Lay My Hat

Windy, I am assuming you have not heard back from Google yet ... Following on from your Paypal France search exercise, are you getting the same results? I am not. The article below provides another interesting example, albeit with a search on Viagra and coming at it from a different angle. The autho...

Of course, its the buying PageRank issue. Thanks kc. I hope you made enough money to offset the losses you have had as a result of being penalised!

4. wouldn't say it's democratic these days! They clearly favour big brands (which I've raised elsewhere on LMH) and can bring down websites (and livelihoods) on a whim. Take the penalty I illustrated above. There was nothing democratic about that - Google just decided to penalise the site as it dec...

Thanks for the explanation Gam - I was indeed reading you too literally and I was not aware of the mechanics of the kind of sites to which your were referring.

gam wrote: ... a template site is one which is auto generated from a database ...

By this definition, aren't most of the rental listing sites template sites? Pages on those sites are 'auto generated from a database'.

But presumably the ideal is somewhere between the two. Yes, and that, for me anyway, hits the nail on the head! Where to draw the line between the two. Another example all together, the labelling of image files. Google says do not use image-1, image-2, etc., but how far can/should you go with using...

IMO the 'home' reference is getting way over-analysed - it was after all a more off the cuff remark. Where ever it actually refers (I am no longer sure I know now), the point I think that was being made is that using the word 'home' over keyword stuffing is preferable. She probably thinks someone wh...

LOL Now I am becoming sceptical again :x FWIW On the last point my reading is the second of your two readings. Even she says it's a total guess on her part!!! In fairness, I think on 'total guess' she did not want to be drawn, and although she created Webmaster Central while at Google - I think she ...

... in Google's new world, where a site titled "Home" with great content about Napa Valley is supposed to rank better in a search for "Napa Valley" than a site with a title "Napa Valley" but poor content, Google's Fox: ... B&B in Napa that titles their home page ‘h...

Having come to the same conclusion I am now re SEOing a bit again now :-) I noticed :-) It must be pretty difficult to effectively rank a site that doesn't use any keywords or spiderable content. I am not sure what you mean by "spiderable" here - isnt all text (including html) on a page '...

My scepticism has been allayed somewhat by comparing the performance of two of my websites since this thread started. One I started a few years ago, and in terms of SEO I followed all the advice (a few threads here in which I contributed to attest to this) we were all told to (incidentally by the 'S...

When I put in Normandy beach house rental Granville - which seemed a reasonable search term - my blog came up (on page 1) before my (paid for) web site.

For me, your blog did not appear on page one (page two, 5) - but your paid for site was 7 and 8 on page one.

Entirely understandable

To correct the record, I have checked my Webmasters log and found that it was 6 days I had a response from Google, not 3 weeks - it probably felt like three weeks

I know that to be true, but it does raise the question about SEO work. Hours put in only for search results to be a "bit random. It has been true for some time now. But this is exactly the point - Google realise someone searching for 'X' in England will probably not want the same pages as some...

Out of interest who did you contact at Google? I filled in the form via the Webmasters whatever page. It took just under 3 weeks to get a response. You will just have to be patient on that one - as I am sure they have many of those requests now. I sympathise entirely - I would probably be feeling t...