News Source: http://www.sugarrae.com
Published: Dec 19, 2007 - 10:51 am
Story Found By: gyutae 1515 Days ago
Category: SEO
20 Comments
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News Source: http://www.sugarrae.com
Published: Dec 19, 2007 - 10:51 am
Story Found By: gyutae 1515 Days ago
Category: SEO
20 Comments
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Comments
Oh Man, you have to visit that blog post just to see the photoshopped picture!
Love the photo!
That is a lot of evidence for pretty obscure phrases. So what gives?Once Matt’s hand stops smarting from the ;) smackdown, maybe he’ll be able to give us an idea!!!!Dave
Wow twitter was buzzing about that photo yesterday... worth the wait! hahaNice post too, even if it is a lousy situation to be in.
Who’s the "report as spam" assclown? Can’t be Matt since he slapped Rae already. ;)
I was also waiting for this photo with buzz from twitter- great picture!!
The picture is priceless but the assumption of a smackdown is highly overhyped. I did a little poking around and some queries still pop to the top as the #1 results, some are buried, and some seem to be attributed to places like Sphinn but who would’ve expected that if you submit your articles all over the place, what a concept.There’s no obvious sign of a penalty, things still rank well, and your PR is still intact so I’d blame it on a random algo shuffle and stop the chicken little routine.I can show you what a site looks like with a true smackdown if you want, and it’s not one of mine... first Google set ALL their pages to supplemental when they still showed supplemental, THEN it got worse...When you query "info:smackdowndomain.com" Google says:"Sorry, no information is available for the URL smackdowndomain.com"Yet shows you a list of indexed pages.The PR was dumped to 0.Now THAT’s a smackdown and it couldn’t have happened to anyone better than a competitor of mine!
@ IncrediBILLAre you emplying there is only 1 level of filter, penalty etc etc? I would have to disagree with you there.
Sigh. Anybody else having trouble getting on to Rae’s site?
>>>so I’d blame it on a random algo shuffle and stop the chicken little routineBill, I love you. Over the years, at wmw, you’ve been a voice I followed, but you’re wrong here. I didn’t say I was banned. And I still rank top for things like "merchant circle" - but when I don’t rank top ten for an EXACT quote of one of my posts titles with "sugarrae" after it, can you REALLY tell me it isn’t acting like is has some sort of penalty - or as I’ve said numerous times - "or devalutation" to it? Random algo shuffle over a two year period? Some of the top names in SEO will tell you these types of results have been appearing for a long time. I don’t cry wolf - I’ve waited a *long* time to make this post.
*Grumble, grumble. Stupid not loading...*Yes. That’s me muttering.
@ Sugarrae - my blog suffered something similar a while back but it snapped back. Some of your blog posts still rank #1 for their title without quotes which is a good sign.I think you’re suffering from Sphinnism (tm) which means Sphinn (or some site) is indexing the first paragraph of your posts and getting credit for it before your site, not sure about this 100%, but I’ve seen something similar on a few other sites. I think it’s a situation of the more popular constantly changing site WINS when it comes to being the primary source for the content.Things that didn’t hit the Sphinn home page (or other home pages) still seem to link to your site directly.100% conjecture based on a 15 minute sampling of your site, but I would suggest looking down this road a bit more.Why I even suggest this is about a year ago someone asked me to help with a similar problem and I suggested deferring putting content in the RSS feed or anywhere else until you saw Google index the page and that deferred indexing seemed to work for him but I’ve never tried it anywhere else so it’s still a wild ass guess IMO so YMMV.
I wanna see a little contest out of this - all the so called SEO "experts" out there hazard a guess as to what’s really happening before Matt Cutts posts the spoiler on Rae’s blog. My bet is most guesses will be just that - guesses.
I am going to go for some possibly educated based on unsubstantiated poorly conceived testing "facts" for my entry ;)
I wanna see a little contest out of this - all the so called SEO "experts" out there hazard a guess as to what’s really happening before Matt Cutts posts the spoiler on Rae’s blog. My bet is most guesses will be just that - guesses. I would like to see this as well. ... but good luck getting the "Gurus" to respond... most are so far out of touch of any practical SEO... they just regurgitate all of the common SEO gibberish at their speaking gigs. Asking them to troubleshoot a real problem would be too much.I posted what I thought on her blog.... I don’t see a problem and I don’t think there is a penalty or hand edit.
