Google's latest algorithmic changes seem to be either horribly wrong or not fully baked.
Our site went from ranking #8 for our target search "artist websites" to PAGE 440 of the results. Our listing for "how to sell art" just went away. There's been nothing but original content on our site for 10 years, and, among artists, we're considered one of the best sources of art marketing information, given that I owned an art gallery for 20 years and all of our other writers are professional artists. (and yet Google still has ehow ranked for "how to sell art".....yeah, I'm sure ehow knows a whole lot more than we do).
I'm saying this not to vent, but to concur with Aaron and others that there is something wrong. It may not hurt Google's business....the latest algorithm's probably improve adsense revenue, and that's fine, it's their business. Fortunately I've read HN long enough to know not to build my entire company on top of someone else's platform and, as much as it upsets me, we don't need Google. Bing (and Yahoo) have us at #3 for that same search ("artist websites"). We don't depend on search engines as our only source of marketing leads....nor even our main source.
The most frustrating thing is not even that it happens, but that they do not communicate. There's no way to find out WHAT happened. Nothing in Webmaster Tools. No way to pay for search support. I read the Google blog post with guidelines on how to structure content after Panda and, none of that applied to us, at least not that I could tell.
They say "just focus on users" and that's what we do, but I guess, that's BS.
I, frankly, think Google's gotten to big for their britches and as unlikely as it is to happen, I hope Bing, Blekko and yes, DuckDuckGo take some market share away. Windows is better for having OSX and Linux to compete with. Maybe Google would be a bit less "evil" with more competition too.
Sorry for the bit of the rant, I'm usually only a lurker here, but this article of Aaron's really hit close to home this week. At least there are a couple of relevant points buried in my little rant....I hope ;-)
>the latest algorithm's probably improve adsense revenue, and that's fine, it's their business
There's no reason to jump to that conclusion. We don't make ranking changes to improve adsense revenue, and don't use it as a metric to evaluate ranking algorithms. We don't even have a mechanism to collect the data.
Thank you for replying, thank you for clarifying that. My question is since we've followed Google guidelines for 10 years, never intentionally engaged in any practices against Google's recommendations, are already doing the suggestions outlined in the most recent Google blog post on this subject, yet have, for some reason lost all of our rankings completely and are being outranked by known content farms and sites with adsense, what should we do?
I realize you can't guarantee any results, but honestly, we really have absolutely no clue what to do next. Every change we've made to our site in the past 2 years has been to try to do everything we read that Google wants from official Google channels. We truly just don't know what else to do.
Edit to add: we did 3 months ago change from a very long domain name to a short one (faso.com) because it is shorter and we own a federal trademark on the word "FASO" and thought that Google wanted to place more emphasis on brands - our rankings stayed the same and even improved....until Monday.
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Google's latest algorithmic changes seem to be either horribly wrong or not fully baked.
Our site went from ranking #8 for our target search "artist websites" to PAGE 440 of the results. Our listing for "how to sell art" just went away. There's been nothing but original content on our site for 10 years, and, among artists, we're considered one of the best sources of art marketing information, given that I owned an art gallery for 20 years and all of our other writers are professional artists. (and yet Google still has ehow ranked for "how to sell art".....yeah, I'm sure ehow knows a whole lot more than we do).
I'm saying this not to vent, but to concur with Aaron and others that there is something wrong. It may not hurt Google's business....the latest algorithm's probably improve adsense revenue, and that's fine, it's their business. Fortunately I've read HN long enough to know not to build my entire company on top of someone else's platform and, as much as it upsets me, we don't need Google. Bing (and Yahoo) have us at #3 for that same search ("artist websites"). We don't depend on search engines as our only source of marketing leads....nor even our main source.
The most frustrating thing is not even that it happens, but that they do not communicate. There's no way to find out WHAT happened. Nothing in Webmaster Tools. No way to pay for search support. I read the Google blog post with guidelines on how to structure content after Panda and, none of that applied to us, at least not that I could tell.
They say "just focus on users" and that's what we do, but I guess, that's BS.
I, frankly, think Google's gotten to big for their britches and as unlikely as it is to happen, I hope Bing, Blekko and yes, DuckDuckGo take some market share away. Windows is better for having OSX and Linux to compete with. Maybe Google would be a bit less "evil" with more competition too.
Sorry for the bit of the rant, I'm usually only a lurker here, but this article of Aaron's really hit close to home this week. At least there are a couple of relevant points buried in my little rant....I hope ;-)
>the latest algorithm's probably improve adsense revenue, and that's fine, it's their business
There's no reason to jump to that conclusion. We don't make ranking changes to improve adsense revenue, and don't use it as a metric to evaluate ranking algorithms. We don't even have a mechanism to collect the data.
Thank you for replying, thank you for clarifying that. My question is since we've followed Google guidelines for 10 years, never intentionally engaged in any practices against Google's recommendations, are already doing the suggestions outlined in the most recent Google blog post on this subject, yet have, for some reason lost all of our rankings completely and are being outranked by known content farms and sites with adsense, what should we do?
I realize you can't guarantee any results, but honestly, we really have absolutely no clue what to do next. Every change we've made to our site in the past 2 years has been to try to do everything we read that Google wants from official Google channels. We truly just don't know what else to do.
Edit to add: we did 3 months ago change from a very long domain name to a short one (faso.com) because it is shorter and we own a federal trademark on the word "FASO" and thought that Google wanted to place more emphasis on brands - our rankings stayed the same and even improved....until Monday.