Webdesign en SEO nieuws

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.

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'.

Hi Matt,

For years now i have worked hard to put up a good website, got bumped time and time again by people stealing my work.

And now my content is being stolen by Google!

You at Google are displaying large photos of my site without permission to do so!

Many photos are mine but there are also pictures you took that i paid for and am not allowed to redistribute.

We fought spammers and scrapers for years and now Google turns out to be the worst one.

Is this the way you want the web to be? Google using other peoples content without the owners having a benefit from it?

You guys copied books, you came up with a new shop that killed most of my traffic and therefor customers and now you plain and simple steal my properties?

Google once had a motto "Don't be evil"

Well it turns out YOU ARE THE EVIL!!!!

Not so sincerely anymore,

Tonnie Lubbers


Note: i send this letter to Matt Cuts Googles spam cop and will post a larger article about this subject on this weblog soon

Normaal gesproken geeft Matt Cutts (SEO woordvoerder van Google) tips en vrij algemene uitleg over hoe Google het web doorzoekt en wat u wel of niet zou moeten doen. Nu komt Matt met een publieke oproep om de Google bot uw javascripts en css-files te laten doorzoeken. Dit om 'beter te kunnen begrijpen waar uw site over gaat'.



Veelal worden Javascript files / directories en soms ook die van de CSS in de robots.txt voor zoekrobots als 'verboden gebied' opgegeven. De zoekrobot mag deze bestanden niet doorzoeken en opnemen. Eigenlijk een vrij logische keuze, want wat heeft een zoekrobot immers met de techniek achter de site van doen!?

Een van de door Matt gebruikte argumenten om de googlebot wel deze files te laten doorzoeken is het voorbeeld van middels Javascript geïnclude informatie. Doordat Javascript niet doorzocht kan worden, kan Google dus ook niet aan de zo opgeroepen informatie komen.

Gaat u Google bot toestaan om deze files te doorzoeken?

Of wellicht heeft u middels Javascript of CSS andere informatie aan de zoekrobot gevoerd die uw bezoeker niet te zien krijgt!?