rob

Google therefore done a decent job for 'man in street' searcher?

stender

I don't think so in all cases. One of my sites which was on page 1 and had lots of relevant content and virtually no ads is now page 4. Page 1 is made up mainly of newspaper sites with stories which were current years ago along with wikipedia and imdb. I notice the ads are now at the bottom of the page instead of top. Is that something new?

julian

I wonder if G will start to look at the over CMS use -Joomla, WP and the like and go back to 'old skool' flat file .html!?

crazihos

When my moms buying stuff online (eg washing machines*) she spends a couple of hours if not more looking at sites to pick one.

Whether they were all really great sites or not she'd happily lap up affiliate style sites as part of the enjoyable buying experience.

Now if she searches "washing machines" in the top 10 she has a choice of 8 retailers all offering the same products, one review site (which which she would have to pay to join) and wikipedia in case she wants to know the history of washing machines.

Out of the top 30 results 27 are retailers.

For people like my mom Google is now rubbish.

* I have no idea what the washing machine search results were like before penguin btw - its just the first product I thought of and the results seem typical.

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rob

I dont see how pages of aff site with dupe or 500 words of possibly spun low grade content would enhance the buying process.

dougs

The none retailer sites that have to play games just need some time to workout what to do...the good ones will be back though.

We had numerous sites hit but I am very happy, we are very good at adapting. We had a huge list of great things ready to implement but Google was rewarding our rubbish and others rubbish...so that is what we gave them

Opportunities galore now.

Doug

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Sean

Whereas prior to this update she would have had an extra fifty or more sites advertising washing machines from the twenty-seven retailers that now dominate. Who more deserves the prime Google position, the company that holds millions of Pounds of stock or somebody sitting in their bedroom doing nothing but trying to trick Google and punters into thinking they're the retailer.

Btw, I'm generalising here, some affiliate sites offer genuine added value and deserve reward for their hard work but the vast majority are just dressed up affiliate feeds

Sean

I've got no link to them whatsoever but this site is a great example of affiliates adding value

http://camerapricebuster.com/

boxfish

This is a good one too and it seems to have held up in the rankings

http://snapsort.com/compare/Canon_EO...Canon_EOS_550D

I think 99% of aff sites probably deserved to have been canned though, mine included.

Sean

Mine too, I moved from buying and selling domains to sticking up affiliate sites that use the same templates and software with minor tweaks and the same crappy, half hearted feeds as everyone else. They're crap, offer nothing that can't be found on 100's of similar shitty sites and give me no satisfaction.