My site has been First Now vanished from Google

My site has been the first of its kind, I drop off Google

[sabine7777]

For the past year I have experienced periodically being completely dropped off Google. My site has been the FIRST of its kind and is in all the natural search results on the first spot. I'm just a small business, but since spet of 2004 I have been vanishing off of Google every 6 weeks or so--recently it has been more often and for longer periods. Does Google discriminate against Older sites? Are they doing it so that we will advertise with them? Any help, advice, comment from a desperate single mother of 4!

[stargeek]

dazz:
this doesn't look like anything to do with onpage optimization, as I said before this looks plainly like a change in valuation of external vs internal links.

time to fire up the link farms.

[edited by: stargeek at 1:41 pm (utc) on Sep. 26, 2005]

[diddlydazz]

dayo_uk

Or not at all.

sorry to hear that, we still have one MIA but was putting that down to something else.

dazz

[stargeek]

the updated DC's also seem to have fewer pages in the total results numbers.

[diddlydazz]

this doesn't look like anything to do with onpage optimization

couldn't agree more!

for those who are rushing to change things on their pages, unless there is something slightly dodgy you have done since the last update then leave well alone!

if your sites are whitehat and unique content then my advice would be to carry on building your sites, turn your attention to another SE, and forget about G for at least a couple of weeks.

it doesnt look like this is over by a long shot yet.

anyone without 301 redirects setup for nonWWW/WWW or vice versa then find the time to add them.

dazz

[np2003]

Google is attempting to ban a lot of sites ranking in at high positions, they are doing this to drive their Adwords revenue up. Google is no longer about good search results, its all about driving revenue UP to meet Wallstreet expectations, this in turn increases their share price so they can sell out before it tanks, its only a matter of time before Microsoft will destroy them.

Ask yourself, with the amount of click fraud occuring, why aren't Google doing anything about it? Because it makes them money.

They use to have my respect but now they're just plain greedy. I guess they don't realize that most of their "early" referrals and cause of buzz was from webmasters and experts a-like. Another looksmart coming I fear.

[edited by: np2003 at 1:49 pm (utc) on Sep. 26, 2005]

[stargeek]

"tt doesnt look like this is over by a long shot yet."
agreed - "66.102.7.104" looks like google.com again

[taps]

dazz:
my site had been hit in February, came back in May and was hit this time again.

As I stated before, a problem with my robots.txt made Googlebot crawl duplicate pages again (print versions).

I deleted those dupes via URL removal console and am waiting to recover. I desperately hope that this wouldn't take three months again.

[diddlydazz]

np2003

lots of WebmasterWorld members have felt the same frustration and anger as you are probably feeling right now. (check out the Feb 05 threads)

there is nothing anyone can say to make you feel better, but this update/pre-update is nowhere near over IMO

i hope you have some better news soon

dazz

[diddlydazz]

my site had been hit in February, came back in May and was hit this time again

did you make any changes between feb and may?

dazz

[stargeek]

I'm seeing more than two sets of data, some with the additional google sitemaps links in the snippets, some without.
also the allinanchor command is showing different results on the updated DCs

[Dayo_UK]

See my problem really started about last December - did not really find out about the non-www/www problem until March.

I just wonder if the time between Dec and March hurt my site - I see that some people are seeing returns to good rankings in another thread.

Hoooo Hummmmmm

[diddlydazz]

zzz.zzz.zzz.104 DCs tend to be used mainly for googles cache.

in other words go to google.com and hover your mouse over one of the CACHED links and see which datacenter is being used for cache.

NSLOOKUP google.com from a dos prompt to find out which DCS are being used to return resuolts for you.

there have been many discussions on G's datacenters, especially around feb.

the most common DCs in use then were:

216.239.37.99 --- E Canada - Texas - London - S California - Alabama - New Zealand - Australia - Phoenix - Oregon - Denmark - Germany - Switzerland - Dublin, Ireland - New York City - Boston - N California - Portugal - Chennai & Punjab, India
216.239.39.99 --- Ontario, Canada - Oregon - Alabama - New Zealand - Australia - Florida - N California - Dallas - Phoenix - Denmark - Germany - Switzerland - Dublin, Ireland - New York City - Japan - Boston - Portugal - Chennai, India
216.239.39.104 --- London, UK - Dublin, Ireland - Switzerland - Portugal
216.239.49.114 --- Switzerland
216.239.57.99 --- New York - Alabama - N California - Florida - Dallas - Phoenix - Germany - Melbourne, Australia - Denmark - Dublin, Ireland - Ontario, Canada - Switzerland - Japan - New York City - Boston - Portugal - Chennai, India
216.239.57.103 --- Ontario, Canada - California - Melbourne, Australia - Switzerland
216.239.57.104 --- London, UK - Eastern Canada - California - Atlanta, GA - Phoenix - Dublin, Ireland - Switzerland - Portugal
216.239.57.147 --- California
216.239.59.99 --- Berlin & Hannover, Germany - Xiamen, China - UK (no loc) - Denmark - Switzerland
216.239.59.104 --- London, UK - Berlin, Germany - Netherlands - Dallas - Switzerland - Dublin, Ireland - Denmark - Portugal
216.239.59.147 --- Portugal - Switzerland - Denmark
216.239.63.104 --- California - Vancouver, Canada - Australia - Phoenix - Massachusetts
64.233.161.99 --- Venezuela - Eastern Canada - New York - Denmark - Boston - Dublin, Ireland
64.233.161.104 --- North Carolina - Venezuela - Eastern Canada - Boston - Denmark - Dublin, Ireland
64.233.161.184 --- Venezuela
64.233.167.99 --- Wisconsin - Ontario, Canada - Mid USA
64.233.167.104 --- Wisconsin - Ontario, Canada - Alberta, Canada - Phoenix - Colorado - Dublin, Ireland
64.233.167.147 --- Ontario, Canada - Chicago
64.233.174.10 --- Switzerland
64.233.174.18 --- Switzerland
64.233.179.104 --- N California
64.233.183.104 --- Dublin, Ireland
64.233.187.99 --- Atlanta, GA - Switzerland - Dublin, Ireland
64.233.187.104 --- North Carolina - Phoenix - Switzerland - Dublin, Ireland
64.233.189.104 --- Punjab, India
66.102.7.99 --- Melbourne, Australia - Chennai, India
66.102.7.104 --- California - Phoenix - Israel - Chennai, India
66.102.7.147 --- New Zealand - California - Australia - Chennai, India
66.102.9.99 --- Barcelona & Madrid, Spain - Switzerland - Hannover, Germany - Dublin, Ireland - Prague, Czech Republic - Denmark
66.102.9.104 --- Barcelona & Madrid, Spain - Switzerland - Hannover, Germany - Dublin, Ireland - Denmark - Romania - Brussels, Belgium
66.102.11.99 --- London & Leeds UK - Valencia, Spain - Netherlands - Denmark - Germany - Switzerland - Dublin, Ireland - Spain (no loc) - Brussels, Belgium
66.102.11.104 --- London & Leeds UK - Portugal - Switzerland - Germany - Netherlands - Denmark - Prague, Czech Republic - Dublin, Ireland

check them out

dazz

[europeforvisitors]

my site had been hit in February, came back in May and was hit this time again.

My site's Google referrals increased by at least 30% with Allegra in February, dropped by 70-75% in the update of late March (which SEW acknowledged but WW ignored), and bounced back with Bourbon in late June. All of which just confirms the cliche that search rankings are a "zero-sum game."

So far this month, most of my own rankings--the ones that I watch, anyway--are unchanged, as they were through every update until March 23. (My site is "organic," with no SEO other than the kind recommended by the Google Webmaster guidelines, which probably means it normally doesn't show any characteristics that might trip a targeted Google filter.)

[tebrino]

I see lot of googlebot activity in last 4 days and it crawled all my pages for several times. Hopefully this update is not over yet...

[stargeek]

any blackhats seeing their all-to-one multiple domain link farms doing well on the updated DCs?

[stargeek]

"66.102.9.99 --- Barcelona & Madrid, Spain - Switzerland - Hannover, Germany - Dublin, Ireland - Prague, Czech Republic - Denmark
66.102.9.104 --- Barcelona & Madrid, Spain - Switzerland - Hannover, Germany - Dublin, Ireland - Denmark - Romania - Brussels, Belgium"

those are both showing Update Katrina.

[stargeek]

and all DCs, including www, are showing Katrina with lots of -owiowiejk -owiowiejk -owiowiejk -owiowiejk -owiowiejk style arguments appended to the end of the search.

[reseller]

europeforvisitors

Long time no post!

Glad to hear that you are surviving this one. Can't talk much. Have just been visiting my dentist for 45 loooong minutes. It seems the older one get the more time one spend on Teeth Optimizations ;-)

[taps]

dazz: yes, I have changed things between feb and may. I set 301 redirects and cleared up any duplicate content. That seemed to help.

I'm now considering to drop print versions and my mailforms (used to send an article to someone who might be interested). These pages give a litte comfort to users but are always a risk for me.

[diddlydazz]

taps

drop print versions

IMHO i would use robots.txt or .htaccess to block googlebot instead of taking a feature of your site away.

good luck!

dazz

[theBear]

taps,

You have mail.

