Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
The stable site (Site A) is a personal/resume site. The one that's seen a big drop (Site B) is more commercial, with AdSense and some affiliate links (not a ton) including two sitewide affiliate banners in a global include.
Site B actually has many more links, all on target, many I didn't even ask for, just links based on the quality of the content. It also has much more content, much more traffic (before the drop anyway), and is overall cleaner. In other words, it *should* be doing better than Site A!
I've come up with some possibilities, please suggest anything else I should look at:
1. Google hates affiliates. Sure, some affiliate pages still do well, but overall Google doesn't like them.
2. There are several sites scraping my RSS feed - could Google see this as dupe content and be hurting me for it? Previously I always ranked while the dupes were buried so I didn't think much of it.
3. I recently moved servers, could that be it? The stable Site A also moved along with Site B so this doesn't seem likley.
4. I did a few design changes to clean navigation, consolidated a bunch of nav links into drop-down menus.
Any suggestions?
--Illah
I've put it down to Google screwing everything up again just like they did with the last Jagger 'improvement'.
It sure would be nice if Google started concentrating again on their core business. I always found their search results very accurate pre-Jagger and these days their results are no-where near as good.
It's almost like they are intentionally trying to shoot themselves in the foot taking real sites with them while promoting scraper sites.
Before the Google updates my site did as it should. It was very fair and when I worked on it I usually got a proportional increase for my efforts. Now there's no rhyme or reason behind Google's changes.
In the past I always overpowered the scraper sites but with the updates I get punished and the scraper sites get rewarded.
Because the scrapers are all adsense based it becomes an issue of Google subsidizing the theft from my site. I've asked many times why Google is not more discerning in who they let into AdSense but no response.
They don't seem to realize that by letting scaper sites into the AdSense program they are compounding the problem.
I've given up on Google entirely. They strike me as a company that could care less about their customers's issues that are early warning signs about deficits in their business practices.
If it's not Google subsidizing scraper sites through AdSense dollars it's Google filling sites with MFA ads and killing off all earnings.
They don't care - that's all I can come up with after 6 months of 'improvements'. They are on another planet and not at all aware that the steps they are taking are causing them to loose value - rapidly.
Honestly, before any of their 'improvements' such as Jagger, my site was ranked properly and the people who came in on Google searches got relevant material from me. I wasn't #1 but I didn't deserve to be. There were a small number of other sites that were more deserving and they got the top listings.
Some issues that I was better on got me the top listing. This encouraged me to continue to develop content to hold onto that listing by helping others (my site is tech support).
Now, if I add content it's a crapshoot. I've extensively looked into this Google issue over and over again and I see the same core problems. If I owned Google the first person on the chopping block would be Matt Cutts. It's apparently his job to ensure quality control but it's not happening.
Google would be far better off to roll the clock back one year to when things were fair and their service was accurate.
They are and then I've confirmed in one quick look that Google is 'imporoving' again and I can go back to doing what's important - shifting my site away from any dependency on Google at all. I won't bet my future on a company making these kind of mistakes with absolutely no accountability or concern.
Let's just say that we spend as much time and effort to build a good site adding pages every week to gain viewer ship and sales over the last two years In fact, since we launched our site in 2003 our viewer ship have increased anywhere to 7% - 16% per month.
With this latest screw up of Google, our traffic has dropped over 50% for the last 45 days!
I blame myself if I screw up!
Who does Google blame if they screw up?
Honestly, if they could roll the clock back one full year before the 'improvements' things would be much better. But to give you an idea....
My site is small and just began covering it's overhead last August. Up until then I was growing and managed to reach 6,000 visitors per day (like I said - it's small) I work REALLY hard for each visitor I get. The Jagger updates cut the traffic in half. Gradually, my site began rising again from the damage done by Google. Basically, people's search engine result clicks voted me back up to where I belonged. That took 2 months. Then the next Jagger 'improvement' came followed shortly by another. The net result was that at one point Google knocked my traffic down, update by update to the 1,000 visitor mark (from 6,000).
