the only game in town for new sites these days is likely facebook traffic, snapchat and youtube.
Google has been looking more and more like the yellow pages in my experience. They serve fast local results because so many people crowd source the info as it's used a lot.
As far as finding useful things outside of local results, the quality varies and the things that are censored are more due to their war on spam than any regulations.
The good thing is that people can still share cool things via snapchat, fbook and their future replacements. The need for google is not the same as it once was.
Sure people will continue to use it as it's convenient for many local searches and accurate enough for that, and its default choice on many mobile devices.
as for web sites and their creators, trying to please google's changing pleasure zones is an unending game without clear rules, taking time and money without an end in sight. Their war an spam has crushed many that were not trying to fight it.
Between mysterious penalties (algorithmic of course, the manual ones are not so mysterious unless it's the google plus network), negative seo, and competition that uses inside info, there is little hope for new sites in many categories to get top placement.
I suggest to either establish local brick and mortar to get those kind of local results with google, or give up fighting google's algorithm and the competition - just buy some ads with them, but consider that you'll likely get more quality visitors with ads and engagement with fbook, snap and others.
Given the search results I had today when looking for a particular model of samsung cell phone - I would guess that page rank is playing a bigger role than one might have guessed - even though it said results effected by your neighborhood location (my neighborhood listed) - I sure had lots of results for phone companies in the UK and other abroad places that offered no helpful information to me about the unlocked phone and how it worked with various lte bands here.
Of course, selection bias and all that, other people's experience will vary. If most of your searches are for stack exchange info you might feel they are relevant and awesome. I prefer to use search engines to search for multiple different sources of info about things to get a bigger picture.
> sadly the only game in town for new sites these days is likely facebook traffic, snapchat and youtube.
I disagree. I started a new site last year for work, it's an educational site that contains resources for teachers and parents supporting children with a variety of special educational needs.
SEO isn't a big deal for us, but I did all the basics, made sure pages were structured properly and the content is good. 12 months later virtually all our traffic is from organic search, and we don't use Facebook, Snapchat and only use Youtube to host a few videos.
It seems to me like Google is still doing its job OK.
> 12 months later virtually all our traffic is from organic search
That is a very dangerous position to be in. If all your traffic comes from a single source you are essentially one algorithm change or a penalty away from non-existence.
Sure, just like university pages die out because students stop visiting them... Oh wait they don't. Despite most being terrible and badly indexed.
See, there are secondary deeper sources like word of mouth, aggregators like reddit etc.
They do not direct a lot of traffic but they will make a good site (esp. specialist) resurface every now and again. There are also mailing lists and forums which are too diffuse to count in many cases.
This is opposed to relatively less worthy news sites or ones depending on ad income to run.
Or perhaps the page has very specific content, requiring specific search which means there is little competition except from junk like Quora...
Unfortunately, that’s just not the case. Individual employees within Google can arbitrarily kill a website by turning on a manual penalty against the site and marking that penalty as hidden from the site owner.
Funny, I heard a similar thing from someone who had access to insiders in that group, except it was explained something like:
someone inside the search or spam team and put a downrank signal on a site with their name on it - and only if the person who put their name on it was consulted, could it be removed.
No way to prove that's true, or an issue with one of my sites, however I think it would be really evil for them to do something like that and still accept disavow lists from us. IT would also be impossible to fix a site if Matt Cutts had put his name as a downrank blocker on a site and he was no longer at the company and able to take his block off of one - of if his pet sites we assigned to someone else who had no interest in de-penalizing a site that had fixed it's issues and such.
To think of all the hours we have spent creating and uploading disavow lists over the years with the google promise it could help - only to find out there may be a hidden curse that is impossible to remove, I mean, it's unfair and they set people up to waste even more time trying to please google knowing that it will never happen.
I always wondered if it's some things like this that would of caused mr Cutts to walk away from google as it seemed that they decided to take the penalties too far. Just a gut feeling, I don't expect there to ever be proof of anything like that, and I have given up on big G changing for the better.
That's grounds for a lawsuit if true. Maybe you should substantiate such a strong claim, it is rather poor form to make such a definitive statement without proof or some legal action to go with it. How much worse could it get, after all, according to you they've already done the deed, might as well make it stick now.
