July 22nd Sufferers

[kdobson99]

For those of us hit on July 22nd, where it appears almost like a rollback, I have made another observation that leads me to believe this is some kind of "glitch" on google's end, rather than a penalty/filter.

First let me say that my site that got hit is a PR7 site that has been around for over 5 years. It gets a lot of respect from google as I could add a page on most any topic, do some basic SEO work and it would rank decent.

As I have stated on other threads, only those pages that existed prior to June 16th still rank well. Any page added after that time ranked well in early July, then went away on July 22nd. Serps on established pages reverted back to where they were after June 16th.

Now, today I started checking backlinks. On the pages that still rank well (pre June 16 pages) backlinks pointing to those interior pages are still there. For those that lost their rankings, no backlinks are showing. Of course this might have been expected without a backlink update... but just after the July 16th (or so) backlink update, there were links showing for those pages.

Of course in the past you didn't need an actual observable backlink update to get credit from google for new links. Google gives credit for a link when it finds it, not when it does a backlink update. Therefore, these pages that no longer rank well (post June 16th pages) are not getting credit for new backlinks, but instead google appears to be relying on the backlink data as it existed on June 16th. That is the only way I can explain these newer pages getting cached and indexed regularly and not ranking, while every page that does have backlink data still ranks well.

Any thoughts?