Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
On July 28th, were the people affected all completely removed or did some people see their rankings drop considerably?
My experience was my site came out with Bourban and then went back to the sandbox on July 22. It could have been a dup filter that hit me on the 22nd since I have several pages close in content that are computer generated. I also launched a site in early July with 1 link from my homepage that had similar topics and linking structure as my original site that could have hurt my site.
I'd like to hear from others what happened bringing these two updates together...
First time I've heard of a sector dependent update-
But it describes what my site and Reseller, Jgbmarc, Kdobson, Sheffnet and others described in the epic Bourbon update thread of what happened to their sites 16,22,28th July.
Pre Update site doing well for a 20 odd phrases then Poof. Site appears to be penalised by a 30 place ranking drop for ALL phrases.
Theories
--A manual G review and penalty for being a thin affiliate.
--Pages being hijacked and G incorrectly punishing my site for dupe.
Sound familiar to anyone? Anymore theories?
...these changes have affected entire sites rather than individual pages.
While Google will probably never admit to it, the post-Bourbon adjustments appear to have been largely driven by human reivew. Most affected have been sites that experienced big drops or gains during the Allegra and Bourbon algo updates. In all likelyhood there is now an algo that's flagging borderline sites for human review and, in some cases, applying a temporary penality.
Sorry but I had to laugh when I read that. They don't even listen to reports of blatant spam repeatedly sent to them affecting huge key terms and you believe that? Tell you what, find a spammer, the most egregious spammer you can find. Report them to Google and I say you can't knock them out of the index no matter how hard you blow. Shame on Google I say.
Google says that the fluctuations are just the algo and there is no penalty...My guess is that my site was hit across the entire domain with duplicate content filters that were tightened up...at least in my case where content is very similar across many pages.
Several highly active sites with lots of daily changes used to never get much activity and now with the constantly updated sitemap, the traffic is up by over 300%.
The sites which are static reference sites have dropped by about 50%.
Thanks
Where this site where in the top 10 in mid May, it went to 27 and 38. Right now down at 43 and 57...
Our website is still there, but the rankings are very poor, traffic is about 10% of the days before...
I wondered what happened and couldn't find a clue. Some details of our site to share and see if something can be found that triggered this 'filter'.
1. I added Adsense on this site 10 days before 21st July. I used a 'channel' of an existing Adsense account which we use on another website of ours. That website do have some related pages, though not the same content
2. Some time ago I start using a couple of the same Affiliate Links on both websites.
3. We use 'server-redirects' (like Kelkoo uses them...) to protect our content and measure clicks.
Cannot think of more...
This site only ranked well from June 16th to July 22. Now it is buried...and deserves it, but I just want to know why it had its day in the sun and what sent it back to oblivion since very little changed on it...One day goog loved it and the next it hated it, when in reality, it should have never loved it so broadly.
First time I've heard of a sector dependent update-
But it describes what my site and Reseller, Jgbmarc, Kdobson, Sheffnet and others described in the epic Bourbon update thread of what happened to their sites 16,22,28th July.Pre Update site doing well for a 20 odd phrases then Poof. Site appears to be penalised by a 30 place ranking drop for ALL phrases.
Yep -happened to an older site of mine (circa 1999, about 12k pages or so). Top 5 for 3 years give or take. On July 16th, all pages previously ranked in top 5 (about 400 phrases or so) dropped about 30-40 spots, almost as if someone had looked at the site (which I doubt) and said "let's knock this site back a few pages".
However, as I've said before - this has happened a handful of times over the last few years,a nd the site has always bounced back in 6-8 weeks or so.
Things to note:
1. I had been having connectivity problems due to some kind of router issue, but was TOLD that the problem was on my ISP's end, not on the server end (several traceroutes run from various servers woudl seem to confirm connectivity was fine, but if I couldn't reach it several times per day for hours at a time, perhaps the bots couldn't either).
2. The site doesn't use any ODP data (although there is a searchable directory, it's full of our articles/submitted sites, etc.
3. Doing the suggested search for "www.mydomainname.com" brings the site up on pages 3-5 (depending I suppose on which datacenter it hits). Although I've never used that search before, so I don't know if it was always that way.
4. The site is getting daily crawls from various googlebots (regular and mozilla flavor) and has had it's index page updated in the cache several times since July 16th.
5. The site still receives some google traffic (although average google traffic is down about 75-80%), and there are still some internal article pages (about 300-400) that rank in the top 10 for rather specific and obscure phrases.
Overall, I would say (as long as you're not a thin affiliate or an ODP clone) simply keep on keeping on. Give it 6-8 weeks or so, and see if this thing straightens itself out.
I mean sites which contain useful information of a reference nature and do not ever change.
Those pages do not get updated and the sitemap does not get updated. The reference type site rankings have dropped substantially and the daily traffic is down by about 50% at a time of year when searches for those kind of sites usually skyrocket.
I immediately sent off a re-inclusion request, and within a week I was back in.
Yes, I frequently notice people reporting that they begin to get problems after adding Adsense.
Is there any merit to the suggestion that adding Adsense to your site puts you under the spotlight and more likely to get a penalty?
Suppose you deliver x per cent of clicks to Adsense, and they think that this is too high, maybe they take a look, judge that you must be clicking the links yourself and knock you down 3/4 pages to see whether the clicks drop accordingly. If they don't drop then it must be you who's clicking so the penalty remains on the basis of click fraud.
I'm seriously considering removing Adsense completely from my site. I only make a few dollars a day anyway.
Is there any merit to the suggestion that adding Adsense to your site puts you under the spotlight and more likely to get a penalty?
It's unlikely that having AdSense on your site would, in itself, make you more vulnerable to a review. After all, there must be hundreds of thousands of publishers running AdSense, and many are doing quite well in the SERPs. If AdSense is a "trigger factor," it's probably just one of several or many, and it shouldn't be a cause for concern unless you think your site wouldn't pass a manual review for other reasons.
Give it 6-8 weeks or so, and see if this thing straightens itself out
This is what I will do also.
It used to do really well for the main keywords, then on came Bourbon and pushed it down. July 28 pushed it down another 20 positions.
The only change since after bourbon has been adding a Google Sitemap...
After Bourbon we found one site that had cloned almost all of the vital pages (including some of our internal links). That site is close to five years old. We asked them to remove the content copied from us, and they did. However, there might be more of these...
It strikes me that using AdWords might actually give Google a very good pointer as to the main interest points for the site, making it possible to pinpoint the niche very well. And thinking of it, our AdWords competitors' sites aren't scoring very well in the SERPs either.
The weirdest thing is that this is just about the only site I'm working with that isn't doing well in Google's SERPs.
