Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
The problem with search engine guidelines is if you state the exact process then it is always going to be exploited, unless you manually review every entry...
So do you think that is it or more movement to come this week?
I spoke to Google again regards our own site and they just said the same thing again. Site not penalised...normal movement as they add pages etc. So not too helpful, though I can understand why they are so cloak and dagger.
For myself looks like just need to resign to this lower search traffic baseline and build on it. But will keep an eye in the hope of some movement.
Now that we have all expressed our frustration and sadness about the situation of Google, lets get back to business ;-)
Any good news of sites recovering?
Or any more sad news about sites dropping in rankings or just dropped out of the index?
Thanks!
for a short period Google was showing less pages on site:www.mysite.foo - about 270.000 instead of 309.000 before. Before Sep 22nd it was only 110.000. (sorry, don't know which DC it was).
Maybe Google is calculating the changes after I removed a lot of pages from the index using the removal console.
There's a little bit of hope.
Yes my new site is topping out now please check the search listing for search terms "google sucks"
Hmmm - I know it not allowed at WebmasterWorld - just cant believe what I am seeing.
[edited by: Dayo_UK at 12:31 pm (utc) on Oct. 4, 2005]
I have had some problems in mid Dec of 04 - ranks started to shift up and down, but many remained in the top20. then on 2nd of Feb 05 the site was gone, but mostly recovered on March 8th and fully recovered on 28th of March 05. no problems since, but now the site is gone. filter=0 does not bring it back. the SERPs in my sector look pretty bad - most of the sites in the top20 should really not be there and hardly deserve the spots that they occupy. quite shameful.
Google is beginning to get a reputation for "not listening" - that is going to hurt it in the long run far more than any small-scale problems with it's SERPs.
>>Hmmm - I know it not allowed at WebmasterWorld - just cant believe what I am seeing. <<
Ok. We are all ears ;-)
We get NOTHING free from Google. Google's whole business is living off the sweat of honest webmasters and reselling our work in the form of search engine results.
You are certainly free to stop them from listing your sites. In fact they make many options/tools available to do just that. You don't have to let Google list your pages, you choose to do so. This doesn't mean you get a say in how you are ranked, nor what criteria is used.
Just because some webmasters have chosen to depend on Google for their traffic doesn't change the fact that Google can do what they want with their rankings, regardless of their market size. They are not obligated to list you, me or anyone else in their search engine.
The analogy is television. We are independent producers of programming who choose to sell on a deferred royalty basis. You think I can set up a new network and just show all the NBC, ABC, CBS programming on my network while paying no fee?
No you can't, unless like you, you allowed them to show your content for free. You are certainly able to request Google pay you or not show your content, but I am guessing they would just eliminate you from their search engine, as they would eliminate anyone else who asked.
Google produces NOTHING. ALL their profit come from our product. They're not even like TV guide - even they produce some original content like those crossword puzzles :)
That is not true.. Google has their hands in a lot of things and some of them even produce content... Not terribly relevant if Google can do what they want with their search engine though. I think the first question anyone has to defend in court is if they didn't like what Google was doing with their web pages, how come they didn't make use of the tools to stop Google from doing it?
Trying to prove in court that you are somehow deserving of spot 8 instead of spot 28 is not likely to be fruitful.
Matt has been hijacked - and you also know we should not out them here.
just cant believe what I am seeing
OK - I saw the original post, and got the link. The missing links came up when I removed the "browser=Opera" part of the link.
I cannot understand what I was seeing!
As for the Google-Webmaster relationship, it's a two-way street. Google depends on our content, sites, and pages for their SERPs. Without us, there is nothing.
In return for this, we expect that content, those sites and pages to be available to people searching for them. No biggie. But when our original content, sites, and pages are buried under other sites that have scraped our content, copied our titles and meta tags, then LINK to us, it's insulting.
Same goes for directory sites. Why a search engine would list a directory of links among the SERPs is beyond me. Hey, Google: people go to www.google.com to find sites. If they wanted www.spammy-directory-of-blue-widget-sites. com, they'd GO THERE!
The SEs just need to stop indexing directories and scrapers. PERIOD. Just make them go away. Then people will stop making them and flooding the SEs with them.
Affiliate sites can go under a separate classification where people can go if they want to BUY something. Information and content sites go in another classification. That way, searchers fine tune their results.
It really doesn't have to be difficult.
But if Matt Blog can be hijacked and removed from the listings on lots of search terms that are original to the site by someone.
