Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
So: if your pages are still supplemental, feel free to write to sesnyc06 [at] gmail.com with the subject line of "stillsupplemental" (all one word), and I'll ask someone to check the emails out.
Hope that helps, and I'm glad that lots of people are seeing a full recovery,
GoogleGuy
[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 5:20 pm (utc) on Mar. 22, 2006]
As the DC is not Big Daddy you were never in Supplemental land at that DC. So this cannot be seen as a fix.
Well I suppose that takes care of that glimmer of hope I had for a moment.
I have 2 problems and am hoping you guys might be able to give me some advice. I'm in the same boat with all of you, except I just took this in-house SEO position 3 months ago & now Google does this. Any feedback would be really appreciated.
1. My homepage is not in the index at all, nor is it in the Supps! The non-www version is in the supplementals, but I've had a 301 in place redirecting to the www-version for about 2-3 months. What should I take from this? Am I just the "unlucky" one to have the homepage out of the index as well?
2. Googlebot/Mozillabot has seemingly stopped crawling our site altogether. Most people here have reported a dramatic increase in crawling activity--but non here :(
We've got a mid-sized site (~150 pages) & just added 75 original content pages/articles which I thought would do the trick because we had gotten sooo close. The site is actually larger than most (now) in this industry space, apart from the lead-gen directory sites (mainly done by <edited>, but that's an entirely different post).
Since these 2 major factors seem to be different for us, I'm just looking for some answers...
<No specifics about the space, please
See Forum Charter [webmasterworld.com]>
[edited by: tedster at 12:39 am (utc) on Mar. 17, 2006]
Does anyone have an updated list of what DC's are currently in Big Daddy?
I'm wondering if Google's engineers didn't take account of some things like this and if it is the exceptions which have interfered in the logical process in the BD update. ie there's got to be a reason why some good sites are out and some good sites are not
see :
[webmasterworld.com...]
Our server was hacked in Jul/Aug05 with robots.txt applied and removed, then legit 301's were applied by us to 1 site in Feb, possibly while the Google "180 day rule " of suspending the site was still in play for the site.
Only this site collapsed - all the others stayed out of the supplemenary index, although pages are slow to reappear.
The issue is not whether we have a special case, but more if our experience exposes the exception to the rule approach that might have upset some sites on DC's in the BD migration ... just a thought
Matt Cutts Said,
March 16, 2006 @ 11:49 amGary and Rahul #26: I’m looking into it. Lots of people have come back, and I’m asking someone to read the stillsupplemental emails from WebmasterWorld.
Hopefully this may result in a new fix fairly soon.
Gary
I know Matt, Google Guy and the Google team's being extra pleasant saying they're fixing it , and i thank them for acknowledging Gary's justified outburst , but gee it's hard to smile and laugh when reading Matt's blog in a situation like this, wondering what the likelihood is of your own site being fixed and returning to normality.
I wonder if "someone" or one person is enough to review all the problems per Matt's communique
Can we joke around on your blog a bit later when we're restored. No hard feeling Matt - we just need help.
Its not just being an authority thats still in supplemental hell that drives us mad its the fact that the serps have loads of Junk ranking where we should be.
If all sites had this issue at least the field would be level. Currently a good number got away with it whilst a good number got stuffed - this just isnt right.
Some very large authority sites have been stuffed by google and bottom line is that the serps results from google are worse than ever as a result.
I dont see any change in the last week since GGs orignal post over a week ago saying the problem was going to be fixed - we are no further forward apart from a few thin sites that claim a few pages came back.
Looks to me like google treats the supplemental index like the trash can. Once your pages are in it its going to be a nightmare to get them back out.
Just to clarify I am Gary (alias Ellio) and I think it was Raul who let loose on Google I was a little more reserved with my request!
Shows #1 for allinanchor search for a few terms.
A while back, our site ended with .shtml
www.mysite.com
www.mysite.com/index.shtml
This was when we were too stupid to realized about the non www and www so we also had:
mysite.com
mysite.com/index.shtml
Now, we redesigned our site and we no longer have the .shtml. (redesign well over a year ago)
With our new redesign, we were still in the *too stupid* phase to realize about the 301's. Last May/June we went down on Google and we discovered we needed the 301's because Google had indexed both:
www.mysite.com and mysite.com
So, we put the 301's in, our site bounced back not too long after. However, we are back down as of December 27 and when I do a "site:mysite.com -www" search I find these:
www.mysite.com/index.shtml
mysite.com/index.shtml
They are outdated and have the proper 401's on them but is Google now considering them our home page? If I do the "site:mysite.com -www" the first page that comes up is the home page. Yet if I do "site:mysite.com" my home page is somewhere on the 70th page in the site search.
