Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
In my case mycompanyname is a single word, which I invented. The only references to it online are links to my site. For the last couple years, when I search for mycompanyname, I was always #1, and then all the folks who link to me are refenced below.
Since Allegra, mycompanyname.com is not in the SERPs at all for a search on mycompanyname. I also don't appear in searches on directory.google.com, although you can SEE mycompanyname.com listed in the directory! What on earth!
Some facts:
- My PR recently went from 6 to 3 as of Allegra.
- for the last month I had a 301 redirect on / to route it to /cityname/
- if I search: mycompanyname site:mycompanyname.com I get a couple hundred hits, which is right
- if I search: allinurl:mycompanyname I see something really weird: first SERP is someone that links to me, 2nd SERP is blank (yes, blank - there's a 1 inch space!), then I get a couple more SERPs, then my /cityname page appears
Something is really weird here....
Comments anyone else?
I'm afraid you're right. Google does these major changes in 3 or 6 month intervals. To google this may not be a bug, it might working just as they hoped it would. So what 10k or so sites are hurt?
of course, I woudl love to be proven wrong. Google does change things around the 2nd -3rd of each month too so let's hope.
I used to get referals from Google, but not anymore unless the search is in quotes. The site is a PR4, although the changes to the directory indicate (by my position), makes me believe I will go to a PR5 in April.
I currently get 3 times more search traffic from ASK than Google and they have only a couple of my pages in their index.
Yesterday, I was #211 for my own site's name and that page was marked supplemental. Remarkably, I just checked and I am #23 in Google.com - Yahoo!
Opps sorry, wrong forum.
walkman: Please cleanse your mind of these impure thoughts. Just because the internet is running slow and your Postman comes late doesn't give you the right to talk dirty in a public forum! :)
Anyhow, although I'm not one of the smart guys alluded to above, I think maybe 2 weeks max before these issues are basically resolved. We'll know when Allegra is finished by looking at the bottom of Google's page:
©2005 Google - Searching 8,058,044,652 web pages
"The best part was that the sites came back with first-page rankings, and they're still holding those rankings today."
By the way - what I did was get rid of all possible duplicate content (url-only pages) and all supplemental pages from google index.
Don't go getting too optimistic on my part. (Shades of Clint Eastwood's "Outlaw Josey Wales" where Chief Dan George says, "I notice when you get to disliking someone, they don't stick around long, neither").
Anyway, when those sites disappeared, I was sweating like crazy. Not because it was costing me money, but because I was trying to build credentials. Hard to sell a client on credentials when your sites can't be found.
Those select DC's are showing my site on the first page for search results that were previously #495 or worse. There's obviously something going on.
For many years I traded commodities on a very conservative account balance. One thing I learned to be true about commodities can be applied to nearly every aspect of life: when circumstances (market values, personal lives, search engines, etc) reach a point where things are whip-sawing around, there's a big change coming.
It could be the sign of a bottom , or the sign of a top. But it's definitely the sign of oncoming change.
In terms of SEO, I'm as green as they come here. But, as I've said, I've been whip-sawed before by Google, and had my sites come back from the black hole to the first page.
Yes, things are definitely improving - here are some observations:
I didn't notice Allega until Feb 6, then a few days later all was well again, and then after the 10th, everything was just all over the place, never got lost, was just tossed way down on some DCs some of the time; usually correlated in one case with a pseudo-directory Fraudsite.org that has pages that to a simplistic algo/filter could look more 'real' than Realsite.com. I say simplistic because it seems that part of what has gone wrong is some filter that tries to make a duplicate content decision based on Title and meta/desc/keywords and/or H1 headers depending on what pages do or do not have to compare. From that simplistic perspective, Fraudsite can look more 'real' than Realsite. Interior pages seem to be subject to the same kind of simplistic filter, as if actual page Content doesn't matter for this particular filter. (?!)
I am most curious about those sites that seem totally immune to Allegra, stuff that has hardly moved in the SERPs. I seem to see two disjoint categories:
A) PR5 or higher with thousands of interlinked pages and thousands of IBLs, some to interior pages.
