Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Can anybody say why this update is called Alerga?
The correct name is "Allegra," which also happens to be the name of an allergy medication. "Allegra" was used because so many Webmasters and SEOs are allergic to the Sandbox.
Many Webmasters and SEOs are waiting for an update named "Levitra," which they hope will give them a lift in the rankings.
[edited by: walkman at 6:38 pm (utc) on Feb. 6, 2005]
Levitra.. perhaps Viagra to keep your site up?
Totally agree that things do not look to good with the update.
Its not a disaster, but I do see a ton of new sites at the top which probably should not be there just yet, ie they look a little underbaked.
Perhaps, if what everyone here says is true that Google have released a load of sites from the sandbox then maybe they still have to go through another stage to sort them properly into the results and give them their proper placings..
Well I can hope..
Some spam in the top but looking good.
Congratulations Google!
[edited by: zafile at 6:41 pm (utc) on Feb. 6, 2005]
Bring the heat MSN!
Congratulations Brett for holding at number one.
Google rocks!
Impressions still are low but there is still something goin on.
Sometime yesterday if vanished almost completely. If I do a search for the company name, I get all the sites that link to mine, but no pages from my site.
If I do a search for one of my keywords, a page that previously ranked about #25 is now #483.
I was wondering why traffic was off yesterday. Now I know the answer.
I'm just waiting for the update that ranks Amazon as #47 for the search 'Amazon'
To true.
At least there would be a legitamate reason for Amazon not being number one for 'Amazon' eg River, Warriors etc.
Cant really think of a reason why my company is not number one for its unique name.
Search for our company name, (in the domain and thousands on incoming links) and we are nowhere. Link pages that mention us scoring higher than we do.
Search for an obscure product we sell (only about 2 or 3 other suppliers in the world sell), keyword1, keyword2, keyword3 and our entry is on page 8. The entries before us mention the keywords but scattered about the pages. Quite a few links pages to us there aswell.
Seems quite rough, the popular searches seem good though. It looks like they've turned on heavy penalties to remove spam but its catching a lot of false positives.
also i thought G was doing rolling updates now? this reminds me of the old dance!
I am not sure what the keywords did this time (never watch them any more) - but referrals are up about 5% from google.
yeah that's great for you white hats with "quality content", but what about us affiliate scum? we need traffic too :)
3 of my sites have held steady during this update, but one flagship site, pure html, no affiliate links, thousands of backlinks including dmoz and yahoo directory listings, (even a few edu links) has been creamed.
Funny thing is this happened before on sep 23rd, I lost half my google traffic but mostly for the little keyword combos on sub pages, my main front page keywords stayed intact....Then before Christmas traffic began to flow better than before......6 weeks of traffic bliss until Allegra when 95 percent of google traffic on this site has now vanished.....
The sites now in the top 10 (I've moved from 1 - 35) I see now have very little front page text, under a hundred words of copy, very high keyword density, anchor text links in the menu bars or site maps lead to product pages with very little textual content....
After a few days research I've found that most of the sites currently in the top 10 have a couple hundred hundred backlinks at most, admittedly with a lot of variation in the anchor text, but most of these seem to be traded links with off topic web sites.
Can't complain really, it's google's engine and this site has had a good innings....but looking at the current top 10, I don't think this month's algo knob tweaking has made any improvement.
Perhaps the webmasters who have negligible front page text do better because they don't have hundreds of sites copying their text and content scraping....Which triggers duplicate content penalties.
A lot of spam websites have taken up the positions for a key phrase I'm optimizing for.
Theo
It seems that if there ever was a capacity problem, Google have solved the problem by removing old established sites and adding the sandboxed sites of whinging webmasters.
This is clearly an act of insanity.
it is a disaster but I don't blame people "whining" about not ranking for a year or so. I blame G, the $56 billion company, for not being able to handle this correctly. Why did the move the first update to all the databases and then replace with this disaster? Is this done or...?
Frankly, I've seen my oldest site (6+ years) stay rock-solid through every update from florida on (ok...it DID drop 1 spot on this one, but it still raniks in the top 10).
Further, my "newest" site which had been in the sandbox (or whatever caused it to rank on pages 100+ for all relevant key phrases) since late Feb/Early March has emerged in the top ten (actually over 60 #1 positions for various pages) with a vengeance as of about 36 hours ago.
Couple that with the telentless scraper sites that had been perying on my content like wolves being effectively zapped, and I have yet to see a negative to this update.
so if your happy or sad
happy don't gloat
sad don't give up quite yet
steve
Careful zafile - next month your site(s) may disappear. If you make any money this month then save most of it because it may not last.
Yep....make sure you save all your pennies, we all KNOW you can't pssibly make a living without google.
YAWN.
yeah that's great for you white hats with "quality content", but what about us affiliate scum? we need traffic too :)
Better start typing then.
Perhaps the webmasters who have negligible front page text do better because they don't have hundreds of sites copying their text and content scraping....Which triggers duplicate content penalties.
No....We have a "mostly" text front page, with only 9 images (including logo) and we've leapt up quite a bit in this update.
First, my site has basically disappeared from Google. It doesn't show on any of the searches that I usually check, nor does it show for a search on my company name.
My 3 1/2 year old site also has disappeared from Google. Large hobby/non-profit site with some separate affiliate pages. Traffic went way down after the mid-December update. Now, with this update, it's non-existent. I think I had 4 unique vistors from google yesterday (aside from google images).
Glad I'm still getting traffic from Yahoo and MSN. :)