Dorian, pretty easy solution to what sounds like sour grapes on your part. Pitch to speak at conferences yourself. It’s easy to sit back and poke at people, yet I’ve seen plenty of SEOs put in time on site clinic panels and offered solid advice that I know works, because then I hear back from attendees about improvements. And of course these are guesses -- the only people who know for sure are those at Google.Looking at Rae’s examples, I don’t see a penalty. If she was penalized, to me I wouldn’t see her page AT ALL in the top results. For [link experts sugarrae], Eric Ward (and his 10+ year old domain) comes first, which I can understand. Digg second -- yeah, a little more authority than Sugarrae. Famousagents.com? Duggmirror? Sphinn! Yeah, those see odd to be ranking above her -- and when I look at Google rivals, her page is tops at all of them. To me, that’s just bad ranking by Google, rather than an overt penalty. And now that she IS ranking tops at Google for that search, I’m going to guess that Matt and gang have tweaked the overall algorithm behind the scenes to correct for whatever was screwing her up.Search Engine Land had a similar problem with some of my pages. Exact title searches were not bringing some of them up at all, while other sites just mentioning them ranked way ahead. I didn’t think it was a ranking penalty but rather a glitch with Google -- and it turned out to be exactly that, one that I understand to be cleared up.On [monkey balls seo], Mathat outranked her on Yahoo, Microsoft and Ask -- so it’s hard to say it was Google itself so out of line. Her coming below some scrapers before still being on the home page was an issue. Google, of course, now has her tops. So I guess it’s just the others slapping a penalty.For [google face of evil], Yahoo doesn’t list her first, Microsoft has her way at the bottom of the page but still on first page of results, and it’s Ask that does what she felt Google should do. As above, Google tweaks have now brought her up.[shameless stuntie mybloglog] still has her second on Google rather than first, though it’s her new page listed rather than old. Since Stuntdubl actually uses two of those words in his title tag while she uses none of them on either of her pages -- and this is for a search that brings back all of 3 matches (now 4), I guess I’m not surprised that he comes first.Of course, it sounds like she’s saying originally, a search for that listed only two sites, then you had to view omitted results to see what was missing -- and she was considered a dupe. Sure, odd, especially when the same search at Yahoo, Microsoft and Ask bring Todd first and her second. But Google can be funky weird on duplicate detection in display which, to my understanding, is run differently than from ranking. IE, she wasn’t filtered out of the ranking process as being a dupe. She was found, but then the algorithm that decides what to display from the final cut say "oh, a dupe."In terms of ["a note to my fellow women of seo" sugarrae], Google’s not the only one with issues. At Ask, she come up first but with the /blog/ URL version that redirects. Yahoo lists her first but weird, with no description. You get a cached link, but that doesn’t work -- so it makes me think Yahoo thinks it’s barred from crawling the page for some reason. Microsoft comes through for her -- Google remains screwy today. That search should bring her page up.Here, I again don’t think it’s a penalty but another issue with Google. I’m not an in the trenches SEO, but I run a site and just saw the same thing happen to me -- pages that should absolutely have come up for exact searches failed to do so. Turned out to be some data center glitch, and I’d wager in my guesswork that this same thing is happening to her.On [outing people for taking naps during the day whore], Ask doesn’t return her at all because it hasn’t indexed her page. Yahoo and Microsoft do, putting her tops at Yahoo and second at Microsoft (with or without quotes). Conclusion: not penalized, just bad ranking.So far running through the examples, I can fly with the there’s no penalty argument. She’s still showing up in top results. She ought to be doing better, but it feels more like some of the links pointing at her are being downgraded, which is impacting her own authoritity. That wouldn’t be surprising given all the dicking around with PageRank over paid links, which is also a sign of why maybe that wasn’t such a great idea on Google’s part.That’s my guesswork. Matt’s now chimed in to say nope, no recent issues with the domain. But that’s not quite the same thing as saying there’s no penalty. He specifically said there might be other stuff that needs to be checked on. But far more telling is the day after, suddenly many things are all better. To me, that a sign that some Google engineers sat down, tried to figure out what in the kabillion algorithm factors they have were responsible for these oddities and pushed the dial over.As a reminder, Rand did a similar post of some relevancy issues. [dark side of wikipedia], for example, still doesn’t list him on the first page at all [and damn, Sphinn’s like rocking in these things. Wow. I can tell you, we don’t actually get that much search traffic though!]. Yahoo gets him high on first page but Microsoft and Ask show no love. So related to the PageRank changes? Harder to say that when the others don’t show the same.