Over some more months people voted my site back up again by clicking on my search results. I then climbed back up from the damage done by Google 'improvements'.
Now Google did some more improvements to knock me back down again. I've been averaging 3500 visits per day after their latest 'improvements'. Here's the most recent stats;
April 10 - 2818 visits
April 11 - 2575 visits
April 12 - 1812 visits
April 13 - 1280 so far...
As you can see, Google has been 'improving' again. Now here's the dead simple truth - over the last 6 months Google has continually been doing everything possible to decimate what little is left of my site.
But the proof that they are mistaken in their 'improvements' is that if a few months go by the site always rises to at least it's former level. This happens because people 'vote' it back up to the top by clicking on my more relevant links.
So if the people think my site is worth visiting then obviously Google's 'improvements' are going against what people are voting for.
Long & short - I'm moving my site as far from being Google dependant as possible. If that fails I'll pull the plug on it and sell my servers and equipment off.
Like yourself, I remember when writing good content was rewarding. I remember when Google ranking were fair (and I was never #1 across the board) and better sites then mine were ranked higher. I remember when sites that were worse then mine were ranked lower. All of that was before Google made any 'improvements'.
Once Google began 'improving' things with updates the scraper sites began to outrank me. Google's intent was to punish the people scraping content but they resulted in rewarding them.
I posted on Matt Cutt's site repeatedly about it but nothing was ever said. In fact, he seemed quite proud that a new update was coming out! Every time they rolled out an update the same thing happened - scrapers got promoted and I got demoted.
I talked to so many people about this in the Google groups (and there were so many similar replies) that the topic never died off. This isn't an isolated incident - it's been on-going for months now and is affecting a LOT of good people (and not the scraper sites).
Unlike most people I'm no longer enamoured with Google. The rose colored glasses came off with the first Jagger update.
It's time to start talking about the honest people that are getting the shaft everytime Google comes up with another 'bright idea'. I don't like posting negative content - I try to stay away from it wherever possible but I've been patient and am tired of Google operating in a 'hear no evil see no evil' vacuum.
Same results, same isolated incidents, same questions!
I think we don't have to look any further than Google business model, it has expanded beyond control and accountability!
Problem is many people just aren't that web savvy...
--Illah
Google - the company that likes to subsidize scraper
sites with AdSense dollars!
I'm actually writing an article about this whole disaster backed with exact traffic charts to show the coorelation between Google's 'improvements' and my traffic drops. Every time Google updates I loose 50% of my traffic. Right now I can handle one more update before they've finished my site off completely and I have to shut it down and sell off the equipment - it's that serious.
For some reason my site is REALLY sensitive to these 'updates' and I see nearly instant results and typically an immediate 50% drop in traffic every time they 'improve' their algorithm. At the same time I consistantly see the scraper sites rise back to the top of the charts.
I remember the good old days when I didn't need to concern myself with scraper sites - Google's algorithm was great & people always voted me to the top of the charts with their clicks. Scraper sites were never in the top 50 until Matt Cutts started fixing Google.
I'm really getting tired of having Google's foot on my throat while all day long I see and hear praise about how they are so good - while in the background they are killing off sites without a thought and wrecking what was a great search engine.
I've always liked and supported Google. Even after the first Jagger update I gave them the benefit of the doubt and waited for them to get things straight. My view changed with every update and the cooresponding 50% drop in traffic. As it stands, since September Google has taken me down from 6,000 visits per day down to 1,000 - each decrease can be tracked directly back to their updates.
Each time the people vote me back to the top of the charts and if that's not a clear indictment that Google has madness to their method then I don't know what to say. The problem is they are now killing my site off at a rate where I'm not able to recover completely after each 'upgrade'
I've tried talking to Matt Cutts kindly on his blog, I've posted so many times in the Google Groups about this that the threads grow out of control from people reporting the same thing. Not even a response but Matt is all to eager to excitedly report about another 'upgrade'. It's almost like he's proud of the work that he's doing?!?
