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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]
This happens once in a while, my advice is if you have a good, established site do not worry, do not change a thing in your site and most probably eventually you will be fine in few weeks.
What you're looking at is a super specific instance, what people are referring to when it comes to the sandbox is a very general event, that is easily visible to anyone. However, the duplicate content issues you've pointed out are yet another instance of what I am beginning to consider increasingly visible signs of stress and possible failure of the google algo.
Too many compromises have been made in the last year to enable the algo to function the way it should. As mentioned here and elsewhere, many of those compromises had non-engineering causes, such as income boost.
Why people consider this a wild 'theory' is beyond me. This is business 101, boost quarterly profits before IPO to maximize share price, keep them high to maintain price level. If this is hard to understand, business is obviously not something you should get into.
I also lost 50% of my traffic and can't figure out why. How can you tell if your site has been hijacked with meta-refresh or 302 redirect? I want to see if this is the reason.
good question... any ideas anyone?
bether2,
are you sure you are not affected with the dupe filter? your site can be as clean as you want but if others eg excite.co.jp serve your content as theirs then your content will all of a sudden look very duplicate to google.
Pretty sure. On the many keywords I've checked, adding &filter=0 to the google search URL does not change the position of my pages in the SERPs. If I was affected by a dup content filter, I would expect to see a difference when the filter is removed (ie, when adding &filter=0).
lizardx,
To me this is the wildest of the wild speculation, maybe it even borders on libel. This is accusing Google of crime - plain and simple stock manipulation! I do not believe google is a criminal. they are simply having problems with their se/algorithm - main index capacity problems.
I also lost 50% of my traffic and can't figure out why. How can you tell if your site has been hijacked with meta-refresh or 302 redirect? I want to see if this is the reason.
with 456 replies spanning 31 pages...this prolly is not just about a hijack
are you sure you are not affected with the dupe filter? your site can be as clean as you want but if others eg excite.co.jp serve your content as theirs then your content will all of a sudden look very duplicate to google.
Ok - I've noticed my whole site has recently been duplicated on excite.co.jp - are you saying my recent drop to 20% of my normal traffic could be because of this?
Who are these excite people and how can they get away with duplicating my site like they do?
with 456 replies spanning 31 pages...this prolly is not just about a hijack
with 459 replies regarding this subject, many of which cover the dupe content filtering, part of the problem may be due to this.
[webmasterworld.com...]
Theres some discussion there about the hijack problem and how it is related to dupe content filtering.
Im not saying it is the problem, but it MIGHT just be a combination of issues with G's algo.
With that being said, anyone know of a good way of detecting these dupe content hijacks?
[edited by: Shurik at 11:18 pm (utc) on Dec. 22, 2004]
On a related note, as has already been discussed here, G seems to be moving dupe pages into it's Supplemental Index, which it defines as follows:
"Supplemental results are triggered on a relatively small number of queries for which Google's main index does not provide many results. Because this index is still in testing..."
So clearly they haven't ironed out the Supplemental Index yet. Hopefully one of it's purposes will be to weed out hijackers.
I just discovered today that many sites duplicating our content (most notably affiliate links), have now been moved to the Supplemental Index.
(It should be listed once though.)
Nothing wrong with exchanging content. But if I were a SE, I would not be eager to show a bunch of pages in the SERP's that had 'exchanged content' with one and other...
Umm we exchange traffic for merchant's datafeeds. :)
By the way, those of you who have been complaining about traffic loss. Have you kept a log of your positions in the SERPS?
I've seen a fair number of results return to, or close to their original positions.
1) Look for an increased requirement for external links.
2) Look for a slight decline in the value of internal links.
3) Not sure where the knob has landed in terms of dupe content.
My theory is a lot of what we saw shuffling might be related to some internal infrastructure updated (rolling out some new databases or software). A number of items were broken and remain broken.
-- Cache date with -1
-- Huge changes in amount of pages returned etc
Sorry, don't think this is the "big one".
Umm we exchange traffic for merchant's datafeeds. :)
What's a datafeed? Oh yeah, one of those text blurbs that appears in identical form across hundreds if not thousands of Web sites...right? ;-)
1) Look for an increased requirement for external links.
2) Look for a slight decline in the value of internal links.
3) Not sure where the knob has landed in terms of dupe content.......Sorry, don't think this is the "big one".
My 2 cents: Sharpest summary of the current update that I've read so far. :-)
I think that dup content filters have been dialed up in numerous areas, but when dampening of internal links is involved it's hard to sort out what else is going on exactly. Dup filters do seem to have been dialed up though, beyond what would be accounted for by dampening of internal links.
2 words should really sum it up!
GIVE UP! :>~
If I enter the query "blue widgets" in google.com:
I get less results when I turn the filter "OFF" (add "&filter=0")
And I get more results when I turn the filter "ON" (leave the query as it is or add "&filter=1")
I think this is a little bit strange because a filter is filtering things out and does not display more results!?
Will google use this filter or will they turn it off soon or will they refine it?
In my oppinion I think the current results are really bad and I hope they will solve this soon.
You are rite... with the filter the results are not that good.
Could this be the cause of a dup filter for my site? The pages do appear twice. I hesitate to go to Google and remove the pages with the %20-%20 because it could just be something weird.
wellzy
For those of you that are having problems with Google why not just drop google and start showing your support for other search engines like Yahoo and the new MSN Search?
I think the key that you and so many other webmasters miss is that those of us who aren't screaming at the top of our lungs and crying about how google has killed our business never "gave up" showing "support" for other search engines. In fact, the webmaster who will always have the longevity in this business are the ones that NEVER focus on any single engine.
Frankly, I couldn't care less if google went out of business tomorrow, as there would quickly be an engine stepping in as the new "darling" of the public.
If you've done this as long as some of us, you would rememebr the heady days of altavista, excite, lycos, etc. etc., and realize that "this too shall pass".
Any thoughts on this sign from Google?
WebFusion! As soon as you wrote that I shot off to Webcrawler and there it still lives...& we're #1 for many of our terms:-))
Now to get out that Mosaic browser...!
Personally, my main concern right now is as a user, even though Google is still sending a decent amount of traffic (although much, much less than before) the results as a whole are completely useless from a user's point of view.
I feel lost - after two years of using Google to find stuff, which search engine am I going to use now it no longer works?
From my point of you - it looks like internal links are less important -- and there is: less credit for matching your exact keyword in the filename (keyword-widget.html) and the H1 and Title.
Minus that I have no idea what is going on
no single result of ecards website..
Curious. As a user, I almost never have any trouble finding what I am looking for on the first try. Either we do much different kinds of searches, or your searching strategy is less than optimal. (For example, not always using quotes when they obviously should be.)
Strip out the webmasters from the general searching population and 99% of them are not using quotes.
Always good to check and see the current month's most common searches: Google.com, yahoo.com, www.google.com, www.yahoo.com amazingly still top the charts for the most part, Britney/Briteney/Britany/etc. aside. Doh.
As for searching, I've gone multi-bookmark. When I want local and specific, Yahoo; when I want obscure or theoretical, Google. When I want interesting and related, AJ. And still I never always get what I want. :-(
I'm talking searching now, not other stuff. :-)
