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.
