Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
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I did a search for site:www.yoursite.com just now and whenever I click on a result (listed as www.yoursite.com) I get referred to yoursite.com.
I suspect that this is the cause of your drop - i.e. your pagerank was for the www version but now they are all being redirected.
A while ago I 301ed one of my sites to another one and all the traffic disappeared - I didn't seem to get any extra traffic or PR from that site.
Perhaps it's a matter of time before it resolves but it seems to me that Google may not like 301s as much as it says it does.
If your site:
- is more than 1 year old
- has PR5 or better
- contains more than 5.000 pages
- receives more than 1.000 inbound links
And:
- some dozens of scrapers have collected content from your site
- some dozens of scrapers are redirecting outgoing links to your site
- you have no enough money to be a recoognized brand
...you will be in nowhere.
Great.
I have a few sites and Google traffic is way down. I saw a dip in total index pages from 160,000 to 122,000 at some point about a month ago. Traffic was still very high. Now it seems the faucet has been turned to a trickle.
Are there any tools to "watch the dance" on different servers from once query? I recall a tool that did this with frames a while back.
Thanks for your feedback in advance.
- A site has ranked well for years has now fallen...
This is the same with out site. Our traffic was lost after Feb. 2nd. It Has not yet come back. During this update (Bourbon), we lost even more visitors from Google.
Both Yahoo and MSN love our site. This is the only saving grace. Yahoo and MSN have been updating more frequently and delivering more and more traffic. Terms we rank in the top 10 of Yahoo and MSN - we are in 800 range in Google.
We offer relevant straight ahead informative articles. We do not use any black hat techniques or any SEO for that matter... Just straight HTML with incoming links from people who decide to link to us.
It is amazing, we almost had as many visitor from Altavista as we did from Google. If it stays this way, Altavista will over take Google this week.
Our was major fall, we had around 10,000 referrals from Google a day before Feb. 2nd. On Feb. 2nd, almost all serps dropped. It is now down to about 200 per day.
Just my thoughts...
PS: We went back and forth with Google Help - basic response: "There is no penalty on your site."
It seems someone in the Googleplex decided that:
If your site:
- is more than 1 year old
- has PR5 or better
- contains more than 5.000 pages
- receives more than 1.000 inbound linksAnd:
- some dozens of scrapers have collected content from your site
- some dozens of scrapers are redirecting outgoing links to your site
- you have no enough money to be a recoognized brand...you will be in nowhere.
Great.
I am seeing the first part of what you are seeing.
My site which was dropped from the SERPS was over a year old, was PR6, had hundreds of pages and thousands of inbound links.
The sites being dropped from the SERP results in this "update" seem to be mainly large successful information-only sites.
Oddly, it seems like the group most negatively affected by this horribly flawed update were AdSense publishers.
Having said that, my scraper sites are doing fine, some dropped and some rose, as always.
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.
Not the interesting question. The interesting thing is the percenatge of people complaining about odd/unjust/unlikely changes who don't have the www/non-www issue consistent, or have inconsistent linking like relative links or some links to "/" while others go to index.html or default.asp?
That percentage is close to 100%, if not literally 100%.
301 for me has not be a problem at all for many sites that i see. I think eventually google will pick it up if you have 301d correctly.
Many informational sites i have noticed have not dropped at all.
Thirdly, the update is not over, i think theirs alot more to come as per recommended by all the mods here.
64.233.167.99
64.233.167.104
Hope these go all over. No change in traffic from google since these aren't shwoing on google.com
so maybe in the highly $$$ areas is where all the fuss is, non commercial looks fine to me.
Nope, not from where I sit.
<<The interesting thing is the percenatge of people complaining about odd/unjust/unlikely changes who don't have the www/non-www issue consistent, or have inconsistent linking like relative links or some links to "/" while others go to index.html or default.asp?>>
Do you know of an authorative / non technical guide or thread for checking and resolving this issue. It's been chewed on here many times before. Aside from a couple of GoogleGuy thoughts, I don't recall anyone producing a consistent "guide".
Thanks for anything you can point to....
Bit drunk - so bit confused by your post.
Do you agree that there is a problem with google and the way it handles non-www and www domains?
I know you watch Google closely - so would be interested in your opionion.
