WebProNews

very usefull information.. great

We will be adding News for fresh daily content but it's too bad that archival content such as museum quality art is getting battered by daily social bleeps & "for the moment" information. We've just kept adding since 1995 instead of changing so if you want to see a "web site museum" take a look at TheHamptons.com - it's become "a monument" of original design and original content with new content layered on top. Back in the day, the concept was about layers of information. We're moving towards redesign but for now it's kind of cool that we might be able to grab the award for the oldest site design on the web ; ) We were #1 till 3 weeks ago for search term "the hamptons" and just dropped to below Google's own ads for local business links as a result of the latest algorithm tweak. HOWEVER the archival & fresh mix WAS working for 14 years. Seems to me like google is reaping the rewards from everyone else's content and not giving back much for it. just my take...

Thanks for the info. You can certainly drive yourself crazy trying to figure out what to do in response to Google's latest algorithm change. One thing's for sure though. PageRank set Google apart from the crowd and they aren't going to drop it. Their job now is to sort out the good links from the bad links. When you are link building, you know what is a good link and what is a bad link. Get good, useful incoming links, but more than that, don't screw up your pages chasing the algorithm so much that they don't convert.

Yeah, I think inbound links have far too much weight in Google's algorithm....and finally everyone has figured it out! This day was sure to come.

does google use any other methods of getting rid of spam? like manually checking its search results? i know this seems like a tall order but there must be otherways rather than just changing one algorithm?

The things that have always helped Google are its simplicity and clutter-free appearance coupled with its search relevance. If Google doesn't improve its relevance it could actually harm the level of intake of new Internet users who won't be able to find useful content.

For most everyday people who have bought a computer, Google is "The Internet" or at least "The" Internet guide - they don't know the separation and most wouldn't know where to go for a better alternative. People use the word Google as a verb: rather than saying they'll look up something, they'll Google-it.

Without relevance, experienced users may look at other search engines but new users will simply walk away.

Welcome to the Free Market Economy where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Google is just prone to furthering this truth in their algorithm precisely because of the catch 22 this article mentions. You have to stop spam, but you want to appropriate worth where it is due. Small business like ours are left washing back in forth in the Google sea with constant reminders from SEO's to just keep hammering away at Content and relevant links. This makes me question the future of SEO since optimizing will become a one time lets get the basics straight event because further optimization just means good grapes today, but bad grapes tomorrow.

Great article ..this is clearly a double edged sword for Google - by allowing rankings where there is fast & explosive link growth, they let in the spammers. By disallowing it, they prevent their index being ultra fresh with the latest "buzz".

Getting the right balance is going to be crucial as either extreme will destroy Google's credibility in the long term. But I guess they have enough cash to throw at the problem!

After 8 months of building a site with solid and fresh content and getting links from reliable sites, I still find that poorly constructed sites, with very little content still rank much higher.
Sites with images that don't load or have a paragraph of text come up as page 1 whereas mine which has comprehensive information etc ranks much lower.
Google, in my opinion, is becoming very poor at providing really decent websites and so many results are just sponsored link sites or pages with liitle information and they rank highly due to blackhat methods or due to the domain's age.
Google needs to look at what the site is doing rather than rely on spiders to guage freshness.

Google? Huh?

Google is an overgrown big brother who has grown way too big for it's britches. Google changes the rules faster than most of us change socks and underwear. They are on the fast track to making themselves irrelevant as new search engines begin to take shape and pick up the customers Google gives up through dissatisfaction and disgust.

I am for accurate SEO, Google if allowed to set the infrastructure and standards will be changing daily as someone at Google gets a bone to change something. I don't mind having standards and guidelines to go by, but these nearly daily changes and almost all by Google is not helping the searches at all. When I search on Google, nearly all of the top 100 are irrelevant to what I was searching for. Most of the time I bypass the first 100 pages Google presents and find what I want past that point.

One definite example, try to search for clip art you can download. Nearly all that you will get are "link farms", websites with yet more links to websites that have links that have links to where you might actually find clipart.

Now try to find online game arcades....you will find some game arcades, but then you are also going to find it polluted with link farms.

These are supposed to hurt us in SEO??? By having a lot of links on our pages?

Its a constant meey-go-round trying to keep up with Googles algorithym. If bursts of links are now valued, then again it opens the doors to spammers.. whether it be spamming social bookmark sites or "viral" spamming (if there is such a thing). All i know is you can drive yourself crazy trying to follow the trends dictated by Google. I say concentrate your efforts on pleasing the visitors to youyr website rather than pleasing Google.

Nice post btw

Even though Google is the dominant search engine I would say focus less on receiving traffic from them and go to where your users are. Focus on getting word of mouth referrals which is what the social networks represent.