October 2002 Google Update

Official

[liamgt]

Definately getting different results on backward links for yahoo. www showing 657k and www2 and www3 showing 654k. Results for CNN are also different. Looks like the real deal.

Liam

[edited by: liamgt at 10:06 am (utc) on Oct. 31, 2002]

[qball0213]

Something different I have noticed, and it has already affected traffic, when I search for links to my site, none of my own links show up, while before they did. On previous updates, I'll have to agree with whoever said that it has always looked the same on the ww2 servers at the begginning and ending of the dance, so this will be one case where I hope it does change and pick up some of my internal links.

[quotations]

Several months ago google showed over 700 links into one of my sites. The next month, it showed 56 links in. The next month it showed 123, then 256 the next month and this month it has jumped up to almost 700 again. Is this something that goes on all the time? Do they flush the database and start over each month? Should I expect the backlinks to go down to 53 next month?

Another site used to have over 5800 links in because it was the focal point for non-profit web hosting in the state. Those links have not gone away but now google shows 174 links on www2 and 202 on www. Where did they go?

[rfgdxm1]

>I can try to clear things up about guestbooks a little. We don't currently penalize for guestbooks in our automatic scoring. It's something that a competitor could do to another company, so our automatic scoring doesn't use it.

So far, so good GG.

>Investigating a manual spam complaint involves looking at all the evidence, direct and indirect, that we can find. djgreg, I noticed that several months ago, your domain was near the top of the list in terms of numbers of guestbook signed. At that time, signing guestbooks was a less-discussed technique. That could have been a factor for your domain.

And, now that it has been more discussed, what is Google's policy about guestbook signings? Above you state that you don't apply automatic penalties for this because "It's something that a competitor could do to another company". OK, it isn't automatic, but what stops someone hiring a bored teenager to spend a weekend signing as many guestbooks as they can find with the competitors URL, and then in a couple months report this to Google in a spam complaint? Or just someone doing this to a site of run by someone they just personally hate for the old-fashioned reasons of spite, malice and revenge? There is still no way of knowing who signed the guestbooks, and for what reason. And, every reason to suspect that competitors with money on the line will try to sabotage their competition this way in the real world. Now that you've posted "could have been a factor for your domain" with regard to djgreg's, now that this is public knowledge I'd suspect there are gonna be a lot of attempts to sabotage sites by signing guestbooks.

[tigger]

Normally links don’t jump around like that so it does seem pretty usual although saying that a one of my sites has for the first month dropped about 100 links.

But for me that’s the least of my problems as one site which is still showing as a pr6 has lost all it's links which for the life of me I can't work out why

How can you work out if a site has any penalties against it? As I'm racking my brain to work out what I've done wrong

P.S it's not the site in my profile

[edited by: tigger at 6:14 am (utc) on Nov. 2, 2002]

[shelleycat]

But for me that’s the least of my problems as one site which is still showing as a pr6 has lost all it's links which for the life of me I can't work out why

I have exactly the same thing with a PR4 site. It's still showing PR4 and coming up where it should in the SERPS, so I'm assuming they'll come back at some stage, but it's still a little weird.

[tigger]

Yep, I've still got the rankings but I think you'll find that will be very temporary for both of us as I'm sure once the update settles your PR will vanish so will your results and your not alone

I've already taken a screen shot so that next week I can look at my gone PR6 :(

[shelleycat]

The first time that site was in the index (um, three months ago I think) the backlinks and PR didn't appear right til the end of the crawl although the site was in right from the start. Right now I'm just assuming they're recalculating or something (I added a bunch of new links this month) and they will reappear at the end of the dance. So I'm not worried. But then I don't make money from any of my sites and that's my secondary site as it is, so I'm not worried anyway :)

[rfgdxm1]

>Yep, I've still got the rankings but I think you'll find that will be very temporary for both of us as I'm sure once the update settles your PR will vanish so will your results and your not alone

Sorry to read that. :( I'll guess being a moderator here doesn't prevent Google from mysteriously dropping your site. One thing I have noticed seems to be a repeated pattern. Every update their seems to be a *lot* of people here who find their site dropped from the index for one month. Even once happened to my site. Obviously with computers every now and then things will go kerplooey, even at Google. However, the frequency at which Google seems to "lose" sites is alarmingly high.

[tigger]

New sites this can be the case but once it's done the dance a few times it should show something my site was slowly increasing each month not by a massive amount first month it was just one or two, then 15 or so last month 54, this month nothing, unfortunately I do make money from my site so this is going to hit hard

[tigger]

>I'll guess being a moderator here doesn't prevent Google from mysteriously dropping your site

Guess not, this is the first time anything like this has every happened to me, a few years ago when I was new to SEO I had a site banned from AV but that was because I didn't really understand what I was doing hence I found WebmasterWorld and thanks to the help of many of the old timers learned a lot, that’s why I don't understand what I've done wrong, very frustrated

[Gregory]

<snip>
I do not understand why all of sudden my home page lost PR
and my inner pages got GREYED or PR0-ed.

