Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
duplicate content - but I don't think google is that silly to not know that domain.com and www.domain.com are the same.
As for complaining - Well, when your brand name is taken by another party that is benefiting by being #1 for a search on your brand, then if you fell it's best to just sit back and take it.. I on the other hand would rather come on here, ask as many questions as possible, and learn from the answers that get posted.
I've spent quite some time building my brand, and now according to Google, I'm not even relavant enough to rank for my brand name - that, my friend, is the problem.
ahhh...another preacher talking about good content and how that means good results. We've doen that part and aren't ranking not even for our domain.com. Not all of us have have a million spammy sites that can be ditched in a hearbeat and replaced with another domain. We might be cheap and idiots, but you aren't much better.
I'm buying a few already established domains and follow the 100 domain strategy. Spamming apparently is more honorable than complaining about bad results.
btw, No spamming here. I detest spam as much as the next. Just because I run several sites doesn't mean that I participate in shady SEO/spamming.
ahhh...another preacher talking about good content and how that means good results. We've doen that part and aren't ranking not even for our domain.com. Not all of us have have a million spammy sites that can be ditched in a hearbeat and replaced with another domain. We might be cheap and idiots, but you aren't much better.
Spot on!
If this is your business, then you're are either a.) a cheap *** or b.) an absolute idiot to depend upon organic search engine results to generate all of your revenue.
I can't control the fact that Google are a search monopoly... so I kinda have to roll with the fact that they were referring me about 90% of traffic. I've had more than one company attempt to diversify the referrers, however it just wasn't possible with the type of industry. We did some brand-building in the beginning, and then it grew thorough the work we've done and word-of-mounth.
I have a few people here helping me out, and unfortunately they will have to be let go - because 90% was taken away (though given also) by Google. If more people used MSN or Yahoo, this would be less of an issue (we're ranked good there).
So, on the off-chance that my #*$!ing will get something done to get the site ranked again, and keep those 3 people with jobs, then in their name I'll do it.
PS: Still waiting for GoogleGuy to PM me! :)
[edited by: eelixduppy at 10:03 pm (utc) on Feb. 18, 2009]
to be honest you should be focussing your attention on what you can do to remedy the problem. not what google can do. As i said before i'd be glad to look over your site if you'd like. I wouldn't count on getting help from google.
ahhh...another preacher talking about good content and how that means good results. We've doen that part and aren't ranking not even for our domain.com.
Yes...
I can't control the fact that Google are a search monopoly... so I kinda have to roll with the fact that they were referring me about 90% of traffic. I've had more than one company attempt to diversify the referrers, however it just wasn't possible with the type of industry.
And yes!
Why is it so hard for some of you (I don't want to name anyone Mikec) to understand/concede these simple points? You employ mind constructs and abstract subjectivity instead of relaying plain facts and using deductive reasoning to reach further understanding.
Bring the heat MSN!
[edited by: MLHmptn at 6:30 am (utc) on Feb. 9, 2005]
You have to be willing to spend money.
Or time. In my opinion you can invest either money or time, or both of course.
We tried adwords - it wasn't very effective for our particular items. We depend on a mass of targetted traffic. Items are low price, so we have to sell a lot of them . Why this industry, well we're one of the few that still do it - but someone has to, and in general we are one of the biggest companies out there for what we do.
MSN & Yahoo don't refer much, even though we rank ther better than Google. It just so happens, Google is where everyone searches when they want these items (hobby items). Traffic from Google converts great though.
I invested money in adwords before, then I decided we needed to invest more time, so me and my guys spent months working on content - not only for engines, but for our users.
Now that we've followed all the rules, writing loads of content, we now find ourselves in a worse position than before... and no, I won't be using AdWords again.
What's really a kick in the teeth though, is that we spend literally thousands of $$$ on a new website design.. it went live on Feb 1st - this update happened on Feb 2nd .. so now we've got a great site, and only about 10% of the visitors we had before that will even see it.
The new design launch was too close to the update to be the cause here though.
Yesterday when the pages had a fresh date, we were ranked in our original position, today it's back to being nothing.
perhaps your redesign had something to do with it. i really think you'd be better off trying to learn how to fix your site then hoping that google will just fix its results for you.
Is anyone using mcdar to check the data centers? If so ... the results delivered bare no relationship to the actual search results performed on the individual data centers.
The allinurl: results on mcdar may illustrate a feature of current SERPS that are new to me: an importance is given to website age which ranks above content:
allinurl: my-domain
1 www.my-domain.freeserve.co.uk (6-year-old)
2 www.my-domain.co.uk (5-year-old)
3 www.my-domain.co.uk/home.html (frames page for above)
...
