Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Is Sparkle causing trouble again ;-).
Ya know you just can't keep us critters down.
I took a look at some of what is going on.
There is more than one thing happening.
A lot of links to the cat's site are on pages that are now marked as supplemental (whatever that means I haven't a clue).
I've seen a lot of this along with various possible canonical page problems.
There appears to be a rising use of scripts that do IP delivery, which page wins out and what the impact is on a given page. I also can't figure out.
Tho in a strange way.
When I do:
[google.com...]
I am all over the top BUT it is all the sub.domain pages (e.g. hotel.mysite.com) for the first 100+ NOT my actual site pages.
Without the filter, none of my pages are there.
Oh oh
2)orphaned pages
It might be worth noting that pages can appear orphaned to Google when they are not actually orphans.
If Google doesn't crawl a site in any depth, over time pages can drop out of the index. The links to deeper level pages therefore disappear, and if the deeper pages have no other incoming links, they can start showing up as Supplemental. Eventually they too will drop out of the index.
I was more concerned for the impact that happens to the links and thereby the site linked to when they come from a page marked supplemental.
I looked into this just last night. I selected a random phrase unique to my site and searched for it. I think I may have spotted a pattern. One page came up in the listings, when viewed via Google cache, it had scraped my entire title, meta tags, and then linked to my site. It was listed as supplemental.
When I clicked on the link, I got a blank page.
I kept searching, and found that if the page on my site being linked to in this manner had a higher PR, it didn't seem to affect it. However, if it was an internal page with a lower PR, Google only had URLs and no descriptions listed.
I'm not sure if this helps anyone make a connection or not, but I thought it was interesting. Of course, it could mean absolutely nothing.
This is sorted out now, with my index page listed first, a main category page indented from that, then Cafe Press at #3.
I honestly don't know what I did (if anything) to fix it, or I'd let you know! It's very frustrating. I hope your site recovers quickly.
From what I remember though once Googleguy posted something indicating that when sites that link to you rank above you it is not because they have done something to hurt you, it is that your site has some type of penalty, causing it to go down in rankings.
This seems to be consistent with what I saw with a site that just came back - it now ranks #1 for its site name as well as for ["www.domainname.com"], and didn't before. So I suspect this other site has some other spam penalty applied to it also.
The one that came back had some datafeeds, one in particular that was pretty big, so I think it was a duplicate content problem. I took it off and in a few weeks the site came back. The site that is still gone and has the cafepress problem had one datafeed on it too, but it is now also gone, but has not come back. Hopefully it will too soon.
The one page that just came back into the serps has not existed for about a year. It has a cache date of Nov. 2004.
So at the end of WEEK #1, one can guess that this update/no update (UPD/NUPD) is mainly about deduplications. However, it might have affected affiliate marketing pages/sites too.
The opinions of the contributors to this thread about the the "tools" applied during this UPD/NUPD covers; introduction of filters, manual intervensions, and people like yours trully whom also believe in changes in algos ;-)
The interim results of the UPD/NUPD are:
- original contents sites either removed from the index or lost rankings
- duplicated sites are still there, and sometimes ranking very well
- spam sites have great time on the serps
- Google´s Mr. Eric Schmidt talks about number of sites in Google index instead of the QUALITY of serps!
Anything else to add?
I figured that over time that might happen, but my concern is for the current time.
I think (maybe a bad thing for a Bear to do) that a lot of what is happening is that large numbers of links now come and go because of the various activities of scrapers.
According to the guy from Google, they select canonical pages based upon PR.
And since Google says duplicate content is bad I suspect incorrect pages will get marked as supplemental as a result.
Think about that for a bit, maybe you can see where recursive tail swallowing takes things.
the duplicate content issues have existed for a long time and i'm not seeing a change in the way they are handled, perhaps more sites are getting caught up in it, but thats only a result of the passage of time, not an algo or filter change.
>>reseller i think the changes we are/aren't seeing have more to do with links than anything else.<<
My problem is if I agree with you, and I do think that what you said is highly possible, will lead us to say IT IS AN UPDATE. And that might trigger more frustrations and few negative posts ;-)
Now why I´m saying that IT IS AN UPDATE?
Its the kind of changes and several phases that make me think that its an update. And this UPD/NUPD trully walks like a duck and quacks like a duck ;-)