[edited by: ciml at 3:24 pm (utc) on Nov. 2, 2002]
[edit reason] It's better to keep the discussion general. [/edit]

[excell]

The problem we are having is that during the update we say two things in the results

1) A domain that is no longer hosted anywhere on the web was indexed in google with the root index page of the hosting server with the missing inner pages picking up the main 404 errorpage

2) A domain that moved to another hosting company appeared with the title/description/URL of the old servers root.

I don't know the tech side of it but my partner posted the problem here:
[webmasterworld.com...]

This is taking us days to try to figure out what to do, I am totally paranoid that google will think we have duplicate domains or some sort of spam going on!

[edited by: ciml at 4:01 pm (utc) on Nov. 2, 2002]
[edit reason] It's best to keep it general. [/edit]

[jk3210]

tigger -

FWIW, two weeks ago one of my sites was sitting at #10 one day, then completely vanished from the entire index the next.

Strange

[tigger]

This is the worrying thing with google, although I'm a big fan of the search engine and in the past it's never done me wrong, if you do get a site penalized or dropped, you mite as well start again with new domain and try not to make the same mistake again, but it’s little difficult when you don’t have a clue what you’ve done wrong

[Helpmebe1]

tigger..chill... I am in the same boat.. actually a bunch of us are.. all links are gone.. I can reassure you I just do not spam, link farms..none of that stuff... no reason for yahoo, dmoz and other directory and strong links to vanish.. its just an error and I am sure they will be back by the end of the dance... (umm worrying, biting nails, pulling hair out) yeah..theyll be back! :)

[tigger]

Yeah that’s what I've been telling myself, but I've now gone past the nails and at this rate if I carry on I'll have no fingers to code anyway :) hahaha first time I've laughed in a good few days.

Can google be in-sighted in divorced proceedings you would be believe some of the arguments this update has caused mind you suppose that one good reason not to work with your wife :(

[edited by: tigger at 7:10 am (utc) on Nov. 2, 2002]

[Napoleon]

There's definitely some sort of technical glitch Excell.

>> 2) A domain that moved to another hosting company appeared with the title/description/URL of the old servers root. <<

There was a server crash at the hosting company for a couple of our sites. The sites were down for a day whlist they moved them to a different server.

The result is that Google now shows the hosting companies error message in its returns. Everything else is fine: clicking on the return takes you to the right site, the site itself is perfectly OK, etc.

Also, the site has been visited many times by Google since then

Has something changed in this area GG?

[Helpmebe1]

haa! Well keep those fingers so you can update after being dropped. (just kidding) and no no no... do not work with the spouse.. just at nights this causes enough grief.. as I said in another post.. I may be sleeping outside this weekend... I couldnt imagine being around your other half 24 hours a day.. yikes!

Dont worry about the links though.. I really think they will appear.. their are to many of us legitimate that are missing our links... theirs a glitch... they have to work it out.. ohh by the way.. lets see.. i have a list of people flying into googleplex if they dont.. you may want to join us :)

[tigger]

Mmmmm I'll give it a few more days before I hit the panic button too hard, although it's already been jumped on quite a few times.

I do hope it is a glitch for all of us that appear to be penalized, but I have my doubts.

It looks like I'm not going to be the only one in the dog house this weekend, mind you my problems are I deal with all the marketing & SEOing for us and our clients and the site that has been banned took my wife 2 mths to build, Oooouch I'm so in the xxxx :(

[shelleycat]

I've had a quick look at the cache for my site which is missing backlinks, and I'm 90% sure it has been updated. I haven't updated that site much this month but the page showing is the last one I added before it was deepcrawled, it's from around the time of the last update and I'm pretty sure it wasn't in the cache last month (it's that last bit that only makes me 90% sure, I didn't check before). Since Google has updated the cache for my page in this update, it would be odd to not update the backlinks too and really odd to drop the site altogether. And I *know* it's not a penalty, that site is just too small and boring for that (it's squeaky clean and actually rather un-optimised).

All of which helps lend weight to the glitch theory.

This site is visited by the freshbot fairly often, more when I was updating daily. My other site wasn't in the index last month (I moved it at the wrong time) but it was still being freshed every couple of days. So while I didn't get a stable day to day listing, I was there for about half the time (in for a day, out for a day etc) and got surges of traffic every time I was in. This meant I got about half the Google traffic that I had previously. So if this no-back-link-site gets dropped, instead of losing a whole months of traffic, with the fresh listings I'll probably (hopefully) only lose half. I know this still sucks but it's better than losing the lot.

[austtr]

tigger>>> it’s little difficult when you don’t have a clue what you’ve done wrong <<<

There will be many of us who feel the same way. I got taken out at the kness in the late Sept. update. Still in oblivion after the latest one.

