Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
No, that is zero sum game. The most useless posts here are from people saying the serps on some datacenter suck or are good because their own stuff ranks bad or good on that datacenter. Not only does nobody else care, there is someone thinking the exact opposite due to how their stuff is ranking.
In any case (repeating mantra from past several updates), a lot folks should consider that screw ups are not deliberate policies. Google has been a technical mess for more than a year now, just over two years really. Allegra was just a blip of an update, but was a huge technical disaster. Google also has a horrible time figuring out canonical pages, particularly when webmasters deliberately do inconsistent things.
This update seems to me to be another minor bit of shuffling, with the added "bonus" of a lot of anomalies, most caused by lazy or uniformed webmastering (meaning if you have been reading webmasterworld and haven't had a 301 on for non-www and www since at least last summer, you only have yourself to blame).
I see almost no changes in my niches, except... a HUGE increase in straight redirect domains. This tactical trash gets discovered fairly quickly but apparently a new tactic has been discovered and needs to be squashed; authority sites performing same as recently; sites still in the sandbox dumped back to pre-Allegra levels, while sites that got out of the sandbox with Allegra doing a bit better.
64.233.163.104 is not the active SERPS kangol. My question is has anybody seen "google.com" SERPS change yet?
Yes. 64.233.163.104 and the other DCs being discussed are google.com.
(Which datacenter your results come from when you type in "google.com" is based of your location [physical and network], the load being handled by each DC, and doubtless some other factors. But all of these IP addresses are google.com for somebody.)
In the DC experiment done in supporters 64.233.167.104 was accessed but 64.233.163.104 was not. Although that was a limited test.
No apparent change on a five year old site.
Traffic continued to grow. In Feb., we were around 3,500-4,000 page views a day. We hit a high of over 7,000 page views last month. We started adding more content last month again, and were about to do a big push when Bourbon came along and banged us down.
We're a general interest site, just broke the Alexa 100,000, no SEO tricks, we just follow the Google Webmaster guidelines religiously.
Only thing I can think of, going over the Webmaster guidelines again, is that we have over 100 internal links from our homepage, because we snuck up to over 120 categories. D'oh. I'm changing that right now.
8 years on the web, and I've never seen anything like this. We rode out every other update without a hitch. Never even bothered to look before.
There are some strange things Google is doing to us: showing 6,100 links when we have 1,900 pages. Also, when we do link:www.ourname.com, Google brings up many of our own links (but all with www. in front, as far as I can tell). Is this something we're doing wrong, or a problem they're having?
Or no problem at all?
The first two pages of SERPS for its typical keyphrases now show obscure sites that link to my site, like discussion groups, message boards, and oddball directories with weird names from foreign countries. Trouble is, the searcher, even if they looked at these 'directory' pages, would be unlikely to find the link to my site, as it is amongst a full text page of other stuff. Most people don't use Edit/Find...
The real site is now on about page 3 or 4 or 5.
Couple of my other sites stayed the same in SERPS (for which I am ever so thankful),
and like in a previous dramatic update a couple yrs ago,
a couple old static single freebie pages, like ISP's let you make on their server, now are in top 3 SERP simply cause there is a link to my real sites.
Lousey results for the searcher...
There is NOTHING YOU CAN DO during this massive Algo Changes...
For future refrence:
You know for all these massive algo changes.. all the way from Florida to Burbon... my rankings have remained pretty stable... for stable keywords... my site is not huge... it's not tiny either... between 5,000 to 10,000 visitors a day... depending on news.. (it's a breaking news site).. about 50% of the traffic comes from Search Engines, the other 50% is from blogs, links from other sites... etc etc..
The point I am trying to make is just do the best site you can... don't try all these blackhat SEO tactics.. follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines to the letter.. and you should not see dramatic swings in your rankings...
Why? it's simple... some people do risky stuff and rank high... that is when Google finds that risky stuff the next algo change removes them and replaces them with other people that did risky stuff... the guys that have a stable site.. that keeps working on new content, new backlinks... etc etc... those sites are generally more stable... you find yourself on page 1 (sometimes page 2) for the keyword you are looking for.. and you hang out there for years if you just keep working on it...
As an Afterthought.... if you guys think this Algo change is forever... that is what people during the Florida update thought... these things happen.. they last about 60 days.. and another hurricane comes though...
The point I am trying to make is just do the best site you can... don't try all these blackhat SEO tactics.. follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines to the letter.. and you should not see dramatic swings in your rankings...
I would say well over half the people complaining of quality sites being massacred by this update ARE already following these guidelines.
