Ok, this is just a rant for all the latest Google changes so if you are looking for directory related content just ignore it.
More and more webmasters have been complaining lately about big drops in the SERPs about going supplemental etc. Especially on June 27th some major changes in the SERPs occurred. The common seems to be that a lot of websites went from page 1 to page 5 like there is a new a algorithm in place that penalizes sites by not allowing them to cross the barrier of the 4th of 5th page. Matt Cutts in a comment at his blog said:
I believe any changes on the 27th were refreshing data used by an existing algorithm.
and that:
AKA, that’s what happened. Arubicus, the change went through evaluation just like any other change and showed a positive improvement.
So why are webmaster complaining about poor search results and massive changes?
One might argue that only the ones hit by this refresh are complaining but in my opinion the results are getting worst and worst. More spam sites appear all the time in Google results and legit sites disappear. In my opinion this is the result of Google deciding to go after the “grey hat” techniques that they can easily identify, like link exchanges and the like in combination with their inability to fight the latest wave of pure “black hat” sites and techniques (like the subdomain problem).
This is getting more evident all the time. Now Matt Cutts says that they saw improved results. I really can’t argue since I don’t know their quality control processes and I wouldn’t be surprised if a survey of average users was showing that. So again why are webmasters complaining?
My opinion is that there are a lot of factors that contribute to this. Webmasters are probably the most efficient searchers, they can find what they are looking for in the least amount of time by using very specific searches with long tail queries in combination with operators. In addition to that once they get the results page they can identify spammy sites and relevant sites without the need to visit them while the average user will probably click on one of the first three results (I have noticed from my sites that for some queries moving from number 5 to number 3 can cause a very big increase in traffic). So when webmasters use their very specific queries the number of results is usually very small and there is where you see all the spam sites and there are a lot of them.
Now these spam sites or at least some of them scrape the content that gets delivered to googlebot from various sites across the internet so where does that lead? You guessed it to duplicate content penalties and which sites are affected? You guessed it again the medium to small size sites which are owned by the webmasters complaining and not some company or some organization. These sites because of the penalties not only they loose their multiple keywords rankings but also their main keyword rankings. You might ask what is left then, the answer is simple authority sites that are very hard to get penalized like wikipedia and spam sites. Authority sites dominate the main keyword phrases and spam sites the long tail searches and of course the misspellings and the average Webmaster Joe that has been found guilty of link exchanging and duplicate content is left banging his head on the wall. Isn’t life great at the countryside?
So what is the solution? Matt Cutts advice is to check our sites to see if they break Google’s Quality Guidelines. (One might argue that Google needs to check their index as well)
To be honest reading just the first phrase is enough “Make pages for users, not for search engines.”
So why should I read any further if you are telling me that when I build my website I should not care or think about search engines? Obviously I need since I depend on search engines for traffic but let’s not forget that they depend on webmaster Joe as well for content. The main difference is that they can decide and act fast because only a few people are needed to talk, discuss, evaluate and make decisions while it is impossible for webmasters to decide to follow a common route of actions. Imagine what would happen if all the webmasters from digitalpoint, sitepoint, namepros and all the webmasters forums one day decided to disallow googlebot, boycott adsense and adwords. Of course this isn’t possible to happen but I wouldn’t be surprised if webmasters started putting “Too cool for Google” banners and buttons on their sites like they used to do for IE.
I guess we will just have to wait for Vista.
PS: When I saw my sites disappearing I panicked but I have one advantage over other webmasters. I don’t depend on my sites to live, I have my own office and business that isn’t internet related so I can say WTH I don’t care. However there are webmasters that webmastering is their full time job and Google seems to totally ignore them and leaving them in the dark with answers like (yes it was just a bad data push or a refresh of data) which is rather evil imho. Why? Because they are Google’s content providers and one thing that I learned on the internet is to respect my content providers.
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