SAFE NATURAL CURES & LIVING

Google is the main search engine on the internet.  They recently made a huge change in how they get their results.   Sites that lost traffic may have had too many outgoing links, not enough incoming links, or too many paid links.  Only Google knows for sure.  The change does not appear to be due to lack of content. 

Google does not assume the varieties of a word.  Cures will not get the same results as cure.  More disturbing is that the searcher will get different results for phrasing:  natural cures will get different results than safe natural cures.  Differentiating between cures (which could be assumed to be pharmaceutical) and natural cures makes sense.  There is also logic to getting a different set of results with herbal cures, since natural cures could involve herbs, food, vitamins, etc., and herbal cures only involve herbs.  Who knows, maybe safe natural cures are separated on purpose because there may be sites on the net that discuss dangerous natural cures.  Google does not differentiate between natural cures that are dangerous and sites about natural cures that discuss how dangerous pharmaceuticals can be.  Healthy natural cures and all natural cures were accepted under natural cures; maybe there is no one on the internet discussing unhealthy natural cures.

It seems obvious that Google and other search engines do have a difficult task in sorting internet sites.  It’s complicated.

Two similar pages from the same site were included in results by different criteria.  One was included because of its title in the head area, but the other was included instead for its description in the head area.  This does seem like one way to keep spammers guessing. 

Another result of the search engine update is limitation.  You may have noticed in the past that one site could be tweaked to come up in Google results hundreds of times.  That kind of site was never legitimate and merely clogged the system.  There is also a slight chance that the reason for the limitation may have been to put small businesses on an even playing field with the huge companies. 

Limitation has a strangling result on sites that offer lots of information.  To use Safe Natural Cures as an example again:  searching for “natural cures” will not bring up any of the cures themselves, even though the phrase is part of the title, and a search for any of the individual cures will not bring up any of the index pages.  Well, that’s acceptable.  But, the new results also include only two of the three indexes for the Safe Natural Cures site for any one search phrase.  For example:  searching under “natural remedies” brings up parts 1 and 2; but searching under “home remedies” brings up parts 1 and 3.  This is definitely a number limitation since all three parts use the same “template,” and contain the same introductory paragraph and basic keywords.  (They are not duplicate pages since they each have a separate group of remedies.)

It is hoped that Google will be able to say good-bye to twosies for real sites and find another way to keep out the spammers.

Their secret?  After looking through the source view at tons of sites, it seems obvious that Google wants to keep out spammers.  That includes real sites with real content to offer.  A site can be listed high in the results by its title, description, keywords, url name, or even the name of its css file.  That may even alternate by date or time of the search, by how many people are searching for that phrase, etc.  Content can either help or hurt depending on how it is presented.

The bottom line is the actual combination - the total achieved by the formula.  Some would call it keyword density, but it boils down to the density overall.  Using the same word or phrase in the meta tags and title, content, and headings is a good way to be found in the listings.  But, using the same word or phrase in all of the meta tags and title, content, css file, and headings makes you look like a spammer and can keep your site either unlisted or buried so deep it doesn’t matter if it’s listed or not.  Especially if the phrase is used as a link in the content too many times.  Sites can now contain too much of a good thing. 

Variety is not only the spice of life, it is more difficult for spammers to fake.