Dealing with the consequences of Bourbon Update

Which changes has Bourbon brought about & How to deal with them?

[reseller]

Assuming that the greatest part of of the latest Google update (Bourbon) is completed, its rather important to do some damage assessments, study the changes brought about by Bourbon and suggest ways to deal with them.

We need to keep this thread focused on the followings:

- Changes on your own site ranking on the serps (lost & gained positions or disappearance of the site).

- Changes you have noticed on the new serps (both google.com and your local google site) especially in regards to the nature of the top 10 or 20 ranking sites.

- Stability of the serps. I.e do you get the same serps when you run the same query within the same day or 2-3 successive days (both google.com and your local google site).

- Effective ethical measures to deal with the above mentioned changes.

Thanks.

[caveman]

Things are still stirring around. More SERP sets again right now; at least three. Looks llike at least one important filter we've been expecting (or what has the effect of a filter) was added back today sometime...knocking out some geo results where they make no sense (i.e. a good thing). Don't need a site about Miami widget services at the top of the heap when searching for 'widget services'.

[annej]

>Since annj's site has now recovered and she hadn't changed her links from rel. to abs., what does that say? It never really mattered would be my first inclination.<

I need to make it clear what I did. I can see how I caused some misunderstanding.

I have two sites, the large one was not hurt at all by the Bourbon update while the small one was hurt badly (page titles only showed up if I used quotes and even then under numerous scraper sites who had copied my title.)

I have redirects to www on both of my sites now. I did that about a three days ago.

I had also changed all my relative links to absolute links on the small site as it was only around 80 pages. That is the site with the penalty

I was terribly worried that the same penalty would happen to my larger site if not right away in the next update so I had been planning to change the links on on my large site but was overwhelmed with the task of doing this change on hundreds of pages. In the message I think that Googleguy assumed I was talking about the penalized site and of course I figured that also meant the other site didn't need it either.

I'm still not sure if setting up the redirect and changing everything over the absolute links had anything to the fact the site is back up on 64.233.167.104. Doing those things may not have made any difference.

I hope this helps those of you who are trying to analyze what happened in this update.

[helleborine]

The allin's have been updated in my areas sometime today, and a few DCs show movement where they had been completely still for d-a-y-s.

[steveb]

"Dayo_UK, the point I was trying to make is that my site has always had relative links and has always performed well in Google (except for a two-month period before Bourbon when the www vs. non-www issue may have come into play)."

Which is exactly the point, and I'm not sure why you are confusing people now.

Your relative links crippled your site. Like others, like walkman, once you fixed the key problem with relative links by putting a 301 on, you recovered.

Now if we can avoid the half-statements, relative links are an invitation to disaster these days. They don't *have* to be. You *can* still use them, but you should protect yourself if you do. A 301 is a neccessity. A base tag seems good. Consistent linking should be used (meaning link to domain.com/ all the time, not some of the time and other of the times to domain.com/index.html).

If you use absolute links you avoid having to use the base tag, and never have to worry about the relative links pointing to "/" versus "/index.html" or whatever, but you can use relative links if you just are neat and consistent and conscious that you are using them.

This canonical stuff is the issue of the past year, and apparently for the forseeable future. Take steps to protect yourself. Just because you had no problems in the past doesn't mean you won't have any in the future.

[helleborine]

I wonder if Clint recalls the existence of a rogue URL with cached duplicate content in the [clintsdomain.com%09...] (not real domain) format?

Has this been sorted out?

[theBear]

steveb I'll repeat this here for folks.

Absent a 301 redirect rule set having relative hrefs allows your site to be split apart by the search engine bots.

If you have absolute hrefs, and no 301 redirect your site can still be split apart but it requires more work on someones part because they can't enlist the search engines bot to shred the site. It will stop on the page it starts on. Can still be done though, just a bit more work.

With proper 301s it can't be split in that manner, regardless of the type of hrefs used..

The intent of the splitting is to degrade your site by triping various Google gotchas like massive duplicate content etc.

I do believe that someone has admitted that only a site that is degrading can have a page hijacked.

Of course having only one valid visable server alias is the best protection, no 301 ruleset needed even with relative hrefs.

[steveb]

Yes, if you use absolute links but don't have a 301, you still can be hurt by someone else linking to your "other" loop. Absolute links just protect you from harming yourself that way.

The 301 is the key thing.

[annej]

only a site that is degrading can have a page hijacked

Would someone explain what this means in a way that a person like me (the technically clueless one) can understand?

[g1smd]

If your PR is falling and somone links to you using a 302 redirect then their URL will appear in the index shown against your content. Your URL will drop out of the index. The person redirecting to you can then serve ads to the visitor to make themselves some money or do whatever they want with the traffic; your traffic.

