Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
[webmasterworld.com...]
My website has plenty of outbound links, but they are on relevant pages. The problem my site has always had, was a lack of "inbound links." I got tired of searching for people to link to me (with all the spammy sites around) and gave up. So my pages have acquired some links naturally I guess(and I'll bet I still don't have more than 30 inbound links for the whole site) Still have a PR4, which I've had since it disappeared in Nov.
[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 8:54 pm (utc) on May 27, 2005]
You might find it in that SEW thread, but to recap, duplicate content, interlinked sites, hidden text.
Anything to do with Bourbon? Probably not...
The results are bad now. Only half the update elements have been applied. It's like a car on an assembly line that is half done being pointed at and called a butt ugly useless car. It isn't finished. Perhaps that is bad for your business, but it still isn't finished in any case.
I would have assumed that they would apply the "quality elements" to their current results, therefore a penalty applied sustained in Bourbon would carry to up to the next update at least.
To follow your analogy, I understood the update process more as in "putting in a new motor to the car." Do you have actual insight into this? It would be nice to know.
Are you suggesting that they are rebuilding everything from scratch?
He is not aloof nor is google to anybody else. They are secretive and cryptic in their answers. Webmasters want a proper reply as to what is in Bourbon and why so drastic an update.
Alan Greenspan has nothing on google. Some of googleguy's comments were helpful, but with other comments, even reading "between the lines" still leave me in oblivion.
I am sure that higher ups at the plex stresses that he has to be very careful with what information he can give us. Never the less, I certainly appreciate his taking time to give us attention.
We need to spend a little less time critizing his comments and just be thankful such an important person participates in this forum.
I didn't look at the content of his pages for hidden text etc, I stopped after seeing a pile of duplicated pages in the index.
As well as at least 39 probable hidden 302 leaches.
What's the use if noone is ever going to get to see them?
------------
A few pages back (it actually took me that long until now to research this with interruptions) some people were mentioning js and how it might possibly have an effect because of being misread, etc..
I've had this spreadsheet with pages that were affected on our site (dropping 80-100 places) and those that we felt should have been but weren't (because they were similar, on the same domain, etc.) and their differences. I noticed one new difference I hadn't before because of that comment. How do I say this?...
We hand code almost all our pages, so we use very simple html. On some pages, for formatting sake, we have added a very simple style script like the following:
<STYLE TYPE="text/css">
<!--
h1, h2 {
margin-bottom: 1px;
margin-top: 1px;
padding-bottom: 0;
font-family: Arial;
}
-->
</STYLE>
All it does is get rid of that irritating extra space above and below standard Headlines <H1> and make them Arial font and should have no impact on overall readability (as far as hiding text or anything). It is pretty much the ONLY style code we use on 99% of our pages, so it makes a good clean comparison. In the H1 tag on most of our pages is typically the keyword we are targeting.
- About 90% of the pages which WERE dumped have this code on it. (i.e. some have been dumped for other reasons)
- NONE of the pages, which we checked, which were UNAFFECTED (kept their top 10 ranks) had it on them.
This does NOT imply that ALL those which had it were dumped (although I've yet to find one which wasn't). Nor does it imply that NONE of those WITHOUT it were NOT DUMPED.
However considering the quantity of pages we've checked (close to 100 on either side of the wall), it is a very high correlation.
We will be testing removing this code today to see what effect it has on rank.
Any suggestions as to why G might penalize or possibly misread this code?
Too much power and they have blown it - Microsoft will clean up!
Thanks for the guess.
In fact I will go further and possibly anticipate that it could have been any number of 500 factors that google may take into account. Or indeed a combination of factors that Clint should have known about. Though I don’t know all and certainly not any new ones, but google may expect Clint to know and abide by it. Or indeed a webmaster must spend his entire life scouring websites to find forums and clues hidden in them to determine the future of his website. Is it a 301?, maybe a 302? or a trailing slash, one too many keywords?, empty container element?, inbound outbound links? shared ip? new domain name?, the list is endless.
Clint, I think it is the obligation of webmasters to know google’s surreptitious 500+ parameters that a webmaster must adhere to like “a google decree of the internet”. Any one of these parameters being violated or blasphemed ultimately sends a website into oblivion without mercy or compassion.
I will now make a guess myself and say that it is not a guess but a fact that google singles out websites with its algo. If you are in its radar “”BANG”” down goes your website. I will stick by this even if confronted by GoogleGuy and it will be his job to disprove my claim. Google is not as advanced as many poople may think. It is using a crude method of depleting ranking sites via its algo and it is as simple as that. Those that are not affected are not winners and those are affected disappear in results. 8billion pages represents a money making facility that will never run out and can be tweaked to kingdom come.
Winners and losers are effected by a balancing algo that takes into account acceptable methods to rank. An algo that blasts a website into oblivion is an altogether different ball game, one that invokes anger and hate.
A stoic and merciless algo script awaits any unsuspecting webmaster in the next spectacularly named update.
If he's typical of those who've suffered a drop, you've no-one to blame but yourselves ;-)
On May 20 I had over 150 referrals from Google. The following day on May 21 it was down to 7 referrals, and hasn't gone above 12 since.
Traffic to my site had dropped by 50% and AdSense earnings are down to around a dollar a day, whereas before May 21 they were regularly up into double figures per day.
I searched Google for some virtually unique key phrases that appear on my web pages, but all I got were results for other sites and mine was nowhere to be seen. The site is still on there as I searched for the domain name, but it just isn't coming up in the SERPs.
What the heck is going on? Is this to do with the update do you think? I'm going to start losing sleep over this if it doesn't go back to normal.
Nobody is holding anyone up for anything.
I told what I found and where I stopped.
He knows he has duplicate content problems, there are currently serveral milion sitting duplicate content targets for all kinds of fun.
If duplicate content is a major concern then best that be cleaned up. If the text is light grey on a lighter grey background, eyeballs are all different, if the text is absolute positioned off page then fine. I didn't go that far.
