Back from Bourbon

[history]

For those of you who have given up on the damage done by the Bourbon update… there still might be hope. My site (400+ page history site), which was badly hit by Google’s May update, just came back late last night to its original standing in Google. I was originally on page one of Google with most of my keywords and keyword phrases for years. After May, the site was still page one with Yahoo and Msn; still indexed with Google, but in “no man’s land” in Google searches. I had about five duplicate content pages left over from a recent renovation; also 4 or 5 pages with the ‘http://www.mysite.com/’ and the ‘http://mysite.com’ problem. I contacted Google and was told about 3 weeks later that there was no penalty, but I still lost 95% of Google traffic. The only repairs I made were to eliminate the duplicate pages, but these pages really weren’t an issue in the loss of traffic. I now have 9 pages with the ‘http://www.mysite.com/’ and the ‘http://mysite.com’ problem. Other than that everything is back to normal.

[MikeNoLastName]

We got dumped May 23 and although I've been seeing some significant bouncing around over the last few days from about #80-#110 and back but nothing impressive or consistantly upwards.

Can someone post a couple DCs where they're seeing the improved results? Might just be our local DC hasn't caught up yet.

Got canned response from G, and no response or apparent effect from multiple e-mails (one a week) to jun2005 address.

>How do you watch "live" stats?
try: tail -f access_log
if you have a linux box

[Johan007]

Yes I am back on the first of this month. I also agreed I have no idea if any of my changes had made any impact... but I did learn loads on SEO and cleaned up allot of old pages, and factored in not to rely on free SERP for business so some good has come from it all!

I too got a reply from Google saying that because the site is in the index it is not penalised (erm right I dunno?).

[reseller]

BillyS

>I wonder whether they have switched back to pre-Bourbon algos!
Definately not reseller.<

Agreed.

But from the feedback of friends here until now I can´t see a common factor or tendency. Maybe its the everflux after the update.. and of course maybe not ;-)

And Folks

Lets have all these feedbacks coming. We need to know what the h*ll is going on?

[reseller]

johnhh

>Reseller: >thanks very much GG - all of us here owe you one.<
To clarify I was actually refering to the people who work so hard on our sites! <

And you give them my best regards for a well done job!

[MikeNoLastName]

Nope, just checked every data center I know of. We're still F$%#d.

We DID move up from 10th page to 5th page under the first 25 word unique sentence on our home page in quotes (probably because there are now only 7 pages of results for it - yippee G cleared out some scrapers) behind of course 5 pages full of PR0 scraper sites with supplemental results, who link to us with snippets and run Adsense.

So in general I'd have to say on the whole, NO, we've not had any significant improvement anywhere.

[indistinguishable obscene muttering under breath...]

[musicales]

Same effect but in reverse - we left the sandbox with bourbon and are now right back where we were a month ago ):

[reseller]

MikeNoLastName

What are the measures you have taken to deal with the current situation of your site? I.e have you made any changes, 301 redirect, removing dups etc..

Thanks.

[MikeNoLastName]

We already had the 301 redirect non-to-www in since March some time, when the issue first came up, although when Bourbon came along they somehow found a bunch of our old non-www pages cached from before March. Many went away by Mid-June but about 54 out of 1000 still remain on one domain (as supplementals and even though I've seen Gbot spider nearly every single one and discover the 301 redirect in the last month) and 3 on the other (including the home page on the later which came and went and came again) All of which are showing cached from Nov, Jan and Feb I believe.

Other than that we've been extremely careful about duplicate pages since 1999.

We DO have a few hundred scraper sites which all copy snipets of our site, mostly the home page, but also a dozen other pages which formerly ranked high on G and still do on Y and MSN on very competitive niche keywords.

We still update our pages at least once a week, as we always have, and haven't made any significant changes.

The single significant change we DID make was UN-redirecting the second domain home page which was 301 redirected to the 1st domain home page since about Nov 2004. We've been slowly merging everything over to the first domain, so this was a back-step. The first home page went under on May 23, the second was good until June 16ish. So we assumed the first was dragging down the second, since they are highly interlinked. We thought unlinking them might allow one or the other to float back up if there was a penalty. But to date neither has.

[stu2]

Has something significant happened since end of June? The search for my keywords looks awfully like they did pre-bourbon? Have they brought back an old index or something?

I used Google Sitemaps a few days after it was 1st introduced (about 3 weeks ago). All my pages got indexed correctly and I was pleased with my SERPS rankings. The last time I checked them was in the last few days of June and everything was still ok.

Now, doing a search on my keywords, the SERPS give me deja vue. Look awfully familar to pre-bourbon days. When I do a site:www.mydomain.com there are a significant number (maybe 15-20%) of my pages have lost their titles and caches and only now show the url. What causes that?

