Blog of Preetinder Singh

Google results are a mess these days. With Penguin, they might have dropped the sites that were doing some shady SEO or were spammy in a way but now search results will only be relevant if content is found on “trusted/white listed” websites. Google would rank the trusted website with less relevancy much above the “not so trusted” website with much more relevancy. This is bad for users. I think relevancy is much more important than going to a “trusted/reputed” website.

Trusted sites = The big guys or the sites that haven’t done any black hat SEO, these sites pass the Panda/Penguin filters.

I’m not complaining because my own sites won’t rank but because the sites that rank, don’t deserve to rank. If my site gets outranked by a better site which provides better content, I’d understand, it’s only fair. It would make me want to create better content.

Few days ago I wrote this post about a WordPress Malware. Apparently, Google thinks this post does not deserves to rank.

Google would rather rank some other websites. Have a look. I took these screenshots after clearing all history/cache.

Page 1

Page 2

Page 3

Page 4

The results for same query on Bing.

The results for same query on Yahoo(Bing).

IMO ever since Penguin, search quality is declining. And I don’t understand why they think it’s a success?

They say Google ends up making more money from Adwords with all this mess. If your business is dependent on Google traffic (if you sell stuff online or your clients find you online) and you just lost rankings, you would probably buy traffic through Adwords. Google gets richer.

How could Google do this, isn’t this bad for their business in the long run. Maybe not, what other choice do users have? Bing? Yahoo? It seems highly unlikely that they could ever replace Google.

So much for “Don’t be evil” or maybe all this mess is just collateral damage. Google, please give more weight to relevancy.

Update: My site now ranks #3 for the same search query.

I’ve been disappointed with Google serps over the last few months. Even since they rolled out Penguin. Not because some of my own websites lost rankings, but because Google results now are not so relevant. Sometimes there are just two many results from the same website. I’ve always used Google to find stuff online, and I still do. Loyalty? Habit? Don’t know. For some queries Bing results are much better. My websites continue to maintain good rankings on Bing/Yahoo.

There was lot of buzz about Penguin 2.0 update recently on webmaster forums/blogs. If you do a search on Google custom search, results are different. Someone noticed the new results on Foxstart.com. Other sites like Blackle.com would also show different results than mainstream Google.

Notice the traffic spike on that day!

Matt Cutts said the update would be “jarring and jolting”.

If the search results on foxstart.com are a preview of Penguin 2.0 update, I welcome the update. Rankings have improved for my website. Don’t know how is the search quality overall.

One of my website was first hit by page layout algorithm, 19th January 2012, then Penguin, 24th February 2012, probably hit by Panda as well. Traffic, revenue was growing for years, and in three months, earnings went down to as they were in July 2009. I kind of saw this coming, didn’t want to make any significant change to the site because things were going great, didn’t want to mess things up. This might have to do with having a few “thin content” pages. I intend to work on the site, improve user experience, bring down the bounce rate. I’ve been wanting to do a lot of things, but I often end up procrastinating. Penguin probably runs like Panda.