What would the lawsuit be? WE would have to show standing, no problem there. Damages, no problem there. Discovery would be interesting to say the least.
Is it fraud? Is it criminal?
What would be the charges?
Is it lieing to the public, other webmasters?
Forcing so many to waste time working on sites to make G happy, knowing that they will never achieve ranks without being mentioned in newsy articles on a select few sites that are not going to write about them?
From the public statements of how all this was created, it would seem to me they had every intention of misleading web site makers - causing them to fail, causing them to spend more time working on content - working on disavow lists - spend money on SEO help - all knowing that those things were going to fail.
They encouraged people to do things they knew would not work. They told people not to do things that are working for other sites that are in the top.
The intended to frustrate those people who had done things to gain search positions - intentionally causing mental anguish and suffering or something.
What would the lawsuit really say though?
I think the Missouri(?) attorney general did some legal maneuvering around this like 2 years ago, but I never heard anything about it since the initial announcement.
Maybe you should substantiate such a strong claim, it is rather poor form to make such a definitive statement without proof
What form of proof would you accept short of a statement acknowledging the penalty, via a venue controlled only by Google?
or some legal action to go with it.
Do you have advice on obtaining representation competent enough to take on Google? My budget is $0.
(Also, is it such a strong claim? I understand the presumption of innocence. But why would the discovery that Google can and does secretely, manually, penalize websites without cause be so shocking?)
> What form of proof would you accept short of a statement acknowledging the penalty, via a venue controlled only by Google?
A copy of an email from a google insider would do nicely.
> Do you have advice on obtaining representation competent enough to take on Google?
GoFundMe or a lawyer willing to do this on a contingency basis.
> Also, is it such a strong claim?
Yes, it would be huge. Google has made lots of statements about internal processes that would make this impossible as well as a large number of statements about how their algorithms are the determining factors here. Google employees running the show willy-nilly based on personal preference would be a bombshell.
> But why would the discovery that Google can and does secretely, manually, penalize websites without cause be so shocking?
The 'without cause' bit is what would be shocking.
A copy of an email from a google insider would do nicely.
I have something equivalent. I haven’t published it because doing so will destroy the whistle-blower’s life - assuming Google terminates them and drags their names through the mud, which I have no doubt the company would do.
"[a few] employees running the show willy-nilly based on personal preference would be a bombshell." - It should be, but no one seemed to care so long as the daily usage stats were showing upward trends and android was selling more and more and all that.
Time and again Matt and the spam team announced changes to the system that would only affect, what was it, 2% of search queries and tricky language like that right? Well, how many people were on the spam team? a dozen? a 100 ?
They pushed changes to "the magical super brain algorithm" - that targeted a small amount of people, several times.
They knew some of these changes were so harsh, they released the disavow tool as an olive branch - but it's half baked. I've submitted dozens of them.
So they, or at least some of them knew they were spam hunting with bazookas instead of scalpels, just like youtube announced with the annotations thing recently ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18540525 )
Things are shifting a bit at the big G it seems, I saw a headline today saying another large walk out is being planned over the censorship / censored version for china / draginfly(?) project - I still wonder if this is the same reason Matt Cutts took a leave of absence - seeing the spam team take an overly hard and unfair approach to things - censoring the search results to an amount that could be considered a bobmshell if it got out - I would love to have heard those internal discussions. No idea, just a gut feeling.
Of course they are smart enough to hide behind carefully crafted statements - and will have all kinds of deniability - much like fbook, it's the magical algorythm not some mean in dark veils censoring results for things they don't like!
Look, some of the censoring over the years I understand - changing all the torrent links to movies that used to dominate - sure, regulation and lawsuit pressure from well funded groups. But some of the "this algo change affects only 2% of results - come on - I know there was hatred for spam - and well funder super smart group of people challenged to destroy it.
However some of the spam was not make google bad, much of what some outfits did was look at what google liked and put in the top 10 - make something similar. Repeat.
Some people did terrible spam I would never do, some of it was harmless.
At least Mr Cutts would occasionally warn people about the impending doom, and sometimes give pre-clues, like stop the press releases before they obliterated large groups of sites.