[chopin2256]

Still no luck with my site. I just have no motivation to continue building it anymore. It hasn't been updated since May 21, and will continue to not be updated until it gets out of this stupid penalty phase. I did fix the canonical problems, and hijacks though. But adding information to that site is just not as fun as it used to be. It's doing great in yahoo and msn though!

But this Bourbon update, although initially upsetting, actually was good in a way for me personally. If it was never for Bourbon, I would have never got the idea to create another site, and to hunt down and buy a 10 year old pr 7 site. Instead, I would have continued to be naive and build on my current pr 4 site, which has 1/20th of the inbound links, and is nowhere near as authoritative as the site I had just purchased. So, thats how I turned this depressing incident into something 50 times better. It opened up my mind and eyes, bigtime.

[reseller]

chopin2256

>So, thats how I turned this depressing incident into something 50 times better. It opened up my mind and eyes, bigtime.<

I like your creative and productive way of thinking. Actually we talked in the thread of dealing with the consequences of Bourbon about several measures. Moving contents of a site which was hit to a new site was one of them. Creating emergency sites was another measure. And all are legit.

Especially when you are running a business site and you and maybe co-workers depending on the revenue generated, you MUST be prepared and have a PLAN-B ready at all time. To sit tight, wait and see isn´t going to solve a business site problem at all.

[ugnius]

during allegra lost 75%, during bourbon - remaining 25%, around Jun 25 recovered to prebourbon, not all 25%, lets say about 18 of 25. Still suffer the main loss during allegra.
Anyone with the similar pattern?

[reseller]

ugnius

>Still suffer the main loss during allegra.<

The same here. And I wish to hear from anybody who have recovered from Allegra.

[kwngian]

My site also got hit by the Jun 15 update but till now, no recovery in sight. Did a url removal for duplicate contents and my traffic drop even further.

Now, the referrers I am getting from google are only a little more google's image search (which I really dislike).

Like choppin, I have no enthusiasm to update my site and just leaving it there to rot and continue building my other new sites.

[Clint]

Wow, this thread got rather active in a hurry. Hmm, looks like a new "Bourbon" info thread, I knew one would show up soon. ;) I tried starting a new one after Reseller's thread was closed, but I was not allowed.

To what IP does Google.com resolve in your area?

Sorry, I don't know how to determine this.

"History", I've used NeoTrace Pro for years and I can't recall the other non-program methods. I think you should be able to go to the command prompt in XP and type tracert www.google.com and the final hop is the IP, unless they can't be pinged to the final hop. (I just tried that on mine and it didn't work with any domain, probably something in my firewall blocking cmd prompt networking since I can do it with NeoTrace and it is indeed fully pingable). Note though that their IP can change a few times each day. Right now in my area it's [64.233.161.147...]

If you're still showing the same results today, then it may be safe to say the results you previously saw are propagating to other IP areas (other DC's, which in case you don't know are "DataCenters").

[Edit] tracert www.google.com works. I originally had 4 wwww before it! Haven't woke up well yet! ;) I just ran it again, and right now it's [64.233.161.99...] so that's changed in matter of 2 minutes! It shows that IP on NeoTrace and the cmd prompt trace, so it apparently works.

[reseller]

Clint

>Wow, this thread got rather active in a hurry. Hmm, looks like a new "Bourbon" info thread, I knew one would show up soon.<

I guess there is still a big demand to discuss, learn and share within such vital subject.

looking forward to the next 600+ posts ;-)

[Johan007]

Google said my site had not been penalised and is fine. So does that mean I can put back the changes I made back?! Hmmm I am very confused however I don’t think I will take the chance.

Has Google replied to anyone saying they HAD been penalised?

[Wibfision]

Lost traffic after Allegra, then traffic returned to about 30% of previous levels before Bourbon. Lost traffic initially after Bourbon, then traffic came back to higher levels than ever before around June 15th/16th, then disappeared again on 30th June.

Well, it was good for 2 weeks, but I feel like a mouse to Google the cat!

[Atticus]

My site has 1,700 pages.

As of this AM, site: shows 38,000 results (most supplimental).

Zero referrals from G SERPs.

A search for a unique phrase in quotes for one of the pages yields 11 results (all supplimental) -- 10 scrapers and my page at the end of the list at #11. That's just one example; I've had hundreds of pages scraped.

I don't know where the 'G is broken' debate left off, but it certainly isn't indexing my site correctly.

This site has hundreds of good inbound links, many from .edu and k-12 sites. It was killed by Allegra, buried by Bourbon.