There have already been a lot of people saying things like this on this very forum over the last 18 months who only now, with the storm upon them either in Feb or this week, have realised it IS possible to be thrown to the bottom of the pile without having dallied in ANY sort of black hat SEO.
I gained enormously from Florida but woke up every day with fingers crossed as I knew people with quality sites were being hit.
February 2 is a date I won't forget in a long time....
Google is an overgrown formula.. .that is all it is... and good sites take hits... I have had sites take a hit before.. good high quality sites..
Problem: We have people doing X and spamming our Database.
Solution: Modify Algo to make those people not successful with that method.
Problem: The Algo mod changed a bunch of legit sites as well.
Solution: Try to tweek it so they rank high but the spammers don't.
Problem: We tweeked... and they rank high again.. but new spammers are showing up dirtying the results.
Solution: Modify the Algo to make those people not successful with that method.
......
See my point... people are going to take hits... and it's not your fault you are...
We normally have 21000 page views on a Sunday - this was halved. Revenue has dropped 90%.
I am certain the servers used by Google are IP country specific - our analysis is that google.co.uk traffic is responsible for the drop. Our main site is a .co.uk
We use no black hat - just extra original content. After 7-8 years on Google we have built traffic each year & improved position.
It appears that PR is not a factor - nor searchers habits. Whilst aware of new competition the drop on our established site is scary as we always have ridden out changes by google.
We have increased ranking on some of our regional sites ( ,com's) - the people who do them are happy:[smilestopper])
We have told adwords that we won't be advertising as we will not be able to afford it! They ignored the comment on the reply.
Is the cache date important? Ideas?
Oh, there's one good thing from the update: a site my partner did for someone last year finally showed up where it should. It's the person's name, the authority site on said person, and it had been stuck between 30-50 for a year. It's now #3. It should be #1, but we won't quibble. He'll be extremely happy, plus he'll know that there was nothing wrong with the site in the first place and it was Google's fault that it was sandboxed.
It currently seems a bit of a half-way-house, one domain is page 2 for "keyword Combination" but is page 120 on this new set. Before it was nowhere to be seen.
Is the dust settling?
Hughie
A search on "string of text on my page" brings up two results; www.mysite.com and mysite.com
Do you think this means I'm having a www. vs non www. problem? I have read about the 301 to www. but I've also read of 301's causing a lot of problems for people so I haven't tried it yet. Any suggestions?
TIA
Happened to me after the last update. Figured it was Googles way of telling me to get lost.
This thing is going to go on for a couple of weeks...maybe a month.
Common demoninators so far:
1) Lots of sandboxed sites are now indexed.
2) Some authority sites have taken a big hit and dropped position or totally out of the serps.
3) The total returned pages are way up...a few keywords I follow the total is up anywhere from 30-50% more.
4) You really can't identify specific whitehat or blackhat seo affecting the changes.
Analysis:
Google has opened the barn door and let all (authority/established and sandboxed) site compete for position. Right now they are letting the chips fall where they may.
Then...in a few days they are going to see what they have got and the tweaking of the algo begins.
It's not anywhere close to being over folks.
Somebody wrote:
„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 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.“
However, my observations say that the portals are even bigger.
It´s a good idea to reduce big portals (shopping portals) with subdomains? (e.g. for categories -> category.mydomain.com/... ... etc.)?
When we search for an EXACT unique string WITH QUOTES we do NOT show up AT ALL (but lots of sites which scraped our description do)! However searching WITHOUT QUOTES we come up around 20th. It's almost like sites which match a keyword/phrase TOO closely are being penalized. Likewise doing site:www.#*$!.com brings up our HOME PAGE and previously most popular pages near the bottom, and pages indexed with no description at the top.
BTW, our domain is under 2000 pages. ATW indexes around 1500 while G currently only shows 580!
[edited by: MikeNoLastName at 10:21 pm (utc) on May 23, 2005]
We are doing a detailed anaysis of page positions as we have the weird thing of same page design/keyword structure resulting in different page rankings for different pages.
Agree .co.uk is probably a mix at the moment
But this one is bad. I'm in the same boat, people even searching specifically for our brand name will find other sites that mention us, but NOT us, until deep into Page two. Makes it look like we're out of business.
You know, if we were pulling tricks or not following the guidelines, sure, I'd understand. If you're gaming, losing occasionally is part of it. But to lose without gaming... well, this is encouragement to STOP putting out good content, and think up some spam sites! I mean, why spend a year creating good content that gets hit, when you can crank out spam sites in a few days, and keep cranking them out when you get hit? (Not that we're ready to do that yet, but you can make a business case for it at this point.)