B) Small sites, sometimes just a single page with Titles like FAQs or LINKS or XXX YYY Resume or Resume of XXX YYY. These are sites with few or (usually) no directory listings.
In both cases, these types of sites seem unmoved by the Allegra filters/algo. :)
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dickbaker: I've been optimistic about the eventual Allegra outcome since early Feb - pessimism accomplishes nothing. But, I never thought that things would get so screwed up for so many 'whitehat' folks for such a long period of time. It'll be worth it if the scum/spam/scrapers/frauds/crooks are dealt a serious blow by Google as seems to be the case on some of my routine searches. :)
as far as changes: I see them on some DCs, but it's just for the domain_name or domain_name.com keywords. No other keyword ranks anywhere near pre-allegra and no referrals yet from Google. Not sure what to make of this.
Also in the last few days a site that appears to be pagejacking my site has been (on and off) appearing in the SERPS. Interestingly I had searched extensively for any pages that might be pagejacking me, but this site never showed up in any searches.
If it is a case of pagejacking, then it appears to be relatively easy to do and easy to hide.
Google, please do something about this quickly!
[thought]You know, if someone was to post details of how to do this and then do it to a high profile site, then Google's resources may become a little more focused.[/thought]
Those 25 datacenters also give me first-page ranking for the keyphrases I want.
This is a definite improvement over just a couple of weeks ago.
My traffic is also coming back. Pre-Allegra, I was getting 1500 to 1700 visitors a day. After the site disappeared, that dropped to about 1300 a day. Yesterday the site saw over 2,000 visitors. My goal for the site was to have 100,000 visitors a month by this time. If the other datacenters follow suit, I'll be hitting that goal.
Fingers and toes are still crossed.
In the last few days I have seen the "larger" index at www.google.com for a few minutes at a time. I don't see any BL change for sites that I look at; and I rarely check PR so I can't comment on any changes there.
looking pretty good but I haven't checked the logs yet and refuse too :), hoping I get surprised monday or so. Maybe I'm in all DCs that don't matter. The search is just for "mydomainname", that's all. Didn't try other keywords yet
walkman: Good grief! Now you're getting optimistic too. Please exercise restraint, else you will soon be sending flowers to Larry and Sergey and proclaiming yourself the "Michael Jordan of SEO" ;) :))
Jordan actually won and did very good ;)
I also got a nice link from the Internet Public Library on Friday and two more .edu sites last week.
Let's see now, everyone thinks my site is pretty good but... Google. I got my most competitive search last week from Google in quite some time. As I remember, it was around 5,000 competing on a keyphrase That was in quotes of course because those are the only ones I get from Google.
Oh well, maybe next month. In the meanwhile I keep on researching and writing.
My client, who owns the site, is starting the process of suing Excite USA for triple damages for copyright violation. I will let you know how that plays out. They are just starting the process now.
Thanks in advance!
Only things I have done:
Added a 301 redirect from the non www version of my site to the www.version.
I got a couple of scrapers knocked out of Google.
Added content, content, content.
Does any of this have anything to do with it.... who knows?
I got a couple of scrapers knocked out of Google.
Good for you - and everybody else - except the scrapers of course. It would be a good thing if just 1% of the effort expended in the various 302 threads was 're-directed' to identifying scraper / fake directory sites** and link farms and filing a Google Spam report. In my limited experience with these Spam reports, Google DOES act and whacks these types of offenders if you file a factual report that clearly identifies the offender and how they violate Google guidelines, as long as the report is submitted without hyperbole or BS or self-interest. These types of sites - often 10s of thousands of pages or larger - are a much more serious problem for Google than "hidden text" etc.
A separate, but related issue: The particular type of directory that is best described as "ODP clone" continues to be whacked by the Allegra update. I am seeing sites where 90%+ of the ODP clones linked to the sites have been relegated to "supplemental" status, and I suspect they will stay in that purgatory. There are, no doubt, WebmasterWorld members with these types of directories being affected by this. This may also have a detrimental PR effect on some sites being linked to by these directories since whatever PR that may have been passed from the clones is now probably nil.
