Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
This time I prefer to keep calm about this update. So instead of start a thread about how evil-ish is Google, I decided to start a thread to discover the cause of all this mess.
I'll try to explain all SEO relevant characteristics of my affected site (I have other sites not affected by this update), and I hope more people do the same, so we can find a pattern and act consequently.
Morphology:
The site is three years old, and is structured in folder, and every folder is about a different theme and they are not related.
Every folder has articles (unique content), a discussion forum, a links section and in some cases, photo galleries.
Most of the articles have a thread in the forum to discuss about it. And the first user comments are displayed under the article. After the comments, there is a link to the related forum thread, so the discussion can go on without disturbing too much.
The article has a link to the thread, but the forum thread has no link back to the article.
I run Adsense ads in all the pages of the site.
Inbound links:
4 of the subwebs ( folders) of the site have an inbound link from 4 different DMOZ categories.
There are some (maybe 3 or 4) link exchanges, but from/to related sites.
Outbound links:
All the outbound links are to 'good' sites. The outbound links are usually only in the links section, and some directly from the articles.
Inner linkage:
The main page of the domain links to all the folders of the site.
All the pages in the folders have a link to the rest of pages of the same folder.
In addition, the footer of all the pages have links to the rest of the root of the other folders.
Every folder has a valid sitemap submitted to google a few months ago.
Special folders:
One of the mini-sites (folders) is a 'free photo album' application, so there are a lot of pages with the same text, but with a different picture.
Other mini-site is a directory of hotels and restaurants of a city in Spain, so again there are a lot of 'similar' pages.
Evolution in the serps:
The last two months the number of indexed pages in google has been growing after being in the supplemental hell.
The position in the serps for a open broad of searches was quite good, always in the first page for my targeted keywords and variations.
Panic actions:
I know I should have stayed away from making changes now, but.... Today I've created a robots.txt that exclude googlebot from indexing the images of the free photo album site, and the details of every hotel and restaurant from the spanish city site.
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Any similarity with your affected sites?
[edited by: tedster at 8:07 pm (utc) on June 28, 2006]
no as I was unaware G was looking for affiliate sites and to a certain extent still not sure although the new site I'm working on the affiliate links are hidden - just in case
>As for the recent changes from the 27th. My prediction is that those sites that experienced a major drop (50%+, such as myself) won't experience a comeback for at least 3 months
I do hope your wrong Chico I was hoping for a recovery within the next few days as in last time this happened
Depends if this is a first stage of changes Google are making or if this is the end of the current set of changes.
Kidder - yep I am also waiting for freshed crawl data to get into the index to see what impact this has.
have you noticed how every superhero has an everyday alter ego?
have you noticed how every superhero has an everyday alter ego?
Why is this thread not on the homepage?!?!? Google is having a dance/update/change and it is nowhere to be seen on the front page of webmaster world.
This is an update of some sort and they are building the base for a new result. Perhaps a summer update
to test if they can increase revenue?
I would like to hear somebody from Google telling me: 'You're a bad boy and we punished you', or 'Our new programmer compiled the wrong code' or whatever other reason.
I've filled a reinclusion request, and I'm waiting a response from Google. They don't have to explain themselves, but I would appreciate it.
Didnt change anything.It looks as the site is not banned and why then to fill reinclusion request?
Because
site:command - (without space)show some unrelevant part of the site and not homepage
site: command - (with space)show my homepage with good title and description
From all datacenter this is only center where i can see old position
64.233.189.104
cache from 28 june
I have only google adsense on the site from advvertisement and couldnt understand this move from google.
Glitch or not but i'm already mentally ruined.
I hope that googleguy come here and explain what's actually gone on.
Are affiliates link problem or something else or this is simple temporary google problem that will be soon fixed.
I can relate to "Bugs", but a bug on what? Why some has been effected and some not?
If we find the bug, then maybe there is a work-around until they fix it!
Well, I'm hoping that I'm wrong too, but the last time this happened to me, it took about the 6 months mark to resolve.
Also - I misspoke earlier when I said Anti-SEO filter... I really meant to say Over-SEO filter ie. A page that looks as though it has been intentionally modiied to increase rankings in Google. This was one speculation in the Mar '05 update.
kinda like being searched for a pair of scissors in my pocket going through security at the airport..while the bazooka in my checked in luggage isnt searched at all!
Too true. Two sites that appear well above mine in the SERPs for a big keyword are spam-city. One uses the same 2-word keyword over 50 times on one small page, and the other has blatant hidden text on several of the pages. Truly unbelievable.
" this is the crazy thing...they have active filters for micro seo where innocently used keywords too many times will drop your page..but huge scale spam goes unchecked...."
So what are you proposing as the solution? Are you suggesting that Google shouldn't apply any filters unless it can catch everything? Or that it shouldn't attempt to fight spam (however imperfectly) until it can read Webmasters' minds and tell the difference between "innocent," accidental keyword stuffing and keyword stuffing for the purposes of SEO?
Some bad guys will always squeak by, and some collateral damage will always occur. It's unreasonable to expect perfection. At best, we can hope that Google will monitor the effects of its filters/algorithm changes/whatever and make adjustments when things go wrong--although, realistically, we can't expect that such monitoring will cure unexpected glitches overnight.
So what are you proposing as the solution?
are you asking me to code the actual filter?...because if youre simply asking whats my solution to not filtering some large scale spam that used to be effectively dealt with it would be to filter it again...but surely youu werent actually asking me that?
Are you suggesting that Google shouldn't apply any filters unless it can catch everything?
erm...no..that would be silly wouldnt you think?
Some bad guys will always squeak by, and some collateral damage will always occur.
well clearly you have less faith in google than i do :)
That does not mean that they are always right, but I have seen results like this prior to jagger, then watched it all go away. Then come back for a while during big daddy, then go away and so on.
From what I have observed is that every 4 months (but it is not always limited to that) Google has a data refresh. However, they have smaller data refreshes in between the dramatic ones. Sometimes it is good for me, and then there are times when it gets ugly bad.
I have kept historical ranking data over the past year and can see this kind of pattern daily. I am of course only going by my historical data, but if the rankings hold over the weekend, that is a strong indication that for the keywords that I track, I will have good rankings for abouyt 30 days and then another data refresh will come along and either keep me in good graces, or put me back in to the depths of nothingness.
All in all, I hope everyone fairs well soon, but from where i am at, i am ok with what i have seen this week.
After I read your post I checked and that is actually what the case appears to be, mine was cached on the 27th and then dissapeared into
the woodwork that night, all the sites still on the first page (except for one) have not been cached since the 22nd. This is a very
interesting theory. Now, I'm dying to see what happens when the others get indexed.
I had been tempted to try and optimize to match the ones in the remaining top ten but now that this new observation has occurred I think I'll wait and see what happens to them when they are cached before I make any changes.
Another observation, my site still has it's Page Rank 5 rating, slipped from top ten into the thirties on the 27th, crept back up a little yesterday but went way back into the 50's and 80's today. I don't know if my heart can survive this.
I'm also noticing the spamming thing, repeated key words with blatant spamming are in the top ten while sites such as mine with legitimate, moderate percentages aren't doing as well.
Regarding site: My home page shows up first under site:www.mysite.com but not site:mysite.com
However homepage listed top (using site:) on the following IPs.
64.233.189.104
72.14.207.99
72.14.207.104
72.14.207.107
64.233.189.107
Which also appear to be returning different (Pre 27J) SERPs.
Of course they might still be updating.
Continues here [webmasterworld.com...]
[edited by: engine at 4:18 pm (utc) on June 30, 2006]
