Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Over and done with?
All done all through?
>> just checking some keywords on .co.uk and I'm now finding GB's ranking higher than some sites - this really is just daft, in fact one I've just checked had 3 GB's in the top 20 <<
Now that's interesting. We have a sample guestbook on our site, which is only really a code sample for those wanting to add the script to their own sites. Over the past few days, there has been a huge increase in the number of spammers posting links.
Although we simply remove their posts (spammers seem unable to read), and excluded this from spiders some time ago, your post made me check. Sure enough -- it's back in index with an old cache date and ranking well. Go figure!
<edit> Forgot to mention that we never received that much traffic in the past via this URL -- that was the point of my post, after all ;)
[edited by: LegalAlien at 2:54 pm (utc) on Nov. 11, 2005]
Ive also been looking at this. I also changed title tags to remove a kw. Though serps i follow still shows sites with 1000's of pages using very similar titles on all the pages and two in particular even use the same identical desciption on at least 8,000 pages. So im not convinced it's that alone. Though Ive given up trying to figure it out.
On another point i was just looking a some searches i follow on 66.102.9.104 - they are hopeless. Not because my site doesnt show, it does, it's whats ranking in the top ten. 8 of the first 10 results were totally unrelated to my search. It seems if the body text and/or title tag contain the kw's or phrases its there in the top 10, regardless of actual relevance.
Its a complete joke. All i do now is shake my head at the results and laugh simply because they are comical.
This brought me to an important decision.
My g traffic is gone and not coming back unless i dance to google's tune and fill my pages full of crap, which i'm not willing to do, in the past ive adjusted this and that to keep on top of it but now it's getting out of hand. The pages ranking in my sector are stuffed full of trash with very little content on what they are ranking for.
Im not angry at google either. It's there call how they run their affairs as it is mine, if we dont see eye to eye on what we feel is the right or wrong way to list pages then we carry on independently of each other. If our paths cross so be it but my days of chasing what they want are over. If they like what i offer, so be it, if they don't, that's life. Other ways to bring traffic to our sites are out there, many have pointed this out a few times over the three jagger threads, time to go hunting :-)
I thought the dupe content was a serious issue when the site first crashed - probably 70% of our 35000 pages went URL only. We have a site which sells lots of very similar products, and also shows same menus on every page ecetera. I also had the www/non-www issue. Fixed the latter, and tried to fix the template problem but it's just the way the shopping cart software is designed, and many other sites also seemed to suffer.
After G fixed the non-www problem, some meta tags came back, but not many - the ones which came back were the ones I had removed the strap-line from the title tag, and many pages which still had the strap line in had gone supplemental. The non-strap line pages also rank whereas the others are mostly nowhere to be seen, so it's my guess that for my site, they are now willing to accept the 'dupe' content within the site (which they always were before this update!) but put more weight on the title tag.
I'll try anything at the moment but it does make sense to do this (more weight on title tag) rather than punish a site just because it has a lot of internal dupe content.
(I hadn't even realised that the pages looked like dupes until I ran it through a checker - even two completely different products were over 80% similar but as I say, it wasn't a problem until this update started. I think I had two issues - dupe content due to www/non www, and dupe content due to templated site)
Hope that helps somebody!
Are these penalties applied daily, or would it be the next big update that fixes it?
I have a similar problem with my site. Not a site-wide penalty, but a few select pages. This is the first time I have noticed individual pages being clearly penalized on my site. I have had site-wide penalties in the past I believe. I also believe almost all of my problems are due to duplicate content issues as a result of dumb webmastering.
I will be trying the title change to see if I see any effect. Thanks.
I missed that GG comment. Anything else on that one? It seems the mega bl sites are pushed down a bit there.
i found most of the sites that took a knock in sept 22 had over used kw's spanning title, description, on page and url. Though IMO the on page factor was to a lesser extent. I could be wrong though.
i looked at around 30+ sites. This was common throughout.
Others may comment and help you out but not many solid conclusions have been posted about this by those who cleaned up there sites and have their rankings back. (or any i could see)
"If you missed or simply ignored messages 290 and 298:
GG tells ya straight out it's an experimental db.
GG tells ya it's off in its own corner.
GG tells ya if (if, not when) anything comes of it,
the time frame would be months (with an s, as in plural) not days or weeks."
Its sad we have to wait that long, but ok I have been waiting for 13 month now for them to fix 302bug, non www stuff, so what the heck.
it just about sums up the current state of the serps doesn't it when a GB outranks sites. so it makes you wonder how long it will be before they do a re-think on this current mess
I see tons of Craigslist SPAM ads ranking for competetive finance terms. Most of the time, the pages no longer exist.
i found most of the sites that took a knock in sept 22 had over used kw's spanning title, description, on page and url. Though IMO the on page factor was to a lesser extent. I could be wrong though.
i looked at around 30+ sites. This was common throughout.
