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It seems that a major google update is under way. I just checked www.google.com with the normal set of keywords that I generally use to monitor any changes and found what I believe is a major update. Now its back to original results. Its kinda on and off.
One of my site had a 50% increase in the number of pages crawled.
I hadn't much chance to check out whether the update spells good news or not, so lets keep our fingers crossed.
<Imaster adds>
The changes are visible on 216.239.39.104
[edited by: ciml at 2:15 pm (utc) on Dec. 16, 2004]
[edit reason] Addition [/edit]
I'm still confused as to what the filter is supposed to show me, but it is obviously doing something pretty significant, if my site goes from virtually nowhere to the first page.
Can someone explain again, what it is the filter does, and why my site suddenly appears once the filter is added?
sometimes this appears in the google serps:
In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 2 already displayed.
If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.
where "repeat the search with the omitted results included" is a link which shows the exact same query just with the &filter=0 added, which means: duplicate filter should be turned off.
Could it be caused by the hijackers and 302 redirects? Causing our pages to get a duplicate content penalty and losing our rankings?
Then using the filter=0 causes the page to rank where it's supposed to because it's now showing all duplicate pages also.
This seems like it would be an easy thing to fix on google's part. But it's been happening for at least a year now.
I do not know. I was only faced with this problem for the last few days. Now I have spent all night writing complaints to site owners, registrars (due to fake whois), hosts (copyright violation) and google, and I hope this will help me. The amount of duplication of my site amazed me big time!
Google shows their URL but my page is cached. Yet my page is filterd for dupe content and not theirs?
Come on GoogleGuy! Can't you do something about this? Do you even care? Where are you? This thread has been going for months and others just like it with similar problems caused by the same thing.
I just sat back for a few (12) months knowing that Google would fix this problem because they used to be on top of everything and things got done right. It's not that way anymore.
Why GoogleGuy, can adsense waste money sending me a Flashy light radio in the mail yet you can't pay someone to fix this one small bug that allows click tracking scripts to cause our pages to get a duplicate penalty filter?
I don't need a flashy light radio. But I do need these hijackers and 302 redirect dupe content filters to be fixed so I can get on with my life.
I know you don't owe us webmasters anything but most of us supported you when you were nothing. The reason we supported you was because you were the best. And we still think you are the best.
But when we try to help you by letting you know about something wrong with your results. You just ignore us? For over a year?
Please GoogleGuy, At least let us know there is someone working on this so we can all sleep better at night. There are some webmasters that have went completely broke because suddenly their $ completely went away.
You single handedly feed and house millions of people because of your search engine and many people depend on you to pay their bills.
It was the webmasters that partially helped build google to what it is today. So please listen to us.
For some site crosslinking could be the problem but
I also have sites with less crosslinks and more
internal links and same problem there.
But the odd thing I have newer sites which are 100%
by the book, have pr4 or more and nearly outgoing
links but also 70% less traffic which is a puzzle
to me.
What I learned during the last days is this:
- Sites heavily hit were sites that had a top menu
bar with keywords leading to external sites with
words like webmaster, travel, webhosting to direct
my visitor to specific portals I have on this
- when I check Google for example for:
business+Ukraine
I see clean links in first results, after
switching off the filter with &filter=0
I see many subpages listed in first results
so google is using the filter to remove subpages
with small content from its results.
Also my site templates often had a width column
on the left for content and right column for
adsense ads and menu options/external links.
For revenue reasons I decided to switch colums
but now I think I am being punished for that as
first html content of the content looks duplicate
as navigation links/ads/links are now spidered before
the real content.
I hope my info is useful and all feedback is welcome.
My biggest question is now this. Can I better create
new portals then changing the old portals? What
happens if I update an old portal to the new rules.
Will Google now longer punish it after next google
dance or can this take ages to recover.
It is not a problem making new portals by the book
but would take quite some time to build up pagerank.
So reformatting old sites would be easier as they
already have pagerank.
Ron, the Netherlands
But results 1 and 3 show the metatag keywords in
the description of the link and are the same.
When filter is switched on you see only 1 page of
3 survived of this domain.
Ron
1. for duplicate content age of the site rules
2. new site gets into google and gets a decent ranking thanks to some good new backlinks
3. site gets picked up by the duplicators into fake directories, redirecting (302) outlinks etc. hosted on a legimate older domain or a expired high pr domain
4. google notices that there is some duplication, decides to keep the older copy
5. new site with good anchortext (seo backlinks) is hidden/punished by the filter, therefore is not ranking well allthough it had the potential
6. old copy does not have the good anchortext (seo backlinks), therefore it is not ranking well, either
i dont believe in this theorie, actually, but it technically would make sense and it is not a conspiracy theory
1. this kills the sandbox theory
2. this kills the theory that google seperates money terms
the only thing left would be google thinks of the older domain as the original and filters the new site, and as many spammers use old pr domains they rule over the new sites but do not have enough good blacklinks to show up
Is this a hijack? when I click on the link which
was causing this cache I get a database error so
it looks like a dynamic generate html page by
somekind of script.
