Is the Google Algorithm Insane? You Be the Judge.

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So, I was doing a bit of research for a post I did last year on tennis elbow. I was trying to decide if it was woth spreading a little SEO love to bring it up to where it actually got a visitor or two (Just kidding, it does get one or two.)

Looking at which websites ranked for my tennis elbow related keyword, I was surprised to find the U.S. Tennis Association's own page on the subject down on page 11. Presumably they are a greater authority on a tennis-related subject than the mini blogs I discovered populating the SERPs 6 or 8 pages above that.

On the first page there are results from webmd.com, about.com, a Squidoo lens selling a CB product, and whaddoo you know, another page from that same mini blog, coincidentally selling the same CB product as the Squidoo page. It shows that thin sites and affiliate focused web 2.0 properties can still escape Google's wrath.

On another Google note, I was also checking one of my rarely posted on blogs today. It is in a subfolder of my main domain for that niche. Imagine my shock when I found that while the blog was at position #2 on page 2 for the chosen keyword, the main site was at position #1.

What's the big deal?

The main site is a website template that still contains mostly placeholders, such as
"Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipi scing elit. Mauris urna urna, varius et, interdum a, tincidunt quis, libero. Aenean sit"

and 16 broken image links.

Really, Google?
#search engine optimization #algorithm #blogs #google #insane #judge
  • Banned
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  • Banned
    Shoot me indeed, I'm also seeing very strange things, having clients report to me that they dropped for a keyword that we didn't even put any focus on and keywords that are heavily optimized rank like crazy, so long anchor diversity penalty that everyone screams about like they want to be Mr. Parrot.
    • [1] reply
    • Not me. I never saw evidence of varying anchor text. In fact, I have 100% to one keyword and ranking fine lol.
      • [1] reply
  • Well, get used to it. Nowadays those huge websites, especially those big web2.0 and social media websites, can get good keyword rank much more easily than small sites.I don't know why, but it's true. I've seen many squidoo and stumble pages ranked very well, and what they have are just spin contents and few affiliate links..
  • One thing i have seen recently in Google and which makes me go mad is-
    On first page of Google for certain keywords, Google will show me search results from the same website(1-5 top results).

    I mean what the hell Google is doing, in Feb or March monthly search quality highlights, they said that they were working on improving this, but i see nothing, in fact post penguin update i see it rising, this problem has became even bigger. I now see the same for many keywords.

    Anyone encountered the same?
    • [2] replies
    • Seems to be a common experience. I've seen that plenty of times, and it hasn't improved my user experience one bit. They are also returning much more shoping and product oriented results, even for things that would not seem to warrant it.
    • I see this all the time on pages 2 through 5. Makes it incredibly hard to research something you are interested in.

      The one positive though is they have to fix this issue soon...and hopefully that means some recovery for penalized sites.
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    Is the Google Algorithm Insane? You Be the Judge.

    So, I was doing a bit of research for a post I did last year on tennis elbow. I was trying to decide if it was woth spreading a little SEO love to bring it up to where it actually got a visitor or two (Just kidding, it does get one or two.) Looking at which websites ranked for my tennis elbow related keyword, I was surprised to find the U.S. Tennis Association's own page on the subject down on page 11. Presumably they are a greater authority on a tennis-related subject than the mini blogs I discovered populating the SERPs 6 or 8 pages above that.