I've followed Matt's advice about reporting scraper sites after each update - only to find that not one of them was taken out. I reported those sites publicy in the groups and on his blog - everyone saw them, agreed (it was black and white) and nothing was done about it.
They must just round-file every report of a scraper site. I've reported AdSense violations up the wazoo and the same thing - nothing gets done about it.
It's time to shine a lot of light on this problem at Google - maybe enough bad press will compell them into doing something about it because they sure aren't listening to the multitudes of complaints being generated every time they make an 'improvement'.
My guess is that Google has some type of anti-scraper algo that's just FAILING. It probably has a hard time identifying the source vs. the scrape, so the source can get killed. It's really retarded, because with all the PhD talent that Google is hiring you'd think they'd know this was not a legitimate site:
[SCRAPER-SITE.com...]
Even a layman can see the blatant RSS2HTML script with the XMLFILE= pointed at my site! I mean 13 year old kids doing beginner web programming could probably spot that.
That URL ranks #4 for one of my keywords while I only come up when I click 'repeat search with omitted results'
Haha gotta love it!
--Illah
in such a case we should better focus on making webpage as much independend from google as it is possible... but for me, as for a 'young' webmaster, it is not as easy as it seems... maybe you could provide us with some hints?
So in googles defense I don't think they are favoring adsense sites....
I do think this is somehow related to google maybe trying to clean dup content.... but, problem here is google uses dmoz, and how can they ban a site that also downloads and uses dmoz data, if they do and its even displayied often in their search results....
maybe they are favoring the big boys.... that advertise as well... maybe they want the adsense users to spend some money in adwords...
anyhow I agree with mmiller, that google hasn't been the same since they tried to destroy the google bombs.
I genuinely feel your pain with this, one of our sites still has thousands of pages waiting to go back in the index.
The way i see it is that since Google went public its just about making more and more money on Adwords. The fact they have an income of a large country let alone a business is simply not enough, as each quarters results roll in, so they want to make more and more.
Also, having maxed out adwords revenue they are messing with non core ideas also which lets be honest about, matt cutts may well be excited about them, but for the rest of us, who cares?, do we need Google froogle, google local, google maps, google calender, blah, blah, blah - Nope, just plain quality search as it used to be, will do me just fine thanks very much!
The SERPS results now are imo no longer about delivering perfect search results but more about how far you can push the quality down to push up adwords revenue and having found that line and crossing it the serps reflect this.
These updates are not about improving search, (how much more improvement can you make to a wheel?) they are about improving revenue for Google - webmasters need to understand this.
If you have an authority site on Blue widgets that site would have ranked 2 yrs ago for "Blue Widget", "Blue Widgets", "Your Blue Widgets", "My Blue widgets" etc, etc because the site was a Blue widget Authority.
Currently, Google does not want that authority site to rank for variations of Blue widget, it wants it to show somewhere in the serps for some variations and wants the site to buy adwords to feature for all of them. The search user meanwhile would want to see the authority site for "Blue Widgets" listed for "Blue Widget" if they typed the search in without the plural - this is what we are now dealing with. (Oh and build a page optimised to the plural and get bashed for duplicate content)
The so called Big Daddy is just another update where they try to improve the income from adwords. Do they really give a flying fig if your authority site ranks or not, or if your traffic has halved? what they do care about is if adwords revenue falls if the results are too good.
IMO Google want to deliver OK ish search results not perfect results and keep working on increasing adwords spend by bringing into play the buying of adwords on longer search term string requests or minor variations of the same search request.
The main problem we have is that Google Dominates, we have put it there, the webmaster is to blame. We need Yahoo and MSN and the small search engines to take more of its market share so that search is spread over a number of players. In the UK Google has about 75% of the market for sectors we work on hence why changes to its algo are noticed.
Good luck with your sites and other webmasters who have had traffic loss with this update - i hope things improve soon, but dont for one moment assume that this is an error on Googles behalf, the hard fact is that IF they wanted to fix these issues, Cannonicals, suplementals, etc, etc im sure they could, the sad fact however is that it could be that they dont want to rush to fix them, it could be that they are seeing imrovements in adwords revenue due to the results not being so good and they like it the way it is.
