I guess many of you are aware of google's change in their ranking scheme at the end of last year, which excludes listings that are obviously optimised for the search phrase:

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

This is a good thing, because all of those annoying portal sites which arbitrarily include key phrases to get listed are excluded from the results. It's also a bad thing, because a whole bunch of other useful sites trigger the filter and don't get listed.

Do a search for 'puzzle games' and tell me how many good puzzle game sites you can find. I *want* to see addictive247.com, brainblock.com, dosgames.com, xdgames.com, lobstersoft.com and of course lexaloffle.com (:. These sites have all been exluded according to this tool:

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

Has anyone been effected by the changes, but then managed to escape the filter by changing their page content? I'm wondering if sites have been tagged for keyphrases, or if this is reevaluated for every google-dance.

Of course, it is foolish in the long term to rely on traffic from search engines, and the best thing to do is have a lot of good, relevant content and incoming links, but until I get to that point I'd like to be able to weasel my way around the filter (:

Interesting to see that Dexterity is fine for 'Free Game Downloads', despite having a homepage with 6 occurances including the title.

I don't entirely understand that webpage, and its scraper tool appears to be wrong - running the same search on google (for a particular set of terms) is returning as the TOP RESULT one of the things it claims have been excluded from the top 100. *Shrug*

for most of the searches related to my website seem to have either stayed the same or improved. Some of the download sites with my game listed seem to have been removed but from the looks of it most of them aren't to important in terms of the downloads they bring me anyway.

On a related note, is anyone on the forum subscribed to webpronews? They've been focusing a lot on Google lately and give some nice advice too... at first I thought it was just junk mail (even spam assasin flags it up sometimes) but it's actually not a bad read!

I'm sure most already seen this but just in case... http://www.searchenginewatch.com (www.searchenginewatch.com)

We were pretty unaffected and maybe even got a little boost. To be honest, I've found good solid partners is worth 10x a good search placement, higher page rank and good search placement should follow naturally.

Brian, what do you mean by a good solid partner? I don't understand in what aspect are you referring to partnership.

The talk about the changes to Google's rankings have amused me, because I've either seen no change or a slight increase. My sales referred from Google have increased a bit.

I think it's best not to take SEO too far - don't tweak to a particular search algorithm, but do write well structured HTML. Try to make it as clear to a computer what your page is about - then let Google tweak their algorithm and let them determine which page is most appropriate. That's been my philosophy. If the reads well with CSS turned off, then I feel I've done my job. But that's just my opinion.

PS I can confirm that the Scraper tool doesn't work, some of the "excluded" pages are still ranking highly for my search terms too. Though maybe some of them should be excluded!

I was hit hard by the Florida update. I was in the top twenty for the keywords I was shooting for, now I don't even show up. I haven't been sure how to repair this, because it seems every book, website, and article on SEO is now obsolete. The best advice I've heard so far is "put up relevant content," but that's easier said than done, and also no guarantee of placement. Between this and my inability to drive any sales from Adwords, I'm flummoxed. I'll probably go back to working on my conversion rate, but still, if you don't get the downloads, conversions won't save you.

Google was never much of a referrer for Samu Games, but for my other product, The Journal (http://www.davidrm.com/thejournal/), it has always been pretty important.

In the middle of 2003, I played some games with Web page titles, and that actually did help The Journal's placement on Google. Google's changes in November, though, completely wiped that out. In fact, after the change, The Journal's placement for several key phrases all but disappeared. Since then, though, my placement has recovered (I guess they've been tweaking some more).

The Journal's site is all about relevant content. That was a goal from the beginning, and augmented in 2000 when I launched The Journal's newsletter. The newsletter contains tips and tricks about using The Journal, as well as writing exercises, articles about journaling, and book reviews. These have added up over the past 3 years to create a rather significant collection of information that is valuable to users of The Journal *and* people who are just looking for information about journaling.

I recommend to anyone that they follow a similar plan. Don't try to be "Topic Central" overnight. Instead, commit to steadily increasing your content over time, with an eye towards being useful to your own users & players, and to anyone else, as well.

-David

Originally posted by pangyan
Brian, what do you mean by a good solid partner? I don't understand in what aspect are you referring to partnership.
Simply good link partners. They give good exposure, drive others to site, and so forth. Lots of webmasters found us via partners and linked to us simply because liked our site and didn't even ask for link in return. The more links the merrier since it raises google pagerank in turn helping google search position. I'm not saying google isn't valuable, they are, just that they drive only a small portion of traffic. Note, good link partners = good solid honest guys with something good to give in return benefiting both. If someone looks shady, trust you instincts and run for the hills, most every time I've ignored that feeling we've been burned some way or another.

Oh, and nice thing about link partners is your placement position won't juggle up and don't every other day such as with google. Their solid. Ok I better stop talking bout google now, knock on wood :)