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.
Search for a unique phrase from your site in quotes. You may find scrapers listing you. If you find an entry in the SERPS that has your title, and the cache shows your exact page, but the url is not yours, this is a "hijack."
I suspect that both being "hijacked" and appearing in alot of scrapers has a negative effect on your placement in the SERPs. Others would disagree.
Is there a quick way to do this check? Also, how can I remove the offending pages from the search engine?
Is this a scraper site? If so, how do I get rid of this idiot?
I followed your advice to chopin2256 and searched between quotes for a phrase referring to our charter at the bottom of every page of our site (as I mentioned before, 4 or 5 years old, hundreeds of orginal content on very specialized topic - heaviliy hit by Bourbon).
Google says there are 20.600 results. When I ask to see the "ignored results" and I follow the pages 10 by 10, I get 97 pages of results - all for our site.
I would tend to conclude that there is no hijack or anything. Is this a correct conclusion?
If yes, why the initial 20.600 number or results?
Thanks.
Can't really answer that except to speculate. Sounds like you might be OK. I get hundreds of other domain results coming up with matches for snippets from my sites, including matches on unique phrases, site names and copyright notices. So if you're not really seeing any of that, it may bode well for you.
Regarding only being able to see 97 out of 20,000 matching results -- Google is a notoriously bad counter of pages and links. That might mean that there really are only 97 matches, all your own sites, or it could mean that Google has become more effective at sweeping the evidence of the 302 problem (but not the problem itself) under the proverbial rug. Based on the most recent GoogleGuy comments on a 302 fix, some WebmasterWorld members have speculated that they merely made the method of confirming some error in the SERPS regarding 302's more difficult, rather than solving the underlying cause.
My take on Google at this point (seeing as how my sites have almost completely disappeared from their index) is to stop worrying about them altogether. Hundreds of K-12 and university pages link to my sites and other search engines continue to rank my sites highly. Google has made their engine irrelevant to my business. I'm sure that they don't miss me and I am not losing any sleep over them.
Somebody's got to be last for someone to be first! On person goes down, another goes up. It's not like the first page of results is blank now.
Truly baffled here.
I agree - the results don't even contain competitors instead they are totally irrelevant!
Sites with re-directs, spam, black hat, poor directory sites all back in.
Its like they turned the age filter up. If your sites over a certain age it ranks high regardless of what onpage content they have.
Absolutely cr@p.I just cant believe it. For once they have it almost right then they change it to this. Priceless......
Nixon UK and dt1961:
I agree completely.
Some of my pages with absolutely no competition can no longer be found in the SERPS.
The results for those searches can most charitably be described as "random."
My site which was hammered was PR6 and was over a year old. It has about 400 pages and competes for a different keyword phrase on each page. The majority of these keyword phrases are very uncompetitive. Some have no competition at all.
I have 17 other sites which were unaffected.
It may be interesting that this site still wins the allinanchor: searches, so its pages are still in Google's database somewhere. The entire site still gets crawled by Googlebot every day.
This update clearly does not meet the needs of web searchers.
I can pretty much verify that this theory is incorrect.
My site which was penalized heavily links out to almost no one.
On the other hand, I have a site which links out to pretty much everyone in the SEO world, and it was not penalized.
I also maintain a niche' web directory. It has no function but to link out -- and it is my only site which is doing better after the Bourbon disaster.
Sorry Mike. :)
<Continued... [webmasterworld.com]>
[edited by: ciml at 4:20 pm (utc) on May 28, 2005]