Time will tell and the update is still ongoing, but how long has this been rolled out, it feels like months to me!
One of my keywords that I was complaining about is now #1! It was the very same one that I was talking about when I reported the scraper outranking me yesterday.
Unfortunately on pretty much every other keyword the scrapers still outrank me. The only upside is this provides a glimmer of hope that my site being killed is just a Big Daddy hiccup. Hopefully I'll be back where I should be soon...but I'm not holding my breath.
--Illah
We can hope that whatever was damaged is being fixed. I had strong hopes that Big Daddy would be the tool to help Google fi way.x some long-standing issues. It still may turn out that
Thing is, it would be nice if you could see a chart with the corresponding drop (by date) so that it would be clearly evident who caused this fall off :-)
--Illah
However, I do think you've described your situation quite well.
Thanks tedster - it's just as well as it's enough to make you cry. It makes me cry. You ever see that Simpsons episode where Homer falls off the cliff hitting every rock, boulder and protrusion on the way down? dOh, the last I checked I was down to 1300 visits per day. That beats the all time record after a Google 'update'.
This coming week I'm off to look for work. Someone has to pay for the small loan on my servers that I bought late last year after I learned Google AdSense could cover the overhead.
The servers were barely installed and then Jagger was released - along with a drop from a steady but rising 6,000 visits per day to 3,500 ( a term I call the 'Jagger Effect'). By the time all 3 parts of it were released they had decimated me to the tune of 1,500 visits per day - along with the corresponding drop in AdSense revenue.
I watched as my site recovered from Jagger 1 - right back up to 6,000 people per day. The people had voted me right back to where I belonged. Jagger 2 bruised the site though, and while it came back - it wasn't all the way. Jagger 3 did likewise.....
It had recovered back to 3,500 or so per day until this month's 'Big Daddy' (don't you love those names? It seems Google is proud of them!) which has now got me down to 1,300 visitors per day but if there's any consolation - it can't get much worse because I'm very close to all traffic being direct with the usual smatterings of Yahoo/MSN referrals...... I never knew they were important until now.
I feel just like the knight in the Monty Python movie - the one that's getting dismembered - except that it's Matt Cutts performing the amputations.... Cutts is an appropriate name don't you think? As is his famous pirate costume - it was a costume - wasn't it?
I remember when we all cheered Microsoft to the top and thought Bill Gates was the best and the brightest. I mean everyone was enamored with them...they could do no wrong. And then one day they stopped listening to their customers and started telling us what we want....
This time I think I've finally learned my lesson. First Jagger 1, 2 & 3 and then MFA ads and now Big Daddy. On top of that the GoogleBot has gone from being a 3x daily visitor to being rare as hens teeth. My content used to be indexed and displayed in two days! I can only assume that Google has decided I am no longer worth visiting and instead has elected to reward someone else - the scraper sites that steal my content.
Now that Google has cut my traffic, rewarded the scrapers, cut my AdSense earnings down to $5 (or less) per day, limited my ability to block only 200 MFA's - there's nothing else I can do. The MFA's alone are pouring in at levels that fill the competing sites form and I can't review the ads fast enough through the preview tool anymore - there's just too many junk ads :-(
Google has their foot on my throat and they are not going to take it off. I've posted kindly on Matt Cutts site, I've spent many hours trying to do my part by being a responsible 'Googalian' - policing sites stealing MY content by pouring through the Google index and reporting hundreds - always including the keywords 'Jagger'.
I've reported AdSense violations from here until eternity for both myself and everyone else in an effort to do my part in keeping the AdSense program clean - but I've never see one action taken on any report I've made - and I've checked. Instead I've seen the same sites advertising on my site!
I've never seen a company that I liked and believed in go bad so fast. One year ago they had a great search engine that properly reported and ranked results. On top of that they were able to pay out good money to web sites for truly excellent ads. More then one person actually told me that it was faster to click on an AdSense ad then it was to go back to Google and do a search - plus, the site they ended up on stood a high chance of being what they wanted!
