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.

[GoogleGuy]

sailorjwd, that's a valid reason to send us an email. Bear in mind that the engineers won't be able to reply to emails, but we can read them. It's easier if you give a typical query you would have expected to show up for, not just your site name. I checked, and a few people have already dropped us notes. If you do, please include your WebmasterWorld nickname so that it's easier to put things into context.

P.S. J., thanks for the spam report. I love to hear about any spammy sites that we're missing. :)

[reseller]

Dealing with the consequences of Bourbon Update
Google-Updates Survival Kit

Hi Folks!

As you might have read in GoogleGuy post msg #:765 ; Bourbon is winding down. Based on that I´m updating our Google-Updates Survival Kit. Here I go:

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

- Removing 302 redirects

- Removing duplicates

- Subtle page changes and monitor SERP changes

- Create and submit a Google Sitemap (You want Google to crawl more of your web pages)
[google.com...]

- Optimize your site for other search engines (like Yahoo, MSN ..)
Keep working to increase non Google sources of visitors.

- Transfer your affected site to a spare/emergency site
An emergency site is an additional site with 1-2 pages of real content related to your affected site. You create the emergency site in good time, submit it to the majors (also maybe local directories) and leave it to age for at least 6 months before moving the content of your affected site to it.

Resources:

Google Update Bourbon Part 4
[webmasterworld.com...]

Dropped from Google - a checklist to find out why.
[webmasterworld.com...]

Further Google 302 Redirect Problems
[webmasterworld.com...]

301 for non-www. to www. not working, plus custom error stops working
[webmasterworld.com...]

Google Sitemaps
[webmasterworld.com...]

Successful Site in 12 Months with Google Alone (Brett Tabke)
[webmasterworld.com...]

Sandbox Question and SEO for Google
[webmasterworld.com...]

GoogleGuy's posts (Some posts and advice on Bourbon and other topics)
[webmasterworld.com...]

eval.google.com - Google's Secret Evaluation Lab..
[webmasterworld.com...]

Your comments and suggestions shall be highly appreciated.

Thanks!

[sailorjwd]

Thanks GG... although I forgot to put my handle on the email.

For everyone, here is what info I'm giving to Google (note I hide a few things here to conform to TOS):

Gentlemen,
I am requesting some information that might explain why my website (http://www.mydomain.com ) no longer appears anywhere in the top 100 results for any keyword phrases for which it ranked within the top 10 for about 4.7 years.

This problem is with nearly ALL search phrases. Visitors used to find my site on about 1500 different search phrases each day and about 20,000 different phrases each month.

Overnight, my visitors from Google search dropped from 5,000 per day to zero per day.

For example:

"Blue Widget Consultants" - I can't be found anywhere and used to be top 3 for 4.5 years.

Unique company name as a quoted string:
"XYZ Widget Design" - I am currently around 50th place behind 49 of 6,000 pages that mentioned my company.

My unique URL:

"mydomain.com" - can't be found in the top 100 (not sure where it is).

I've always expected to be up/down in the search results based on algorithm changes but I never expected my entire site would be lost completely.

Is there anything under my control that might help my site recover from this situation?

(my search result rankings on Yahoo and MSN remain very good)

[GoogleGuy]

reseller, one point I'd want people to be very clear on: please do not remove your own site using Google's url removal tool. Someone here on WebmasterWorld recommended that as a possible way to handle canonicalization problems, and all it will really do is remove your own site for 180 days.

Also, I saw at least one person who wrote and still thinks that allinurl:yourdomain.com returning a result like someotherdomain.com/redirect?url=www.yourdomain.com could be a hijacking. That's a common misperception. All that "allinurl:yourdomain.com" does is look for documents with "yourdomain com" anywhere in the url that we saw. It's not a hijacking if you see results from other sites with allinurl. The only time you need to worry is if you do site:yourdomain.com and then you see results from someotherdomain.com.

Hope that helps,
GoogleGuy

[chopin2256]

Glad to finally be able to speak about my sites poor rankings. Had to get that off my chest! Hope my email gets read and thanks Googleguy for this opportunity.

[sailorjwd]

And more on 'Really Sad',

My site used to get emails every other day thanking us for the content on this site.

