My response to Florida & Google

Bllx to Google. They've really gone and messed things up with this update.
I'm removing their banner ads from the next build of my site. I wrote to
them, and got a standard reply, so action is the only thing. Okay, it won't
kill their business, but sod them.

Bllx to Google. They've really gone and messed things up with this update.

Maybe all is not lost with Florida. There may not be a filtering issue after
all, and the fix may be easier than first anticipated.

Taking a lead from a post at webmasterworld.com, the exclusion of some pages
from the google index may actually be caused by a change in how stemming is
handled by Florida. Initial observations seem to support this theory.

As most of you know, stemming is the practice of including several common
word forms in a search when only one form is present in the requested search
string. For example, if you search for 'car' a search engine may also
include pages with 'cars' in the results. Including plurals and other word
forms in search results is a common practice at many search engines.

Florida seems to take stemming one step further, to the point where it can
EXCLUDE pages with the requested word form in favor of another form.

For example, a while back I did a promotion for a site that dealt with
antique telephones. I was able to get that site to #3 at google for that
keyword phrase (antique telephones). After Florida that page could not be
found at all with the same search phrase. Using the Scroogle screen scraper
I confirmed that the page still existed in the google database:

http://www.google-watch.org/scraper.html

The current search result for that keyword phrase at google shows the ATCA
(Antique Telephone Collectors Association) page in the top position. Here is
a link to that search:

http://www.google.com/search?sourcei...que+telephones

While it is no surprise to find the ATCA page at the top for that general
subject, I found that the word 'telephones' (plural) does not appear
anywhere in that page, nor does the word 'telephones' (plural) appear in any
of the meta tags for that page. This seemed strange to me, since the plural
form was specifically used in the search string. However, the word
'telephone' (singular) appears many times in that page.

(By the way, it is unlikely that the ATCA participates in google adwords
since the ATCA is not a commercial organization and is solely supported by
the donations of a small group of collectors. I seriously doubt that the
inclusion of the ATCA page in google's results has anything to do with
direct financial gain to google.)

I got curious, so I looked at each site listed on the first result page and
found that the word 'telephone' (singular) appeared at least once in each
page in the first 10 that google found, also in the second 10, and in the
third 10.

You guessed it, the page I promoted only had the plural form since the
target keyword phrase was 'antique telephones'.

My theory (still somewhat untested at this point) is that google prefers
some forms for certain words over another, and may exclude a page from
results if that preferred form is not present in the page. Accordingly, I
have crafted some new pages and submitted them to google to test this
theory.

make sure you post again when you have some test results.
thanks for sharing

Thanks for your candour.

If google has messed up its new stemming algo to the extent
that it EXCLUDES the word one is actually searching for,
that would explain a lot, including why may pages did not
drop, Mine did not, and i always use the singular, plural,
and adjectival forms of each keyword -- and even the
adverbial form too, if possible.

Those who had sonic.net in Northern California as their isp
(and there have been a few of you here in this newsgroup)
may recall the dark days when sonic instituted an in-house
home-built search engine called Kvack for use on members'
sites. The stemmping algo on that one was so screwy that if
you asked for TOOTH, you got BOOTH, but never TEETH. If you
asked for TEETH, you got TOOTH only, In fact, there was no
way to return a result for the word TEETH in it at all. My
favourite (not!) result was for VET: Kvack gave you pages
with VOTE on them. We used to have some fun with that
stinking thing, until they finally took it down. I wonder if
the guy who coded it went to work for google!

Anyway, RFI Admin, please let us know how your tests work
out.

cat yronwode

that would explain a lot, including why may pages did not
drop, Mine did not, and i always use the singular, plural,
and adjectival forms of each keyword -- and even the
adverbial form too, if possible.

Thanks for the feedback Cat. The fact that your pages contain keywords in
several forms and are still visible in google results is important
information, and is consistant with my theory.

catherine yronwode wrote:

Thanks for your candour.

If google has messed up its new stemming algo to the extent
that it EXCLUDES the word one is actually searching for,
that would explain a lot, including why may pages did not
drop, Mine did not, and i always use the singular, plural,
and adjectival forms of each keyword -- and even the
adverbial form too, if possible.

Those who had sonic.net in Northern California as their isp
(and there have been a few of you here in this newsgroup)
may recall the dark days when sonic instituted an in-house
home-built search engine called Kvack for use on members'
sites. The stemmping algo on that one was so screwy that if
you asked for TOOTH, you got BOOTH, but never TEETH. If you
asked for TEETH, you got TOOTH only, In fact, there was no
way to return a result for the word TEETH in it at all. My
favourite (not!) result was for VET: Kvack gave you pages
with VOTE on them. We used to have some fun with that
stinking thing, until they finally took it down. I wonder if
the guy who coded it went to work for google!

Anyway, RFI Admin, please let us know how your tests work
out.

cat yronwode

Cat,

How do you explain my keywords then?

House signs

the only stemmed phrase is "sign" which is included in the copy but my
site has gone too!

I start to think that everyone is on the right track and then I go a
full circle because nothing makes any sense.

I too looked at your site and though, hmm, you have used just about
every alternative word or phrase, that may be the key. Then I looked at
one of my competitors sites in comparison to mine, (who does still show
on Google) and apart from the fact that he has got very dubious links
coming from his own mirror type site , I could see no real difference.

What I don't get is why has there been no word from Google? Not even a
leaked word! They must have things pretty tightly screwed down there for
no comment to have come about at all, in the news or on the net.

Jez.

--
Extract the "URINE" in your reply

How do you explain my keywords then?

House signs

What is the URL of your page? I'll take a look at it.

RFI Admin wrote:

How do you explain my keywords then?

House signs




What is the URL of your page? I'll take a look at it.

Here's the URL. Thanks for having a look.

http://www.rusticstone.net/

Jez.

Here's the URL. Thanks for having a look.

http://www.rusticstone.net/

Jez.

Your page seems to be an exception to my theory. From studying your page and
the currently top ranked pages at google for the keyword phrase 'house
signs' I'm not seeing anything to help explain why you aren't listed.

On Wed, 24 Dec 2003 10:02:03 -0800, "RFI Admin" <rfi (AT) ruralfree (DOT) net>
wrote:

http://www.rusticstone.net/

Jez.


Your page seems to be an exception to my theory. From studying your page and
the currently top ranked pages at google for the keyword phrase 'house
signs' I'm not seeing anything to help explain why you aren't listed.

Hi,

I don't think this site fits the standard florida site that lost it's
main SERPs.

If I recall correctly you went from no where before asking for advice
here (or was it directly to me by email?) to getting short term
success.

Anyway, I know I gave you some advice which you took mostly and your
sites SERPs improved after a short period of time. When Florida hit
you lost the SERPs.

So this could be 'normal' Google sort of stuff, Freshbot listings
etc...

Since your PR isn't very high it may just be a case of needing more
links.

BTW with regards the theory discussed in this thread, I haven't looked
at it fully, but if it helps your research in the first two weeks
after Florida my sites SERPs (both the one in the sig and
www.adultlingerieuk.com) improved significantly.

I tend to use both plural and singular forms of keywords on pages
(especially the Lingerie site). My Lingerie site dropped significantly
a week or two ago (SEO one holding strong), but this is possibly a
penalty/ban that will be unrelated to what others have experienced.

David
_
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