:-( : Update...false alarm Sept 2005

What *is* an Update?

[straticus]

Continued from:
[webmasterworld.com...]

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It seem the backlink update has begun, not surprising after the heavy spidering lately, good luck everyone!

[Dayo_UK]

>>>>If you have lost a page, search for a long string of text in quotes, see how you aren't ranking for the text but a bunch of supplemental crap is there, then click the "more results" link at the end of the results, then poof see your page pop up at #1 for the search.

Yes, this has been the case for my sites for ages. I assume that it is becoming more widespread.

I just think it is Google showing just how crap they are, and they want to prove it - as if anyone did not believe already.

[g1smd]

There are various IPs listed in this thread. Pick a few and have a look.

Google has at least 50 different IP addresses for various datacentres. To get a picture you only need to look at half a dozen or so; several from each of the 64 and 66 and 216 blocks.

[reseller]

tigger

>>are you seeing these new results on .com or one of the DC's as I'm not seeing any major changes on either .com or .co.uk? with the keywords I monitor <<

I see the new results on the DCs I posted and on my google.com (at present 66.249.93.104).

[cristinita]

I guess we should call all these changes Update Backwards because SERPs seem to going back to the past...

[reseller]

Folks

Please mind your blood pressure ;-)

Update Brett is still young and we mightbe looking at ONLY part one of the famous 3.5

[djmick200]

If things stay as they are then Im throwing in the towel ;-)

[Gary_I]

Reseller

Lost all traffic from Google in Feb 2-3 update.

Came back flying July 20th, and struggling big time as of today.

Site (sites - more than one affected) is travel related

What I am now seeing is a lot of the older and I mean older sites resurfacing that were there before.

The SERPS look more like some kind of rollback to me

[r3nz0]

djmick200 never trow the towel..

[cristinita]

Gary_I,

Same thing for me in travel-related spanish sites, update seems to be bringing back stuff that was up in the serps long ago...

[djmick200]

Hey r3nz0 s was joking buddy :-)

Im still not seeing any rollback for my sector. Complete changes. Those of you seeing a rollback, what date are we roughly talking about?

[Angelis]

Still not seeing anything changing here...

...Will keep looking.

[reseller]

Gary_I

>>Reseller

Lost all traffic from Google in Feb 2-3 update.

Came back flying July 20th, and struggling big time as of today.<<

I do hope that you emerge victorious again when things settle down ;-)

[JuniorOptimizer]

Not an update, a disaster. My 8 year old primary money making websites has been destroyed.

[Jonno549]

Hi Guys,
Ive never seen the serps in such a mess. It's like it's getting results from different indexes, taken at different times and kind of put it all together in one big mess, scraper sites and all. It has to be temporary.

[edited by: Jonno549 at 11:59 am (utc) on Sep. 22, 2005]

[Angelis]

They will come back after a few days more than likely if it is an update. Things always go down then reappear (usually) so I wouldnt worry unless its gone for more than 3 days.

[JuniorOptimizer]

I hope you're right. These results are a real mess. Many old sites, as stated by others, have risen to the top unexpectedly. There are even off-topic sites ranking in the top 20.

[wiseapple]

Reseller -
Still not back after Feb. 2nd. We have basically gone from 15K-20K refs per day from Google down to about 100-200. It is a mystery why. Yahoo, MSN, and Ask still provide a great amount of traffic. Therefore, I cannot change to much. Hopefully this update will bring some better news.

[Autoweb]

Hi Guys,
We are having the same problems. I hate relying on Google so heavily, because they have the power to trash your income in a nanosecond.
I sincerely hope the glitch rectifies, or were in trouble.

[edited by: Autoweb at 12:17 pm (utc) on Sep. 22, 2005]

[toughturkey]

Big changes in one of my sectors. A site of mine that was buried alive 3 years ago has come to the surface (#3) for some air.

[SEOPTI]

Google will force people more and more into AdWords, SEO will be dead soon.

[Salon99]

My first post, but it's obvious that people are suffering here, so I thought I would chip in, hopefully in a re-assuring sense.

We host a couple of significant scientific sites, not commercial sites I might add. We wouldn't know SEO if it hit us in the face, so we have done nothing whatsoever to justify any type of penalty or downgrade.

One of these sites has today disappeared from Google to all intents and purposes. Major searches on key terms which the site covers fail to show it, even though in value terms it should be #1 on these, as it remains on Yahoo and MSN. It does appear on semi-related strange search terms though.

This doesn't lose us any money, but it is somewhat inconvenient for the public in this niche area, as they would expect to find us. There is probably more harm done to Google in this respect. Peculiar.

The re-assurance is that I would be surprised if this state of affairs remained, as there must be many many other key sites adrift as well. It cannot help Google.

Best of luck to you all.

[Dayo_UK]

>>>>The re-assurance is that I would be surprised if this state of affairs remained, as there must be many many other key sites adrift as well. It cannot help Google.

Erm - this does not re-assure - that has been happening for months for lots of sites.

It just underlines the difficulties that Google is having.

However, I have been here long enough to try not to think on a daily basis. I will wait for a while yet.

[wiseapple]

It can be frustrating when your site disappears from the serps and you are left with trying to figure out why. It can be even more frustrating when you employ no SEO and think you are following all the rules. Then all of sudden you are caught up in some glitch or wide-sweeping action of Google where they are trying to get rid of a certain groups of sites (scrapers, 302s, bad 301, bad links, dup content, etc...). What to do? Not sure. Submit reinclusion request? Many sites do not get removed from the index. However, there pages get pushed into oblivion. Therefore, if you submit a reinclusion request, you will get the obvious email back from Google saying you are in the index.

[taps]

our site is still in the index. One thing is strange: with site:www.widget.com I receive more than 300.000 results. After Bourbon I always received something around 100.000.

Due to our dynamic structure the second figure is ok. We had all the last years between 100.000 and 170.000 entries.

Maybe some other dup content problem is showing up.

But I will not take any action until next monday. If the site will still be buried I'll consider starting up from the scratch again - new domain, new structure, new design.

It is really frustrating to see six years of hard work going down the drain.

[Angelis]

Awful waste of 6 years, just leave the site up and concentrate on MSN and Yahoo, Google isnt the be all and end all of everything, infact of late sites I look after have been getting 5 - 6 even 50% more traffic than from Google.

Just because the rubber falls off the end of your pencil does mean you have to buy a new one.

[Jonno549]

I've noticed increased traffic from smaller referrers lately also, mainly from local and niche search engines and directories, and from other related sites.

[Dayo_UK]

Actually I have a site which Google has almost got right.

I say almost as in the site is getting crawled correctly and the homepage appears to be the most important page within the site :o!

Still ranking bad - but intresting.

[bobster2]

RIP SEO

[wakahii]

Looks like the 'giant' search engine is not capable of indexing all the pages. They probably prefer the PPC with 2% from the FREE/regular searches

[prema]

i can see that sites which have had top positions in google for a long time using cloaking techniques have been removed now. Its good in one way to eliminate sites which use spam.