A Question for anybody out there: Recently, I seem to be seeing folks in various threads noting that their PR5 or PR6 page (and one PR7) is "lost". This seems to be mainly a late Feb - March phenomenon, whereas PR4 and less were often hit much sooner. Is this true - is it possible that in some sense, Allegra in "moving up the PR ladder"? :)
**some of whom are 302 / meta refresh offenders anyway :)
I have 4 PR5 sites that started to sink in the middle of January, just before Allegra. They continued to sink into oblivion while Allegra was fluctuating and finally they lost their title and descriptions. They are in the supplemental index and have not been spidered in over 4 weeks.
My site was hit on December 16th with this strange phenomenon. My site is PR6 and remained PR6.
As of today, my site is back in most datacenters for it's name but keeps bouncing in and out of a few datacenters. So it is not over yet. In the datacenters where I am now coming up for my company name, I no longer see those spammy sites that are 302 linking to me coming up before my site. I can only hold my breath and cross my fingers that this will hold.
One other thing worth mentioning, this seemed to have happened in August for just a couple of days. At least, the traffic drop was the same but I did't investigate it further as traffic returned.
We got knocked down in the serps for our unique name - Feb 3. We lost perhaps 90% of our Google traffic. Throughout Feb, MSN and Yahoo far surpassed Google in terms of finding our good results for end users. Prior to Feb, MSN and Yahoo were insignificant compared to Google.
Google churned throughout Feb and we started to come back. In early March, I found that we were always #1 or worst case #2 for our unique name.
Well, I just checked and it looks like Feb 3 results all over again. Can't find our site and all the scumscraper results are back in force.
Very strange. I thought Google had fixed its problems. Sadly, they seem as messed up as ever. If you submitted Google as your final project for a college class, you'd get an F grade for search results if I were the professor. They are completely dysfunctional for certain searches and nobody seems to notice or care.
Now it has fallen off the map again. The top result on some DCs is my post I made on Friday to the public ODP forum! (The site is still waiting to be reviewed after 7 months...)
Did you recover slightly and now you can't find your site again?
Is your site once again buried below a bunch of sites that mention or link to your site?
Just curious how many this happened to...
Following Allegra I dropped to 200+ and the page showed as supplemental. I monitor this daily now and I jumpt anywhere from around #45 to #225.
Since Google traffic is down for so many sites, I wonder if overall Google searches are down as well. I know lots of people are going to other SEs to check their results too, where before they'd just check Google and be done with it.
Any statistics on searches that are successfully completed? Probably a difficult statistic to measure, if it exists. I do think it would be interesting to see how many people no longer use Google exclusively, but check other SEs to make sure they aren't missing anything. Judging by my site alone, I know there are hundreds of good content pages that people can't find in Google right now for their search terms, and they're all at #1 or #2 everywhere else. These pages have no ads, no spammy techniques, etc., on them, so there's no reason for them to be buried under a bunch of other pages that all MENTION MY PAGES!
Seems every day that goes by Google exposes its poor SERPs to people, who can't find what they want and they go elsewhere. This surely can't last much longer! I noticed on a mailing list I'm on someone was looking for a particular page on my site, but couldn't find it in Google, and before I could respond 3 other people gave them the URL for it, noting that Google isn't a good search engine any longer.
Now these people aren't webmasters, so it would seem the level of awareness of this issue is rising. How long can Google stay on top with comments like these?
Search Engines that list us in there SERBS
1 - 10 of 630,000 Results for widget employment -alltheweb
1-10 results out of 137,300 for widget employment -web.ask
Web results for "widget employment " (1 - 20 of 51)-dogpile
Results 1 to 10 of about 35,653,313 for widget employment -gigablast
widget employment 72 unique top-ten pages selected from at least 133,000,000 matching results -Ixquick
Search Results 1-15 of 47 for widget employment - mamma
1-10 of 187,356 containing widget employment (0.09 seconds)search.-msn
Results 1 - 10 of about 680,000 for widget employment - 0.10 sec -yahoo
We have also a blog site that we launched in September 2004 widget blog 1350-2575 links depending what data center is displaying the SERBS that contains the word (widget) and it is also not listed in google SERBS any more, but listed in all other search engines.