I wish there wasn’t such a hang up on my use of the word "penalty"... I tried to also use "devaluation" and "being caught in a filter"... to me, anything that prevents my site from showing up where it is supposed to be is a penalty, regardless of what anyone else chooses to call it because my ranks are indeed penalized over it. Regardless of the wording I used, my point was that something was very wrong in the way Google was treating my site for a lot of queries. ;-)@Danny - yeah, on shameless stuntie, my issue wasn’t not being first, it was that I was indeed listed in the omitted results as if I were a dupe.>>>That wouldn’t be surprising given all the dicking around with PageRank over paid linksI’d love to be able to take credit for giving an example of why the paid links thing is dumb, but I can’t. This "phenomenon" with my site has been going on for almost two years.>>>But far more telling is the day after, suddenly many things are all better.Bingo.>>>but good luck getting the "Gurus" to respond... most are so far out of touch of any practical SEO... they just regurgitate all of the common SEO gibberish at their speaking gigs. Asking them to troubleshoot a real problem would be too much@dorian I don’t think that’s a fair blanket statement to make. My *specialty* is troubleshooting - that’s why this whole issue was driving me insane. Ironically, my own site is the only site I had ever come across where I could NOT find the/a problem. I do practical, hands on SEO every single day. My sites, my companies - survive/thrive on it. But, I’ll hope I was lumped into the "not most" category ;-)
The exact issue is that the pages she was trying to rank for were supplemental. When she blogged about the issue, supplemental pages, even those for exact quotes, would usually not show in serps. Right about that time, Google fixed that issue (probably not because of Rae’s post, btw):http://tinyurl.com/2b8rhcShe mentioned in her comments how she was sure that she did not have supp pages, because there was no "repeat the search with the omitted results included" link. She, like many in the industry, was confusing the similar pages filter with the supp index, and she did (and still does) have pages in the supplemental index. She has approx 31 of them now as I write this. When she wrote her blog post, that mattered. Now, not really.Btw, this isn’t a guess. A widespread lack of technical information and people who seem to thrive on misinformation does not mean that the information isn’t out there to be had. I’m not trying to be argumentative or anything, it’s just that Halfdeck is right, there is way too much guessing being passed of as factual information in this industry, and there really is no need. This isn’t rocket science (although it does require some technical knowledge). I emailed Rae all the supporting evidence, although I have no clue if she ever saw it.
no mvandemar I never got a thing from you....>>>Right about that time, Google fixed that issue (probably not because of Rae’s post, btw)Yes, Matt said he’d "look into it" and less than four hours later, all of MY serp issues were fixed. Total coincidence with a global Google update... right...
you know the nomenclature thing is on both sides, on more than one occasion google has said there wasn’t an update, and after a mountain of evidence to the contrary, they come out with the "it was bad data push" or some other equally bizare descrption. At the end of the day it doesn’t matter if the wiring was faulty, the switch doesn’t work or the bulb is broken you’re still standing in a dark room with no lights.Call it a penalty, call it a filter, call it jimmy crack-corn-and-I-don’t-care, the fact was that there was something on Google’s end that was preventing her blog from ranking for terms where it should have. I’ll admit to having seen many of the SERP’s in question way before she made this post, in fact we did a bit of testing, and something was definitely "rotten in denmark".Of course no one will admit to making a manual adjustment, because that would destroy the illusion that the algo gets more right than wrong, and that the handle on the toilet doesn’t need to be jiggled every so often to keep the water from running, but lets say I’m not a big believer in coincidences ...