[MikeNoLastName]

"If you use absolute links you avoid having to use the base tag, and never have to worry about the relative links pointing to "/" versus "/index.html" or whatever, but you can use relative links if you just are neat and consistent and conscious that you are using them. "

Did I miss something? "relative vs absolute" links aside, what is the deal with index.html vs /? Are you talking about just in links or in redirects too?
Our domain has been REALLY screwed up since May 23 (still - and getting even worse on the DC annej mentions) but "/ vs index.html" is one of the FEW things we HAVEN'T seen happen :-).
I don't see how being careful with these can make a difference when someone else could just as easily do it to you. If it were a problem, all I'd have to do is submit or link www.goo gle.com/index.html (which BTW DOES resolve to a valid page) to give them a penalty. Since G deletes all these at once via a URL console remove, I suspect it knows enough to automatically combine them all into one listing by default.
Also if your server automatically converts .com to .com/ should it matter how you or ANYONE else refers to it including with 301 redirects (in so far as domain.com vs domain.com/)?

[g1smd]

If you link to / and to /folder/ and to www.domain.com/folder/ then you can change the name of the index file filename at any time without having to re-do any of your links.

Google treats domain.com/page1.html and www.domain.com/page1.html as separate pages.

They also treat / and /index.html as separate pages too.

[linkjack]

The biggest lesson is that spilling the beans does not pay off. If you keep your lips tight Google will have a difficult time producing the next bourbon.

[g1smd]

They got eyes too. They look at sites.

That's where they get most of their ideas.

[Undead Hunter]

Reseller:

You asked -

emergency site; was it a site that you have created with one page or two and allowed to age (possible sandboxed) before moving your contents (or part of)?

- have you moved the "old" contents gradually to the emrgency site or just in one shot?

1) it was a one page "coming soon" site with a Pagerank 4, spidered back in November. It's been taking us that long to get around to putting content on it. if I searched for the domain name, the site came up # 1, but does that tell you whether is it sandboxed or not?

2) I moved the contents from one section of our Main site (which was hit hard by Bourbon as I've said) to this site. No redirects in place from the original site yet. As I mentioned, they didn't rank very well, so I do suspect that site is "sandboxed" in general, though I'm a bit shaky on the specifics of sandboxing. I guess the only way to know for sure is pull off this content and test out new content there. My guess is that it will be a while before this site gets rolling, despite being indexed for a while.

And oh, our main site is rolling again, climbing back to about 1/2 our previous traffic levels, up from 1/10th of our traffic during the Bourbon update. Revenue tonight is keeping pace, so far at 1/2 of our previous average.

And believe me, I'm dancing about that. If this holds, it means we can be back and running again, and that new content will get in there, too.

[Lorel]

I manage 27 client sites. I put a 301 redirect from non-www to www on all of them back in March. I have added a base href on all pages for 1/2 of them.

All of them are fine and no change in traffic.

[nanotopia]

My site, which is over 5 years old, follows all of the best practices, and has had solid SERPs which have had steady growth, has suddenly been hammered on Goole SERPs. In the past two days, I've seen a 2/3 drop in traffic, because of this sudden change.

In fact, I had the most traffic I've ever had about 3 days ago, and then bam!, Google did something and I was gone across the board.

Is this a result of Bourbon, indexing, or something else? I rely on the traffic for my income, and I'm pretty freaked out about the whole thing. My site is in my profile if anyone can help me investigate and figure out what's going on.

I'd appreciate any help or insight, because like I said before, this (with adsense) has been my income, and helps me pay for things like my mortgage and trips like the Conference next week in New Orleans.

[canuck]

There have been sites hit by Bourbon that have had the 301-redirect already in place. Our site was one of them that has had the redirect for over 2 years now, there are others in the original update thread that claim the same.

Also, Annej's fixing her www/non-www issue and rebounding is no proof... 3 days does not a comeback make.

Let us put all our bickering in context:
This is day 27 of the Bourbon update!

Translation: Google can't figure out what's wrong, how are we suppose to?!

[theBear]

canuck, is your redirect still effective and is it correct?

There are ip addresses that my be biting you and if you are using a cPanel/WHM setup and have played with hotlink protection you may have over written you own rewrite rule s.

An yes you are correct a few days back doesn't mean the problem is over.

[canuck]

theBear, we've had no problems with the www/non-www issue for over 1.5 years now. Our Homepage as well as internal pages are all 301'd to our preferred format.

- canuck

[theBear]

nanotopia,

Results 501 - 585 of about 588 are currently sitting in Googles index for the non www form of your domain.

