SEO

How credible is your text?

Google needs 300 words, oh wait no, it needs 500 now to mark your text as credible. What? No, that was last week, now it needs a 1000 words to get your page worthwhile ranking ....

What the ....?

Another SEO hoax was innitiated by some guru that saw a text ranking better because he used a 1000 words.

Did it realy? Did it realy rank better because there were a 1000 words or did he write a unique piece that is worthwhile reading and has tons of information ... or was it just because he got enough links to it from good sites or did it rank because it was new?

No, the guru is sure its because of the 1000 words. Well get of your ass and follow him he knows where to go. Put tons of text on your pages, even if it is jibberisch.

Even if he is lost, whole hoards of wanne be seo's and desperate site owners jump up and do what he says, because he told it, or even because 'it might be true'.

Have fun writing

Today i wrote a mail to 'Matt Cutts', at least i think i write to him. One never knows if he is interested in, or even has the time to read and reply.

Well Matt*,

You guys at Google have finally done it.

My site has gone from top rankings. I cant see what i have done wrong, i cant see what might have caused this after 10 years of top rankings.

10 years of building a site to your rules, no linkschemes no bad links, linkfarming or whatever. Writing good content that got stolen by others that outrank us now. Websites that build links like crazy outrank us now. Sites with little to no content, just a few links, sites aming for one goal, destruction of the competitors outrank us now.

Nothing negative is in webmastercentral. And i am not allone. Thousands if not millions of website owners have no idea what hit them and how to solve it.

I can only say you wrecked a good index and made it more vulnerable to attacks.

When things got out of control way back then, first thing you did was starting to penalize websites for bad links. Which you by the way dont show in your searches any more, so a webmaster hit by this is totaly defenceless.

Instead of filtering the bad sites, you made the decission to penalize the site linked to.

Bad neighbourhood got introduced. Targeting websites on servers that you found to be 'bad'. Owners of sites on those servers / in those neighbourhoods got hit. Even if the site was legit and good. You chose the way of harming the good instead of get your act together and fight the bad. Why? Because you couldnt find a way to stop it.

You then started to put more weight on generic domains, the result should have been obvious to you guys, the bad ones wrecked it and little meaningless domains got favoured above old and serious ones. Even sites just a couple weeks old with almost no content and none or very little backlinks got top ranked.

A brilliant idea was to take voting serious, people as you could predict (i did long time before) wrecked it, and still you placed it in your rankingsystem. Rankingsites have been proven to have up to 75% of fake votes. Websites just a few months old suddenly had 100's of votes and wait, just look, wow the got all 5 stars ratings ....

Then blogging got targeted. Webmasters are anxious now to place good articles with links on their blogs. Guestblogging got killed because you guys cant see the difference between good content written for the blogs audience and you penalized it.

Good sites with good content and authority are outlaw now, free game for (and now i will use strong language as i feel i have kept it in for long enough now) shit head criminals, that have one goal 'wrecking sites'.

You stated it wouldnt be possible to attack a site and make its rankings drop this way.

Matt, you and i know from way back, remember .info sites and an open registration server??? that this was possible and would be used by people with no moral at all to do harm to others.

You wanted to deliver good sites and instead helped those driven by one goal; wrecking other sites to get better rankings.

Time and time again you didnt solve a problem, you didnt take away the bad ones, no, you just took the easiest way and penalized sites.

You once stated the ranking should not be based upon who has the biggest bag of money. LOL. We both know you make deals with big companies to get better placement and lower prices for clicks in addwords.

And finaly, to kill little business, you had one trick up your sleeve and started to turn your searchengine into a portal showing adds above the results and push natural links down the fold on tablets and smart phones. 'Blocking' your competitors was another shot that went sour for little ones by a EU rule you should give the big gamers better positions.

What you have achieved is this:

- bad seo prevails, website ranking is outlaw now and a site hit has no defence ...

You even changed your statement form:

There’s almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index. If you’re concerned about another site linking to yours, we suggest contacting the webmaster of the site in question. Google aggregates and organizes information published on the web; we don’t control the content of these pages.

To:

Google works hard to prevent other webmasters from being able to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index. If you’re concerned about another site linking to yours, we suggest contacting the webmaster of the site in question. Google aggregates and organizes information published on the web; we don’t control the content of these pages.

Google doesnt prevent attacks, you just take out your only tool you seem to have to fight back: a penalty!

You got webmasters afraid to place links, you penalize them for what others do wrong.

Matt, you remember Altavista?



Tonnie Lubbers
Vision2Form Design

........................


* I wasnt sure i wrote all those years to the real Matt Cutts, and i still am not. I dont even care if it reaches the real one or not. Who ever reads this and who ever answered all my mail all those years, do with it what you want.

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.

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'.

Zoals met veel zaken die met Google te maken hebben, is er vaak onduidelijkheid over wat er bij Google nu wel en wat niet mag. Zo ook omtrend de 301 redirect permanent een code die door de server wordt uitgegeven als een document dat opgevraagd wordt verhuist is naar een andere locatie.

Hoeveel van die redirects mag je nu toepassen? Zit daar een limiet aan en hoe pas je ze het beste toe?

Samenvatting:

Samengevat geeft Matt Cutts aan dat er géén limiet op het aantal redirects zit dat je toepast, alleen moet je er wel op letten dat de documenten die je verhuist ook daadwerkelijk voor langere tijd op die locatie zullen blijven staan. Voor tijdelijke verhuizingen gebruik je het best een 302 temporary redirect De zoekrobot weet dat het document uiteindelijk weer op zijn oude locatie zal worden terug geplaatst.

Bij het verhuizen van meerdere documenten naar een nieuwe site, is het verstandiger bij elk document de nieuwe locatie op te geven dan alles in 1 keer door te verwijzen naar dezelfde locatie op de nieuwe site. Bijvoorbeeld alle verwijzingen naar de index te laten gaan.

Daarnaast is het belangrijk géén eindeloze keten van 301's op te bouwen voor een document.

Bijvoorbeeld: document A verhuist naar locatie XX, vandaar is het weer verhuist naar XY, vandaar weer naar XYZ en ... etc.

Bij deze hops zet Google na de 3e keer zijn vraagtekens en haakt naar alle waarschijnlijkheid bij de 4e doorverwijzing af.

Denk dus van te voren echt goed na over de structuur die je gaat hanteren op je site. Mocht er in de toekomst dan toch een structuurverandering plaatsvinden, of documenten zelfs van site verwisselen, sta dan stil bij de opzet en doe het het liefst in 1 keer goed!

Tot slot nog de opmerking die Matt plaatst over de pagerank. Als een redirect op de juiste wijze is geplaatst, zal de pagerank vanzelf meegaan naar de nieuwe locatie.