Update Allegra - Google Update 2-2-2005

[illusionist]

My site which came back on december 26 update, seems to have disappeared again on this data center [216.239.53.99...] . Its notwhere to be found even in allinanchor, allintitle etc? I see majot change on that data center, is this a new update?

[LostOne]

"I've been through this sort of stuff before. I made absolutely no changes with the site when it tanked in September. Now its back. Go figure."

Same here, but it was mid December when the hit took place.

"It looks as if they've turned down (again) the weighting given to TITLE and Hx tags"

I complained about that two weeks ago when we were in the dumpster. Now that two major phrases of ours have improved in the results title tags are working.

Yes it looks like an update to me, but we have been doing much better without Goo. They just add some more pleasure when we don't expect it anymore.

[danny]

Age isn't helping me.

My home page now ranks 33rd for a search on my name!

[Dynamoo]

Well, out of three main sites that I run, two are significantly up and one significantly down. The two up ones are listed in the ODP, the down one isn't. Perhaps this gives some weighting to the "authority" sites theory.

The "down" site is also quite well optimised on page, the "up" sites not so much. Odd.

[Localizer]

During the last week of December I lost for 4 directories the title and description at the index.
Traffic decreased extremely, I panicked a little bit and removed 2 directories to see wha't will happen.

Well.......those 2 directories which I lef alive are back in the index! Including those new directories.

Strange thing: My second site which is competing my flagship, is completely messed up overnight. I lost ALL titles and descriptions for all 600 pages.

Anyone experienced the same?

[joeking]

I cleaned up a blog style site in December that had become choked with comments from casinos, etc., with links to their sites. Not surprisingly it was nowhere in Google, PR had dropped to 0 and it wasn't even ranked for its own name.

As an aside, it wasn't penalised by either msn or yahoo for this, only Google.

I've added new content regularly over the last month or so.

After seeing this thread, I checked its main keyword today and the site is now ranking in second place.

So certainly some major SERPs changes are underway from where I'm seeing things.

[taps]

Total desaster for me. My site almost has vanished from google. I can still find some serps - but very deep in the 20-30s.

The site content only - around 2.600 articles, mainly how to's and tips.

However I can see googlebot crawling madly across the site.

Maybe Google decided to throw my page out of the index and to rescan it completely. One possible cause: The site is in Google for about five years now. By changing the URLs from

www.widget.com/showarticle.php3?widgetno=1

to

www.widget.com/showarticle.php?widgetno=1
(without the "3" after php)

and last spring to

www.widget.com/how-to-use-a-widget_widgetno_1.html

some duplicate content appeared on the site. Maybe the do a complete rescan and hopefully my site will show up again.

[Hinso]

Google virtually stopped all referrals to one of my sites this morning, but they seem to have started returning results for some keywords in the last half hour or so.

Perhaps those of us who have lost a massive amount of traffic today should give it a bit of time for the new SERPS to settle down. All is not yet lost ... or is it?

[valeyard]

Looking through some of the worst affected keyphrases it seems that a lot of the sites unexpectedly ranking well have very low toolbar PR.

Is it possible that this update hasn't had PR added into the mix yet?

Of course that would mean I was wrong about TITLE and Hx tags, but I'd far rather think I was wrong than think that these results are going to stick.

[sailorjwd]

After 5 years of consistent, good, search results ranking, my site as almost disappeared - not even first when search on my company name.

This is absurd..

Is there an email address at Google to ask if my site has been penalized for some reason?

[Dayo_UK]

Ditto

Cant find my site by typing in the site name!

What is going on?

[illusionist]

Your site most probably hasnt been penalized, i dont know what google is upto but it looks like its giving turns on which site will rule serps.

August update i was down, Decmeber up, Feb down again only time will tell when its going to be up....

Take my advise dont watse ur time emailing google, you will get a canned response. I have been through this alot of times now. You just have to wait and wait....nothing more you can do.

It looks like this update is going to stick as it has the most pages. But can also revert back...but for time being its gonna stick. :(

[valeyard]

It looks like this update is going to stick as it has the most pages. But can also revert back...but for time being its gonna stick. :(

Well, if it hasn't changed by Monday I'm going out to buy a black hat.

If irrelevant junk is what Google wants then irrelevant junk is what it's gonna get. :-(

[Imaster]

After 5 years of consistent, good, search results ranking, my site as almost disappeared - not even first when search on my company name.
This is absurd..

Is there an email address at Google to ask if my site has been penalized for some reason?

Ditto
Cant find my site by typing in the site name!

What is going on?

Same with one of my site.

Current Scenario:

The same thing is happening to one of my 4 year old authority whitehat site which until today was ranking tremendously high. Now when I type the site name, i see only the main page placed at around 15th position (was 1st before with a cluster) and on the second page I see a cluster with "More Results from this site" for this same site. [My settings are 100 results per page]. I also tried checking several of my top keywords and they all have gone very down in the serps. Even when I type in the exact title of my home page with the sitename, its 5th. Has it been sandboxed?

This site is a sub-domain of my main site. All other sub-domains are perfectly fine and not much changes. Each sub-domains have tons of good backlinks.

