Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Well I certainly hope so, things are starting to look a little lost now. March/April and now most of May without any real change for the better.
More like Jan-May without any real change for the better. Hard to believe Google's been in turmoil for almost half a year now.
How would you rate the quality of your inbound links? Ratio of one-way links to reciprocal links? etc...
The other half (the community and blogs) has at max 3 recips (I'm not a fan), the rest are all one-way. The quality of the one-ways varies from the great (power directories, themed links from blogs and article submissions) to the not so great (minor directories). Overall though I would say the site is at a healthy link level.
I have seen a 600% increase in traffic to the community and blog half and a 90% decrease in traffic to the affiliate half.
I reckon the lack of quality links to the affiliate half has sealed its low traffic fate. But on the 16th and 17th, traffic levels before Dec 27th came right back. I just want to know when the rollercoaster is going to stop.
Anyone have any thoughts on this?
For my level one pages in one of my online stores, I had 70 pages fully indexed. I watched the past week as the went from 70 pages to two pages. Yet googlebot is going a bit wild on my site, the pages are not reappearing.
I think Big daddy is still not fixed and still has issues with dropping pages. I just do not understand why google would index and cache a page and then just drop it.
It seems a waste of resources and bandwidth. May be they really are out of room in their servers. I know matt posted on his blog his thoughts. There are conflicting reports about this still and google has not made a public statement since.
Interesting thoughts for investors.
Then on the 18th, they sent us back to social siberia.
Whatever they did, I wish they would do it again, because it removed a lot of scraper sites that show up higher than us.
At least the 16th and 17th change was not just me. I hope results like that return. I wonder what caused the changes in ranking for some sites. Was it a filter turned off, some tweaking to a current algo formula, or a rollback to older data or ranking for whatever reason.Anyone have any thoughts on this?
My thoughts:
I had one site go belly-up in rankings back on Dec. 27. May 16-17 brought all those rankings back, and then of course, disappeared again.
The only thing we were ever told about the Dec. 27 changes was that it involved a "data refresh".
So, I have to assume that 16-17 results involved old data.
Either that, or "data refresh" was a lie, and the Dec 27 changes involved a filter of some sort (which is what I really believe). If so, then 16-17 changes involved that filter not yet being applied.
Either way, I think the 16-17 results are history, and we will never see them again, except for the occasional glitch when G uses old data or forgets to apply a filter for a day or two.
That is a slap in the face, placed behind all supplemental sites, behind all scammers, and scrapers and scum bags.
On the 17th, Google had correctly ranked us #30 for that search term. We ar enot sandboxed otherwise we would not show up at all. Keep in mind that early last year we were ranked in the Top 10 for that keyword, as our site is the best consumer advocate site on the web with the mmost useful content on buying diamond rings and avoiding scams.
We never did any kind of spemdexing techniques whatsoever, and our site is written to be user friendly, and was well liked by search engines. We are even in DMOZ and YAhoo directory under wedding sites.
Last septemebr we appear to have dropped out of site, and have been working ever since to get back into good rank to no avail.
But something is defintiely broke in Google's filters. They tuned the filters properly on May 16, many of our keywords were back in Top 10 rank again.
Then someone at Google screwed it all up again on May 18, turning the wrong tuning knob.
Did you do link: command test on your site on 16th/17th of may?
If so: did you notice an increase in your backlinks being displayed?
Unfortuantely I forogt to run any tests on 16th/17th - foolishly thought the cahnge was for good.
I think this is a knock on effect.
If google's algo decides to not count the links from one page to another within your site, then page is going to lose its cache etc.
Have your external backlinks changed? - This could be the reason for the start of the above process.
Clients are also screaming as they see their pages drop off the face of the earth!
These are all quality sites with great content and backlinks and no black hat at all. We watched them start rising up the ranks in Jan / Feb and then saw some great results in late March / early April. Now? Nothing! We might as well be back in January!
You know Its about time Google stopped this "double secret probation" nonsense and told us what the heck they are up too! 3 weeks and not one word about this mess. It was bad enough Big Daddy was 6 months of wondering but to then screw everyting back up after that pain and say nothing is REALLY out of line!
Come on Google .. TALK!
Many webmasters are in exactly the same position. I know, some consolation. We are having to tell clients to make sure their business/website is commercially viable if you take Google serps out of the equation. That way, when the inevitable happens, that is, their quality content-rich site disappears under a sea of crappy spam in the Google serps, they can still turn a profit.
Focus on getting original news articles out to vertical news portals, very targeted PPC keyword campaigns etc. Unless you have an old, established site, treat hits from Google serps as a bit of icing, but something you can never depend upon.
