Webdesign en SEO nieuws

Matt Cutts gooit maar weer eens een balletje op middels een site review.

Om enige roering te veroorzaken wordt nu gevraagd om kleine websites die het toch echt beter zouden moeten doen in Google, via een formulier bekend te maken.

Daarnaast wordt verzocht om vooral aan te geven waarom deze site het beter zou moeten doen in de rankings.

Waarom?

De enige reden die me te binnen schiet is dat Google zelf in de gaten krijgt dat de wijzigingen die ze aangebracht hebben op z'n zachtst gezegd niet erg goed zijn.

Vooral kleine sites hebben meer en meer moeite om tegen grote jongens op te boksen die zeker, puur gelet op de inhoud, niet op top plaatsen zouden mogen verschijnen.

Door generieke domeinen te prevaleren, algoritme wijzigingen, het EU-besluit om Google te dwingen concurrenten als prijsvergelijkingssites beter te laten ranken, Google's nieuwe merchant-blok dat alle aandacht trekt en een dik blok met ads boven de zoekresultaten, krijgen kleine sites het steeds moeilijker.

Zelfs sites die al jarenlang autoriteit op hun gebied hebben, zakken door alle wijzigingen weg naar de 2e of zelfs 3e pagina.

Google wordt een portaal waar de beste zoekresultaten tonen op de tweede plaats blijkt te komen.

Zou de luide kritiek dan toch een gehoor hebben gekregen? Of is het slechts een proefballonnetje opgelaten om te kijken hoeveel spam erop binnenkomt?

Immers, Google is van plan om bij de zoekresultaten meer interactie van zoekers te verkrijgen. Een link ter beoordeling van het resultaat bijvoorbeeld. Beiden, het formulier en ook de interactie, vragen om spam. Bedrijven die links massaal zullen gaan aanklikken om concurrentie uit te schakelen of massaal formulieren gaan invullen om sites als 'belangrijk' aan te merken.

Denkt u maar eens aan de 'beoordelingen' die massaal worden misbruikt door bedrijven. 5 sterren en 99% goedkeurende / lovende kritieken over producten en diensten zijn heel gewoon bij sites die nog maar net komen kijken.

Onderzoek in Duitsland wees al aan dat van dergelijke beoordelingen meer dan een derde fake is. Ondanks die 'spam-gevoeligheid' blijft Google dergelijke mogelijkheden onderzoeken en toepassen.

Het succes groeit Google boven het hoofd. Het grote belang van een goede positie in de zoekresultaten maakt haar gevoelig voor aanvallen. Nog meer van dergelijke 'waardeoordelen' als belangrijk gaan beschouwen, zou zomaar eens de ondergang van haar succes kunnen inluiden.

Fresh fresh, new new what ya gona do if Google kills you.

For years Google told us to be brave, be nice and behave and build a large website with many links to it to become authoritative in the field we were operating in.

Write about your product, business with the intention to inform your visitors / customers.

Now, with the hunt for being the fresh prince of search engine land, old sites are being ranked lower and lower to favour the newbies.

New websites on generic domains with little or no content at all are favoured just to satisfy the hunger for new fresh pages.

So, if you have a site on which you have almost literally wrote about every single aspect on your product you could think of and these infos aren't likely going to change, the only thing you can do to prevent a drop is to write new content.

Rewrite the old stuff, even if it still is as up to date as it was when you wrote it years ago.

Its been enough, for years we have been lied to by Google and its representatives.

'Do no evil' was their moto. Well it should have been 'ill fuck ya with all i can' for sure.

For years now, Google has revoked your privacy rights, done every thing a company could do, because they could get away with it.

Selling and using your data, copying books, without consent of the authors, using your images and storing the originals on their servers, and now even sharing your data with the NSA.

How much should a company do to you before you say "STOP"?

For me it stops right here, right now. Just this evening i deleted my account. So, no more adsense, no more webmastertools (that where used to get your data in detail anyway) and no more tracking!

