Want proof that Google is fucked up? Do a search with the phrase “gay porn webmasters forum”. It’s bad enough that GayDemon doesn’t even show up on the first page, but the number one result (as of 6:30 pm EST on 4/16/2012) is a forum that has closed, and the link listed is from 2006! The second result is for a forum that appears to be mostly a straight porn webmaster site with a few gay related posts. The third result is for a web development forum called v7n. I could go on but it would just depress you… or make you angry.
Last week I was doing a search for digital camera reviews and was surprised at how bad the results were. This must have something to do with all the tinkering they’ve been doing. I think someone in charge at Google needs to do a search for the phrase “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.
So I have offically had it with Google and am changing all my browser default search engines to Bing. I may even give up on other Google products like Analytics. But giving up Gmail would be tough.
By the way, the same search for “gay porn webmasters forum” on Bing resulted in GayDemon showing up in 5th place.
Re: Goodbye Google, Hello Bing! (Or proof that Google is fucked up)
That’s okay, Butch Dixon is ranking number five for “big hung men” just because they put the phrase at the beginning of their title tag. There’s not even one instance of that phrase on any of the next on the homepage. Yesterday, they were number six behind my big dick blog, today they’re ahead of me. Figure that one out.
I sure hope the sky doesn’t fall when they fix this.
Re: Goodbye Google, Hello Bing! (Or proof that Google is fucked up)
Google’s search results are profoundly screwed up when it comes to porn. It’s all just zero content pirate sites and tubes. Throw in a few retailers for good measure. I’ve wondered if Google’s Safe Search team also oversees this component of the index.
It would truly be a great day if everyone gave up on Google and went to Bing, but then they’d not be directed so to much stolen content…so what’s the incentive?
Re: Goodbye Google, Hello Bing! (Or proof that Google is fucked up)
I’ve already started maximizing for BING with the new site. If you have more than 1 domain, and most of us do, maximize 1 site for BING and if one of your domains is still doing good on Google, leave it alone and conentrate on SEO for BING with the others.
If you’re working with only 1 domain, good luck with your decision… that’s gonna be a tuffy.
Re: Goodbye Google, Hello Bing! (Or proof that Google is fucked up)
[QUOTE=aniehoff;114183]Yep, my site ranks the same on Bing as it did on Google when things were normal…
Is there a big difference to optimizing site for Google vs. Bing?[/QUOTE]
The gap has grown pretty big in how BING and Google rank sites. Although Google doesn’t really place importance on the meta tag “keywords”, BING and Yahoo do. However, with all the crap going on with Google, that might be changing down the road. It’s just so damn hard to figure out what Google is doing… and I really don’t think they do either!
Recommendation:
If you aren’t using the keyword meta tag, add one. It won’t hurt your Google rankings or at least “shouldn’t”… hard to say for sure now with all the juggling that Google is doing. I haven’t seen anything on my SEO boards that indicates differently.
Re: Goodbye Google, Hello Bing! (Or proof that Google is fucked up)
I am soooo sick and tired of google providing me with nothing more than “opinion” sites as results (yahoo answers, forums, etc), plus I hate that their results are now crazy out of date too (I wish I could set the default search in google to be “past year” only!!!). Bing does what google used to do 4 or 5 years ago, not the best results but far better than the current crap google spits out.
I wish others would start switching away from google too, maybe a mass exodus would make them rethink their current search results strategy!
Re: Goodbye Google, Hello Bing! (Or proof that Google is fucked up)
I guess the problem with Bing is that they didn’t really get things right out of the gate, so people were underwhelmed.
But what I don’t get is this: doesn’t the Bing search bar come as a default on Internet Explorer? And given that surfers are generally a force-fed bunch doing whatever is pushed in front of their faces, I’m surprised Bing doesn’t have more traffic.
I don’t know what it’s going to take to ween people off the Google teet, but it sure would be nice to have more balance.
Re: Goodbye Google, Hello Bing! (Or proof that Google is fucked up)
If I asked 15 of my closest friends if they know what Bing is, I don’t think that 4 of them could tell me the right answer.
Google is just so big and so default and it’s localized in smallest languages… It would have to be a huge screw up for people to part their ways with google… unfortunately.
I am really sick of their latest SEO changes, last year was strange enough, but the results that I keep getting last month are just ridiculous, from 2007, 2009… lots of pirate sites, lots of useless sites that are just Adwords, lots of blogs with absolutely nothing related to my search term… it’s just odd.
