Reply to: Question about Google search results?

[PAH]

Company sells prime advertising space to highest bidder shock!

If you want an ad on the front page of a newspaper you'll pay more than for one buried on page 12. This is hardly something new.

The new bit is that front page news may be burried if people who read the paper everyday prefer to read other stories. Maybe that explains why there's so many 'celebrities' on the from pages these days when there's real news out there but not in the paper!

I suppose it really favours the well established sites that have long been on the first page, it's only the newer sites that'll struggle to make inroads if all this personalised search stuff works how it appears to.

[NickFitz]

Apart from the bit where if you pay enough for AdWords you get on the front page, either at the top or down the side.

Company sells prime advertising space to highest bidder shock!

If you want an ad on the front page of a newspaper you'll pay more than for one buried on page 12. This is hardly something new.

[Fred Bloggs]

For a UK search on my keywords, I'm one up from the bottom on the first page now. Not bad. (Seems a good tip above to use IE8 private browsing to do searches from, BTW).

[Sysman]

Apart from the bit where if you pay enough for AdWords you get on the front page, either at the top or down the side.

And where it suggests that I really mean someone else when I put in my own name.

That never happened until recently.

[PAH]

Google have never modified their search results for payment. If you have proof to the contrary, you have a world exclusive.

Apart from the bit where if you pay enough for AdWords you get on the front page, either at the top or down the side.

[NickFitz]

Except for the Google shysters. They're forcing people to pay up for AdWords if they want to guarantee their site is on the first page.

Google have never modified their search results for payment. If you have proof to the contrary, you have a world exclusive.

[PAH]

Absolutely. The days of SEO shysters claiming to "guarantee" results are behind us

Except for the Google shysters. They're forcing people to pay up for AdWords if they want to guarantee their site is on the first page.

Google are getting too big and need taking down a peg. Which will it be to do it, Bing or M12.

[NickFitz]

Sounds like the ranking of your website will also be affected by your visitors search history too if they've already done some searches and haven't deleted their cookies!

Absolutely. The days of SEO shysters claiming to "guarantee" results are behind us

[Fred Bloggs]

Sounds like the ranking of your website will also be affected by your visitors search history too if they've already done some searches and haven't deleted their cookies!

I agree. For example if someone has searched a number of times for the three keywords that match my own skill set they may well be completely fed up of clicking on page after page of agency websites and thereby overlook my own website where they could hire me directly.

[PAH]

Thanks NF, I haven't a problem with personalisation per se. So I think it's fine for me to just delete the Google cookie occaisionally when I want to see what changes to my webpages has done to their Google ranking.

Sounds like the ranking of your website will also be affected by your visitors search history too if they've already done some searches and haven't deleted their cookies!

[Fred Bloggs]

what changes did you make to your site to make the leap of 8 pages ?

Validated the HTML against W3C standards, focussed on just three key words (went against advice here about the "long tail") careful attention to unique relevant page titles, unique relevant description tags, keywords, uploaded XML sitemap, a mild rewrite of content. Basically I followed the Google webmaster hints and tips plus suggestions from here. I did register a domain name with my three keywords in it, but so far, I haven't used it.

So far, the increase in business = zip, but it's early days and a very specialised market. I only need a couple of good leads and I'm quids in. The website now competes with top line agency and on-line jobs boards for my chosen keywords, good result, I'd say. Total work, about 5 or 6 hours.

[FiveTimes]

what changes did you make to your site to make the leap of 8 pages ?

[Fred Bloggs]

Thanks NF, I haven't a problem with personalisation per se. So I think it's fine for me to just delete the Google cookie occaisionally when I want to see what changes to my webpages has done to their Google ranking.

[NickFitz]

Or, if you use IE8 may be worth trying to open the browser window when testing using the Safety --> InPrivate option (i.e. pron mode) as this doesn't retain cookies.

Not tried it, but if its works it'd be easier to do that than to delete cookies.

That should work as long as you remember not to do anything else with Google for the duration of the session: InPrivate doesn't reject cookies, it just treats them all as session cookies. In other words, they are set and updated and so forth, and are returned to the server with each request, and thus have whatever effect they're meant to have on the current browsing session, but they are only held in memory (not written to disk) and are discarded when the session is ended by closing the window.

Cheers, never thought of using IE8 at all actually. F'Fox 3.5.7 makes it extremely easy to selectively remove cookies though.

Isn't it easier to click "Disable customizations" once and turn it off completely? Note that when you delete the cookie you automatically turn customisations back on again, so you potentially have to delete the cookie after every single interaction with Google to get reliable results. If you use the option Google provides, you can be sure it's turned off.

[Fred Bloggs]

Or, if you use IE8 may be worth trying to open the browser window when testing using the Safety --> InPrivate option (i.e. pron mode) as this doesn't retain cookies.

Not tried it, but if its works it'd be easier to do that than to delete cookies.

Cheers, never thought of using IE8 at all actually. F'Fox 3.5.7 makes it extremely easy to selectively remove cookies though.