Anyone else annoyed that google changed their search results to no longer passively include your site in a users personal results if they've visited your page in the past?

Let's say you are paying google adwords to bring 1000 visitors a day to a new site because it doesn't rank in the top 10 or 20 of the SERPs. In the past, since those people visited your site, viewed a few pages, if they do a similar search, your site comes up on their first page for SERPs.

Now users have to use the Google +1 button for this to happen. This means your site has to have google +1 button on it, the user also has to have a google +1 account, because the only other place to find it is on the google search results, which for adwords they are not coming from google search.

I say this is a blatant conflict of interest and gives a huge advantage to established sites already ranked at the top of googles SERPs.

I don't think people should see it like that.
If someone came to your website once and liked it, he will remember it; bookmark it; sign up for something you offer, something..
If he didn't find what he wanted, what is the point of it coming up every time he searches for the term that got him there?

The point is not getting anyone to your website but people who are interested in it and if they are interested they will probably plus one it. This is how the web works these days. You have to use social media and adapt to changes..

Having read the Googleblog post is seems like as per usual it has been mis-read and mis-interpreted. and again, as usual the clueless twittering classes spread the half-arsed version rather than doing a bit of work and actually READING and UNDERSTANDING the original.

Realistically speaking surely it is a change for the better. If personalised results and the passive feed of previous searches into the query results is reserved for the users WITH Google accounts rather than for everybody (as it is now), it makes it better for the people who are Google's target audience.
They don't care about webmasters or marketers, they aim to show the best results to their user, and if their users have "voted" for a particular page after performing a particular search, surely it is common sense to show that page as being "useful" to those same searchers. It is only the same as you having a list of browser favourites and history and your browser suggesting places you have been before.

If you lot could get it into your heads that the best way of getting search results is to give the SEs pages that they WANT to show their user, pages that Google's users WILL "bookmark", pages that are really good for the visitors. Rather than blundering around trying to find "tricks" to "getting good SERP" you probably all do better.

Then on the other hand, we could just leave the clowns blundering around blindly and let them die off while those who do know the right ways flourish and take the best traffic.

I have to disagree with your interpretation of user actions. Users are fairly lazy by nature. Just like a company that takes customer feedback, the majority are only those who had a bad experience. It is rare that people would call a company to offer a compliment. Just like having to manually click on the +1 button. I have the following stats, so far this month, for one of my sites:

56,646 Visits

19,853 Unique Visitors

1,173,411 Pageviews

20.71 Pages/Visit

00:42:02 Avg. Time on Site

7.66% Bounce Rate

24.07% % New Visits



Great numbers, although I'd like to get more visitors. So I put the google +1 button in my banner and didn't get a single click in 24 hours. Late last night I put it more prevalent on the pages and I've gotten a total of 2 clicks. 2 CLICKS. I have 1700 visitors so far today, with 77% repeat visitors, and all I got was 2 clicks.

Google is plain and simply trying to promote their google+ and compete with Facebook. Google is #1 in search so they are leveraging that to catch Facebook. It is things like this that cause great companies to fail. Search should be search. It shouldn't be about what social network platform you belong to.

Google says this is to keep people from inflating SERP results. There are already thousands of sites that will give you google +1 button clicks to artificially inflate your site numbers. With it harder to get in front of people eyes, more people will use deceptive techniques like these.

BTW, if those numbers don't prove that users like the site I referenced, I don't know what does.

Great numbers, although I'd like to get more visitors

Not "great" numbers at all, just meaningless numbers without having context for them.

I see you missed out the only number that actually means anything at all, that is conversions.

None of you seem to have a clue how to actually analyse your visitor statistics, you talk about "bounce rate", "time on site", and "page views" without actually understanding what it really means for your pages.

I have 1700 visitors so far today, with 77% repeat visitors, and all I got was 2 clicks.

You make it sound as if it is somehow Google's fault.

It is YOUR fault, if want your conversion to be a +1 click, a Facebook "like" or a "Digg" share, YOU have to guide your visitors to that goal, and with a conversion of 0.12% (2/1700*100) you targeting of visitors is abysmal.

YOU are in control of visitors, YOU can influence their actions, YOU decide what action you want them to take.


The problem is with most of you is that youdo NOT know how to market your pages.
You are too focussed on "valuable links" AND "most important keywords" to learn anything about running a successful website!!!

Conversions? I restarted my an ad campaign with google adwords for the site I listed my stats for a few days ago, do you want to know what the conversion rate is that google lists?