Thing is, a lot of those sites that were seo'd to the top were actually good sites made to engage the users for those keywords. Google did not just hurt the "evil spammers" - they hurt themselves and their trusting users by removing a lot of good sites with content people were looking for.
It's fine and all - they are a private company. I just wish they would be more transparent and honest about it.
They put a little notice "some results are missing becuase of chilling effects, those bad hollywood censors, cough cough, dmca censoring is wrong, blah blah."
However tons of other results have been censored by a small group of smarty pants and there is no notice posted to visitors, users just assume google is showing the best 80 web site for keywords xyz -
And then there is negative SEO too - in a dozen disavow uploads I have added my suggestion and I think once in a product forums post...
give webmaster tools and option for site owner to say "make it so links don,t count as votes for a site unless approved within the console" - this would be a two fold win - it would stop negative seo attacks, and it would prove that any webmasters trying to game the system with a spam links campaign really did vouch for those 100 site wide links on whatever site that are dofollowed" - or not - because if we did not vouch for them in the webmaster tools, then they would not count against or for our site.
Basically like, nofollow all links unless we checkbox and approve them.
The bad links attacks are seriously lame and they are like a DDOS attack that google encourages at this point.
There is so much that is unfair to good webmasters and to the users of google that trust it. Frankly I am exhausted from wasting time trying to please google and trying to change with the constant algo updates, and disavow updates, and there is no transparency about what is holding some sites down.
Blame the black box magic math thing - but certainly some big G people could explain - but they don't. Everything is purposely left to veiled, broad suggestions. Purposeful lack of transparency, obvious censorship. This is G and you can't deny it.
Oh, the 'without cause' thing - it would be simple to say web site X is being algo penalized for doing spam technique B that was added to the algo in 2015 - well that 'spam' technique was what google liked and was encouraging in 2013 and 2014, so people did B.
There are a few times over the decade I was pretty sure they were tweaking the alogrythm to target things that we were specifically doing - things that were unusual, but were within the guidelines - twice things that Matt mentioned were almost like a "this means you, we see what you are doing, and it's technically not spam by our definition, but we don't like that it can be used to rank up sites, so in order to discourage it's future use by others, we are saying don't make your own PBN, we don't like that"
well - PBN was one of the methods that worked for lots of sites, for a long time after that.
Anyways, it might be a bombshell now that people are thinking about the bigger picture, but the things you say are shocking have basically already all played out right in public. Thing is, not many people were really paying attention to the censor team, er, spam team.
Most people who looked at google things were focused on those press releases, and what the articles said at tech crunch, mashable, etc. Shiny phones, acquisitions, press releases. All that jazz.
It seems to me it's only end of 2018 that people are starting think about what's behind the koolaid everyone has been drinking with their silicon valley glasses, and how they are affecting large groups of other people.
I'm glad to see the world waking up to the damage that censoring big G and Fbook and others can cause.
Sure a lawyer could get into these things and prove them and it could stink, but that would be hard and it would not being the change that I think is really needed.
It's time we got some more transparency and honesty. Its not fair.
It wouldn't hurt google to show webmasters what is holding their sites down - people could take the big G algo and run it on their own portal and they would not be competing with google - the secret sauce for ranking and down ranking is not going to change the fact that google is embedded everywhere already - when other engines copied the results you did not see google disappear while everyone switch their defaults to yahoo and bing.
Apologies for this wall of text, and as I realize I just put too many issues into one rant, this may not convey well the details of these things.
Seems like the original comment is complaining about something he knows nothing about.
Search algorithms are hard, and Google is doing a good job at it. If not, I dare anyone to make a better search engine.
The people I attract to my site also mainly come from Google. People searching for something and finding it. It's very strong.
If you want your article to be shared on social media, you better make sure you have a clickbait title that makes people upset and angry. If you want to be ranked on google, make sure you have a good article.
My site is ranked pretty high on important keywords, and I didn't use any of the SEO hacks. My strategy: make good web content, and rely on the search engines that their algorithms need to be optimized to present good web content.
So far that has been working out really well.
I seriously never saw any quality links on my Facebook feed.
"he knows nothing about."
- I don't know everything about google or seo, but I have been semi-professionally paying attention to these issues with multiple sources for many years. Back "in the day" webmasters associated the google index update with moon phases and a mysterious "googleguy" would occasionally confirm new indexes are now live.
