How may front pages did you lose?

Google kicks clean html front pages

[stinkfoot]

I lost 2 top ranking front pages
All other pages on the sites still getting a few hits
both still top ranked by msn
urls = keyword1 - keyword2 - keyword3 - keyword4

Anyone else with losses please post like to get an idea of simliarities

[nileshkurhade]

I know "-gobbledygook" means nothing, but how r the reulst older.

[Napoleon]

Lost some, but, how's this for a great algo:

I have a site well ranked for 'red green yellow'. Nice.

However, Google has kindly chopped all the sites covering 'red green', which has actually NOTHING AT ALL to do with 'red green yellow'. It leaves my site in the top 3 for that sub-phrase.

Well thanks for the extra traffic guys. Useless basically, especially for the searcher. I am now getting thousands of folks through the door looking for something I don't actually cover.

Obviously, I'll either add some sort of affiliate stuff there to cover it, or maybe approach a vendor in that space to sell advertising.

Either way, I'll make it a win somehow, but it does show how badly targeted Google is at present. I cannot believe this can go on for ever.

[lucky5]

I think one of the problems is incoming links from spam sites. The home pages from our two most popular sites (top ten for 3 years) disappeared even though their internal pages still show well in serps. The home pages have disappeared ONLY for their main keywords, not for secondary terms. In other words, the pages are still in the index but not being served for their main keywords.

By doing a search on our sites' titles as shown in ODP, I found tons of incoming links to these home pages using the exact ODP title as anchor text (which obviously contains our main keywords) from spam sites built soley to serve google adsense ads. The sites show only the google adsense box and then 10-15 links copied right out of the ODP directory (which are only there to add indexible text to an otherwise empty page).

I think Google is recognizing these incoming links as junk and assessing a penalty. The front pages on other sites we maintain that are built using the same optomization (totally clean, no tricks) but do not have these junk incoming links have maintained their top ten positions just fine.

One of the big problems that may be bringing down home pages of lots of very popular and clean sites is the big uptick in junk incoming links, an uncontrollable problem CREATED by google who have offered spammers a way to make money serving their PPC listings.

[nfinland]

To the question

"I was wondering if anyone feels as though I should go and change everything on my index page."

I wouldnīt. Wait and see, examine the sites in the top positions now, learn from them, read these posts here, maybe wait for the next update...

----

Maybe you wounīt get any help from my comments below, but here they are anyway:

I have sevaral sites in the same industry -> mobile entertainment, which is a very competitive area. My sites havenīt dropped from the index, they get roughly the same traffic and the top listing is still dominated by the same ones as before the update.

Hereīs some general comments:

The most competitive search strings in my industry is a keyword1 keyword2 combination = "manufacturer" + ringtones (nokia ringtones, motorola ringtones etc.) The top results for these searches are quite the same as before this update. Some changes can be seen.

The sites that are still in there use the optimizing rules we are familiar with: keywords in Title, H1 tags, keyword density 5-10 % etc. Most sites have 50-100+ backlinks from other sites (mainly from the same industry). A general overview also shows that most sites have "real" backlinks (no linktrade campains etc.). Backlinks usually have different anchor text also. Something I think I have noticed is that sites with not the exact keyword1 keyword2 combination rank better after this update.

Some changes can be seen - what are they:

- Some spammers disappeared
- Backlinks from Forums arenīt counted and sites that previously ranked good due to a big number of these kind links fell back.
- And then thereīs something I havenīt understood yet. There are some new sites that jumped from nowhere and if you examine them closer they arenīt really optimized at all and some of them have the keywords once in body and thatīs all.

I also noticed that on one of my sites were I used the old good optimization "trick" that always have given good results -> exact keyword in title, Hx tags, alt tags, bold, URL, anchor text in backlinks, etc. is nowhere to be found anymore on that keyword search. Well this optimization trick has been very easy to use and has been wide spread. I understand Google very well if they do not like this. Why would they allow only sites that have been optimized like this to rule the top listings. There are millions of good sites with relevant info that never show up in searches becouse the webmasters of these sites donīt do optimization. If Google could help people find these sites as well it would be a big step forward.

