Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Hi, I haven't seen your site so I don't know. But after this hit, my SEO believes strongly that my 'excessive pop-unders' from Tribal Fusion have something to do with my adverse circumstance right now. Someone here also blamed it on the iframe which I also have a quite a few. I really used it for legit reason. Though, I'm not sure if Google shares my point of view.
Lots of things about this update that are, for now, reminiscent of Florida. Word forms, geo activity, new ratios re factor importance on homepages versus subs, etc.
Seems to be some tightening on criteria for subpages to rank, especially. Since Florida, subs could still do very well based largely on their content, though with some variability depending on the month.
But my early observation re Bourbon is that subpage hurdles rose more substantially in a few important ways than homepage hurdles.
OTOH, some (sitewide) hurdles seem to have been loosened a bit, causing a few of our problem sites to pop out of the freezer. All way too fuzzy to call yet.
chopin2256: You comments mirror thousands of similar posts after Florida hit. Sometimes too much reilance on a given keyphrase cause what you describe. Applies to everything from internal and IBL anchor text, to titles, to KW use. Just a thought.
my SEO believes strongly that my 'excessive pop-unders' from Tribal Fusion have something to do with my adverse circumstance right now.
Im not so sure I agree with that, only because of my situation: I have all handmade pages, no pop ups or pop unders. I dont have over excessive inbound links, but enough to outrank most music websites if the key phrase is semi competitive. I have a pretty unique music site dedicated for musicians so main idea of the website is unique. All content pages are html, and none are generated by programs. I never submitted to search engines, I naturally got the bots to come to my site. Site ranks very badly in Google regardless.
[edited by: chopin2256 at 5:34 am (utc) on May 22, 2005]
Sometimes too much reilance on a given keyphrase cause what you describe.
The keyphrase Chopin hardly gives me much traffic. I was just using this as an example. I get (got) most of my traffic from 6000 or more keyphrase combinations per month. Chopin was probably .1 percent of my traffic. All my keyphrase combinations are vanished from Google at least. Yahoo and MSN still contribute to my site but Google was better.
I don't exactly know what your situation is. But here's mine. I used to get like 11k from Google alone daily for like 3 years already. During Allegra, I lost like 80%. I thought it's just a glitch in the system. So I waited and wrote content as usual. A new content page linked by 85 different sources was ranked pretty high (top 5). During this update, it went MIA. Same goes for all my other content pages posted between Feb and May. Of course, the pages that were posted before Allegra dropped another 10 to 20 places. So I'm now in worse situation than ever.
A Google CEO presentation did imply Google has plans to penalize sites that use pop-unders excessively, because the SE doesn't want top sites to show pop-unders to its users.
That's my 2 cents.
Suffering until this ends or will start over.
John
Wait and see - I hope you make it out ok. Your links is what I hear is a target, Amazon.
I am ok, because I run mine through a ad server, but we are seeing others go down hard.
Understand that I am not referring to true content sites in this case.
Thanks for sharing your experience.
My site has about 18.9k pages counted by Google. I couldn't recall a single page that doesn't have a pop-under code. So, I have 18.9k pop codes. And Alexa and my SEO said I have too many pops. There are some of them that FireFox couldn't block.
Now that someone brought up iframe issue. I am now thinking about it.
Thanks.
Irock - where did you see this?
<added>What's a popup? Haven't seen one of those in years.;)
For my money word I'm feeling the heat of new competition jockying for positions 2 thru 10. The site I've long considered my main competitor has disappeared. That same site is the only one in our niche that was unaffected by the Florida debacle. Today, poof! Actually it comes and goes, but hasn't been above 30 for 2 days now. That site is spread across at least 3 different interlinked domains.
There's a sort of a pattern emerging in the top 10 sites. One, two & three respectively represent the U.S., New Zealand and U.K. The remaining sites appear to be thematic, based on religion and language. In other words, the top 10 offers something for everyone. Is anyone else seeing this sort of result?
I'm watching constant fluctuations in the number of results returned. They're bouncing between 1 1/2 million to 6 million. The daily average has been constant at about 2 1/2 million. Apparently a lot of pages are sitting in the supplemental index and are getting reviewed for inclusion in the main index.
Mostly what I see is that if I want to retain my hold on number one I need to keep doing what I've been doing for two years. Update page titles, descriptions, keywords, add more content, and do more validation. If I slack off, that fellow in the U.K. is gonna knock me off the pedastal.
With regards to PR I can say the one competitor that disappeared has always had 1 point more than anyone else in this niche. My own pages haven't changed. I did rename several pages about 2 weeks ago and I kind of hope that when this is all done the PR will come back to those pages. Google has already indexed the new page names.
I haven't checked backlinks in a few days, but last week I noticed that I had very few, probably a tenth of normal. Also, there were no related pages to any other page. I have a feeling that by mid-week those should all be back to normal too.
So, I guess the DCs are definitely still dancing. Don't give up hope if you've been crushed.
And, conversely, don't go out and buy that porsche just yet.. ;)
Blah. So much for nice clean handwritten no-spam content...
I've pulled AdSense off the site and I'll pull the Amazon links at the end of this quarter. I can't imagine either of those is a problem but it's all I can think of to try.
My adsense earnings have went up 500% in the last 3 days.
Well google, whatever you're doing, keep it coming!
Let's give it some time... I am positive there is more to be added into the index mix.
Yep me too. This update has probably been going on for a week at least. The major changes were only starting to get noticed on the 20th.
So plenty more still to be added to the mix? And with PR rolling back and forwards then who knows where it will settle.
[64.233.183.104...]
[64.233.183.99...]
However serps of those two are much different from the rest of the DCs I looked at (as far as my keyphrases are concerned).
#1 A site that is optimized for "free widget plans" but offers nothing but a widget plan software.
#2 A site that used to rank 5 notches lower, perhaps because it was in "frames"
#3 A very poor, very short list of links with horrible descriptions.
#4 A magazine about "widget plans."
#5 A spammy list of links to "free widget plans" stuffed with keywords, popunders and affiliate links.
#6 A custom widget store. No widget plans, free or otherwise.
#6 A custom widget store. Sells a few widget plans.
#8 A page with half a dozen free widget plans.
#9 A painfully short list of "free widget plan" links that hasn't been updated in ages.
#10 A store that mercifully only offers a few "free widget plan" that are simply godawful.
My site that offers 450, outstanding original widget plans with W-A-A-A-A-Y more inbound links than any of the above clowns... #145.
My guess is if your page looks like it's not about the keyword combination, and just happens to mention that combination out of the blue, you'll do extremely well.
>My guess is if your page looks like it's not about the keyword combination, and just happens to mention that combination out of the blue, you'll do extremely well.<
I.e Bourbon is a "SEO equalizer" just like Allegra :-)
>What do you mean, reseller?<
I meant that just like Allegra, it seems that Bourbon rewards sites which havent followed the logic of white hat SEO. As a result you see poor serps quality as you have reported in your post.
I can't imagine google dropping a book review site because of amazon links. That would be ridiculous. I highly doubt they'll penalize you for adsense either.
I agree either seems rather implausible, but it's hard to think what else to try. The problem may be that I was using Amazon search results as AdSense alternate ads - is anyone else using Amazon links inside iframes?
But my rankings were fine in December/January with the same ads and link structure that produced poor rankings in November, bad rankings from February onwards, and now truly appalling ones, so maybe it's all completely out of my control.
