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!

[Dayo_UK]

>>>>One last thing; I'm still astonished that Brett hasn't yet added a post to this thread.

Brett has known about canonical url problems for ages (cant find the thread at moment)

So he has got the protection for his older sites. The newer ones I guess he is more patient with.

Brett has probably been here, seen it before and is chilled about the situation.

Looking at things - it looks like a little test crawl may have gone out on Friday night, Saturday Morning (UK time) - they only scratched the surface of a couple of my sites - however it looks like Googlebot handled things correctly on that crawl. hmmmmz

[djmick200]

'Brett has probably been here, seen it before and is chilled about the situation.'

Exactly, so even more reason to drop a post here.

[soapystar]

Brett_Tabke
1:47 pm on Sept 22, 2005 (utc 0)

"Lets put it on ice till something more definative comes up.!

[webmasterworld.com...]

And then the filter hit.

Maybe Brett has already spoken and you just werent listening?

:)

[djmick200]

I personally think the ice has melted -)

[r3nz0]

i was just before Brett, exited about one of my sites thats was reindexed by google.. and sinds that day it get about 100 referals from mr. G (before it was 0 for a while...)

So that takes me to WWW and post something about that great news.. and Yes there were more websites with Updates.

But after being set in the fridge by Brett i took some rest :) and thought about this;

Lets call this an Update....

Lets wait for the Huge SHAKE up! :)

A lot of query's has the same page 1 results as a month ago.. so imo this was a little update to algo's and not a cewl Shakeup like florida eetc..

just thinking bye

[Jon_King]

Very few people are reporting in this thread. This algo thingy doesn't seem to affect many sites at the moment. The 50 sites and 250 terms I monitor closely have but minor tweaks in top ten sites - nothing to talk about.

[Dayo_UK]

>>>>A lot of query's has the same page 1 results as a month ago.. so imo this was a little update to algo's and not a cewl Shakeup like florida eetc..

Hmmmz - perhaps it was a little test crawl that has caught and sorted out some sites. As I say I can only see Gbot scratching the surface.

However, not sure why other sites have gone down - so this test, or whatever it is might not get the green light.

Stabbing in the dark here though.

[thetrasher]

What do the vanished/punished sites have in common? There must be a reason...

Maybe Google modified its "site is able to pay for better listing rank"-filter? Are you now expected to pay for Google's service? See [webmasterworld.com...]
But it's only a thought.

[stargeek]

" Very few people are reporting in this thread. This algo thingy doesn't seem to affect many sites at the moment. The 50 sites and 250 terms I monitor closely have but minor tweaks in top ten sites - nothing to talk about."

I will agree with that, the "filters" or "tweaks" seem very targetted, and in the large majority of SERPs I'm not seeing any movement to speak of. But everyonce in a while i see a definet targetted change that I think is worth studying.

It seems tho, that a few "pet keywords" of a couple of members here have been affected.

[Iguana]

Tinus

Filter is different per page (not site wide).

How about the possibility that the filter is site-wide but is applied through search phrases - remember Florida when all the changes were applied to 'money terms'. Also the sandbox doesn't seem to affect ranking on really obscure terms. It may also mean that the filter has only been applied to a percentage of search terms and so entire themes have not been hit. So a site-wide penalty may only have been applied to half of the phrases your site normally comes up for (there could be worse to come if this is the case).

[stargeek]

How can we speak of these filters and whether they are by page or by site, or by keyword, if we do not attempt to define what criteria they are filtering?

[Tinus]

<filter is site-wide but is applied through search phrases >

That is a third possibility. It fits with what I see on my two sites. A search term like "blue widgets" are doing the same without filter but "all widgets", which has most relevant term in common, is filtered downwards.
It would mean that Google is site wide calculating which search terms are used to much and tries to correct it with the filter. I use "all widgets" as text link in my navigation bar so there might be an overload. On the other hand: I also advertise on Google with most of the real heavy filtered out search terms but I don't want to believe this is a factor yet.

I took five days off to change the filtered sites but still I think it is to early to change text links and meta tags.

[AndyA]

I still think the results we're seeing today began back in December 2004. I think that was just the first wave of whatever is going on.

I had a site hit hard back then, that still hasn't fully recovered and if I'm lucky this month will see about 50% of the traffic it was getting this time a year ago, prior to whatever happened in December.

I've gone through and removed duplicate text from meta description tags, I removed a news article that was widely covered on the Internet in December, 2004 thinking Google might have hit me with a penalty because so many sites had the same thing, and I checked on anything major I had done prior to the crash in Google referrals.

I added a new forum in November, 2004 and had accidentally linked to it using http:/ /forum. mydomain.com in one spot, (spaces added to break up link) then using http:/ /my domain.com/forum in other spots. The forum linked back to my site as well. I finally deleted the subdomain link and did a 301 to mysite. com/forum to eliminate this from the possibilities.

The site does have some affiliate links on it, but over 90% of the site has no advertising whatsoever, including most of the content pages. Ads mostly appear on navigational pages. No black hat.

I'm at a complete loss as to why this site has been hit so hard. All of these things seem very trivial in my book, but with fussy Google these days, who knows. I think Google is forcing Webmasters who normally wouldn't think that much about SEO, and merrily go along creating new content pages to add to their sites, to now obsess about SEO.

Hey Google, ease up a bit, OK? We're spending so much time trying to figure out what we've done wrong, we can't add any new pages, which means they don't exist for you to index and grow your results. Think about it. It's hard to get bigger and better when the people who provide the material aren't adding as much new content...

[soapystar]

what if it was relative to an average optimisation score for each search term? this would mean the less competitve the term the easier it would be to get binned for over-optimisation..imagine trying work around that one..

:)

[djmick200]

Jon_king and Stargeek make a very good point that it seems only a small number of us seem affected by this.

Those affected feel free to sticky for urls to see if we can make any comparisons.

[wiseapple]

>>>Hey Google, ease up a bit, OK? We're spending so much time trying to figure out what we've done wrong, we can't add any new pages, which means they don't exist for you to index and grow your results.

I agree, with the above statement.

We have been adding new content. However, nothing will rank. This brings the point - the penalty must be sitewide. I have tried adding pages in many different formats.

We get our results back when adding "&filter=0".

I am trying to change some of our meta description and internal links. These have been scraped to death. May making them different than the scrapers will help.

[Tinus]

<an average optimisation score for each search term?>

A correction on this site wide optimisation score fits with what I see on my sites indeed. Then it is an overcorrection because the text links within the site have a lot of weight.

[Tinus]

<These have been scraped to death. May making them different than the scrapers will help>

When that is the case it will help, it will bring you back on the first page but then you will be scraped again and you have to start all over.

A lot of those scrapers have no problems with the filter on important search terms. Maybe here is somewhere a reason to be found. Then all high ranking pages should be changed every month, with the risk of loosing the high rank. Like running in front of the scrapers, that doesn't sound very appealing to me.

Those scapers have something we don't have on our pages to lift them up in front of us in the Serps.

[stargeek]

I'm still not seeing any discussion about what the filters are actualling filtering.

are we talking about Over Optimization (and if so by what criteria? on page keywords, html optimization, titles, meta tags, off page irrelevant links, anchor text repetition) some sort of CIRCA/LSI stuff, duplicate content, a little of everything, or something else entirely?

[JuniorOptimizer]

One obvious observation I can make: the allinanchor rankings have been lowered by the same amount of spots in most cases as the rankings. So I the ranking is number 78, the allinanchor rank is also similar.