Could be that the Adwords theory has some truth, but I also think that optimization has become too easy and Itīs time to let other sites pop up in the toplistings as well (not only optimized sites). If we learn some simple optimization "rules" and use that as a marketing tool what would the search results then be - not higly relevant anyway. The search result would give us a listing on how good the webmaster is in optimizing and that has nothing to do with relevant search results or good content.

Ok, this is enough speculation and my favorite TV program has also started...

[Widestrides]

I think we can conclude the following:

There is no one theory for the new algo that holds true. For every theory, there are many examples that can disprove it.

And so far, I haven't heard of anyone who has made a change to their title, or <H1> tags, or keyword density, and found their site restored to the top of the listings.

And we may be a bit biased, but the more broad-matched results Google is now returning are not as relevant as they were before.

Conclusion: This has to be a mistake or a failed experiment that will be fixed soon. Google can't be that blind to these results, nor deaf to the complaints that must be pouring in.

Here are e-mail addresses from Google's Contact Us page:

Suggestions: [e-mail]
Praise and complaints: [e-mail]
Not satisfied with search results? [e-mail]
Report errors, bugs and broken links: [e-mail]
I have a question and/or need help using Google: [e-mail]

[Vince]

At the time of the big shake-up we not only lost our top key word positions but also our Google directory business listings. Just today our directory listings have reappeared. After reading what seems like a thousand conspiracy theories about what Google may or may not be doing we’ve decided to sit tight with them and focus our efforts on finding different ways to drive customers to our web stores.

Remember the old saying...Don’t put all your eggs in one basket or you will get burned during the hottest buying season of the year and will have to sell your nice house and sports car and your kids will have to attend public schools. (I updated the old saying for the 21st century)

[Nermin]

layer8 i agree with you of not having all eggs in one basket but 99% of my traffic comes from google and yahoo.

google did update i used to be #2 no i can't even find myself and guess what i am not on yahoo either.

it would be better if each search engine can have it's "own" database so that way if we have 100 search engines we can have 100 way of getting to number #1 or atleast spread around

it comes down to if you are good in google you are good in most of the search egnines

i am aware of PPC but by the time i am able to buy PPC my keywords skyrocket and i am not paying $16 a keyword

i would rather give that to google to keep me where i was before :) so google if you want mine $16 a keywrod please let me know :) and i will mail you check

nermin

[JoeyBall]

Does anyone have a vague idea when the homepages might return.

Do you think they are at a point of no return.

[Nermin]

from reading this post and what googleguy has to say i think that the way it is now is the way it's going to stay

he said that some people will like it and some people wont

why they did and how they calculated what to do is what bothers me since my page had no hidden text, links and pages that is #2, #3 and #4 do have that in their source code :(((

[allanp73]

I notice something really interesting today. One of my sites has been penalized for its company name. The company name is Virtually Widgets. The site was ranked #1 for itself since day one, but now only sites that link to it appear in the serps. The Widgets part of the business name is a money word. So it looks like Google is filtering not just certain keywords or phrases but also phrase which contain these keywords or phrases. Now people can't even find the business when they know it.
For my industry the serps are dominated by directories. It looks like in order to rank well or at all you must do the following:
1) mention the exact phrase only 1 or 2 times, but not more than this for top ranking.
2) have really high pr
3) possibly link to a site that has revelant content.
4) pay for a adwords

Google is no longer usage to find information. It pride itselfs that it has cleaned up the serps, but all I see are directories and link sites. It is very difficult to find products and or information on products. I use a search engine in order to avoid using a directory. I want my search results to get from point A to B as quickly as possible.
Google has lost sight of it's purpose.

[allanp73]

JoeyBall,

The index pages are still on Google. Actually, the Google filter's don't just affect index pages they affect all pages. If a page is deemed too optimized for a term it will not appear, it doesn't matter if it is your index page or one of your internal pages. The only way to find these pages is to look for the URL or for terms used on the pages which are not optimized and unique.

[skipfactor]

now only sites that link to it appear in the serps

Instead of making drastic changes, I'm working on becoming those sites. I think the days of big traffic from broad money words are over for the mom-&-pop. They need to rename AdWords 'MoneyWords'.

