Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I'll offer my symptoms as well and put them in chronological order since it appears I have patterns similar to many, but a few smaller differences.
Before June27 everything had been running smooth for a very long time. No significant changes in SERPS had ever occurred. The only "weird" thing I ever saw was about eight or nine months ago when during a PR update my homepage went to PR 0, yet all of my internal pages retained their PR of 3-5. The next PR update "fixed" this and my homepage went back to PR 5 as it had been before.
Otherwise all indexing was normal. Page title in the blue link, multiple lines of snippet text from the page in the black description, etc. Using the "site:" command showed normal results, homepage listed first followed by other pages in some semblance of order. I've never previously, nor currently, have any problems with "supplemental" pages.
June 27 during the evening I lost 95% of my traffic from Google and disappeared in the SERPS.
After June 27 traffic is still way down. Yesterday I saw a tiny increase in SERPS but no increase in traffic. Today I'm down a tiny bit in SERPS from yesterday.
Looking at the "site:" command there are two huge differences. First is that my homepage is missing out of about 700 pages. It isn't listed at all. The second big difference is that most of the pages are listed with the meta-description as the black description text rather than snippets of the text previously used. Pages are still cached.
If I search Google for a specific phrase in quotes that only appears on my website, the page is returned in the search results, however again the description text is just what is in the meta-description and no snippet from the page itself.
June 29 - Googlebot went on a deep crawl of my site, crawling pretty much all of the 700 pages in the site. The crawled pages are not yet showing in the cache.
[edited by: engine at 4:13 pm (utc) on June 30, 2006]
With normalized traffic, I mean compared to a reference to sort out the changes of the weekdays.
Since most of my sites are German, I use the German web stats on
[webhits.de...]
to normalize my own traffic
26 100%
27 93%
28 57%
29 59%
30 65%
When this continues, theres is light on the horizont.
Of course, I didn’t count on the fact that people would count the seconds until I got back. Sheesh.
Welcome back to the world of guys posting in their underwear, Matt!
(was it webwork that coined that phrase?)
Well heck I would love not to rely on google for a big portion of our traffic, but they have a huge monopoly. We can be #1 in msn but its not worth squat.
Sure, we work on other areas for internet traffic, but if you are not in google, you are just not in the game.
We have been hit hard by the latest update on one site. Fortunately I spread my risks by running 4 different businesses, and only one relies purely on organic google traffic.
I wish google had 25% of the market, and the rest was divided elsewhere......but it just isnt that way is it!
*just being hopeful*
My site is not a travel site as the sites mentioned above and has lots of content (very few aff. links compared to content) and has been around for several years..
I hope Matt Cutts or GoogleGuy or Superman comes in and tells us what is going on...
You are a prime example of what some of us mean when we say do not rely on google. You spread your risks.
Everyone should spread his risks. Don't rely on anything. And that includes google. Spread your risks.
Google will someday be eclipsed by something. One should recognize that and have alternative ways of making a living.
Wow. This is truly classic stuff! I love the "Man, is Google ever finished now" posts that come with the bitter taste of losing your website top 10s! Keep 'em coming people!
;)
Wow. This is truly classic stuff! I love the "Man, is Google ever finished now" posts that come with the bitter taste of losing your website top 10s! Keep 'em coming people!
My traffic is overall up, still all these Google changes make for an unpredictable business. Might be down next week. Best is to slowly build up alternative traffic to a survival baseline.
Google will someday be eclipsed by something.
Nobody has a monopoly in search.
What monopolies? Nobody has a monopoly in search.
Sorry it has taken so long to get back, but I've swimming and sunbathing etc etc etc in the wonderful global warming bi-product.
My site has been hit a great deal by Googlebot over the past 36 hours and I'm convinced that my supplimental site will return once picked up again. I have a theory that the people that get hit badly in these updates are those who re-designed their sites during Jagger last year. Google seems to use old data while they are picking up new data and that means that people like me, who were caught napping during the Jagger update will feel the pinch. But, as long as the content is unique and there is no spam in your pages, you'll be back.
[My true side speaking]
I used to be a black hat. Not for me, but for my clients and I was very good. So good infact, that Google still lists some of my favourite clients on page one ... one of them in competition with 97,000,000 other sites. Google don't care about spam, they just care about people saying that they will get you a top ten listing, because they take money out of Google investors mouths. Any other fluctuation is incidental and will rectify itself ... trust me, I'm as crooked as they come ... but I'm on your side.
;-)
Col
Well we are feeling a bit like we've been hit by friendly fire right now and are stil showing a 90% drop in G traffic. Googlebot has been though the site twice in 48hrs, just hoping we wake up to better SERPS tomorrow. Wouldn't mind so much if I even knew what to do to be "blackhat" I can just about muster a product review.
LP
What monopolies? Nobody has a monopoly in search.The monopoly is in doing search well. ;)
Those who are seeing increased spidering now -- is this on sites that saw ranking changes on the 27th?
site:url shows the following number of pages cached:
June 27: 9350
Later June 27:4370
June 28: 4380
June 29:4,390
June 30:10900
July 1: 4500
How do you go from 10900 pages to 4500?!
Similarly
site:url-a -e -i -o -u
1680
1660
219
1650
So by all accounts this update is FAR from done or final.
Anyone getting similar results?
Spidering has remained consistent on my sites. I looked at the entire month of June, and Googlebot came every single day.
"Those who are seeing increased spidering now -- is this on sites that saw ranking changes on the 27th?"
Spidering for 1 July:
Between 50% to 100% of all pages, regardless the domain is affected from the 27 June change or not.
Have a good one everyon
Col :-)
Enjoy the Sun colin
When the site: command returns the index page at the top then things have settled back yes. We had one of our sites suffer from this earlier this year but it came back just fine in uder 2 weeks.
I don't want to make you worry unecessarily and I hope you are right, but this problem was affecting our site for months if not a whole year. Since the 27th it remains fixed, and we're getting our positions back.
I'm convinced this is a tweak to the algo, and not a bug. Google will be assessing the positive and negative impacts, because we might assume they were aiming at something, so further tweaks may follow.
I see Matt Cutts is back and has a few posts about the 27th to welcome him. Those who have had a good result come out of this should make sure he knows that too.
It's great to hear others have seen an improvement, but the quality of serach results seems to be lower for most keywords with more spam and dead pages ranking highly.
Just hope the google boys had a good weekend and come back ready and refreshed.
LP
And of those long lost sites in the 72.14.207.* more of them are fixed as far as the site:domain.com homepage being first.
Lets hope that the sites that went the other way will get the fix soon.
For two affected sites with us:
Site 1) The pages are supplementals which were removed long ago but remain on our server... Maybe should have been deleted or redirected? PR 5 remains same. 5+ Year old site.
Site 2) Only 4 pages in index of approxamately 100, now. Of those the index page is listed last and the three above it seem random accept they are part of some newer pages added last year, one I see with a spelling error in the title. PR6 for 3 years and remains so, 4+ year old site.
