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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!)
Sure hope things change a bit - not so much to rescue lost sites but I CANT FIND ANYTHING I AM LOOKING FOR!
:)
Hey guys if you have spare time why not help some these posts [webmasterworld.com] that no one has yet to answer. everybit helps
IP:208.254.3.160 when I ping www.google.com
My site has moved up in the directory from 56 to 6, PR went from a 5 to a 6, backlinks increased, and keyword1-keyword2-keyword3 shows me at #4. Heck, we're #2 on Froogle for the same keyword phrase. Now we are nowhere to be found in the top 200 for keyword1 keyword2 keyword 3.
I cant fathom how these results are really what Google thinks people are searching for.
Sigh,... :(
Just kidding! We all need a little humor in a heart attack situation.
In all seriousness, I'd just like to add nobody should change a thing on their sites as this update was never close to being over. Sure, losing sales sucks, but your chasing your tail if you do a thing to your site. If your site is good, relevent, and clean of dirty seo tricks, you will be fine.
I've got faith in google despite the present results. You should all be happy that the current results are the worst ever, its just proof that we're still dancing.
Put on your white shoes and dance!
Sincerely,
The Hillbilly
I have also been a full time pro seo for 18 months and focus on G.
I came home tonight and noticed there have been further modestly beneficial changes which is of course welcome.
To my mind what seems to have happened is that G has gone back to some extremely old data in some (my most important) areas and that things are coming slowly back up to date in the affected areas, in line with other update shenaninigans. Once in a while G likes to playn some tricks on us to guage the reaction.
Sites I optimized six months back look good or better than before but my current rising star took a hammering. This points to recently developed link popularity being ignored and old page rank numbers being used while the new ones are worked out.
The results published over the last week are obviously not an improvement so in my book they won't last. G does do the business always has and always will.
Most of the panickers on here have established sites with lots of relevant inbound links and pages optimized in terms of title, anchor text and alt tags and body text in line with the ratios we all understand G to like. They have been hit for positions by the update.
I am not liquid for a lot of cash and I have kids and a family to support and I depend on my incoime from G but it seems to me that what is happening is totally manageable.
Also removed were some bizarreo link pages that had no business being ranked at all, let alone the top 10 for a competitive term. (-va is now the only datacenter showing older results.)
Whether the removal was more pure algo/update, or the results of spam reports, good work Google......... now if we can just put a stake through the heart of Mr. GreenSpam-61-of-the-top-100-results.
Interestingly, results are looking very, very good most of the the time now... except when something is wrong it tends to be VERY wrong, like the mini-webs of self-generated duplicate site/sub-domain spam.
Cheers,
Nigel
If this is not the place to post views, challenges and possible solutions, can someone point me to another website where people can freely exchange ideas, vent frustrations and come to a common consensus?
As for your comment about short term loses and being in business, just because a short term loss is no big deal to you, doesn't mean that it will not potentially cause someone else a great deal of stress and grief right before the biggest season of the year and could potentially have adverse affects in some respect or another.
Just a few thoughts.
We launched a new site 2 days ago which showed 107 pages earlier today and is now back to the 6 pages of before launch. Index page shows 20th and is up to date, rest are old (pre launch).
While I understand your point Lasko, I thought having a message board is where people were supposed to come and talk about things and compare ideas and say what they feel.
Fair point however many new users here at WW missed the debates of Dominic/Esmer
You would also see that every post you read in the last 500 are the same as the previous 1000 posts.
As a member and someone who has been through this nightmare before I am simply suggesting that any actions should be taken once an update is completed. Too many make sudden changes that were not needed.
As for business, well this is business and I stand by my point that long term goals are better then the short term and if you are completely dependent on Google and free traffic then don't be surprised if you need to adapt or change the way you work to become profitable.
Hmmm it would be nice to sell so many things without having to spend a $ on advertising. Not many businesses can do that!
Google is a third party and with third party you can't control you need to have a backup plan.
Just my thoughts :)
[edited by: markus007 at 12:27 am (utc) on Nov. 21, 2003]
Then the results change again.
Obviously, and there are 2 major points made by the knowledgeable here:
(1) If it's an update, it's far from over
(2) If it's a bug, Google is obviously working their butts off to fix it, hence the changing results.
Final analysis - Google IS working on it.
P.S. Quit slamming GoogleGuy - whether you like some of his riddles or not, he seems to be pretty honest.
The 'Survivor' Creed:
Outwit
Outlast
Outplay
See the similarities?
Seeing the same thing. Index pages are bouncing all over the place--in the right direction.
As has been repeated many times - for every loser there is a gainer. The money hasn't been lost just shifted around a little.
>>> In effect, the money will shift to adwords, as many of the current sites are only mildly-to-barely relevant content websites (no e-commerce).
This looks identical to DomEsme from where I'm sitting. My established sites are doing pretty much the same, my newer sites, one in particular (one that got hammered in Domesme) has dropped to nowhere for the main keyphrase.
However, this stuff happens when you're playing the SEO game. You live with it or you stop selling online.
What concerns me at the moment is that I'm trying to find a xmas present for my girlfriend and searches on google for widgety widgets is returning nothing but other search engines and directories on the first two pages...no actual shops at all! Thats really annoying. I want to buy stuff, not go to other search engines...If I pick Google to use as my search engine, why the hell would I want to then go to another search engine to see what results they have for me?
Now I can cope with my sites losing rankings, but when google won't give me anything but search engines and directories on a search for widgets then I really have to complain!
For me, things have mostly stabilized...and might I add...not in a good way.
And what is this I see......A LOOKSMART CRAWLER?
[edited by: greenfrog at 1:20 am (utc) on Nov. 21, 2003]
Yet, since he does not know the whole picture, he does not know what to tell us. It's obvious that the SERPs are still fluctuating, and it's equally obvious that they will eventually settle. Until that happens, we're in update mode.
But, I don't think very many of us are going to be happy with the final score this time :(
They generally look quite good to me. And, this includes random competitive commercial SERPs I check.
Looksmart owns Wisenut. They may have renamed the crawler. What is the Wisenut brand worth? $96.84?
Here's a cute theory as to what's going on.
In order to get more spam reports, Google has very temporarily allowed sites that would seem to be spammy from an algo determination(but still could be okay if viewed by a human) to go to the top of the SERPS in the hope that people who were pushed down will report the spammy offenders. I imagine right now Google is getting ten times the number of spam reports that it ordinarily receives. I know my webmaster is writing them up as fast as he can.
The only problem with this theory is that I've heard so many people report in the past that their spam reports result in no action on the part of Google. But maybe Google has figured out a way to spider the e-mailed spam reports so that they can more efficiently handle them. No telling -- but one thing is for sure, and that is Google has just enlisted a bunch of people to their cause(i.e. - cut down on spammers).
And yes, we are hurting with the one site I'm involved with. Was doing fine until about 1pm eastern today(20 Nov) when we fell from #1 to #7 for our second biggest search term. Traffic is down about 25% as a result although sales $$ are still ontrack. The number of transactions though are down about 15%-20%. Still seeing a lot of flux and a lot of spam bubbling to the top for this important two word search phrase.
GuinnessGuy