Past Scenario:

One of my other site (not one of above) started appearing way down for the site name a few months back during some update. Now it has started appearing higher than before. It was 30th previously. Now it is around 5th. It always used to be 1st before that update a few months back.

I am not at all impressed with this update. First the sandbox, now this ugly update. Whats next? And when the hell are they getting the held-up sites out of the sandbox?

[sailorjwd]

Anyone know what is going on here:

As I mentioned, site dropped almost off the listings for search terms that I have been #1 for for 5 years...
This is when I am search using IE6.0

Just for grins I switch to Firefox and my search results appear normal - me at #1 position.. I tried this with 5 different searches and is consistent.

What's going on with this?

[Dynamoo]

Results may vary, even with different browsers on the same machine. This is quite normal.

Don't forget though that these results will tend to dance around a little and then stabilise. However, if you still can't find your site when you type the domain after a couple of days, then you are most likely under a penalty.

[dataguy]

i dont know what google is up to but it looks like its giving turns on which site will rule serps.

Yeah, that sums it up. I think Google's goals and my goals are the same: to provide valuable, relevant content for my visitors. I've experienced some setbacks with this update, but I'm in it for the long haul and I'm sure it will balance out eventually.

My biggest income site has had a drop in Google referrals, down to 10% of what it had been getting lately. At the same time, 2 of my other sites are experiencing a dramatic increase in traffic. One thing for sure, this too will change.

Man I'm glad I diversified my sites. I think I will work on diverifying some more...

[div01]

This is deja vu all over again.

ps - yesterday was groundhog day...

[httpwebwitch]

So, is this the Groundhog Dance?

I've noticed a whole bunch of sites dropped off the SERPs

[TinkyWinky]

From the sites I can see - it's a massive shift especially in shopping related terms. All the sites I monitor that have shopping stuff in have dropped big time!

Just an idea! Christmas and jan sales gone - less focus on required cos everyone's broke.

[howiejs]

Man - this dancing or whatever you want to call it makes me nuts

My 4 yr old authority site (1,000's of pages) is not ranking for anything at all this morning (not even company name)

AND google is back to showing 3x results for the site:

This happened before - then it went back to normal # of pages returned

Don't they usually do this on weekends?

[Chico_Loco]

Well, I've decided that I'm going to put up a banner to those referred from Google to mention that MSN search is a lot more consistent and that they should be using MSN now and not Google.

For keywords both in and outside of my industry, they results look dismal. And this is coming from a hardcore Google fan for the past 3 or 4 years!

[arubicus]

Welp this is a bummer.

4-5 year old site down the well known toilet. Never had a problem in any search engine ever. Time to get the plunger and see if we can get the website to resurface.

[twebdonny]

All I can say is make sure you are writing emails to G
about such. Comisserating here does nothing to help your case.

Suggestions: [e-mail]

Praise and complaints: [e-mail]

Not satisfied with search results? [e-mail]

Report errors, bugs and broken links: [e-mail]

I have a question and/or need help using Google: [e-mail]

[Jon_King]

I think we are going through a flux in some areas. I have similar situations with top sites dropped or pushed down in the serps. The newly ranked are Amazon books, RSS industry feed sites and the like in our serp areas. This has happened a couple of times before to us and it straightened out to our benefit after a week or two.

[ulysee]

I wonder if a real update is coming because googlebot is eating up every page of my site right now.

[jdwaverly]

Link Popularity is back as very important ranking criteria in the search terms I monitor.

[edited by: jdwaverly at 4:11 pm (utc) on Feb. 3, 2005]

[sailorjwd]

I just fired off pleasantly pleading emails to all google addresses...

I bet they are getting 100's per hour.

I still don't understand the mechanism as to why Firefox shows normal (good) search results for me and IE6 shows my site deeeep in the results.

Can anyone enlighten me as to how this occurs?

[soquinn]

A domain I work on with PR6 and 16,000 backlinks as of today was not in top 100 for dozens of keywords it held positions 1-5 for 2 years prior? Site is 6 years old and all sub-domains, sub folders and pages have also been effected… they had never fluctuated more then 2-3 spots with past updates and was last crawled and cached on of Feb 1.

What’s interesting is that it can still be found on searches for it's own “domain” name straight up (so I assume it’s not been dropped) but on “target keyword + domain” I only see other websites where it is listed, referenced or linked? Looks like a filter on keyword clusters or a filter/penalty on the domain? Sailorjwd, Firefox does not make a difference in this case.

[bether2]

Interesting to see the similarities between this thread and the one 6 weeks ago at [webmasterworld.com...] . Seems to me there is something of a reversal going on - I see a number of people commenting here with the opposite of what they commented in the last thread.

Unfortunately, no reversal for me. My site was hit hard by the mid-Dec update. Many previously high-ranking pages got buried deep in the serps and google traffic went way down. Now my pages have moved *much* further down. From buried deep to almost out of sight.

Oh well, I'm still doing well on Yahoo and MSN. :)

[edited by: bether2 at 4:24 pm (utc) on Feb. 3, 2005]

[metrostang]

I'm still seeing at least two different results when comparing datacenters. This is still a work in progress. One result is typical of what you would have seen a month ago and the other is slightly better, but I'm not seeing sites disappear from the searches I monitor as has been indicated here.