92.54%. I doubt you will find many sites that do much better. Granted Googles definition of conversion includes more than a +1 button click.

As far as making the +1 button be the conversion goal, what would you suggest? I've already added it to the menu banner. I then added it more prominently on the page, with white lettering and a black background. I've also sent emails out to our 7000+ registered users when I was working on the facebook likes, which receive a very dismal response. I don't want to disable the page, redirect, or use popups to force them to take notice. So what would you suggest I do?

The fact that you are getting bookmarked is strong indicator that people like your site. I'd just go with that. Anywhere you advertise a good site you will have a chance of gaining more exposure and potential for "viral" sharing.

Originally Posted by webspace

The fact that you are getting bookmarked is strong indicator that people like your site. I'd just go with that. Anywhere you advertise a good site you will have a chance of gaining more exposure and potential for "viral" sharing.

The problem is, for two key terms I am ranked around 8-9. I know this site is better and has far better usage stats that all but 1 above it, but google doesn't rank it higher. I've done and checked the onpage SEO. I've been building backlinks, etc as well but it hasn't budged. People say building a quality site will push you higher in the ranks. Well google has all my numbers and they haven't budged me higher.

Just building "quality pages" won't help rankings in particular (not that rankings are a useful way to measure anything)

What you see in "ranking" is NOT what everybody else sees.

Quality pages will get you better conversions and it sound like you are another that believes traffic only comes from SEs and you get links to get rankings, to get traffic, when really you SHOULD cut out the middle bit and get links to get traffic.

Originally Posted by aygabtu.com

I have to disagree with your interpretation of user actions. Users are fairly lazy by nature. Just like a company that takes customer feedback, the majority are only those who had a bad experience. It is rare that people would call a company to offer a compliment. Just like having to manually click on the +1 button. I have the following stats, so far this month, for one of my sites:

56,646 Visits

19,853 Unique Visitors

1,173,411 Pageviews

20.71 Pages/Visit

00:42:02 Avg. Time on Site

7.66% Bounce Rate

24.07% % New Visits



Great numbers, although I'd like to get more visitors. So I put the google +1 button in my banner and didn't get a single click in 24 hours.

If you don't mind me asking, where did you get these hits from? Did you happen to get lucky and receive a million hits a month from 1 keyword? Or did you actually have content on your site that was interesting and useful to your users?

If the answer is the second one, this +1 button should be of no issue. As Chris said, it's there to help users find the best results when they search. As also said, you need to make changes, as any business man would do, to fit in a modern society and create conversions.

You don't see phone companies focusing on phone booths do you? Times change, business focus does as well too.

I do agree with you, this Google+ idea is just competition for Facebook, however I do actually see it way better and more useful.

Definitely content that is useful to users, but it is not a wordpress site with tons of articles. It is a game helper site with calculator and game code tools that help players in about a dozen different games. The site has been around for over a year and has many people coming back on a daily basis.

The pageviews numbers google analytics reports are a little deceptive. The site has a lot of jquery and ajax calls that do partial page refreshes. Every time users input values into the input fields it does a call to our server to update their page using the new values, which google counts as a page view. This makes it extremely user friendly for our users, but it is hard to get an accurate count of true page views. We could have put a 'calculate' button on the page and done full page refreshes, but that would suck from a user perspective.

Our numbers still speak for themselves though, we have a lot of user loyalty with over 7200 registered and about 2300 unique users per day, yet have a lot of trouble to get people to do anything to help our site in return like posting backlinks, or just clicking on a facebook like or google +1 button. Feel free to visit one of the pages using the link below and tell me what you would do different to encourage people to click the +1 button.

http://www.aygabtu.com/storm8calcula...game=iMobsters

I am open to suggestions. Thanks.

I'd be careful doing this:

Please help us. If you like our site and this page, please use the Google +1 button below to share it and help our search rank.

It's obviously not working, and it's not really necessary. Your users will +1 you if they think it worth it.

If this number absolutely kills you, just purchase some +1ers.

check out this link for more information on +1.

There is of course the point that if your site WAS good enough and your marketing and branding was strong enough why would the same users have to use Google results to find your pages again???

Nice information guys, as I know that Google Panda updates was planned to target low-quality sites that were ranking well in Google search results. I am really happy that my site is still ranking.

I know nothing about the algorithms, but I see that really crappish free-domain sites rank 2-3 for some keywords while quality ones stay outta' top-100. That's annoying.

The only Key is, have site enrich in content. Google looks more in the content over your links.