Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I'm back back! No old pages, all pages indexed & back to 84% queries from UK. Very Cool.
Unfortunately, I've just decided to sell up and leave Norwich and feel the industry is too shaky for me to base a business on. I off in a few months.
I hope you're back again and best wishes for the new year. Have a Ubootiful New Year ... if you know what I mean ;-)
Col :-)
My homepage has been missing since March. It was back in December, but now missing again. In April, I found a conical and other duplicate content problems which were all fixed by September.
Be clear, the canonical problem is actually all about whether your whole site is listed under www.domain.com or under domain.com, or whether it is a mixture of both (the mixture is the problem!) not whether your main index page comes first in any of the listings.
sorry to hear your trowing in the towel Colin, but I can understand why its stress stress & more stress playing this G game - for me a good bottle of wine normally helps the day go by, problem is right now I'm opening it at breakfast time LOL better make that 2 bottles
Good luck with whatever you do
The key site and keyword I'm tracking goes from #1 to off the edge of the earth. Why is it all or nothing with Google? Logically, placement should only adjust a few places.
How could a site go from being 100% relevant to 0% relevant?
That's a pretty judgemental statement. I use this forum as down time from my writing or other work on my site. In 2005, that amounted to over 350 new pages of hand written content.
All the best mate
Col :-)
So I ignored google and concentrated on working on my site and creating new ones. I did not make any site structure changes or spend my days hunting down hijackers and theives. I just kept working on my site, making it better for visitors, not google.
SincerelySandy, in general this is very good advice, although there are some issues that you should always have resolved before following your advice, rewrites to www/ or non-www for example, make sure site has good search engine friendly urls, basic seo stuff that is. Fixing www/non-www is too easy to not do, it only takes about 2 minutes, so why not?
You can get back in serps sometimes if your site had errors and you fix them, but overall, I am coming to agree more and more with your position, spend the time adding content, making sites, and all that stuff.
That's where I'm headed, and any client I'll be keeping will need to be headed in the same direction. I'm tired of the chase google game.
Once you know enough to have avoided all types of technical errors, worrying about why update x or y messes up your site is a waste of time, I agree. But most people don't know enough, so these threads are really helpful, for example, in the bourbon threads, what was called sloppy webmastering was one major cause of drops, once those types of errors were fixed, site came back.
The fewer seo games I play the happier I am. Plus, if you consistently follow this advice, make more content, one day you'll wake up and find your site may have become an authority site, which is the other way to not worry about updates etc.
By the way, in the new test data center, I'm finally ranking for a very competitive keyword I've been weakly trying off and on to rank for for a few years. Didn't do anything to try to rank, just normal working on site, just so happened google has now decided that the site can rank for that phrase.
Anyway, nice common sense posting, thanks. I'm starting to do this stuff more and more, or not do it, as the case may be.
[edited by: 2by4 at 7:43 pm (utc) on Dec. 30, 2005]
Good luck - shame that it ends this way - I am sure that Google has been the death (and making no doubt) of many business this year.
Tigger
I am on to the boxes of wine now!
BTW - Test DC not showing test results again.
Business is a matter of taking risks. If one takes the risk of relying on one source of business, then one should plan to fail if something prevents delivery from that source.
As much as I do not like the games that Google plays, my problems are my problems and not problems created by Google.
Every one of us should have a business plan and that should have an exit strategy. That strategy should inslude one for the unexpected that we should all expect.
So though I feel for those who did not plan, I reject any insuation that it is in any way Google's fault.
Many on here and other boards think it will only happen to the other guy but as many of us know
We are all at risk in this type of business and has been shown late this year even those whose model is based on PPC are not immune to collateral damage ( adwords changes )
best of luck with whatever new opportunity you take on in 2006
steve
I did not say it was the fault of Google though if business did die as a result of there changes.
It is just the nature of the business (for some of us) - and problems Google has can result in businesses closing.
It is just the way it is among some big business - lots of little business can feed off them. So yes Google can be a death of business - I did not say that it is a great plan to rely on Google traffic solely - just accepting the fact the Google have such a huge amount of traffic that there changes can result in business closure.
If an aeroplane parts manufacturer opens near an Aeroplane Production factory then it is not poor planning that closes them down if the Aeroplane Factory closes down - just the nature of the business.
Anyway - lets get back to talking about the update and the update to come :).
Regarding the update - I'm still seeing no movement on the main DCs here wrt the test indexes. Got an ever growing list of new sites in the test index though.
From what I can see, what we used to call 'freshbot' is only feeding the test index.
Only place I have seen the page with good serps positioning is on test server
So unsure why or how but not complaining
steve