We would even get $5-10 via paypal as a thank you about once a month.

5 major colleges had copied whole sections of our website and put it in their website for the students (since removed :)

We think that the Google results are missing a valuable asset.

[reseller]

GoogleGuy

Thanks for the valuable info. Much appreciated. Shall include the info in my next update.

I read also with much interest your reply to sailorjwd and regard it as a step in the right direction ;-)

Thanks and God bless...

[ltedesco]

GoogleGuy,

When we can be sure that Bourbon is realy over?
Then we can start making changes and stop waiting with hope for resurrection

[wordy]

"reseller, one point I'd want people to be very clear on..."

Only one?

Bring on the horses!

[theBear]

steveb,

Most of these folks just ordered up a domain from hosting company x who had mush for brains do the setup.

Some of these folks are still asking why do I have to do this stuff when fancy pants IE, Moz, Netscape, Opera, or pick your favorite browser provides the same page no matter how you ask for it.

But the real kicker comes when someone actually does a link to one of these sites understanding fully what they are doing.

[sailorjwd]

GG,

If I had used the url-removal tool without a driving permit and removed my homepage would that explained being Totally dropped for ALL search results and being removed from Google's Directory tooo?

The homepage (index.html) has PR 4 and has backlinks that appear to be updating.

Seems odd to me cause the site was running fine for 3 months after removal accident.

If that's the case I can send my employees home and tell them to come back in late August :)

<added>
The only thing that I know that is wrong with the site is a googol of 302 redirects and lots of content was stolen
</addeD>

[2by4]

kgun, very interesting posts, someone who actually understands what google's business actually is, that's a refreshing breath of common sense...

[annej]

sailorjwd mentioned the following:

5 major colleges had copied whole sections of our website and put it in their website for the students (since removed)

I think there is a real concern here with the duplicate page problem. Over the years I've shared articles with various related sites. I'm not about to go back to them now and tell them they have to take them down. But I won't do it in the future. I just had to tell someone who asked that they could not use one of my articles in their newsletter because the newsletter is put online. I had to explain that because of Google I could no longer share articles with other web sites.

Also there are things like press releases. Often I get one on a new book in my field or on an important event going on. This same press release will be posted on several websites.

It seems to me penalizing sites for doing things like this is going too far. If you want sites that are primarily educational there will be duplicated information here and there.

[outland88]

The only question I want to know from the Google crew is the following.

With this update I am finding more and more content thieves hijacking large chunks of my web pages for Adsense and other things. How much is this duplication effecting my rankings and others? To me it seems a large portion of the Google algo would be penalizing for duplication.

[annej]

I just noticed someone mentioning that the whole site is penalize if there are any duplicate pages. Yikes! Maybe that was my Bourbon problem. I guess I'd better search the web to see to see which of my articles are elsewhere on the web. The safest thing, I guess, would be to take the article down from my site. Who would have thought sharing articles would come to this?

[GoogleGuy]

sailorjwd, if you do site:sailorjwd.com (or whatever your domain is), do you see zero results? That would be likely to be the url removal tool; you say that you've used the url removal tool on your own domain?

[sailorjwd]

GG:

I see a full compliment of pages (200). I have 87 pages with NOINDEX on them and they properly don't show up.

By the way, 6 weeks ago my pages started vanishing.

Within two weeks I was down to about 25 fully index pages.. the rest url-only or totally gone.

They gradually started coming back about 3 weeks ago.

A week ago I submitted my sitemap to the new site map thingy and within 3 days all the pages were back in the Site command.

<added>
on or about Feb 6th I nuked my homepage with url removal
</>

[esllou]

GG, I have written to the address you posted and have included my WebmasterWorld name too.

thanks for the address. :-)

[outland88]

Annej until you really know how to track these content thieves you may just be seeing the tip of the iceberg. The cloakers have really come out in this update. Yes I would consider shared content duplication. Overall once the content seems to get duplicated enough somebody’s going to plummet in the rankings. The exception seems to be with the top 30 results in popular categories.

As I see it you really can't protect your rankings in Google anymore unless your site has little content to be stolen. If you print more than a paragraph without links here come the hijackers and scrapers.