[Goanna1]

One of the big problems that may be bringing down home pages of lots of very popular and clean sites is the big uptick in junk incoming links, an uncontrollable problem CREATED by google who have offered spammers a way to make money serving their PPC listings.

Yes, I am having exactly the same problem. We are innocent victims caught in the middle. I cannot believe that they did not test their algo more thoroughly before they unleashed it to cause such havoc. I mean if sites that have only unsolicited links from sites like dmoz are getting zapped, what does it say about the competence of their engineers and the latest update.

Also, Why is it that sites with no SEO are zapped while sites that have set up their own links by log spam etc, are still at the top? How long will they continue to ignore this?

[Goanna1]

I think the days of big traffic from broad money words are over for the mom-&-pop. They need to rename AdWords 'MoneyWords'.

I can see some hard core cheaters with huge networks of sites still doing very well. This "filter" is producing results that are more like a random sniper attack than an effective algo.

[edited by: Goanna1 at 11:23 pm (utc) on Nov. 27, 2003]

[nippi]

> Widestrides

Of course not. This never works with google. if you have a temporary "penalty" for keyword stuffing expect it to last 30 days even if you change everything.

Florida penalises for (keyword1 keyword2) in phrase stuffing, even the most innocent of stuffing. It may be or toned back a lot of bit in 10 days, but my guess it will not go away.

If you reckon you've got keyword stuffing, unstuff.

[skipfactor]

>>huge networks of sites still doing very well

That was my point. My mom-&-pop approach was a bit archaic it seems. Should have listened-up around here a little sooner. :)

[Miop]

My front page is back at no.4 for 2 keyword + uk.
Noted - metal titles lke to match meta descriptions.
Stable sites seem to have this.
A page which has been no.1 for months dropped today...title/ description tags did not quite match. Have altered it to see.

[linear]

Results of my title change:

I changed my title from myname * kw1 kw2 to myname * a phrase containing neither kw in order to probe the title tag effect on my penalty placement.

The updated title is showing in the SERPs now, but I'm still penalized by 110 positions or so for the search kw1 kw2 vs. the search kw1 kw2 -asdfg.

My navbar has the phrase kw1 kw2 as a link to this page on every page of my site, and a hefty number of those pages show as backlinks in Google. I'm considering trying something like k<b></b>w1 k<b></b>w2 just to see what happens. Users would see exactly what they see now.

[vbjaeger]

We are back also at #750 from #4, but at least we are back in the index

[rrl]

I'll certainly follow this with interest and hopefully can fix what's going on, but I'm not going to kill myself over it. If Google wants to become a useless search engine, it's not worth figuring out. The more searches I do, the more astonished I am with the low quality of the serps.

[Iluvlabs]

If you are not high up for your keyword how do you find out where you are. For instance lets say you were number 6 for a keyword and now you manually check "lets say" 100 pages and you don't find your index page; is there a way that you can even see if your index page is indexed under a certain search term without manually checking every page?

[Widestrides]

Iluvlabs:

To see exactly how far you may have fallen, you can go to:
[google.com...] and enter your search term. Here you will only see titles, so it is easy to scour many more results at a glance.

First adjust your Google preferences at [google.com...] to display 50 or 100 results. Second, make sure you have visited your page recently so it will show up as a visited link, highlighted in a defferent color.

Then keep clicking until your different colored link appears. There you are - #757!

[TheDave]

[google.com...]

The 2 important parts to that:

ie - tells it to display in compact mode

&num=100 - tells it to display 100 results

edit - Widestrides beat me :P

[rrl]

Changing my title tag seems to have had some impact. What I've noticed is that the more the search phrase matches the title or text on a site exactly, the more likely it is to get filtered. If the search phrase matches words on the site or title tag, but those words are in a different order, it doesn't get filtered.

I'm off the radar on a search for KW1 KW2 KW3, but I'm back where i was if I do a search for KW3 KW2 KW1 and my title tag is KW1 KW2 KW3.

There also might be an issue with the sites that are in the serps themselves. The ones I see are all huge, but not necessarily that relevant. For example, a page on a directory now ranks high for a very competitive phrase, although it's only mentioned once in this huge directory and that particular page has no back links and only a few sentences of content. Has there been some major change in the weighting regarding size?