7 www.my-domain.com (3-year-old)
Doing a 100-result-per-page `standard' `allinurl: my-domain' search on the same DC (216.239.53.99) => the same order for these pages (8 -> 11, although the .com does not feature on the first page). It is a touch staggering to think that a page which contains nothing much more than a single link will rank above 58,500 (not-my-domain) information pages. That is taking KISS to extremes.
andrew_m:
is whoever got hit by this update also seeing an increase in the number of indexed pages
site:full-domain currently shows 14,000 for me. Across January this number steadily dropped day-by-day by hundreds or thousands at a time. Most of the SERPS results are URL-only.
anyone else notice DMOZ descriptions are being pulled and displayed as the snippet for the index page?
I'm sure others have mentioned the DMOZ descriptions in earlier posts in this thread, but the thread's too long to search them out anymore.
I have found a number of my inner pages which had never seen the light of day before, popping up into top positions for money phrases - all with the DMOZ description as snippets. The referrals to these pages are currently outperforming anything else I have. It can't last. I would be the first to admit that these pages don't deserve top billing.
These pages:
- Have few or no inbound links from off-site
- Have good on-topic content
- Have many on-topic outbound links
- Have on page basic SEO, nothing more
- Low keyword density
- Are aged 5 years
Now that we've followed all the rules, writing loads of content, we now find ourselves in a worse position than before... and no, I won't be using AdWords again.
I'm sorry; it must be my nature - but I believe webmasters who say they have followed the rules...and know what they are doing.
Why assume otherwise - to reinforce your mind set?
Even a clown wouldn't need to draw an assumption as to the circumstances.. I've concisely described them above.
I think I might know a little something as to what is spam, and what isn't.
If I was a spammer, I probably wouldn't be here complainin', I'd be either enjoying the benefits of having at least a few sites that are doing well, or building more spam sites. I have just 2 sites. 1 is unaffected and the other is heavily affected
I don't call anyone else here a spammer, particularly not members with more posts than I, so please have the same common courtesy before posting next time.
<It's good to diversify, but telling a pro hockey player to diversify is silly. Building a business model on free search is simply a risk to reward equation, that's all.>
Some things to bear in mind:
- Anyone can send in feedback. I'm on the group and I'll gather some other engineers to read messages on it as well.
- This will let anyone send comments directly to engineers who read the messages--it's not going through an extra step of user support processing it. The flip side is that although we'll read all the comments we get, and see if we can use the feedback to improve our quality, we won't be able to reply to individual messages. If you're especially happy or unhappy with something in our search results right now, this is the best way to tell us. You'll want to include a concrete search phrase and the exact url that you think is spam or high-quality content. :)
- With any change, there are going to be some sites that move into the first search page and some sites that move out. That's the reality of any change in search engine results--but I do want to hear feedback.
I'll set aside some time tomorrow to sit with some other engineers and read through the feedback we get. If there's a spammy site that's been annoying you, or a very high quality site that you think should do better, please let us know.
Best wishes,
GoogleGuy
I have built websites for people and seen them quit their job and just live it up and then go down the tubes when their site suddenly stopped getting free traffic.
I told them they should not depend on the money their website makes because it don't last but they didn't listen.
Free search engine traffic is like hanging your site on a bungee cord and then throwing it off a bridge. the traffic is up and down for years and from the 4 years I've been at it, I don't think it will ever stop bouncing.
But I do know one thing, You can never depend on it.
Why don't you ever let us know what's going on. Clearly there is a sandbox and clearly sites are getting duplicate penalties from 302 redirects caused by PHP click tracking scripts.
Clearly I have a PR5 site that ranked #1 for a 126,000,000 result keyword but it is blocked from the index because of the 302 redirect problem.
That site was in the top 10 for 3 years and now nothing. The pages are still indexed but none of them show up for any searches anymore except for major obscure keywords.
I've seen this happen to many of my sites that I have built for people and the only thing they all have in common is they all have 302 redirects from PHP scripts.
Could you talk to your engineers about that problem?
I have tried allmost everything and the only way it can be solved is if you fixed it.
I have not filtered my access logs to see the pattern of googlebot visits but I can do it if that helps understanding what is happening. Infact I did not know Allerga update is going on until yesterday when I found that google traffic has dropped since 7th Feb.
May be others who have been hit can share the features of their site. So far it looks like its not just a devaluation of internal links. Aggressive duplicate content penalty is likely, but its not fair. Even pages with unique content are off, its like every page on my domain is hijacked out of the top results where it belongs and buried somewhere deep inside.
I hope its not over yet ...
Mufad.
(added: Congrats europeforvisitors and BigDave :))
Whenever appropriate, do shed some light upon sandbox thing. Its now becoming like a Hitchcock suspense thriller :)
Mc
