Google Less Useful than Billy-Bob's Search-o-rama
It's always interesting when the peculiarities of Google's algorthym intrudes itself into the lives of everyday people. I was cruising around and found one such instance from Jerry Chase of Vermont News & Information
A few years back, I posted an extensive history of an area in Vermont
called "Bolton Falls" on one of my websites. That work was lauded by
the local historical society, and has remained available on the web since then with very few changes. It is a student friendly site with no advertisements and no hidden attempts to tweak the google ranking. It is simply good solid information about the area.Yesterday, I decided to see if there was any new information on the
web about that area that I needed to include on the pages, so I
plugged "Bolton Falls" into the google search engine. As expected, I
didn't see anything that looked like new information. What was
unexpected was that my site, which is _by far_ the most informative on the subject, had dropped in rank to the ONE-HUNDRED NINETEENTH listed, right after the site that got listed for the phrase "Except maybe if Michael Bolton falls off a cliff or something"
While I'm not an expert on Bolton Falls, I think we can all agree that Jerry Chases pages on Bolton Falls is clearly superior to all of the top 10 listings in Google for Bolton Falls.
However what I find really interesting (and a great title for the thread) is the conclusion he comes to:
Just to make sure that the world hadn't gone totally crackers, I did a
Yahoo search on the two phrases. My sites came up as the number one
and number three choices, as I had expected, and as had been the case
on google previously.What this comparative search for my sites on different search engines points out is the horrendous mess that Google has made out of its search engine, degrading it from the number one choice in searching the net to something less useful than Billy-Bob's Search-o-rama and Goat Cheese Outlet.
While there are a few things I'd tighten up on the original page like focusing the internal anchor, ditching the frames, and giving the font tags the old heave ho, what that domain is really missing is some authority and links (
Yahoo link command).
Mr. Chase may be overreacting a bit (just like many in some Google forums), he's really an innocent bystander of Google's restrictive quality filters, or the war against SEO's. I'm not sure this concept will ever become common knowledge to the man on the street, but I suspect more and more Mom & Pop businesses will get first hand experience. For those with little or no technical savvy the options are hire an SEO or use AdWords. For them the internet which was supposed to level the playing field, has now become a 'pay to play' arena. How many of those same people will come to the same conclusion as Mr. Chase that 'Google is broken' and switch to another engine?
Baby with the bath water
I have to agree with the fact that they have made a mess with the SERPs of late and many of the spam filters put in place seem to damage the SERPs more now than ever. It is sad, but I find what I'm looking for more often at Yahoo than at Google.
not surprising though
Yawn. News Flash: Google is not a straight text indexing engine, and pages on Bolton Falls may not rank well for "Bolton Falls" based on context alone. The perspective reflected here is very far from modern; I wonder whether to believe it.
There is oh so much more to SEO for Google than title tags and page content and links. On the one hand I find this expectation that Google will rank those pages hard to believe, but on the other hand I welcome it because it means more business for SEOs, and less for SEOs who don't know how to rank in Google.
Good example of the Long Tail..
..and the problems in getting decent serps for the long tail.
The groupies on the AdSense forum at WMW will preach the mantra of "content, content, content". Currently with Google, content makes very little difference to long tail pages.
By and large Google is not concerned with quality content, and indeed why should they be? But there is real money to be made in the long tail.
(Graywolf, your headline was so good, I nearly avoided reading the thread!)
A Good Point
This is very similar to what I mentioned in another thread.
We are entering a time when so many people have sites or know someone who has that they can now make judgements themselves.
I was talking to someone yesterday and she said that she used to think Google was great now no longer, why?
The small firm where she works has had a website done, staff biogs etc.
They all keep searching for it and it's nowhere to be seen, hence their new opinion. (it's #1 on MSN)
We all know the reasons why this may be, they do not and do not care.
I really do believe this is going to be a new dawn in terms of pressure and criticism for Google.
And from the most important people, not us but the average user that thinks all this happens by magic.
I'd love to see what happens
I'd love to see what happens to Google's results if they turned back their algo to 1,2,3,4 and 5 years ago - and directly compare the SERPs then to now.
I would be surprised if they found that they've actually increased the user experience, because outside of a few narrow verticals, it's an awful bloody mess to me. To find anything useful on Google for research requires longer and longer search strings.
The focus on filters, not user experience, brings to mind the phrase "cut off your nose to spite your face".
The funny thing is he thinks
The funny thing is he thinks pagerank is responsible. If they'd stuck with pagerank the serps would be a lot prettier today.
What a balls-up trust rank and anchor text really is :)
looks like we posted the
looks like we posted the same thing at the same time Brian. Maybe that is a sign :)
Mountain ViewBillies.
yeah but the reasons don't matter do they?
But if you notice Marissa, er, Google, does have a Goats Cheese Emporium and I heard a rumour they were re-naming to Sergey's Search-o-Rama shortly, so don't be a-frettin' - they've got the user experience covered.....
jerry is one angry little man
i understand his frustration, but i'm finding it hard to feel too sorry for the guy. if it was impossible to make money off of organic search listings, then any of us should feel justified in expecting the SERPs to function as more of a pure meritocracy.
however, since there is substantial money to be made off of organic listings, you should expect the SERPs to behave like a market. and in a market environment, if you want more exposure, you should be prepared to put together a marketing plan for your site and execute on it (an idea that's equivalent to preaching to the choir here at TW).
it doesn't sound like he's done anything other than write some good content "a few years ago", and then hope everything would work out for the best. and he's surprisingly bitter about that things didn't work out. his article ends up being a lengthy screed:
pull yourself together, man. search isn't the internet version of "Field of Dreams" - "build it and they will come" is a poor excuse for a marketing plan.
from the perspective of Jim-Bob and Sue-Ellen ...
They simply do not care about marketing plans, ad spend, algorithms, patents or much of anything else, other than when they want to find Billy-Bob's Goat Dealership, it better be on the damn first page. They know the name already, they just want to look up the phone number quickly without going to the popup hell of some online phone directory. If it ain't there, it's obviously crap. Yuppies, or whatever they're called these days, are not the only ones that are into instant gratification.
They don't even care if Billy-Bob's site is totally non W3C compliant and totally broken. They saw the phone number there once, and need it now! Damn inconvenient ever since Bell South quit using operators.
Anything Marissa, Sergey and various Web 2.0 pundits say is totally meaningless to them. It's broken. And when they drive in to town, someone over at Cathy's Coffee & Diner is going to mention that messin' search a ma callit that Billy is running.