[joeduck]

GG -

First, thanks for creating the comment Google Group - this is a very helpful approach to those of us who are, depending on one's perspective, incessant whining pitiful sh*theads or unjustly penalized brilliant online marketing geniuses. (I've been told I represent both these groups).

I know you guys can't respond to each note personally but it would be nice to have an autoreply or some verification that you received the notes.

[joeduck]

Overall once the content seems to get duplicated enough somebody’s going to plummet in the rankings. The exception seems to be with the top 30 results in popular categories.

Outland please elaborate on this as it appears to be our situation and many others, and I'm beginning to think this effect, rather than the controversial "302 hijacking" hypothesis, is the problem affecting many sites who have dropped into obscurity.

Where do you get the "top 30 results exception" idea?

[annej]

I have no way to find hidden copies of my articles but I can find open ones.

Could someone please tell me if doing a
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">
would solve the problem. At least then visitors to my site could still find the articles. Otherwise I'll have to remove them from the site.

[reseller]

annej

>I have no way to find hidden copies of my articles but I can find open ones.<

May I suggest that you look first at your site and see whether you have any duplicate pages there. And forget for now the rest of the web ;-)

Pls. run command site:www.yoursite.com and pay attention also to "Supplemental Result"

[outland88]

I would concur Joe. GG knows duplicated content is more of a problem than the 302’s. Since so much content is being duplicated the only real way to protect results is to give insulation to some sites. Possibly PR. Other sites may not have enough content that can be cut and pasted. In essence they become insulated. Most of the 302’s are found in the supplemental results where much of the duplicated content is not.

Content thieves normally go have the first 100 results because of their popularity. Once those results get duplicated enough along comes an update. Bam, many sites plummet because of duplication and the hijackers now go after the newer results. Once they replace your content with the newer results its possible you could start working your way back up in the rankings. As time progresses the updates will become more drastic.

That's why Google warned against business being dependant on their results. Some can and Google can but not the vast majority.

[MikeNoLastName]

"The exception seems to be with the top 30 results in popular categories. "

Even these aren't necessarily exempt. We were #12 on a 45 million result keyword and got one domain dumped in the first part of Bourbon and a second integrated to it dumped just yesterday.
I might agreed to top 10 results being exempt.

[outland88]

That's no "chiseled in granite" rule Mike. It would vary from category to category. It could be 10-50 in some.

[joeduck]

Outland -

All logical points and fairly consistent with what I've observed for sites that were hurt and unhurt since Allegra, when I think the 'anti spam' stuff kicked into higher gear leaving some collateral damage. GG indicated here and at slashdot that PR is the major determinant of canonical status and that makes sense, though I'm guessing spammers are using old domains with PR and PR tricks to get around that.

The challenge for a fully automated algo is that you cannot "fix" problems without unintended consequences. I think this, more than Google's bottom line as some suggest in this thread, is at the heart of the problem.

[kgun]

Lorel 7:11 pm on June 18, 20

"I think if a lot more people ran their sites through validators (several of them because not all pick up all the errors-not even W3c.org), link checkers, blacklist checkers, browser compatibility programs and checked Google for dupliate content penalities and went out and found some quality links passing PR--this thread would expire in a few days because a lot of the angry people on this thread would be eating humble pie".

Excellent cite. I linked to your site two places, one where I changed your anchor text to this:

"Yoursitename offers tips to stop Hijackers steal your Web Page PR".

Tell me if you want the link deleted or changed to your proposal. Don't hope so, since it seems like an excellent site.

I give it ***** (Max).

KBleivik

[outland88]

The thing Joe is why would people steal content if it’s not profitable. And why would so much get ignored. Tell me what’s the common denominator with a lot of content theft? What's encouraging it so much?

[annej]

I decided to check my site for duplicate pages even though the site and most pages are back. I did find there are still a few pages penalized. I am sure of this because several scraper sites with snippets from the page are ahead of the actual page in the serps. These are pages that used to do well in searches. I did not find any completely duplicated pages of the penalized pages though.

So I am thinking the penalties we are getting are more related to something that the scraper site are doing than an honestly duplicated page done with permission from the author. I did find a few 'with permission' duplicated pages but they don't have penalties.