Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
So, I don't think this is a dupe content filter like a couple of people suggested. filter=0 seems to just disable the new thingy that google rolled out.
Sure enough my site is back at the top, very strange, several old sites have made a come back and most sites that were up on top have fallen, must be a ploy to spark pay advertising in my opinion
I think this is related in some way to links, google is trying to put the people selling text links out of business in my opinion!
I don't agree, because is a shot in foot. Obviously any company try increase profits, but G will do this right way, they have more money than can spend dont is like a small business fighting to keep alive. EarnMoney4Fun heh
Unfortunately the traffic is NOT back but it does seem to be building slowly.
I think Google is making some improvements which have had an unintentional effect and they are now faced with cascading errors.
They whack one mole and another appears. It's a good thing they just loaded $4 billion into the back door, if they didn't have such huge resources I'd say they were certainly headed for a massive meltdown.
But money changes everything. :)
If I had a site both a .com and as .org with the same content on it something somewhere would give.
Is it because they feared or knew that mimimal duplication of the content of my site hurt them or could hurt them...... the same category I am in had 23 listings and now SUDDENLY has 14. My listing was not recategorized it was completely removed.
I dont think so.. When I add filter=0 for my very original "domain name" it 0nly comes in 6th, but lists every single page of my 55 page site from 6th onwards. (1700 results)
I just found this issues:
- dot org version looks a trouble: old stuff cached, 302 redirecting to wrong address (adding extra slash after domain), maybe the main url was "hijacked" by org because rank higher now.
- More backlinks from medium/small sites can help too.
"22-23 september Google traffic dropped dramatically"
[webmasterworld.com...]
which no longer appears publicly available.
The filter 1 year ago was the initial filter that hurt many of my sites. I have been convinced that my particular sites were hurt because I had a lot of datafeed driven pages that acted as doorway pages for affiliate content - like the Amazon Product Feed script. The effect seemed to be that my sites, even though many years old, were "sandboxed" with no results in the top 20 for any search terms, even the site's name. I am not sure whether the filter is triggered by having many pages with duplicate content, or some other structural features of the sites that use datafeed driven content.
And yes, 1 year ago, the sites would show up where they used to by using the &filter=0 string on searches.
My sites had finaly returned in August of this year, but again took a dive on September 22nd this year.
I'm already dreading what September 22nd will bring next year.
what are they doing?
A few things that had been changed on my site between bourbon and now:
- Added a meta description that contains the first paragraph
- My provider moved and so my IP adress changed
- using longer text snippets for article lists in different categories
Reading the previous post I think that maybe the lists are a problem. Because many articles can be found in different categories there is some kind of redundancy. Maybe Google does not like that.
But I cannot see a reason why my site is banned completely.
One other thing: A few articles written between Allegra and Bourbon can still be found at #1. Everything else has vanished. Why? And why is this penalty site wide.
As mentioned before: This site consists of > 3000 self written articles. Sticky me for the URL if you are interested.
I got hit at thursday. I lost my visitors more than 65%.
My site still on TOP 10 if I use the "&filter=0" paramater.
Without "&filter=0" my site somewhere 180th place,
and this is the default serp.
I really don't know what I have to do now ...
But I found some interesting tings ...
When I checked the muber of indexed pages with "site:"
command I get back more than 183000! pages.
I have near 28500 pages only!
Another interest thing:
I have printabe version of original pages. These shtml pages doesn't contain gfx only text.
As I see, google indexed this shtml pages also ... perhaps googlebot thinks this content is duplicated ... BUT in robot.txt I disallowed to craw entire shtml directory to prevent indexing still at last year ...
It seems something really screwed up ...
yeah that brings mine back - so what does that mean?
it seems a bit wrong to think I need to tweak my content thats been copied by others, or let google know mine is the orignal to try get my old ranking back?
hopefully the update / non update still cooking :-S
>>I really don't know what I have to do now ...<<
Best thing to do now is not to make any changes on your site, but just wait till the update is over, IMO.
My site - original content first registered in 1998 semi informational - travel but not very competitive keywords mostly towns and villages that no one has ever heard of.
Results now shown - autogenerated snippets from my site.
What is happening?
I've excluded them via robots.txt and with noindex,nofollow.
However these files are indexed too and may cause a dupe content penalty. When looking for site:www.widget.com printxyz.php I do see all these print versions as url only links.
In these days I see also Googlebot crawling these mail and print versions of my articles. What's going on there. Is my robots.txt defective? Did I do something wrong with noindex,nofollow?
[Added]
One more thing:
When invoking Google's URL removal console I saw something remarkeable: After submitting my robots.txt to the console I saw only "removing image xyz.php".
The possible cause for that: The URL console does not seem to interpret a robots.txt with
[code]User-agent: *[/url]
properly.
I simply duplicated the exclude list and put a
[code]User-agent: Googlebot[/url]
in front of that.
After resubmitting the robots.txt to the URL console Google shows a "removing file" in the status list.
My theory: Maybe you'll have to add a
[code]User-agent: Googlebot[/url]
explicitely in your robots.txt.
Anyone with duplicate print and mail versions: What's in your robots.txt?
[/Added]
What really sucks is how a cloud is now cast on my domain. Even adding new material won't help.
There's about 50 .ru scrapper sites, that have their scrapped results, and then at the bottom of each page the entire text content of my home page! - I don't think emails will do me much good in this circumstance - I think I'll wait and see how this works out.
You may wish to submit a spam report to Google at once:
[google.com...]
I know...I know...
Many fellow members post that they have reported spam to Google with no results at all.
However, from reading GoogleGuy´s and Matt´s recent posts I sense that "Google Search Quality Team" is paying more attention to spam reports.
You have everything to win and nothing to lose.
I hope this helps.
There is at least one site running an IP delivery script using a DMOZ dump as a data source.
If your site is in DMOZ then you are in danger of having duplicated data in Google's index. This duplication is not excerpts but entire pages.
I have found 3 sites that duplicated our home page using such scripts, there may be many more such sites out there.
This situation has been reported to Google through multiple channels.
Like a lot of folks here adding &filter=0 returns our pages in the SERPS.
This is truly preposterous. I've already found out all the contact info on one of these people, and he as a dedicated server at the same place I do. At least it's my fellow small-time webmaster giving it to me this time.
How stupid. Not only are we competing with our own content but to add insult to injury we are penalized for it! and then not even found when people search for it.
Is there nothing we can do?