Fini, end, enough.

I will delete all code in my pages in the next few days on all my websites. I have had it!

I am a human being and i might be alone, but i sure as hell am free! Page and Brinn, you should be proud of your company the way it turned out to be. F' ing humans and their rights, hell ya, a great job done!

After having been on top of search results for years now, all of a sudden things changed a few months ago.

For a large site we have been optimising with good content, that was unique and liked by visitors, we saw a huge drop after the update that appearantly preferes new sites, with generic domain names.

Sites with almost no content outrank old sites just because of the domain name. We had good hopes things would settel after a few weeks, updates always shake things up.

But nothing happend, nothing other than Google giving small companies another blow: the new google merchant popped up.

Finding these changes rather disturbing i wrote Matt and he answered with his standard text, make your site better, more content:

Matt states:
You may see changes in ranking for certain phrases, but I’d encourage you to consider your site’s traffic and conversions as a whole rather than focusing on a small number of trophy phrases.

Those so called trophy phrases dear Matt are the keywords that bring traffic and customers to the site!
If a site with mirrors doesnt rank on that keyword any more (top 3) then sales will drop!

Not very happy with the standard answer i wrote Matt an answer:

Hi Matt,

Thanks for your answer.

I made the following observations:

- generic domains prefered even if they have almost no content and links
- google merchant
- ads on top of results
- productsearch pages prefered
- i have 146.000 links stated on the search query (and there are a lot more)
- dropped on all search queries

I worked almost 10 years on my site to get it at the top for years now.
All is smashed during the update app. 2 months ago.

Fresh pages with literally almost no content on a generic domain is more important to Google than a domain with content, years old and working its ass off.

Thanks for killing small companies.

Whats the lesson to be learned

If you are selling products on the internet, you need Google. But your ranking is, due to all the updates, even with old domains that had authority, an unstable factor to depend on.

Had some pictures in image search that brought some good traffic?

Well, Google changed that too. Image search is now a portal where your large pictures (against copyright laws, but whats new) will be shown, a click on a thumb is no longer leading to your site! SEJ Studies show 65 to 80% less visitors.

Therefor if you want to succeed on the internet, you will have to sell your products in Google merchant or buy ads that will be clicked on by to many 0.1 second visitors (not to speak of frauds).

1 and 1 makes 2

Google is turning into a portal to shop and will do every thing to make shop owners to sell their products through ads or in its merchant center. All with one goal -> making big bucks.

Even lawsuits on brakeing privacy laws, book copying and its dominant search position (pushing competitors back in search results) cant stop the company that gained a top position spreading its motto 'dont do evil'.

Harvey Weinstein, an Oscar winning producer is going to push for legislation that would force websites to pay for linking to news articles. This legislation would require websites to pay a fee to a monitoring organization for every link to an article written by a journalist.

When Weinstein stated that linking and publishing are the same, an short snippet from the article and a link are the same as publishing the whole article, he clearly shows he has no idea about either what the internet is and what makes it work.

Paying for links isnt a new idea, its brought up time and time again by stressed out publishers that cant make enough money online. Their failure to understand the way the internet works, to make money, now has to be made up with everyone paying for links to articles.

Lets turn this the other way round by stating:

Every journalist should pay for a link to their article.

Why?

Simply because if there wasn't a link to the article, it wouldnt be found, and the site it was published on would not have a single visitor and therefor no revenue at all!

Not from visitors clicking on the ads shown and te publisher would not be able to wave with a nice number of visitors to advertisers and ask a nice price. These numbers are used for calculating a monthly fee or clickrate in the exact same way a newspaper sells ads.

That dear mr. Weinstein and all you publishers out there is how the internet works. You deliver content worthwhile reading or watching and people will start linking to you. The more good links a site gets the more people will visit, the more revenue you will get.

So start working on a well based model on how to make money online instead of trying to brake down its concept!