Dayo
See Gooogle what u make me do on a day off - post when I am drunk ;)
>Oddly, it seems like the group most negatively affected by this horribly flawed update were AdSense publishers.<
Not exactly. As an AdSense publisher I have been mostly affected by allegra than this Alcohol Free Bourbon :-)
However I do hope that this update will bring back at least some of the traffic which allegra took away.
The interesting thing is the percenatge of people complaining about odd/unjust/unlikely changes who don't have the www/non-www issue consistent, or have inconsistent linking like relative links or some links to "/"
Agree... the 2 mentioned 'problems' above have nothing to do with my sites, and I've noticed no 'abnormal' change in the serps.
Think Steveb is on to something.
I think he says that there are lot of people complaining about Google while they have unsolved issues like linking to their homepage with or without / and like having a widget.com and a www.widget.com without a 301 redirect.
Cheers
The following did not fix pronblems:
- Making sure there was a 301 redirect for non-www domains.
- Relative vs. non-relative links.
- Getting sites to remove 302-redirects.
After we made those fixes, our site just sank further.
In fact, there are tons of amateur sites that rank above us for keywords that would not know the difference between 301 - 302 - relative links - or any of the things discussed here... They load up MS Front Page and put a page with no validation on shared IP address at the cheapest hosting they can find.
Therefore, I have come to the conclusion - there is nothing you can actually do. You have to wait until Google decides to somehow release you back into the wild.
Someone mentioned here that you are still ranked for you keywords on some server out there in googe land... However, that server only will see the light of day for 20 minutes out of twenty four hour period. That is the trickle of traffic you will get.
Just my thoughts after a frustrating few months of trying to figure it out.
These datacenters I show #3 or #4 for my main keyword and everything else I am about 700+:64.233.167.99
64.233.167.104
I'm seeing exactly the same, however, I don't expect these results to get to google.com - my site is only 3 months old and still in the sandbox. Could these DCs be showing the SERPs without the sandbox filter?
If you are in the top ten on every other search engine in the world for a key term and you are ranked 800 on Google - there is nothing wrong with your site. Basically, there is something wrong with google.
Are the mods trying to stir the pot on this one. Is everyone getting out of the sandbox with these results except me? I can't even rank for a line of unqiue content on my site unless it is in quotes...
Jon: I see substantial variation across those DC's FWIW.
For me, I see 7 varying sets of results from that list.
Yep exactly, that's what I am seeing.
I suspect that this is the cause of your drop - i.e. your pagerank was for the www version but now they are all being redirected.
Maybe, but I've got more inbound links for non-www than for www. And in any case, when my main site doesn't come up in the first 10 pages of search results for my own uniquely weird two-word name (which is at the top of every page), there's got to be more than www-to-non-www redirects involved.
In another thread a while back (I think it was in the Supporters Forum), there was an interesting discussion of how Google may be using data mining in lieu of traditional human-written algorithms these days. As I understood the discussion, Google engineers feed parameters into a "black box" (as in "Here's a list of pages that should rank high" or "Here's a list of pages that are spam") and the data-mining software concocts whatever recipe it needs to produce the desired results. If this is what Google is doing these days, the law of unintended consequences may be contributing to the strangeness and inconsistency of the current SERPs. (And if that doesn't make sense, I'm sure Brett would be pleased to have you join the Supporters Forum and contribute a rebuttal to that thread!)
Google engineers feed parameters into a "black box" (as in "Here's a list of pages that should rank high" or "Here's a list of pages that are spam") and the data-mining software concocts whatever recipe it needs to produce the desired results
That could be one of the main reasons for Google's spam report page.
If we're being realistic, Google is more ruthless than Yahoo when it comes to suppressing parts of the web, and far less transparent.
The description for this thread changed somewhere along the line... do people feel that this update is heralding in a period where Google will genuinley be able to rank sites in a timely manner?
The only good thing is that we now have examples of sites that should be authorities that have been hit. I also believe that I have a couple of sites that are worth people looking at but even my unsigned music reviews site again ranks at #40+ for it's own name. EFV has always been very helpful but very much on the 'content is king' line - the problems some of us have faced over the past 8 months were not about content but we couldn't convince anyone.
It feels to me that the 'punishment' is spreading wider - sites with PR6+ are now being hit (us poor PR5s have been getting blasted in each of the recent updates).
Congratulations on anyone who is doing well out of this update. Don't plan on retiring on your sites income though. Personally, I'm designing a 'find me in Yahoo' advert that I plan to put on all of my pages.