The chancers and disposable domain merchants will probably know what they were up to and have no grounds to feel upset... its the genuine sites that hit an undocumented, unpublished, unknown trap/filter that feel it the most.

I've been raking over these forums for weeks looking for some clue. The bottom line is that I am still none the wiser after doing that.... but if I have to guess, and I am now having to do that, I suspect a lot of the problems have to do with how links are being used.

Google says "we love links, go forth and multiply your links, show me the links!" so that is exactly what we do. Then we hear that it in fact helps to have a PhD in links management. If your inbounds exceed your outbounds and your hubs and authoritities are not in convergence, and your links are back to a site with a PR greater than yours by a factor of 1.0521, and the anchor text of the incoming link is not on topic....... well then sunshine, you must be building a link farm, and that is very naughty! :)

OK, so I exaggerate a little but if this topic was better underderstood and explained UNIFORMLY in simple terms, these forums would not be the final resting place for thousands of manhours that could have been more profitably used doing something productive.... like work maybe?

[msebian]

@ Suterday 10/2 i can´t see from Germany the Update is finish.
How long is the dumny Danc working?

[jimmykav]

I would like to add my 2 cents on the Guestbook thing.

I can understand commercial sites being annoyed at the abuse of guestbook entries.

However, for small family orientated sites like mine guestbooks are a huge asset. They allow people to leave an imprint and say hello to everyone else.

I regularly check my guestbook for spamming or offensive messages. So far I have not found a single instance of absue but if I do they will be removed immediately.

If google were to penalize this feature in future I imagine that it would hurt my site badly. People who search for my family name in google would probably not find my site anymore.

That would google badly because then its results would not be truly relevant.

[edited by: ciml at 3:50 pm (utc) on Nov. 2, 2002]
[edit reason] It's better to keep it general. [/edit]

[Dante_Maure]

Several months ago google showed over 700 links into one of my sites. The next month, it showed 56 links in. The next month it showed 123, then 256 the next month and this month it has jumped up to almost 700 again.

Another site used to have over 5800 links in because it was the focal point for non-profit web hosting in the state. Those links have not gone away but now google shows 174 links on www2 and 202 on www. Where did they go?

Has the PR for your site dropped as well?

Not long ago Google stopped displaying sites with less than a PR of 4 in their link: results. They still count towards a site's total PR though.

If your own PR hasn't declined then it is quite likely that the "missing" links are from PR 1-3 pages and not being displayed.

I have exactly the same thing with a PR4 site. It's still showing PR4 and coming up where it should in the SERPS, so I'm assuming they'll come back at some stage, but it's still a little weird.

Shelley, since your site is only a PR4 it's likely that the majority of your inbound links are of lower PR and therefore are not being displayed using the link: search. If this is the case, they won't "come back" using that search tool... but they never actually went away as far as their value is concerned.

[djgreg]

As I mentioned above it is right that I have signed many many guestbook's with the site in my profile. But I wasn't aware of that I was one of the big spammers on google's black list. Did it because everybody did it. And I didn't do it because of any ranking problems , only because of getting PR. As you can see my site is non commercial , do not selling any products or something like this. I think it would be enough to take away the PR that the guestbooks give to a site and not give a big penalty on it.

Last year I linked to some adult websites, but as I established the link this sites weren't PR0. It can't be that only because I established a link and did not watch the site i link to every month whether it has a penalty or not my site gets a penalty.

[tigger]

GB's are not an issue I've seen one site thats ranking very well in google with over 1500 gb's within the backward links and no it's not mine, I don't have that much time

[Rick_M]

djgreg,

Are you sure some of those commercial adult sites you were linking to weren't your own sites?

Additionally, while you said that your current profile site is not adult, in last month's cache there is a term that I believe is adult.

Regarding pages with no backlinks showing - I know that for some sites, google appears to block the backlinks from showing - I'm not sure why or how this happens, but it didn't appear to change the pagerank for those few sites where I've seen it. Then again, maybe it is a bad sign :(

[djgreg]

Uh Oh Ahrg ,
well then,
I'm really sad :(
In this business you do not have a chance to appear in the first 100 results without using the tricks the others use, but if you use this tricks you are given a penalty. Difficult situation. Of course some of my competitors also got a penalty but there are thousands of sites which are also using tricks and excessive crosslinking but are clever enough to hide it or had luck this time :(
No chance to get back in the business.

[ikbenhet1]

Dante maury, one of my pr7 baclinks has gone too.
This got nothing to do with the pr of the backlinks, for them not to show up. wish that were true. then i would have no worries.

i'm hoping someone will explain, here sometime soon.

[DaveN]

one thing I am seeing is the massive increase of sites in the SERP's.

example one

keyword phase #2 out 358,000 now #4 ot of 682,000

seems a an awfully large increase any one less seeing this.

DaveN