So I've watched many keywords and sites and used google for many results for a long time. I've read a lot of other professionals and tried to keep up with things.
Dare anyone to make a better engine? Google had one prior to panda and whatever other animal spam eater around that time. Of course this is an opinion and they will vary - as a user I felt google was better at delivering less censored results long ago, as a user I admit their local results are better than ever - but the censored ones are certainly worse for my use cases.
I am glad you search is very strong, I hope that continues for you.
I really don't care for the long posted advice "have a good article" and google will rank you high. I could write a great article, I could pay Nobel writers and scientists to write a good article. Fact is if you don't have the right places linking to you you won't be found most of the time. In competitive search phrases if you have not gotten placement in a certain group of online portals, then you won't stand a chance.
The whole "bad backlinks" can cause you to lose your position has been weaponized for a long time. The time it takes to create the right utf encoded link disavow things is a bad joke, and if you are in a competitive area, you may find yourself trying to figure out how someone gets 100 bad links to your site each month when you can't get 10 good or bad links with lots of trying.
You must be an amazing writer to have your site ranked high on "important keywords" just by "mak[ing] good web content". I am glad that's working out well!
I rarely see good quality links on fbook, since I only check it a few times a year. However I have watched the trends, and I can say that depending on google as a webmaster or a user is not a wise idea - you have no way to know when they change things and affect what you can show and what can be seen.
I have watched facebook and others increase their usage and can say after running more than $100k in google ads and fbook ads, that at one time google was king for quality traffic, however I strongly believe fbook is much better for quality leads / customers for the time or money spent.
I stand behind what I said about my experience and current state of thinking in my original comment. I am glad your experience is not the same.
I still feel like google is today's yellow pages, and if not for their forced defaults in android would be fading in usage, and if not for their purchase of youtube would be worth much less today and in the future.
There was a time when many businesses had to out spend each other in the yellow pages to get business, now you can't give away the thick books. I have the last yellow pages I saw in my city, it's from 2013 and it's quite tiny.
> Fact is if you don't have the right places linking to you you won't be found most of the time.
In my case that is definitely not true.
I will tell you my specific use case: if you search for "make my own rpg" on google, my site rpgplayground.com is at #1. It's above the most well known product for this: RPG Maker.
If you look at the links to my site, they are nowhere near RPG Maker. Everybody in that world knows that product, all links go there. Nobody know about my product. Yet I'm at #1.
If you search "make your own rpg", RPG Maker is the top one, mine 2nd.
How did I get there? I wrote some decent blog articles explaining how to make your own RPG.
> You must be an amazing writer to have your site ranked high on "important keywords" just by "mak[ing] good web content". I am glad that's working out well!
I am not, English is not even my native language. But I provide valuable content for people who search for "how to make an RPG" and other related searches.
Congrats on the rankings! It appears from my search here that you may have 2 sites that are both in the top 10 results for that search phrase!
I am guessing that those keywords are not highly competitive money wise, just a guess, as I would assume there would be lots of competition and articles via mashable, tech crunch and similar pushing links around, along with a fair amount of negative seo phishing bad links from multiple pbns to different sites.
I'm sure others have faster access to tools that show what the keyword is worth for adword clicks, what the estimated traffic is and value of such sites.
I have stopped using the seo type tools like the one the article is from, as I have determined that the more valuable spaces to be in are already saturated with players in the index and the cost for time and money is not really worth the expense of the tools and the stress.
I've had a hundred or so domains sent to my email to add to a disavow list, but it seems no one really reads the notes I put in there, so I've lessened my focus on google obviously - the time and money spent elsewhere has bigger rewards for me and those I try to help promote.
I can see how your particular niche is likely to do better with google and not have as many groups of interested people on facebook or snapchat - again just a guess.
Maybe you are someone with faster access to a backlink checker can explain how many quality links you have gotten to your articles just by publishing.
If it's just sitewide links in your header pointing to your other site along site a few hundred blog posts written by you, that would be so funny.
Glad it's been working out for ya, seriously. Google is a fickle friend who can be generous at times, enjoy.
It's true that every niche and business is different.