I have a site in a very competitive area that I added about 900 pages of content to recently. After this recent change, its positioning improved dramatically. Not sure if it would have improved pre-Apocalypse.

[Iluvlabs]

Thanks Widestrides and TheDave for the link; however my lack of results was quite depressing!

[Trawler]

If you subscribe to the theory that they are databasing certain phrases to catch overoptimised sites this would tend to support that the database is growing

I have two sites that have gone AWOL one yesterday, one today. Two diferent industry areas. Both held # 1 rankings for the past year.

1: "discount keyword" was number 1 for past 3 years

2: "discount keyword keyword" same thing.

Also lost a third site a few days before just like # 2 but different industry.

All sites had kewwords in title, meta, alt, no h1 or h2, and on page exact matches. About 10 backlinks to each site all with the keywords in anchor text.

I also read at another forum, can't remember which one that was, that as a test someone put up a (new) totaly de-optimised site (since florida) and did rank extremely well on google. Problem is, only in google, nowhere to be found on the other engines. Ink, alta, msn, ect.

From what I understand, this person is a white hat operator that is very very knowledagble.

Conclusion:

Optimise for google (under the new rules) narrowally and your are lost on the other engines.

Looks like duplicate sites (optimised differently) will be needed to rank well across the boards.

How foolish of gooogle! they are effectivally driving the top seos to go to move over to their competitors.

DUMB! In MHO

I also subscribe to the old school.

That if a user is asking for "green widgets" you better serve up green widgets or else your user will go elsewhere.

That's what I do.

It seems that the way things are now, google is giving them green round widgets, widgets that are green and round, lists of places to compare green widgets, but you have to look really hard to actually find a return that gives you really targeted "green widgets"

True story.

I used to own a deli in Houston, did a five hundred seat lunch (turned over 3 times = 1500 customers daily) 5 days a week.

Lost 250 K in 18 months. Why?

Being from the East, I knew exactly how to make a great Pastrimi sandwich. No one knew better than me. It was hard to find a great Pastrimi sandwhich in Houston at that time. All I had to do was teach my customers to appreciate the way we served it.

Problem was, my customers were from the south and they wanted it made their way. I refused to do that, and assured them they would like it my way, they just had to try it.

You know what? They tried it and then!

They voted with their feet, and I lost my wallet.

I was DUMB! IN MHO

[claus]

>> Optimise for google (under the new rules) narrowally and your are lost on the other engines.

Perspective: Other SE's are/were increasingly returning "good SERPS" - approaching Googlelike quality (a few have mentioned AV, i haven't tried that one recently, alltheweb is fine for me).

From that perspective it makes sense for Google to do something different from what it has done sofar. I'd like to repeat that Google is a Search Engine - it competes in the Search Engine market.

Just a comment - it doesn't really help anyone, i know.
/claus

[karembeu]

I'm seeing an even bigger drop today than from the initial update. We were down from #2 to #118 on our major term, now we are no-where.

I have also noticed that directory or listing sites linking TO US, are now listed well above our page on several other terms we use? **** is up with that. How can a link TO a page be more relevant than the page itself?

Google's aim may be noble, but this update has not served it's purpose IMO, it is making the results less relevant than ever. I personally will be switching to another engine myself if it doesn't change, but that doesn't help my business - as i'm sure the average searcher will not see the problem as quickly or readily, as they don't follow the SERPS like we do.

karembeu

[dazzlindonna]

example of how broad matching has messed the serps up for my term:

let's use water skiing as the example, although that is not my search term (not even close, but the phrase works well for what i am talking about).

my site used to place #1 for water skiing, and now places well below 1000. yet, it places #8 for the word water. now my site really doesn't have much at all to do with water, other than you ski on it. there are many more relevant sites that discuss water than mine. yet mine is extremely relevant to the phrase water skiing. (AGAIN, water skiing is just an example i am using - not the real subject matter, so dont go looking in the serps for this).

just seems like broad matching could really be NOT READY FOR PRIME TIME, and should be *rethunk* by the brainiacs at google.

[dazzlindonna]

I have also noticed that directory or listing sites linking TO US, are now listed well above our page on several other terms we use? **** is up with that. How can a link TO a page be more relevant than the page itself?

same problem for me. it is painful.