europeforvisitors - 3:50 pm on Jun 4, 2005 (gmt 0)

Has anyone that was hit hard with the Bourbon update recovered yet?

GoogleGuy has said the update isn't over (and won't be until later in the month), so it's a bit hard to know what's likely to last. I got slammed really, really hard during the first weekend of the update, losing a heap of Google referrals on top of the 70% or so that had already disappeared after the largely ignored mini-update of March 23. But I recovered three days later, and Google referrals are now back at their record levels of February and early March.

I have noticed some oddities:

- A few high-profile hotel pages from a long-established section of my site appear to be gone from the index. If I search for their page titles with my name added, the SERPs show scraper pages that link to them, but the pages themselves are MIA.

- I created a new section of the site about six weeks ago, redirecting existing pages on the topic into the new section's directories and adding a bunch of new articles. The new articles show up in the index, and the redirected pages show up at their new URLs, but the index.html page for the new section is missing from the SERPs (though it's referenced by several scraper sites that come up in a search for the title and my name).

I can't think of any reason why those hotel pages and that index page would be missing, because similar hotel pages in other directories are doing fine and the index.html pages of my other "sites within the site" continue to rank well in Google. (I'm not going to obsess over the missing pages; they'll probably turn up eventually, and in the meantime, they get plenty of internal referrals: for example, the index.html page that's missing from Google's SERPs usually ranks #3 in my daily traffic report.)