Re: Goodbye Google, Hello Bing! (Or proof that Google is fucked up)
[QUOTE=OldSchool;114184]The gap has grown pretty big in how BING and Google rank sites. Although Google doesn’t really place importance on the meta tag “keywords”, BING and Yahoo do. However, with all the crap going on with Google, that might be changing down the road. It’s just so damn hard to figure out what Google is doing… and I really don’t think they do either!
Recommendation:
If you aren’t using the keyword meta tag, add one. It won’t hurt your Google rankings or at least “shouldn’t”… hard to say for sure now with all the juggling that Google is doing. I haven’t seen anything on my SEO boards that indicates differently.[/QUOTE]
OldSchool:
FYI – I pulled the META Keyword tag off all my movie reviews about a year ago. Guess what? It’s not effected my results in Bing or Yahoo at all, leading me to conclude that it’s a completely depreciated tag. I know some webmasters might ask “oh why not” just keep it - but I decided to just remove the tag…that’s less extraneous stuff on pages to download. What I have been doing instead is a lot more time consuming but I’ve tested works better for me - and that’s adding some keywords in my written copy in one or two <I> and <b> tags, which apparently HTML5 has embraced for such purposes.
Re: Goodbye Google, Hello Bing! (Or proof that Google is fucked up)
[QUOTE=desslock;114205]OldSchool:
FYI – I pulled the META Keyword tag off all my movie reviews about a year ago. Guess what? It’s not effected my results in Bing or Yahoo at all, leading me to conclude that it’s a completely depreciated tag. I know some webmasters might ask “oh why not” just keep it - but I decided to just remove the tag…that’s less extraneous stuff on pages to download. What I have been doing instead is a lot more time consuming but I’ve tested works better for me - and that’s adding some keywords in my written copy in one or two <I> and <b> tags, which apparently HTML5 has embraced for such purposes.
Keep on optimizing!
Steve[/QUOTE]
Hey Steve
Yes, you are correct about the keyword tag not having a lot of importance. It does help for new sites wanting to register with Bing/Yahoo. Bing tends to cache sites and not update any changes, or at least not for long periods of time. Whenever Bing does update a listing and you’ve added the keyword tag, it will help.
As for using keywords in <b> or <strong> in the copy on your site, I don’t mean to burst your bubble, but that has always been a good practice and helps with rankings. You just have to be careful if you aren’t using SEO software when doing so that you don’t go overboard.
For whatever the reason regarding Google, in the searches that I’ve been looking at, I’m noticing more and more of the results are for sites that do have the keywords in the domain. This is very “old school” (no pun intended) which I think is part of the reason we are seeing old out-of-date sites ranking higher now. It’s just a trend that I’ve noticed a lot more of in my rank tracking.
But we all search for different keywords, my experiences aren’t just limited to porn.
Re: Goodbye Google, Hello Bing! (Or proof that Google is fucked up)
In theory HTML5 will improve the optimisation/ranking of sites. The big problem there is Microsoft and Google disagree as to what that means as there’s no standard yet. I’m fairly sure meta tags are ignored by everyone, though they are a good way to break HTML validation since there’s a ton of non-standard ones like the Facebook integration one. Theoretically badly broken validation can impact your SEO.
I’m not seeing any evidence that the Wordpress plugins like all-in-one SEO make huge impact any more than just doing the titles of your posts intelligently does.
It’s rather maddening that the SEs spend all this time telling us to use good SEO and what that means, then throw that one out the window without providing an alternate path, imho penalizing sites for bad SEO makes much more sense (the site owner is too lazy to put the effort in?) than it does to penalize sites that try for best SEO practices.
Saying ‘goodbye Google, hello Bing’ doesn’t really make sense - even though Bing has the same info Google has such as sitemaps they still are usually third place after Yahoo, which is in the 2-5% range at best. Hopefully Google realizes they may have done a lot of overkill in an attempt to stop sites from trying to game them. Pretty much equivalent of weeding a lawn with a flamethrower.
Re: Goodbye Google, Hello Bing! (Or proof that Google is fucked up)
As much as I hate to admit it, WP sites always seem to do well and with little to no SEO. But I still refuse to convert.
I have a dead site, not doing any updates or work on the site and this one has a WP blog. It used to rank low on most search terms… now it’s making almost as much money as my bread winner! Go figure :bang:
sooo true.