Then what hope is there for the rest of us :(
>>But if Matt Blog can be hijacked and removed from the listings on lots of search terms that are original to the site by someone.
Then what hope is there for the rest of us :(<<
Ok. I see what you mean.
Hopefully the mods will allow posting few url examples of this case, just to illustrate that it could happen even to our good friend and fellow member Matt Cutts.
Dear Mods.. feedback please.
I dont really want to be the one that exposes this.
Wonder if it is because he did not 301 redirect - hmmmmmz dont know - but Matt can still appear with the filter=0 added.
I dont really understand how the hijack process works - but however they have done it - to prove a point or whatever - it just shows the problems that occur.
It is a proper hijack though - not only have they stole the content but they have stole the traffic :(
>>Wonder if it is because he did not 301 redirect - hmmmmmz dont know - but Matt can still appear with the filter=0 added.
I dont really understand how the hijack process works - but however they have done it - to prove a point or whatever - it just shows the problems that occur.
It is a proper hijack though - not only have they stole the content but they have stole the traffic :( <<
Poor Matt (:(
However, thanks God that its just a blog and not another education site, Pop & Mom site nor my own site ;-)
[edited by: reseller at 1:13 pm (utc) on Oct. 4, 2005]
>>I have stickied Brett<<
I think that Brett is in UK now at the PubCon in London.
You may wish to sticky tedster!
This is a situation which has not arisen before and cannot be comparable to TV, magazines, or anything else. Everything that came before was based on conventional paid advertisements.
Google (and the internet) grew as a free way of finding information in the new and free internet.
Over time Google's postion will be eroded since although it has its monopoly, it has next to zero monopoly power (it can't lock us into using the Google search).
Google's current problems stem from it's monopoly encouraging SEO's to concentrate entirely on finding ways of exploiting loopholes and weaknesses in the Google algo to manipulate rankings.
'Optimise for Google, the rest will follow'.
This success will be it's downfall since the engines that have not been the focus of manic SEO optimisation start to deliver better results.
This is what is starting to happen now.
The future is human rated/ratable serps. Attempting to get the best serps by algo will in the future be looked upon as just a techy dream left over from the .com boom.
What I am seeing is not a normal 302 Hijack.
What appears to have happened is someone has taken Matts content (word for word) and provided this as Cloaked pages to Googlebot.
When the user hits the site they get a page from that site (a test page)
These pages are sometimes outranking the original content from Matts site and sometimes therefore putting Matts site into the omitted results sections (eg Filter=0)
It is not on all DCs yet - so has probably only just happened too. (Funny thing is I want to check to see what Matt was saying about Canonical urls and sitemaps as I think it was mentioned on his blog :/ - and then came accross the site)
So in a way it is a cloaking/who own the original content issue rather than a Hijack.
Still a problem for Google.
And yes JuniorOptimizer added to the fact that MC does not make income from the site - I would have thought most visitors are just SEOs who have it bookmarked etc.
Hope the engineers dont get distracted from there main task of sorting out canonical urls ;)
Yeah, true. You generally get the best results out of machines when they have some kind of human oversight. A machine can make a mistake no human over the age of ten would contemplate.
There is some point between pure machine and 'over-patched mainframe cockup' thats probably optimum.
When we look back on the disaster that was Google with hindsight, in the years to come, I have a feeling the exact error is going to be piling patch upon patch. All penalties and filters will have collateral damage akin to medical side effects with drugs, and, like with drugs there will be unique side effects due entirely to the synergistic effects of combined patches that were not apparent with any single patch.
Every new filter or penalty makes the situation exponentially worse now. But Google will not realise this because 1)they move at the speed of a snail and 2)hey it used to work!
If I were Google, I would junk the index, start again from a fresh crawl, remove all filters and penalties and see where we are. Its possible even that won't work because webmasters have changed their sites to accommodate Google's shortcomings - but its difficult to see how the results could possibly be worse.
If I ran Google, I would make an offer for Dogpile and fire everyone at the Googleplex. Adwords account managers first.
[edited by: AlexMiles at 2:05 pm (utc) on Oct. 4, 2005]
>>Just quick clarification.
What I am seeing is not a normal 302 Hijack.
What appears to have happened is someone has taken Matts content (word for word) and provided this as Cloaked pages to Googlebot.<<
What you are seeing my UK friend, is stealing contents in day light and Google isnīt able, as usual, to differentiate between the original contents and the duplicates. And as many fellow members, which sites either dropped totally from the index or just lost much of their rankings because of the same problem, have reported on this thread. It is a real disaster that both Google and the webmasters community are phasing.
