I am very lucky as a web designer. I absolutely love my job and look forward to doing my work. One aspect of it is that I have many clients who have varying requirements and routes to market, some are dependent on their existing clients and repeat business with their sales team and account managers knocking on doors and others are depending completely on Google providing all of their new enquiries and business.
Google regularly updates its algorithm to try and stay one step ahead of the spammers who try and manipulate their index to continue delivering good results to their search ‘customers’. The most recent update was entitled Google Penguin and attempted to clean up their index again especially the manipulated / purchased / automatically generated inbound links into web sites.
Apparently the update has finished but my personal opinion is that they still have some work to do. One of the most common quality issues I’m coming across is the heavy weighting of domain names and using a key word within that which is then built with just a few pages of content (or just one in some cases) which links through to the main parent web site. The ‘doorway’ sites are often bolstered by links from Wikipedia which then cascades down to the main parent site and all three or four sites ranking highly.
The problem is customers have noticed this happening for more than 18 months now and saying to them that Google will (should) eventually penalise this is starting to wear a bit thin – but when I do web design I endeavour to stay whiter than white with the ‘optimisation’ focusing on one web site and quality content on there.
The other thing that isn’t quite right with the results is that one the second or third page, there are multiple entries from the same domain name, surely if you haven’t clicked one of those on the first page you aren’t then going to click on one of them further down.