Forum Moderators: open
The panic is settling down, the whine of worry is receding to a steady hum in the back of my head, and several recovery plans are forming...
I lost my index page entirely, due to lazy keyword stuffing. My fault! Unfortunately, mine is a very small business: no listing = no food (let alone xmas).
I was planning on overhauling the website anyway, and I've given myself until 1/1/04 before I accept an opening with another business and abandon my own. The question now is: overhaul the index page and resubmit to Google immediately, overhaul the entire website and resubmit the whole thing in a few weeks, overhaul the website (starting with the index page of course) and wait for Googlebot. Time is most definitely a factor.
...are any of these plans likely to restore my index page to the directory before I have to throw in the towel in January?
There are also longer range options of starting over with a new website and closing the old.
Mahalo Nui Loa! (Thank you very much!)
Just checked Wisenut, we are at #1.
Only Google, and Hotbot list us less than #1, and at the end of the Google goes so does the traffic.
1. Waaay back on 15th of this month in part one of this thread GoogleGuy stated “I think this update should happen over a slightly shorter timeframe, so most data should be incorporated within 3-4 days I would guess” msg#210 part 1 of this thread dated the 15th.
[webmasterworld.com...]
2. In part two of this thread msg#754 dated the 19th googleguy said “I think most of the data for this iteration has been folded in now.”
[webmasterworld.com...]
3. www-sj the “home data center” has been down for over one month now.
4. www-zu went down right after this “update” started and is still down as of the time of this post.
5. Google did a PageRank update just two weeks before this so called “update” started.
6. Just after the last PageRank update (the one just before this update) the little green PR bars disappeared for a few days. Google admitted in a email to Chris Ridings at chriseo (dot) com that they (Google) were having some problems with the toolbar PR but it should be fixed in a few days.
7. This update is very much like the last catastrophic update last July and is dropping index pages for no understandable reason.
8. Only a very few people, the same ones over and over, keep insisting that they see “good results” from google (Anyone wanna bet their IP’s resolve back to the “G-plex”).
9. The vast majority of people posting say the same thing - the results google is currently showing are the worst ever for google.
10. Searching in Google using quotes, hyphens or underscores returns results that are unbelievably bad and non-relevant and very very different results than what google displayed before this "update".
Conclusion - Google is having some MAJOR problems - Google is currently trying to correct the problems without much success - This would explain the offline data centers and very bad results google is displaying at the moment.
Note to Googlies out their... I am NOT whining about my sites or there ranking and I am NOT bashing Google. I am simply pointing out what seems obvious to me and many many others, that google is having some problems right now.
Google Rocks!
Don't talk to soon. The website that took #1 position for my keywords on Saturday, has vanished as of about an hour ago.
Hope it keeps fine for you
For every webmaster that has a site go down - another site goes up - I do notice that none of them are posting here. Maybe the sites that are going up are too busy spending time improving their sites to come here and grizzle.
The SERPs suck! Most spam, irrelevant results I have ever seen.
Your last post really makes me question the motivation behind ones gloating when so many are suffering.
This also causes me to doubt the statement itself.
You sound like someone I would really like to know - NOT!
there are things more important than google serps in my life :)
Right now there seems to be no rhyme or reason for the results Google is presenting and plenty of 'white hat' quality sites have been nuked, whilst a lot of spam floats to the top (not suggesting you're a spammer).
[edited by: biggles at 8:53 pm (utc) on Nov. 20, 2003]
Not only has he left us. He's not accepting stickies either.
Mind you I turn off email when I am trying to sort out a major problem :)
"Retailers Rise in Google Rankings as Rivals Cry Foul"
Brinn has some comments.....
"Sergei Brinn, co-founder of Google, said in an interview that programmers would review the situation to determine if the system needed to be tweaked. "We'll look at these examples and say, where did our ranking go wrong here and what can we do to make it better?" Mr. Brinn said. "The fundamental principle is that the sites should not artificially game the system."
A very interesting read....
17th
midday #163,
3pm #13
8pm #167
18th
midday #130,
3pm #14
8pm #15
19th
midday #19,
3pm #165
8pm #90
20th
midday #120,
3pm #63
8pm #63
Well, consistent, if nothing else, eh?! ;)
I mean, come on, what are you meant to get people to link to a site with now? Non kw's? Words that have bugger all to do with what you are about?
What a great way of lazer beaming your competitiors into oblivion! Set up a lot of crappy domains, put lots of kw anchor text in every page, targetting your competitiors top terms and kaboom, he's history.
Someone tell me ive got this all wrong.
I'm around. Some of the other threads like
[webmasterworld.com...]
[webmasterworld.com...]
have seemed more productive, so I've been chiming in over there.
Today I find:
Alltheweb - Result 3
Altavista - Result 2
Google - Can't find it
In Google the whole index is made up of archived articles that mention the word Widgets and all the regular spammers.
Now I guess Google owes us nothing, but we are still going to call up our Adwords rep there and lodge our complaints.
This is like the electric company deciding to deliver different voltages to different clients for their own purposes. If there is any demonstration of how Google has too much power well this was it. I can imagine that pulling such a big gaffe right before Xmas will have some serious ramifications for them.
I wish people could reveal what topics and keywords they were looking for when they encountered these results. The different experiences everyone is having must have something to do with the different kinds of searches we're all doing, but it'll be impossible to track that down using generalities. Specifically I wonder how many of the problem searches are in adult or other extremely competitive and spam-riddled topics, where little tweaks could be causing huge swings in the results.
[edited by: SEOPutte at 9:43 pm (utc) on Nov. 20, 2003]
These are the best to check to evaluate if the dance is over or near over. The reason why is that with competitive terms freshbot activity may make it look like the dance is still on. Looks to me like the dance is over, or near over.
You still have yet to address a major issue. Is there hope for re-ranking after re-design for all of our sites that are NO LONGER in SERPS for targeted phrases? These sites are still in index for less targeted terms.
Or should we scrap and start over?
[edited by: ulysee at 9:47 pm (utc) on Nov. 20, 2003]
"Google SEO (as SEO for any other search engine) comes automagically if you do the right things. Google SEO is not what you want to be doing - you want to be making good content for your user base."
Hallelujah, claus. Nice post. :)
What does it take for you guys to understand the obvious?
Stop whining/whinging
Google DOES NOT owe you a living.
Grow up.
For every webmaster that has a site go down - another site goes up - I do notice that none of them are posting here. Maybe the sites that are going up are too busy spending time improving their sites to come here and grizzle.
I have sites that have gone up and I have sites that have maintained #1. I have another site that has been page 1 for a year, has just disappeared in the last 18 hours. Along with this site, every other page that has been in the top 20 for the last year is gone. This is a real estate category with mostly mom @ pop type websites, with the exception of the loacl papers online real estate guide. The only over-seo that ever happens with any of these sites, if any, is recip links and targeted anchor text.
Brett's Guide is my site-building bible. I do the same thing with all my sites. While some are still golden, some are now trashed. My gut feeling was this was a links penalty, but i see too many exceptions for that rule. Hard to do anything else but throw my hands up in the air because I see absolutely nothing consistent with what is happening.
steve