I guess I am wondering if with the data refresh, these old pages came back, the bot took those old outdated 401's as the home page and dumped my real home page.
If so, I can't decide if I should request the removal of those pages. I fear with my luck, the bot will also remove "www.mysite.com".
Also, after the index looked so clean, we decided to remove the robots.txt file that mentioned the .shtml pages since they no longer seemed to appear. They only have come back since December 27.
Any thoughts appreciated.
Berrysharpie
1) We still have the 301's in place
2) We have replaced the robots.txt file stopping the .shtml pages (even though we don't actually have any anymore)
3) Our site currently has all .html files so our home page would be:
www.mysite.com
www.mysite.com/index.html
The index seems to only see www.mysite.com/index.html as www.mysite.com so that is working properly.
The whole www vs non www is not to hard for any programmer to figure out. I explained the issue to my son who is in 10th grade and he figured out the fix really quick.
Google asks us to register and choose how to index our sites via sitemaps which most of us use. Either www or non www. If websites do not register google assigns a default of www
x = non www
y = www
z = What google indexes/cache/assigns page rank
If x=y then z=y or z=x depending on how we register or the default.
Geez, how simple mathmatical equation can take care of all the 301's google has been asking for and these guys call themselves engineers? May be google should hire my 16 year old son.... Absolutely baffled...
I've been ignoring this thread, mostly because we don't have any sites that have any issues like these ones you are all finding. None of our sites are forums and the vast majority are for bricks and mortar businesses.
However, whilst doing some ad analysis on blogs, I notice that virtually every blog I loked at (over 60 of them) all had a high homepage and zero inner pages.
You don't suppose that Google decided that Blogs were transient and that inner pages are not that relevent in the greater scheme of things do you?
Let's forget about Google would you?
Why everytime I want to get some fresh content about any subject end up using Yahoo? You already know that. Yahoo database is more dynamic, it is alive. Instead, google database almost always shows "partial or complete paralysis" and every time it does an update ends up experiencing "jerking muscle tremors"
"A supplemental result is just like a regular web result, except that it's pulled from our supplemental index."
Isn't this nice,
I did send them a reply with no reply back, 2 days and counting.
The "supplemental" links to pages of our site that have a "XXXXXXXXXX" address appear with cache dates of January and February 2005. Google is reverting back to "old" pages and making them supplemental? Google has current caches of our site's pages
I realize this
Just frustrated, traffic down 90%
They think that Supplemental Results are not a problem... even when they show a page with out of date addresses and phone numbers on it for example.
Google has current caches of all our pages but only a few of them show up in BD, and the rest are supplemental with jan & feb 2005 cache dates.
and
Elio - Gary may get a fix , but again it looks like 1 of 100's of variables Google hasn't prepared for which are getting exposed and being in the "Supplementary Hell " - extra hot - i go a step further .
plus
Just to clarify I am Gary (alias Ellio) and I think it was Raul who let loose on Google I was a little more reserved with my request!
Gary - I think you were more restrained than a loaded cannonball -it's just that you lit the fire for Raul. Don't be apologetic - there's a lot of us out here grateful for your remarks and i guess grateful that it was acknowledged by Matt.
Thankfully Matt's acknowledged the problem and i guess that kinda indicates how seriously they're taking your remarks and Raul's as representative of what the webmaster community is experiencing and feeding back. to them.
I wish they had more than 1 person reading WebmasterWorld - but i guess it's more than a sample!
From a business point of view it looks like it's recognised by Google that relevancy on results is suffering - i mean if you have an authority site with M's of activity and it has been dropped and multiply the problem it's reached a critical point which will be starting to loose some surfers by them switching to a 2nd search on Yahoo or MSN
Let's wish Matt and his team success in managing this problem asap ........plzzzz
It may be that a few manual fixes are in order until they get the algo fully sorted.
If I were Google I would really want this fixed quickly so I could get on with the campaign against the real enemy - spammers.
Why upset the webmaster community if you don't have too - just does not make sense.
So I remain quietly confident.
Gary