Google engineers.. thoughts ;-)
...and then if you have an EU MP try to contact him and explain the reasons why the EU should take some actions against US based SE's that control the world data and consequently due to the evolution of marketing via internet the financial future of thousands of businesses small or big and more to say the financial development of the Planet.Google Yahoo and MSN is nothing else then another face of the American imperialism and Dogma of take control of the Planet.I have already contact my EU MP rep's and at this moment they are reading for the first time maybe that thread at ww.I have contact certain newspapers and TV stations that they where greatfull about so much feed about manipulation of business ,finance data,marketing ups and downs,upsolute e-comerce dependancy of businesses via web giants like the one mentioned above.
I guess that is a war goin on.
Laughable at best. What is exactly would be the basis of such an action? Google isn't preventing an EU-based company from creating a better search engine are they? How exactly would a government institute such controls?
All search engines should be regulated by the government and a set of guidelines to be followed for what is required to rank, if this doesn't work, government needs to take over completely! IMO
Yeah....that's a great idea. Since a search engine is effectively a form of opinion (insitiuted via a programmed algo), let's have the government tell us how and what our opinons should be. Thanks, but you can form your own communist search engine somewhere else.
Google Yahoo and MSN is nothing else then another face of the American imperialism
Yet, so many of you EU "marketers" are perfectly happy to earn a buck from those same imperialistic americans. Have the courage of your convictions and ban all the american search engines from your sites. Maybe you can find an EU-based search engine to make up for it (good luck).
There speaks someone who never paid twice the price for an Adword because of his nationality.
Sounds like a conversion rate problem - which is your problem, not google's.
I have a .COM as my main website, but I also have the same domain name with .NET and .ORG pointing to it, with a 301 keeping everything clean, and changing the URL to .COM.
Apparentely, my domain registrar had a forward from my .ORG domain to the .COM domain. The 302 wasn't working correctly (or well), so about 80 duplicate pages appeared in Google's index for .ORG.
In my case, the dup filter doesn't return me to my normal SERPs. Instead, it appears that I have an actual penalty on my website (this is all a guess) that throws any mention of my website outside of the SERPs -- regardless of whether or not I put the dup filter text at the end of the search.
The good news is that this problem was easily fixed, I'm still in Google's index, and my PR remains unchanged (although I'm aware this is changed at different times from algo updates). I've already requested reinclusion to Google, and told them of this issue, and that it's fixed. Now I can only hope that it will return within the next few weeks.
[edited by: nanotopia at 2:31 pm (utc) on Oct. 4, 2005]
I see that threadwatch.org has brought this story:
Google's Matt Cutts get's Google Hijacked
With reference to Dayo_UK posts on this thread about the same subject.
However, as discussed it is a different issue to a 302 bug.
What I am seeing is not a normal 302 Hijack.
...
you also know we should not out them here
Precis: London's sewers were not up to the growing population in the 1800s, and the city's raw sewage was put straight into the local rivers (like The Fleet) which then flushed it into the Thames.
One summer, the weather was incredibly hot. The Thames began to give off an odure so strong that even the Peers in the House of Lords could smell it. Now, the Management had a reason to act, and the City's sewers were fixed. Thousands of the city's children dying was not enough to make them act, but being caused to throw up whilst attempting to drink their wine on the House of Commons' terraces was.
Perhaps, the odure of the SERPs may now have reached Google's nostrils.
I would publicise this as much as possible.
I have a .COM as my main website, but I also have the same domain name with .NET and .ORG pointing to it, with a 301 keeping everything clean, and changing the URL to .COM.Apparentely, my domain registrar had a forward from my .ORG domain to the .COM domain. The 302 wasn't working correctly (or well), so about 80 duplicate pages appeared in Google's index for .ORG.
This is fairly common practice. All that will happen is that Google will drop out the weaker duplicates.
What I'm seeing is .COM and .NET variants of a .CO.UK site outperforming it in the SERPs, despite their lack of PageRank. It sure looks like a penalty to me.
Like a lot of Google tweaks, there's more than one element at work here. The introduction of billions of crufty pages is one change. Arbitary penalisation of sites is another change. When these two things *combine* on your site.. well, it's game over. :(
We have an unnamed problem occuring in an unnamed update with no resolution in sight. I'm not saying the YPN will perform any better with reduced traffic, but maybe my small message will get through to someone. I also turned off my AdWords permanently on 9/22. My Googlecentric view of the internet has to change, for my own mental health at this point :)
