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.
however we ARE up on:
64.233.171.104
which is the one mentioned by someone else recently as their home DC. Now the question is which of these are actual publicly USED DCs? The place I first found it up (64.233.187.104) is the one which comes up currently for my area, indicating it is an acutal used one.
And yes the results look VERY much like pre-update results (actually so did the updated ones for my niche with a few exceptions) which is why I was wondering if a few posts back if G was in fact backing out the update. Although the "cached" dates all say "May 22"
as I mentioned earlier I was hit hard by this latest update like many of you and lost 50 of my traffic, and 2/3 of my income as it was my best traffic that was lost.
I am a full time webmaster and my webincome is my only source of income so this forced me to get more creative.
So what I did was try to do the best with the litle traffic I got left and I have now managed to bring back some of the lost income by writing better sales pitch for some products. If my traffic now returns to normal I will make a lot more than I used to because I was forced to improve on something I thought was already good enough. I suggest others to do the same, because there is nothing we can do about the SERPs anyway.
I'd say G is officially in the process of backing this update OUT!
rotflmao I new it was too good to be true but its a good thing I took a screen capture as I am going to brag about this for years.
<No specific keywords, please>
[edited by: tedster at 2:57 am (utc) on May 24, 2005]
72.14.207.104
I just started to get a lot of traffic from it.
Someone else said that Google was not giving much weight to DMOZ. Does anyone else know if that is true?
One of my sites got a boost when it came into DMOZ. It also shows their description and I am pretty sure that Google place sites that are in the DMOZ higher on the SERPs.
Well then, cool, whatever, I'll take a #97 -> #12, #47 -> #7 and a #3 -> #1 overnight boost everyday! My Adsense report is loving it!
I just noticed we jumped back up to number 1 & 2 for keywords (May 22 cache date) then went back 30 minutes later and refreshed for it to show the May 21 cache date and our "boo boo" totals were there again.
My hope is that the May 22 cache is the wave of the future...at least for a couple of days ;)
shucky darn. Man I am going to have to drink a bottle of bourbon this update. What If I sent a bottle of bourbon to Adwords Div. interesting concept. Might that work? What would you lable such a dubious gift?
Ohh well I guess I am going to have to do more homework and pound the street corners begging for links again . You know its shameless what a guy has to do to get some love on updates like this. I think I am going to have to continue selling blood on eBay. Ahhh woohhh warze me what have I done I have to go out to the liquor store and ease my suffering.
This indeed has been the last bullet in the gun for me in my game of google roulette I was bound to get it in the ear eventually.
Those DCs seem to have old stuff (seeing some familiar faces on my benchmark serps from the last two or three months).
Use those results to find out what is being tweaked on the other forums.
That will allow me to say that 64.233.163.104 and 64.233.167.104 probably are new results... I had no ranking at all on any keywords(to be fair site had PR4 all the time but no DMOZ and no Google listing), at 64.233.163.104 and 64.233.167.104 site ranking well on both with increase in backlinks. Not on main Google dot com site. I noticed "time" today when the same results appeared on main Google search page but they gone quickly in about 3 hours and now main Google, www2 and www3 looks like the same as day before. I also noticed that www2 was last one rollback to old results.
By the way - I did some minor changes on page later today and it is already cashed on both 64... sites.
I hope it helps.
:)
G keep your eyes open, penalize one good site for kick-off five scrapers don't is a good deal. Every spam site penalized, five is created, but if a good site is penalized, no one will be created.
More conventional on-site SEO is also working less, and possibly to a negative end -- The sites which have been rising above me in this update use much more natural language, both in navigational and paragraph elements.
Further, ROS could be doing more harm than good.
Despicable and unacceptable bias towards new domains is still a runaway train with no IT-journalists on board.
A few semi random thoughts that I had over a smoke break -- and you gave me the perfect launching point. I'm attempting to keep this free of sarcasm... so bear with me while I play naive.
You've most probably not been penalized. In their quest to provide better results, google has turned a few knobs. Some of them affect you, some affect others. Given that the serp results tweaking can best be compared to using a mixing deck .. there are hundreds of factors (and a few more) that can be tweaked.
If you're in the top 500 for your results -- chances are you don't have any major penalties on your site. Atleast not ones which justify capital punishment. Chances are you've been algorithmically degraded because of dupe content, lack of a diverse range of links, 302s etc.
There are various qualitative, quantitative, on site, off site factors mixed in with sun spot activity at play.
The best thing to do at this point would be to try and snap shot as many variations as possible while the serps are dancing. "Do nothing" does not mean site tight on your rear end.. it means, don't make site wide changes.
These variations will then start giving you an insight on some of the factors being tweaked.