Others may comment and help you out but not many solid conclusions have been posted about this by those who cleaned up there sites and have their rankings back. (or any i could see) >
One thing I have noticed is that some sites which sank during Florida whether they were doing anything dodgy or had just made mistakes, and who then cleaned up and returned to the top, have mostly stayed stayed firm during this update, maybe dropping a few pages but then coming back quickly.
I don't know whether cleaning up will help or not, but if it helps our site to evolve into something more solid, I'll do that!
I did indeed lose all of my site rankings on Sept. 22. They came back on Oct. 17, until late into Jagger. Then, I lost 3 (or more) of my pages rankings due to obvious penalties, but maintained hundreds of others.
So, hmmmm.
Maybe google changed their mindset on penalizing entire site vs. individual pages under certain circumstances?
Back again after last nights excitement. I just had time to fully expand on the anomoly, just in time for 'G' to rectify the issue. Anyhow it was fun while it lasted, with some hilarious results after analysis.
Cheers
What can you do to measure or check if you have duplicate content or not?
For example
site:www.google.com shows clean listing, best I have seen in google for about 2 years,
[64.233.179.99...]
I still see lot of supplement results in this D.C, One site we monitor site: shows 1400 results and almost 600 pages are supplements
But the other D.C is completely clean of supplement which is a huge step forward,
About 2 weeks before Jagger started, our serps became volatile. One day we'd be ranking as normal, and the next day we'd be 20 or more pages down for many of our key phrases. We'd previously been very stable, even throughout previous updates. The site's been up for 7 years.
As Jagger was also preceded by a PR update, my first stop was to check all outbound links, to ensure none of the sites were under penalty. There were 1 or 2, so I removed those links. Then the update really got under way and we ended up out of the top 500 for all our key phrases. Again this was in-and-out on various DCs, but about a week into the update we were off all DCs.
The site was certainly not over-optimized, but I went through and dropped all meta keywords to around 3-4 per page. We then reappeared in the 400s for most of our key phrases.
Although everyone recommended sitting tight until the update was over, this was taking forever, so I looked closely at the sites that were still ranking stably throughout the update.
Looking at the ranking pages only (generally the home pages), most had very little keyword usage in the body text. In fact, most had an unusually low amount of body text. Although we have a fair amount of text, I duplicated the averaged keyword counts, although the comparative weight would have been way down.
Three days later (this seems to be the norm across Google, MSN and Yahoo for our site), we were back in the top 50 for most of our key phrases.
I then looked at site-wide comparisons. I think many of us use keywords across our titles to establish a site-wide theme. Many of the sites I checked did this, but in a very limited way. What I mean is that titles were using 1 or 2 words of a 3-word phrase, but then included ballpark-related words. This was contrary to general belief that a fairly high keyword match across titles needs to be in place to establish theme. Anyhow, I went through our entire public site, trimmed down the title keywords and replaced some keywords with related terms -- this is actually a lot harder than it sounds!
Three days later we were back in the top 30 for most of our keywords.
I then looked at outside factors. I found that the pre-Jagger PR update had dropped the PR for many sites linking to us; actually dropping our PR share by 30 percent. Although this wasn't enough to drop our green bar, I do very much believe this had an effect on our serps -- I know there are those that argue against this. Some site content that I added just prior to the PR update received PR4, whereas it would previously have been PR5, so I can see that the amount of PR we are distributing has fallen.
I have now replaced most of the PR we lost and our serps seem to be about a page down from where they were prior to the update.
I also added a 301 to resolve a minor www/non-www issue, which related to our index page only -- PR was/is the same on both the www and non-www version, but no other pages are affected.
The changes I made have dropped our serps slightly on Yahoo and MSN, but that’s a welcome price to pay for recovery on Google. As there has been so much flux during this update, it’s pretty impossible to determine what, if any of the above changes have had a direct result in our recovery, but this is what I did and it may help someone else confirm what they are seeing.
<edit> Forgot to mention the meta description -- It seemed that many long-term sites with the keyword/phrase at the beginning of their title, keywords and description were gone, whereas those that placed this further into the description were okay, so I did this also. I also matched description weight as best I could.
[edited by: LegalAlien at 4:20 pm (utc) on Nov. 11, 2005]
Google.com shows 3,150,000
?
Not even close.
I'm holding off making any sitewide changes right now till everything settles! will that every happen god only knows! its all a guessing/waiting game and right now the last thing I want to upset is my Y/MSN traffic as thats the only thing that is keeping me above water, albeit a fraction of my G traffic
