Remember that saying from chaos theory about how when a butterfly flaps its wings, it can cause a hurricane a month later halfway around the world? As several people have already noted, Google has made some major changes in their most recent update. The weblogging community was hit hard (for instance, I used to be the #1 mark
; I am now #6). The changes appear to be the result of an attempt to stop two phenomena: explicitly selling ads based on PageRank, and Google bombing.
Specifically, Google is now apparently cross-checking link text with the linked site, and discounting or ignoring links whose text does not appear in the linked site. This all but kills off Google bombing. Searching for go to hell
no longer takes you to microsoft.com; searching for talentless hack
no longer finds ohmessylife.com, although it finds a lot of people who were previously participating in the Google bombing. No definitive word yet on whether Google is actively penalizing such sites.
Unfortunately, the algorithm tweaks necessary to stop these two techniques have caused a wide range of collateral damage, apparently coming down hardest on medium-to-large sites that had previously been doing everything right (as far as page structure, link structure, accessibility, and general honest hard work putting together a usable and useful site). The Webmasterworld forums are alive with complaints and speculation:
- New update, pagerank death?
- September 2002 Google Update Discussion - part 1
- Let’s find out what happened - Sept 2002 Update - pt. 2
(Side note: amongst the confusion, it has been suggested that Google is no longer indexing ALT text in images. I can confirm that this is absolutely false. Searching diveintomark.org for gimli
finds my entry of July 29, where Gimli
is mentioned only in the ALT text of an image.)
Regardless, Google’s search results in general appear to be significantly degraded in many key areas. The forums are full of people complaining that spam sites, doorway pages, and obvious cloaking attempts, which Google used to be so good at filtering out, are now popping up in top spots with disturbing frequency. Nobody in the forums wants to talk about which keywords they’re tracking, so I tried to find my own concrete example of crap search results. It didn’t take long.
- Searching for reservation hotel brings up an empty sub-page of a hotel reservation company in Italy as the first result. This seems unhelpful, and unlikely to be relevant to the average US-based consumer (and Google absolutely knows I’m in the US based on my IP address).
- Searching for news observer nc (the News & Observer is a Raleigh, NC newspaper) does find The News & Observer, but it also finds an Internet betting spam page at #7 and a non-existent page at #9.
- Searching for eminem gives us two generic portal pages, a non-existent site, and a site that redirects to a site that continuously redirects to itself (I am not making this up). And this is just on the first page. Good thing I didn’t care that much about Eminem to begin with, because Google just isn’t that helpful.
Many people in the Webmasterworld forums are now suggesting that AllTheWeb.com has better search results overall. Just as a single comparison, their results for eminem
do appear to be much more relevant. Is this the beginning of the end of Google’s reign?