Any suggestions?
Ron
this kills the sandbox theory
By introducing the sandbox Google thought that some of the blog links will disappear, deleted b webmasters and PR links will not pay off. It’s a smart way to fight spam - at the beginning
"3. almost no sites are released from the sandbox (because there is no sandbox)"
The sandbox does exist. I saw this example someware in a forum but its very good. Couple of months ago Gwen Stefani from No Doubt launched gwenstefani.com. I am sure that the site have tons of quality links and original content. The site is in flash but this is no reason not to rank even for gwen stefani in Google. The site its new less then 3 or 4 month so Google sandboxed it.
It’s a bad thing, Google needs to drop the sand box. They could fight spam by banning with human editors a couple of spam sites and by placing no relevance on forum and blog links.
Hey worker, same here! Once i stick the &filter=0 at the end i'm #1 for my title, just like it always was. Without it #15. This search modifier must be suppressing a lot of things and one of them is what causes our sites to loose ranking. Would be interesting to here opinions of some senior member thought...
This is the nice thing about this forum, this helped me to figure out why my domain is ranked in the 80s for its own name.
As far as the sandbox is concerned, I do not think we will ever hear from Googleguy on that one. If you read some of the analysis of Hilltop, what the new websites are experiencing makes sense. Since Hilltop is likely part of the search algo, I think it would be considered a trade secret.
There are no "money terms" only searches that do not qualify as having associated expert documents. This bypasses the Hilltop algo and allows new sites to rank on less popular keyphrases.
The on page factors that worked in the past are only part of the picture now. If you've had success before, the rules have changed.
Link building is even more important than ever, it is just that a portion of the incoming links need to come from authority sites.
tomasz, that would kill the sandbox theory because, even worse, the new site would be knocked out by the dup. filter as soon as the hijackers/sitecopiers would start taking action with older sites.
Kangol, i see your point, that is what i think would actually be great, as one could be sure that the site will grow. i am in adult and it is almost impossible to beat the authorities, which makes actually sense. however, i think the gwen stefani example is not very evident for this as the site is really crap from the ses point of view.
dutchboy, for sure excite.co.jp has a copy of your site like it has a copy of all my sites, this excite.co.jp issue is addressed somewhere in another thread. Look at:
[google.com...]
luckily, excite.co.jp is considered the copy, at least what according to:
[google.com...]
my problem is that for many of my sites excite.co.jp is considered the original document.
www.featherish.net probably stole your site as well, I am not sure if it was hijacked or if it was phisically copied.
some of my sites are 100 fold copied and even when i search for their domain name "+domain.com" i cannot locate it into the top 100 althought it is a fantasy name and all other sites are only misspellings. however, when i search without the dup filter &filter=0 the site with all pages are #1++ and then the misspellings show up. the situation is so #*$!ed up that when i mention "domain.com" on a very subpage of one of my other sites it is top5 within 2 days. at least for my observations that dup filter is going crazy.
If you check this thread and other forums, you'll find plenty like me (with "clean" sites - at least in my case) who don't know why they've seen a sudden drop in their positions in the serps.
Here's a wild conspiracy speculation - the people spouting all these wild theories are plants by Google to precisely hide the capacity issue.
We should all accept that Google has an index capacity problem, talk in one loud persistent voice about this so that Google will be forced to acknowledge and/or fix the problem! This will never happen if we keep coming up with wilder and wilder theories.
"filter=0" means "filter=off" because "0" is "off" and "1" is "on"
I can see more search reults if I add "filter=0" which means that I turn the filter "OFF" and less results if I do not add "filter=0" which means that the filter is "ON".
And what does that mean exactly to us? Does that mean that the results are good when the filter is "ON" (I do not add "filter=0") or are the results good when we turn the filter off (I add the "filter=0")?
Thanks for any clarification!
Marval,
I was refering to the theories above attributing the sandbox to the dup filters. I hope you're not saing the same thing. there was no sandbox a year and a half ago. the dup filter exists, no doubt, to handle dup content precisely. nothing to do with the sandbox.
[216.239.59.104...]
31 Dec 1969!?
@$%#*$!?
i followed this dup problem since september and never cared much but now, a few days ago i found myself affected with 2 sites which of 100 clones exist and significant parts of my main pages are copied over 1000 documents. the problem is that there are a wild bunch people doing it, some copy the content physically, some use 302 redirec hijacking, and some are just fake pages and directories. and mostly they cannot be contacted due to false whois information.
