Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I had 20,300 pages showing for a site:www.example.com search yesterday and for the past month. Today it dropped to 509 but my traffic is still pretty constant. I normally get around 4,500 - 5,000 to that site per day and today I've already got 4,000.So, either Google doesn't account for even a small percentage of my traffic (which I doubt) or the way Google stores information about my site has changed. i.e. the 20,300 pages are still there, Google will only tell me about 509 of them. As far as I can tell, I think the other pages have been supplemented.
That resonated with something that I was talking about with the crawl/index team. internetheaven, was that post about the site in your profile, or a different site? Your post aligns exactly with one thing I've seen in a couple ways. It would align even more if you were talking about a different site than the one in your profile. :) If you were talking about a different site, would mind sending the site name to bostonpubcon2006 [at] gmail.com with the subject line of "crawlpages" and the name of your site, plus the handle "internetheaven"? I'd like to check the theory.
Just to give folks an update, we've been going through the feedback and noticed one thing. We've been refreshing some (but not all) of the supplemental results. One part of the supplemental indexing system didn't return any results for [site:domain.com] (that is, a site: search with no additional terms). So that would match with fewer results being reported for site: queries but traffic not changing much. The pages are available for queries matching the supplemental results, but just adding a term or stopword to site: wouldn't automatically access those supplemental results.
I'm checking with the crawl/index folks if this might factor into what people are seeing, and I should hear back later today or tomorrow. In the mean time, interested folks might want to check if their search traffic has gone up/down by a major amount, and see if there are fewer/more supplemental results for a site: search for their domain. Since folks outside Google couldn't force the supplemental results to return site: results, it needed a crawl/index person to notice that fact based on the feedback that we've gotten.
Anyone that wants to send more info along those lines to bostonpubcon2006 [at] gmail.com with the subject line "crawlpages" is welcome to. So you might send something like "I originally wrote about domain.com. I looked at my logs and haven't seen a major decrease in traffic; my traffic is about the same. I used to have about X% supplemental results, and now I hardly see any supplemental results with a site:domain.com query."
I've still got someone reading the bostonpubcon email alias, and I've worked with the Sitemaps team to exclude that as a factor. The crawl/index folks are reading portions of the feedback too; if there's more that I notice, I'll stop by to let you know.
[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 8:07 pm (utc) on May 8, 2006]
On a side note, my site: command shows no change in the # of pages and I have checked to make sure some of my newer pages wereen't indexed. Note that they are not in supplemental so there is no way they were just penalized either.
I thought this forum was a hoax as i saw no response on any of the 100 or so messages.
Hopefully, this communication isn't a hoax either - it doesn't look like it, but who knows, there's a lot of uncertainty.
Can i just take the opportunity to thank all of the team at Google [ Vanessa Fox , Matt Cutt's - before you head off to Utah for hols and the other team members if indeed the content on this is true ] - I'm sure the rest of WebmasterWorld members would agree.
Not sure that loosing our top 10 positions and indexed pages is making us jump for joy at the moment - but we're hoping the prob will be fixed.
Some specific mention of the processes that you're going through and how it is effecting us would likely take a bit of the sting away as well.
Google Employee just posted this :
Hey guys, it's not a hoax and Ms "Google Employee" IS listening to
these posts and sending them off to the appropriate places [groups.google.com]. They just
aren't going to answer any single reports here.
"We do look into every report, though we may not have time to respond
to them all individually. "
The sitemaps team has done some things that were never done before, and
has done many things - handled many exceptions - faster than I would
ever have imagined possible within a large Corp. like Google. Google
used to be a super-secret "we ain't saying nuthin'" system, now we are
getting feedback like never before. Let's give the Sitemaps team a
little respect - they can't handle this issue by themselves alone, it
is something that is probably buried elsewhere. Kudos to Vanessa and
the team for putting up a thread about it here and for taking our
problems seriously.
I know you all are hurting and it's been quite some time, but these
things sometimes take their time and IMHO it's worth working out the
details if the index is better afterwards: I would rather be listed
under the 10 results for my niche instead of being listed in a pile of
100 spam results.
Let's continue to keep this thread clean, keep listing the sites that
got hit and the information that is required. [feel free to flame me in
a new thread :-)]
Thanks.
John
[groups.google.com...]
If this isn't a hoax, then there's hope.
[edited by: Whitey at 8:31 am (utc) on May 15, 2006]
I’m just now fully encountering the problem. It’s baffling me how some of my one of a kind articles are going supplemental. These articles often take a month or more to create and don’t have Adsense. Again other search engines are handling it flawlessly and ranking the pages well. Why must Google have sitemaps and nobody else? Google just creates an nver ending flow of work for webmasters so they can line their own pockets. Has anybody told them it’s all right for others to make money, not just them and their buddies.
Two of of my main sites have lost between 47% and 70% of their pages in Google. Find below the number of occurences I find in Google now...
I have Site Map, Big content, no duplicates, no tricks, real clean
Website 1 (5 years): 300,000 => 250,000 => 161,000 (-47%)
and
Website 2 (1 year): 99,000 => 40,000 => 29,900 (-70%)
Those numbers did increase a bit last week but now it is a total disaster.
Any solution? What do you think?
Please help me!
-Google's Adsense revenues will be hit without content pages.
-Webmasters will surely start to switch to other ad networks. Why use Adsense if the pages aren't showing on Google - may as well use Yahoo.
-Why not diversify advertising away from Google if there is a chance the pages are declining.
When leading SEO's in my region, who manage PPC for Blue Chip Co's start talking to me like this on their initiation, i know the thinking is starting to occur elsewhere. And Yahoo is not so bad that some of those folks will come back when it's all fixed [ when?!? ]
etc etc
I think Google have a problem on their side.
Google just creates an never ending flow of work for webmasters
Idle hands are the devils work I believe the saying goes.
That wasn't a post by "Google Employee". It was a post by someone with the nickname "softplus".
Google haven't responded to anything in over a week.
Basically, Google doesn't want 1000 sites in the index selling the same Pocahantas shirt with the same Disney description.
This kind of statement is made so often now that it's almost as if people are starting to believe that it's true.
They may not want 1000 sites in their index selling the same shirt with the same description, but unfortunately in order to qualify as a search engine, they need to.
How annoyed would you be with Google if you were looking to buy this particular shirt, you search on Google, and they present you with one cherry-picked, "original" result? You click it and discover that they are asking $900 for it, they don't ship to your area, and they are currently out of stock. I guess you are just out of luck. Or else you need to find yourself a real search engine that presents you with all of the options, ranked by percieved relevancy. Even Google aren't this dumb.
How annoyed would you be with Google if you were looking to buy this particular shirt, you search on Google, and they present you with one cherry-picked, "original" result? You click it and discover that they are asking $900 for it, they don't ship to your area, and they are currently out of stock. I guess you are just out of luck. Or else you need to find yourself a real search engine that presents you with all of the options, ranked by percieved relevancy. Even Google aren't this dumb.
I second every word.
thanx, great post, all of truth.
May a add that different poeple like different layouts? Some prefer it with navigation on top some with navigation
on left and so on. The users won´t have a chance to chose a page of their prefered layout/navigation. That can´t be in the interest of google.
Or is this a different issue? I notice I don't have 60K+ pages indexed anymore, now I am closer to 25K but I believe that is a result of not having www, non-www, http, and https versions of the same pages indexed. Now I only have the proper www results indexed. That is a good thing.
