Most misleading title of the day!
My sister's a quilter and Google mugged her
11–20 of 115 posts
Re: My sister's a quilter and Google mugged her
#12Comes up first for me - https://www.google.com/#q=portrait+quilts Edit: HA! Sorry, it's an ad! I thought it was the first organic result but it was actually the second ad! I can barely perceive that shade of yellow indicating that it's an ad. Took two or three takes.
It isn't in the search results for me, but there is an ad for portraitquilts.com. So i guess they bit the bullet and paid for advertising.
Re: My sister's a quilter and Google mugged her
#13Eric Schmidt said he was sorry but he couldn’t help.
Now I’m angry.
Wow. I think I respect Google more now. I don't like the "take it to the people" approach needed to get action out of Google, but I like "I know people who know people" approach even less. The chairman of the company should not be dicking about with search results because a friend asked.
Re: My sister's a quilter and Google mugged her
#14Comes up first for me - https://www.google.com/#q=portrait+quilts Edit: HA! Sorry, it's an ad! I thought it was the first organic result but it was actually the second ad! I can barely perceive that shade of yellow indicating that it's an ad. Took two or three takes.
It's an ad for me. Of course, Google's been doing all it can to make ads look like organic results. Looks like she bought into the protection racket.
Re: My sister's a quilter and Google mugged her
#15> Eric Schmidt said he was sorry but he couldn’t help.
This is a good thing. It's incredibly frustrating that Google has no way for people to get help with the search engine. Allowing the few people who happen to know someone who knows someone to get help doesn't make Google any less frustrating in this situation - although it does help that one person.
It would be interesting to learn why the site got delisted (if it did). Often someone complains vociferously, then a Googler points out all the weird SEO links that exist for that domain, and a bunch of odd things happening on the site.
Re: My sister's a quilter and Google mugged her
#16Sorry for the author's sister, but it's kinda reassuring to know that even Google's CEO won't tamper with the results algorithm. Which might or might not be fair, but still...
Re: My sister's a quilter and Google mugged her
#17For the curious: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=portrait+quilts https://duckduckgo.com/?q=photo+quilts http://www.bing.com/search?q=portrait+quilts http://www.bing.com/search?q=photo+quilts http://www.yandex.com/yandsearch?text=portrait+quilts http://www.yandex.com/yandsearch?text=photo+quilts http://www.baidu.com/s?wd=portrait+quilts http://www.baidu.com/s?wd=photo+quilts http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=portrait+quilts…
Or even https://blekko.com/#?q=portrait%20quilts and https://blekko.com/#?q=photo%20quilts
EDIT: By the way, the reason we have this site lower than other engines is that we tend to put howto and non-selling sites over selling sites.
Re: My sister's a quilter and Google mugged her
#18And apparently Mr Cringely doesn't know anything about Webmaster Tools, which would probably be the first stop of anyone wanting to know about a sudden change in rank.
Sudden changes are usually the function of 'action' rather than 'inaction' so I'm guessing that somewhere there was an action. Did she succumb to some black hat SEO marketing pitch? Did Cringely piss off some black hat SEO person? Did her site get compromised and have malware installed? Did she not actually update the content for the last 5 years (including Copyright notice) so it doesn't appear to be a dead site.
The 'OMG I don't show up in results' is a good starting point but hardly the ending point of these stories.
Re: My sister's a quilter and Google mugged her
#19I've had this sort of thing happen myself, client's who's websites lose out on to some spammy site for no obvious reason. People seem to assume that google operates as some sort of public service which provides free services to website owners.
Now I just tell people to factor adwords spend into the development costs for a site.
Re: My sister's a quilter and Google mugged her
#20This is what I see on Google: https://i.cloudup.com/7ymLpPBmma-3000x3000.png
The first organic results don't even show up with the size of my window.
The whole situation these days on the SERP for any purchasable item is pretty sad. Luckily, I don't use Google that much when pricing or shopping. Results for data are much more helpful and useful for me.