When did you install your rewrite rules?

And what are the 3 missing goodies, I think I know, but it will have to wait.

canuck,

I've about run out of eyeball time for tonight sticky me your domain and I'll take a look.

I've looked at six more sites today that makes well over 2 dozen.

Everyone has been split, and there are other similar traits.

[walkman]

>> only a site that is degrading can have a page hijacked

Uh, huh.
Google.com and adsense were hijacked, and didn't rank #1 for "Google" or "Adsense". I doubt Google.com was degrading. Search for "Google hijacked" and you'll see what I'm talking about.

[oldpro]

Google.com and adsense were hijacked, and didn't rank #1 for "Google" or "Adsense". I doubt Google.com was degrading. Search for "Google hijacked" and you'll see what I'm talking about.

I'm not familiar with the "google hijack", but I am the "adsense hijack". I think the latter was what you might call a benelovent hijack...not one of those evil/darkside hijacks with which theBear has been such a great help to many.

[walkman]

>> evil/darkside hijacks
if your site doesn't rank, it really doesn't matter if the link was innocent or not. If it can happen to Google and Adsense, it's safe to say that it can happen to anyone.

You need more than hard work and good content these days; you need luck too. Unless Google fixes this, that is...

[Dayo_UK]

Hmmmm

Got up early to hope for some positive news - not much different from last night.

Night night again folks.

>>>>Everyone has been split, and there are other similar traits.

thebear - everyone I look at too has this from a split of just the homepage being indexed twice(even just url) to hundreds of pages being indexed twice.

[reseller]

Good morning Folks

I still see today few serps sets, though top 5 are the same across all DCs for the keyphrases I'm testing.

It seems that not everybody is happy with the serps of The Mother of All Dcs 64.233.167.104.

I didn't expect yesterday to be a dramatic day as it showed to be. I thought that we have reached the "quite" period after Bourbon where only peaceful tweaking take place. Not so, unfortunately for several fellow members.

Reading the sad stories within this thread illustrate the necessity for all of us to find ways to deal with the consequences of Bourbon Update.

And one more thing. You might have been lucky if you have scaped Allegra and Bourbon updates. However it seems that no site is bulletproof and it is just a matter of time for the next killer update to visit your site.
Therefore, please take a good look at our checklist that I'm updating and posting on this thread and take all possible ethical measures to protect your site.

Good luck to all..

[edited by: reseller at 6:22 am (utc) on June 17, 2005]

[Dayo_UK]

One more thing (Got a black coffee :))

GG If people think they are still getting Canonical URL would you still encourage them to send reports using:-

[google.com...]

I know at /. you said it was hard to get reports due to the nature of domains that were effected being domain.spam.drug.free.com - Also GG did promise that the reported domains would not be looked at for any other misdemeanors - dont know if that still holds.

I just really want Google or GG to know what we are talking about. It has effected all types of sites. I would imagine 30 odd reports was not enough to work on - they probably need 300 or 3000.

[reseller]

annej

>I'm still not sure if setting up the redirect and changing everything over the absolute links had anything to the fact the site is back up on 64.233.167.104. Doing those things may not have made any difference.
I hope this helps those of you who are trying to analyze what happened in this update.<

Thanks annej for sharing. Very generous of you.

However, we can assume and guess but one thing we should all take very seriously for sure; add 301 redirect to our sites.
Reading several posts and depressing sad stories on the threads of Allegra and Bourbon updates leave no doubts whatsoever that a simple measure as to adding 301 redirect might save your several years of hard work, your business and revenues.
By adding a 301 redirect, you have nothing to loose but everything to win!

[Dayo_UK]

>>>>Translation: Google can't figure out what's wrong, how are we suppose to?!

Help them by reporting canonical url issues?

Reseller - yep 301 is important - if I could change your list slightly :)

Updated list

-----------------------------------

Updating the list of suggestions to deal with consequences of Bourbon Update:

- Do a 301 redirect regarding yoursite.com vs. www.yoursite.com (canonical url problem)

- Do nothing as probably more changes on the way

------------------------------------

He he - but other factors on your list are important too.

[reseller]

Dayo_UK

>Reseller - yep 301 is important - if I could change your list slightly :) <

Most welcome.

Shall take your suggestion into account in my next update ;-)

[petehall]

Not lost any positions, however as of yesterday a major two word search phrase dropped from the regular 30,000,000 results to just 2,800,000 :-/

This seems to have stuck across the board!

Is there some kind of problem with a few of the result sets? I find it difficult to believe that a query has dropped to almost one tenth of it's original size.