Whitey - 4:32 am on Jun 7, 2008 (gmt 0)

Are the websites that experienced a massive drop hosted in the US or Europe?

One site i watch is hosted in US with UK TLD

.... I still continue to think there has been a major algorithmn adjustment to Google which is applying to some sites . See [webmasterworld.com...]

Initially, I thought there were some problems with the geo filtering being screwed up with regards to the UK, but I'm not sure about this statement in isolation. Maybe it's a bug and maybe it's not.

Since it's hard to pinpoint we really need a lot of information to decipher the problem or adjustment that G has put in place . If it is only UK related sites, then my hunch is that this could be rolled out in other regions with more aggressive filtering.

Some things I'd like to know or qualify , especially from the long established members here or folks with long established sites, are things like this :

- is this purely selective
- is it only high PR sites and if so what level of PR
- is it only UK related sites and does that mean the TLD and/or hosting [ chief suspect is geo filtering issues ]
- do these sites have an inbalance of linking techniques e.g. lot's of navigation IBL's , footer IBL's ,
- do these sites publish frequent content

My observation so far is that it has been

- highly selective in a competitve niche to a minority of sites
[ total stability around the site i watch ]

- effected by a combination of factor
[ not sure what right now ie one factor in isolation isn't enough to send a site down, more one event combined with another is. This is because I'm observiing others using the same techniques which are unaffected ]

-effected by introduction of high PR link/s , leading to
- recent upward PR increases [ not visible on toolbar ]which have caused a re assessment of the site's "trust" rank.
- it only effects UK TLD's [ need more info on this ]
- a further discounting of low value pages bringing the overall PR down
- thin affiliate sites or sites with aggregated content been only effected [ not 100% on this - just some sites I'm watching ]
- linking stagnation or momentum altered
- lack of fresh , original content

Actually, my feeling is that it's nothing new , it's just more aggressive in it's selection of sites

In the case of one site I'm observing, for any phrase or content [ exact match and broad match ] the whole site has been tanked to between -40 to -60 on phrases that should rank. Not one single exception. When it initially disappeared from Google it was completely off the index for 3 days.

This might correspond to recent discussion by Googler John Mu about the - 60 penalty which appears to have been acknowledged , which would seem to be based on a recent change at G. Some folks have reported improvements coming back quickly with a site clean up.

But there's not enough reports to be sure.

My concern is that the recovery could be indefinite and have effected the trust rank of effected sites - and of course communicating with G through WMT leaves webmasters are exposed to hand checks which could expose other inadvertent nasties and one way communication.

[edited by: Whitey at 5:00 am (utc) on June 7, 2008]