Those search phrases I'm referring to, are probably too niche to make advertisement revenue from them. But if you sell a product, it definitely helps to be on top there, especially since people really search for what you have to offer. So in that sense they might not be listed among "popular keywords".
I don't use a backlink checker, and don't really do anything specific for SEO, except for the more general advice. I also don't have a few hundred blog posts, but just a few good ones.
This is just a guess, but google also tracks how long people stay on your page. Since I offer what they are looking for, they might stay longer and google lists me higher. I don't know, maybe I was just lucky. But it shows that it's definitely possible to rank high for your specific niche.
My sincere apologies for my snappy "he knows nothing about.", that was uncalled for. You seem to know what you're talking about, only from a different perspective than me.
I found a free version of the hrefs backlink tool and put your site in there to take a peek. It does not show ALL the links in the free version, however the links it did show tell a very different story than the one you were painting in your original comment / rebuttal to my statements.
Scanning through the list of links, it appears to be a lot of comment spam and profile spam linking to your site. This may not be your doing, I get that. My guess would be that you made the comments and someone else did the profile spam.
My second quick scroll through of the links, I think there is one good link - in an article from gamesfromscratch site - I thought there were two good site links, but it appears the second one (on gameddev dot net) was placed by you.
The other links that stood out, are links that you added on your own sites to your other site.
I mentioned a sitewide header link on your web site with hundreds of posts... I assumed you had hundreds just by looking at your monthly archives listed in the sidebar - if you just have dozens - I apologize, I did not count.
However, the point is the same. You did not just create a good article and good put you in the top results.
Your site made it in the top results using SEO techniques that are supposed to be strictly forbidden, and detected by the magic algorthm, and penalize your site for doing.
(no dofollow links on your own sites, PBN use, profiles, comments or other links added to the net specifically to rank up your pages)
Unless you have filed some disavow lists, but you mentioned that you don't really do anything specific for SEO so I am assuming you have not disavowed links.
So, for sure your initial statement was misleading, even if just an oversight, I am writing this so others you may see this thread are clear.
I also have pages online that also "offer what they are looking for" as do many other sites, however google is downranking many of them and in lots of cases just removing them from the results completely.
What we may also be seeing here, is that google is selectively censoring the internet search results - by saying "don't do these things or you will be downranked or delisted" - and yet it appears they are not downranking your site (which should be super easy for them to determine you are violating the webmaster guidelines, I am able to see this with a free tool in a few minutes, without cloud data centers crunching info) -
However other sites are often down ranked and instead of giving webmasters info in the webmaster dashboard / console - they just point to the general advice and blame the algorithm - when it appears that the general advice is not sufficient for all, only some sites on the net.
Again, google's lack of transparency is my main beef here. Personally I think what you have done is fine - but they laid out all these rules in steps over the years and it is what it is.
As I mentioned in most of my disavow reports, I think google should give webmasters and option to check a box in the webmaster tools that says only count links that I manully approve in the dashboard for or against the site.
This way negative SEO attacks fail, and if someone was purposely trying to spam a bunch of profile links to rank up, the only way it would help is if they vowed, er vouched for the link spam in the dashboard - which would be proof that they are aware of the links and think google should count them to help rank up.
this is an easy option to make things better.
I'd also like to see an option to only count links that have dofollow added to them (as it's hard for some web page makers to make WP menu links nofollow for example)
And people should be notified that google has gotten complaints / spam reports from other internet users / webmasters - like they do with dmca and such.
There is so much more that could be better - this old system they are using is just blanket censorship for multiple reasons by multiple groups of people. It's not fair to users or webmasters, imho, selection bias, your mileage may vary, etc.
I feel like I find fewer interesting (or odd) little websites these days through Google..Either they no longer exist, or Google ignores them. It is strange and disheartening.
Google is ignoring these sites, using Bing, Qwant or DuckDuckGo works much better for queries where uour looking for that obscure site thst is a treasure trove of info.
Part # are another area where Google Search has notably gotten worse over the past half decade. I've emailed multiple Googlers who claim to want to fix these crap results, but I have yet to have one bother to respond (despite them replying to my comments asking me to contact them!)