Bottom line .. if your site is still ranking in the top 500 for million plus search results, you're in a position to fix it.
(All of this is so much simpler online ... imagine if you had a real store and an earthquake destroyed the only road to your store which brought foot traffic in... )
Ok crazy rant over, please resume comparing DC searches that will likley change in the next five minutes.
So the earthquake has settled it seems....
"So the earthquake has settled it seems...."
The site has almost always weathered update storms very well, in fact, moving up generally. It wasn't around for Florida so no comment on that but the rest have been non-events. I've never laughed or bragged about it just thanked my lucky stars that I was clean and kept going as I always have. More content, more links, better navigation, etc etc...
Now, well, hopefully it isn't over, but I've been absolutely shellacked! (Spelling)
This sucks.
This will sound crazy but it really gets me going. After going through this to the point where like others I can't even type my company name (obscure) and get the actual site rather than sites that link to me I've come to the conclusion that (in my belief) Google just has it wrong. MSN and Yahoo rank me #1 so that says to me searches in Google are not valid as Google has the "wrong" answer to many searches.
IMO, this is happening because of scrapper sites linking to your site and causing a google penalty. In google eyes your site suddenly has an abnormal growth of incoming links. It happened to some of my sites. They were ranked excellent on yahoo but completely disappeared from google over the last two updates.
One thing they all had in common is "exponential growth of incoming links" (from scarper sites) over a very short period of time. Most of those scrappers are using yahoo feeds and if your site appear at top position on Y for competitive terms chances are your link will end up on thousands upon thousands of scrappers.
Which triggers a google filter and nuke you off the google serps.
Scrappers are bringing content down.
We are discussing this very same issue over this thread check my post # 101:
[webmasterworld.com...]
[edited by: max_mm at 8:11 am (utc) on May 24, 2005]
By Google sandboxing my site, and millions of others, they could of won the battle (against SEO's) but lost the war on relevance. And Google do have a massive battle on their hands.
They could very well be testing the waters here, allowing sandboxed sites to rank, but at the same time providing Revenant SERPS and supplying fresher results.
Don’t get me wrong, I have some established sites on Google , no matter how many links my competitors gets, he can’t seem to overtake me.
So, in either scenario there are winners and loosers.
My website has my keyword *all* over it (it has to. It's the name of my company for gosh sakes!)
And yet other websites with casual references to it are ranking ahead of it.
My guess is that there is a penalty for over optimization, but it's completely back firing on Google.
However, before I rush to judgement, I am back up at #1 for my company name which is, btw, <keyword>.com
Odd.
That's a serious problem. It throws the whole link building idea a curve ball. Get more links naturally, ie, don't buy, trade etc..., but don't get too many naturally, even though it is out of your control.
What now then?
Let's look for a minute at Googles Mission Statement.
'Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.'
It doesn't say anything about making any one site more visible than another. The world is big place, no matter how narrow you may think your niche might be. All of the world's information will, by definition, include information that you may find objectionable. This means spammers and scrapers are information. Not necessarily good, but information nonetheless.
Reading the next line in the mission statement I see this:
'As a first step to fulfilling that mission,...'
As a first step. Yes, there is (or was) an established reference point and it is called PR. But some of us took PR for a ride and managed to make it all but worthless. PR was intended to be natural, not manipulated.
Reading a little farther into the mission statement you'll find this line, which I personally believe to be a driving facilitator for Google updates:
'As a business, Google generates revenue by providing advertisers with the opportunity to deliver measurable, cost-effective online advertising that is relevant to the information displayed on any given page.'
Google wants your advertising dollars. You have been making money from their free search service. Now it may be time to pony up. Our site was devasted by Florida, but instead of relying on questionable SERPs we survived by buying ad space. It was an unpleasant wake up call. And today, more than ever, Google is big business. Search does not provide revenue. Search results may be manipulated to help generate revenue (although I'm very certain that would never be publicly disclosed).
So, webmasters who are losing in this round, maybe you are missing your opportunity to become an advertiser. Maybe there are too many other webmasters in your niche who are missing the same opportunity, so the whole niche is getting a shake-up (or shake down). I know that today nearly every one of my competitors is also using AdWords. Pre-Florida it was unheard of. Post-Florida we had no choice - it was a matter of survival. For the most part, our little slice of the web has not been affected by this particular update.
People talking about evil Google should spend more time focusing on the objective fact that Google is buggered. Instead of rants, people should be protecting themselves as best they can from getting a second hand buggering.
If you still insist on ranting, please share your reasoning for why Google has chosen to deliberately remove its own PR9 page from its index and instead show a page on a site with a PR5 main page instead.