[soapystar]

yup the 30th June twiddle looks the more confusing update....because it seems to have left many sites returning the less relevant page then pre-30th....so it seems a page level adjustemnt rather than a site level..to my eyes anyway...

[HarryM]

I'm not back from Bourbon, and I am very confused by what is going on. The traffic for my main site mainly came from Google US and Google UK. Towards the end of March it fell dramatically, with hardly any referals from Google. Then it slowly came back and reached its former level by end of May. Then on 16 June it fell again, only this time even worse, with no Google traffic at all except from Google imgres. And so far no sign of the 2 July improvement others have mentioned.

To me it seems that there is something about this site that is borderline, such that a small tweak in an algo or filter virtually switches the traffic off or on. But what? I've run out of usual suspects. :(

It seemed pointless to just sit and wait. So I've made a number of changes, although it will take Googlebot some time to pick them up.

a) I noticed that on 16 June Google seemed to have rolled back and re-indexed a bunch of print pages urls, despite the fact these had noindex,noarchive meta tags to avoid duplicate content issues. So now I've deleted all print pages just in case, and will let Google 404 them.

b) I've simplified the page layout and got rid of all H2, H3, tags, etc., just in case Google saw too many H tags as over-optimized. Now there is only a simple H1 header at the top of each page.

The only other thing I can think of is that the site contains quite a few references to 'travel', and this may be tripping some sort of commercial filter, even though it's not a travel site as such. Although most of the AdSense ads are travel related.

It looks as if I'll just have to keep simplifying and see what happens.

[MikeNoLastName]

I just noticed I have a page indexed in G from one of my domains which is of the format:
[domain.com...]

Just as on any other domain (at least I just tried here on the WebmasterWorld domain and it works the same) this produces a perfectly valid 200 status page which resolves to my home page resulting in a duplicate of my home page being indexed. Obviously it is a typo on a link to one of our valid pages (e.g. www.domain.com/zabc.htm) from someone elses site on the web.

1. Why isn't G realizing this is the same page and indexing it twice?
2. Could this be causing a duplication penalty?
3. How do I get rid of it without accidently getting rid of the home page?
4. What's to keep a competitor from submitting/linking hundreds of these and getting anyone dup penalized?

[gtmash]

I lost 50% of my traffic on June 16, probably all Google referrals. 80-90% of it has come back on July 1. No changes done. Did not bother with 301 or whatever. Did not change keywords. Did not submit site map.

Looked into all the "survival guide" mumbo jumbo, but never got around to implementing them. It seems everything is coming back to normal without manipulation if a site is legit. Heck, all my pages show up in site searches with both www and no www.

[jdwaverly]

I have the opposite experience from many of you...

After HUGE 95% drop off in G refers on March 27...
Bourbon didn't affect us much (since 95% of our G refers were already missing)

Traffic started to return to pre March levels June 16 .

Then before we could celebrate, June 30 traffic dropped off again by 90%.

Clean site (no cloaking, doorways), plenty of incoming links and basic SEO.

Interestingly, the ranks of some search terms haven't dropped but I can't see any pattern to the mayhem.

I'm starting to believe a previous poster to WW who proposed that G was using algorithms rotated on a semi-weekly basis to keep people off balance.

G has been working to shorten their update cycle...
They obviously have now shortened it to 2 weeks...

They always love those holiday weekends :(

[outland88]

I speculated what Gtmash said would occur with a lot of sites. In other cases sites that had drops in rankings are probably just left down-ranked whether they violated some rule or not.

[MikeNoLastName]

Seems that Bourbon feedback has LEFT the building...

Just tried sending an e-mail and can no longer send anything to the Googleguy posted e-mail, so I guess we're totally SOL and on our own as usual:

Return-Path: <[e-mail]>
X-ClientAddr: 216.239.56.131
From: [e-mail]
Subject: Posting error: jun05feedback
Date: Sun, 03 Jul 2005 20:20:13 +0000

[reseller]

gtmash

>Heck, all my pages show up in site searches with both www and no www. <

Sounds like you need to do a 301 redirect!

[gtmash]

Hehe, yeah, I know.

[nutsandbolts]

Now two sites have dropped off the face of Google after surviving Bourbon.

Great! Build content, two to three pages of quality writing per day and sites get dumped. Blah.

[reseller]

nutsandbolts

>Now two sites have dropped off the face of Google after surviving Bourbon.<

I just wonder if Bourbon update is still going on!

From the feedbacks on this thread things just don´t look like an innocent traditional "everflux".

And I wouldn´t be surprised at all, if The Fat Lady ((c) copyright Caveman 2005) is still at the plex and haven´t received any instructions yet from GoogleGuy to start singing ;-)