Its sufficent to keep me off Google, which neither DDG or Bing could ever achieve. I do occasionally get imposter syndrome, and search something on Google too, but the results are generally more accurate on Qwant (for me at least).
Where Google kills it is built-in currency conversion, wikipedia previews and such.
> Where Google kills it is built-in currency conversion, wikipedia previews and such.
So, all those things that DDG has as well? ;)
And I tried Qwant, but didn't like it and after a short return to Google (which was very short because I've become too used to bangs) I swallowed my annoyance and went back to DDG.
You're not alone. Over the past few years it feels like I have been getting my content "fed" to me via Reddit, FB, IG, etc, when a decade ago I'd always be finding cool new sites via my own Google searches and through a small list of RSS feeds.
I think what's happened is that the biggest sites figured out what it takes to rank on Page 1, be it keyword-stuffing blog posts or whatever. The "interesting" sites I liked didn't update as much, so they fell down the rankings.
It's extremely apparent when a site is SEO-optimized, and for me that turns me off, especially if the area is a niche topic and not well served. If it's something like a reliable way to unclog a toilet, I'm not picky, the most popular search result is probably the one I'm looking for!
May I know what you mean by interesting little websites? I am a student, and for the past 1 year the Google Feed in the Google app/ Chrome Browser has recommended by really good blogs of individual people/websites related to my topics of interest like ML, Vision,AI. I wouldn't have discovered many of these websites on my own or would have when it would be too late. Some of the recommendations have really delighted me from time to time.
It should be a scandal many places inflating engagement. The amount of times my brother has left the house with a new tab open for some web site that keeps playing videos and video ads - so many place purposely inflating video and other usage just to game the advertisers - it's sick.
It's especially bothersome the fbook would be doing this considering they get so much money from ads and have so many talented maths and code people.
> The good thing is that people can still share cool things via snapchat, fbook and their future replacements. The need for google is not the same as it once was.
These platforms are also overrun with spam and users are rapidly becoming disinterested in them, too.
Considering that, which is why I said "and their future replacements"
Hopefully someone makes a new fbook that allows people to choose their own level of filtering / moderation / censoring. And actually gives you the chronological feed of stuff from your friends and family instead of trying to space out the stuff you want with stuff you don't and more ads.
Snapchat could stay the way it was, prioritize friends added instead of distant friends, keep the ads minimal and probably keep usage for a long time.
I still believe people needed yahoo and google more some years ago. These days more people are getting most of their online content directly from facebook (which I abhor by the way) - but I'm pretty sure that's true.
If that is true and google is giving instant answers without the need to click over to a result, it seems that it is also true that users and webmasters don't have the same need for google as they once did. Unless fbook goes offline, I don't see that reversing anytime soon.
Thanks for the tip - they do have the network numbers for the a6 and a8 on there.
I wish they had colored bars showing the amount of network coverage for each 2g 3g 4g etc like BHphoto has for the phones - it would be easier than trying to remember the megaherts and two digit numbers I need for tmobile and my friend needs for att and I need to consider with a move that may require verizon.
Noticed they have a site search at the top, so if they have details about every phone I can just skip google which is bringing me lots of info about the phone in Europe, go straight here and search within.
> But there are a few similar metrics around, one of which is Ahrefs’ URL Rating (UR).
There you have it folks, the article in a nutshell. While somewhat interesting and still vaguely informing, the primary goal is to sell you something. TLDR: "Pagerank as a single metric to track your sites ranking for Google is dead. Use my single metric to track your sites ranking for Google"
Sure, but something about the echo of the sound of salesmen makes the whole thing a measurable deal worse. At least, enough for me to be put off by it - if only a tad. If the sole aim was to educate and inform, leaving the sales pitch off would have been better.
I think the PageRank patent is finally expired, but I'm not a hundred percent sure. If so, that's just one less roadblock in the way of anyone who wants to enter the search engine market and challenge Google and Bing.
The original patent is expired, though Google has patented some tweaked versions since then, which are still protected, so one has to be careful when using it.
The brutal rebuff reminds me of the argument against using keywords, which I still add to my websites as, when used appropriately, adds value. PR is similar in that, while it may no longer matter to Google, it still matters (and you don't have to pay $7/mo. to figure that out) because there are other search engines crawling the surface Web that aren't Google.