[walkman]

my traffic is about 30% less this update. Not a real killer, since I'm still doing relatively well, but it's a lot of money (for me ;)). NO dupes, all content is entered manually by me, and there's enough (truly) "related," and then some random stuff on each page to make the dupe a non-issue.

My problem: I stopped getting links by asking people with personal pages to link, or adding them to directories. My competitors are doing it apparently. Some have counters (yep, still), some have exchanges with totally unrelated sites, bought ROS links, etc. I will never stoop to that level, mainly because I have a lot to loose, but I have to decide how to get some links.

Let's face it, not enough people link to a commercial site to keep up with bought or wholesale links. I know it's contrary to how Google designed the system, but the system has flaws, and if I do nothing I'll be buried in the SERPS. Organic links, to me means those added by others without any input from you. My only defense--yes, it's somewhat flawed-- is that I have what people are looking for (no misleading redirects), and that I'm not nearly as bad as the competiton on "cheating".

[edited by: walkman at 5:08 pm (utc) on Sep. 26, 2005]

[arubicus]

EFV -

"All of which just confirms the cliche that search rankings are a zero-sum game."

Oh, poo! If confirms it is a "value game". Since the serps are Google's representation of value for the sites in it's index, it cannot be zero sum. You may say that if site x ranks #1 in the serps it "takes away" from those below it, but in reality site x ranks #1 because it represents the value Google requires for that position. Site who are not #1 has not given nor do they represent the value Google's requires at that particular time for position #1. Can more than one site be #1? Not at the SAME time but DIFFERENT SITES CAN be #1 for a period of time so long as it provides the value Google thinks is necessary. If it were Zero sum #1 is gone for good. Like a raw mineral. But since we all can CREATE VALUE, and yet destroy value, with our sites we then can move up and down in search results never "owning" any postion and never really "taking" away postions from others.

[tahiti]

guess i will chip in here after lurking for a long long time on this thread.

For all those webmaster that suffered a site wide hit from Google - i am sorry to know that and i feel your pain. i am in the same boat as you -- but crying/shouting/begging for help here wont help us much.

i am currently conducting an analysis for my field -- appreciate if those site webmasters who suffered site-wide filter penalty on 22rd - 24th September
can PM me on the industry you are in, the search term that you are monitoring, a brief on your site's problem and if possible, the site that suffered the drop.

in return, i will get my findings posted here in this thread. lets the facts talk.

thanks in advance for any help.

[stargeek]

walkman: your post leads me to believe that you agree with me in that the Katrina DCs are an adjustment of internal vs external linking values. Am I correct to say that?

[AlexK]

diddlydazz:

anyone being hit that was hit in Feb 05?

Yup.

Went from ~3,500/day to ~2,000/day in one day. Put in 301-redirects for non-www to www (which does not make a vast difference, but lets me feel good at having something positive to do).

By July-Sept (and allowing for Summer weighting) was back at pre-Feb-3 levels. Come Sep 21, the identical drop to 8 months earlier.

Was also shafted in Nov and Dec 2004 changes, and have never recovered any of that.

We webmasters have been riding Google's gravy-train for a long time, and have loved them because of it. That has changed for good, and our attitudes towards Google have changed accordingly. Growing up is sometimes difficult to do, but worth it in the long-run. I hope.

[walkman]

stargeek,
I really can't say that. From Google's (original and new) patent application, we know that links matter a lot. I think not adding new ones, caught up with me.

Google is reading this:
"The rate of links for Walkman's site dropped, therefore his site is not as important, especially compared to his compettiors who had a x% increase in link over the past 3 months. Drop his site a few notches down on the SERPS"

I must also say that a few days, or even weeks are not enough to panic. Google does one thing, and then fine tunes it little by little.

[edited by: walkman at 5:30 pm (utc) on Sep. 26, 2005]

[stargeek]

"The rate of links for Walkman's site dropped, therefore his site is not as important, especially compared to his compettiors who had a x% increase in link over the past 3 months. Drop his site a few notches down on the SERPS"

that is an interesting assertion. I'll go apply that to what I'm seeing and see if i can co-oberate it.

[taps]

dazz:
I've been using robots.txt and meta robots noindex,nofollow as a kind of backup. After disregarding important entries in robots.txt (my fault) Googlebot did not regard the meta tag also.

I think Googlebot ignores the meta robots as soon as it finds an entry "user-agent: Googlebot" in robots.txt.

I think you're right: I'm going to use .htaccess as a backup so that Googlebot will be unable to access those kind of files again.

Did one silly thing today: Wrote a mail to Google and asked them to remove my dupe content penalty. I'm sure, I'll get some canned response. But why not trying it at least. ;-)

[texasville]

Was hoping that if this was really an update my sandboxed site would finally pop out but (sigh) no luck.