Think about that. People were clicking the AdSense ads knowing full well they were ads because the chances of them seeing what they were looking for was very high. Hello? Is anyone out there? And yes, there is a reason for talking about these glory days in the past tense.
I was rewarded for writing good content and now look where we're at - the exact opposite. The last thing I want to do is publish more content because I know it now has absolutely no bearing on Google. The only reason I ever answer a question on my site anymore is to help someone else - that's it. The only time I make a FAQ anymore is when I absolutely have to - it's not worth it anymore. That's the affect the Jagger series had on me.
I don't know whatever prompted them to go on a search engine improvement project when what they had was shockingly accurate. I can't even explain how shocked I was when, time after time, I would see my content properly ranked in their index. I was never #1 when there was better content then mine and I was always ranked higher then content that was not as good as mine. At times those rankings would change and I would look at competing sites and see that I had dropped lower because they had improved their content - it was so accurate and uncannily honest that it blew me away - and I'm hard to impress!
I remember several instances where I was motivated enough to re-write my content, make it more comprehensive and easier to read, make it more accurate and able to solve a wider range of problems, add pictures to make following the directions fool-proof and then watch as I re-took my rightful place in the charts. Hello? Is there anyone out there?
If I sluffed off I lost my rankings - just like clockwork. That's the way it's supposed to be. That's fair & that's accurate. So it should be.
I was rewarded for making excellent content, and given enough time, the cream always did rise to the top. If I wanted more traffic the recipe was simple - write genuine and great content that helped others - it was a guaranteed pathway to success and that's certainly doing no evil.
The problem is that my small site can only take so many repeated amputations from Google before it reaches a point of no return. And I think that's exactly what the 'improvements' at Google have finally brought it down to.
I fought hard to get 6,000 people a day. I'm not like most of the people here who have big sites and an inherent talent for making a site popular. I did dream about making hundreds of thousands of dollars from AdSense but I was also realistic about my abilities. Instead I just tried my best to help others and generate good content and to be pleased with what I did get. When I made 300 p/month I hoped to get to 400 and dreamed about 500.
I brought on new talent (a hard thing to do when you can't pay them) and as wonderful as they are - they are now loosing interest in my site because there is so little traffic (less questions/people to help). You ever get that feeling that others around you know the writing is on the wall - but they are too kind to come out and tell you so? I've been silently fighting that ever since Google first started 'fixing' things and turning my site into an amputee. Big Daddy has finally caused me to give up - I'm not going to keep working and hoping while someone has their foot on my throat - someone that I have absolutely no control over and that wakes up one morning and decides to jerk me around.
In closing, I think the clearest example of how out of touch Google is can be seen not just by the MFA ads, the decimation of site traffic and the subsidizing of scraper sites with AdSense dollars, but instead in the 'cool' names they give their updates. They say Big Daddy and I read Big Trouble - the Emperor has no clothes - again!
Ah heck, one last thing, after all, this knight still has one leg left for them to amputate!
If we all added;
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /
to our robots.txt file there would be no Google. Stop and think about that. Think about what would happen if every site in the world added those lines.
We created them by letting them scrape our content and build a business around it. We also display their ads and bring them their advertising revenue. When their motto was Do No Evil it worked well but they changed their motto to Hear no Evil - See no Evil
and now look at what's happened in 8 short months. Google used to be really great but then they hooked up with a pirate who started tinkering with something that wasn't broken - in an effort to make it better? On top of that - they're proud of what they've done. Hello? Is anyone listening?
Works for me. Last Googlebot visit on one site was late on 29 March UTC.
Since then, no visits despite over 20 page updates, each accompanied by a sitemap update to reflect the last change and three well-spaced sitemap submissions.
When the general public hears about this, Google's stock is going to TANK!
I edited all my feeds to only include snippets, no HTML, and a big headline with a URL to my site at the end of every entry :-) Hopefully that removes some scraper dupe penalties if that's the issue. That's the last thing I can think of.
Oh well, nothing I can do now but wait and see if Google sorts itself out...
--Illah
