Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Enjoy Mardi Gras and have a good celebration party
Tell that to the many many thousands of dollars of revenue that have been, are, and will be lost. (thank goodness not all eggs are in one basket).
Never had an update with this kind of effect on any site of ours. EVER. Sure we go up and down but nothing like this.
But there isn't much we can do about it. Just trying to make sense of what is happening. To better understand who is experiencing what and how. Nothing wrong with seeking more information. As far as complaining. It is useless.
CHEERS! Gotta have that drink now.
Tell that to the many many thousands of dollars of revenue that have been, are, and will be lost.
If it is was all good unique content, then I am very sorry for you. Some true hard working webmasters seem to be getting hit bad this time 'round.
Google has a seriosu problem in its hands. There's a new batch of sites missing every update. My site is back after many months, but at 25% of what I was getting before...
A bunch of garbage links have been eliminated!
Those links were made by unscrupulous webmasters to benefit from my sites, I guess.
There's been a lot of negative comments towards Google in this thread. However, I must say, by looking at the backlink update, Google rocks!
I can't see a pattern. It seems random.
I was shocked to find out that my site has literally dissapeared from Google. I just can't believe that google would "penalise" my site. I am only trying to create awareness about the tsunami disaster by showing the tsunami videos to encourage people to donate which many indeed have.
I really don't understand what is going on with google recently. First it took my site weeks to start ranking in google while it was in the top 5 results for tsunami related keywords on the other search engines only days after launching it and when it finally started ranking well it gets wiped out off the internet for no apparent reason even though it has thousands of links many of them from .edu sites and enciclopedias and was even featured on the news.
I am very angry about this and if my site does not rank farely again soon I will remove the link from my site to google and discourage my visitors from using that search engine. Google has let me down bigtime.
To all the honest webmasters who have been unfairly penalised by google: I FEEL YOUR PAIN :-(
I can dream, can't I?
I don't monitor keyphrases like some of you do, but for some phrases that I occasionally check that the site does well on, the site is now a no-show. Even for the last name of the person (a syndicated journalist) associated with the site, it's now way down in the rankings - normally it is #1 for her last name. It doesn't make any sense. It'd be like if you searched on Letterman, and his show was #80 on the list.
The site's a great resource for consumers on personal finance, real estate, and consumer news. Newsweek even featured the site this week as a great site for consumers. We've never done any optimization stuff that is bad - we just post good content every couple of days and put appropriate title and description tags on the page.
What could have caused this dramatic fall from grace? I don't see any sites that have outright hijacked the entire site. The only thing I can think of is that because the site is associated with a syndicated column and a metro news anchor maybe Google saw that column on other newspaper sites and the television transcripts on the station site and thought the site I work on stole it from those sites (when in fact our site is the original source).
The only other thing I can think of is that yesterday we changed the right nav on the page (it's a #include on rightnav.asp), which of course affected every page on the site , so maybe that threw Google off? It was a pretty minor change, so I don't see how that could have a bad effect.
Any ideas? I'm at a loss.
I'm at a loss
It would seem that Google is too - they lost our pages!
I bet MSN still ranks you well?
I got curious and searched Google and MSN for "Google update".
Interestingly, I found WebmasterWorld number one in Google. Congratulations Brett.
Via MSN, I found the Google Blog page. It gave me an insight on what Google is doing against blog spammers. Also, interesting to know about Google Local.
Definitely, looks like Google and MSN are trying to offer the best results and trying to keep spammers off their tails.
Time will tell who wins.
P.s. No more specifics!
1) The SERPS (in my area at least) are just so radically different. The old guard are largely gone to be replaced by sistes I've never seen before. Surely this isn't credible? It's like Google is saying "You know all the stuff we told you yesterday when you were doing your searches....utter rubbish.... but hopefully these are better!".
2) Roll on the day that we have three search engines with a third each and their own results. Then, instead of sobbing into our pints, we might be singing "Two out of three ain't bad".
Having said that, if you can figure out from my post what my client's site is, I would appreciate the traffic since I'm no longer getting it from Google. :) And, the sad thing is that even if you knew the name of the journalist, you could enter their name in Google and never find the site.
OK, time to sleep.
I'm becoming less and less dependant on Google. MSN and Yahoo are providing great traffic.
Same here. I've been diversified and was never really that dependent on Google. I learned my lesson on Google a long time ago.
Ask yourself whether you its actually true or you just want to believe it!
We run about 200 sites across Europe from tiny to large and I can see no discernable differnce on any of them
I must agree with you. My results are pretty stable.
There has been a lot of negativity during the night, and I just cannot see that much of a change anywhere for moste of my keywords. Where I see changes, we are in fact moving up.
Most of our SEOing has been on-site techniques, combined with interlinking of pages. In fact, I's say every single page on the 10 sites I co-own and work with has at least one link to another page (not necesarily the main page) on another of the 10 sites. Some pages will have reciprocal links to another language version on another domain.
This has been warned against, but since it actually makes sence to our visitors we've kept doing it, and it works out great.
We link pretty freely and quite generously to other sites as well, but we have never done any organized link exchanges with sites we don't own.
The oldest sites are from 1998 and the newest where registered last fall. Of course, the newer ones aren't doing as well as the older, but they are picking up in serps.
That offered, I would very much like to hear more about the sites that have been dropped.
What techniques have you been using?
Are you dropped for all and every possible search?
Are you dropped on these IP DCs only or also on google.com? Are you just as invisible on other google domains?
I'm really curious.
Why?
Because it appears all you need is two PR 5 sites cross linked on about every page to each other.
One of the new entrants in my area has 613 backlinks and 95% are internal or from it's big brother.
Stuffing keywords in the domain or page filename doesn't seem to hurt either!
Big step back Google.
Could it be that those people who weren't hurt have huge sites and numbers of internal backlinks?
Could it be that those people who weren't hurt have huge sites and numbers of internal backlinks?
As I said above. That's what we have been doing for years, and it has always worked for us. I wouldn't say we are huge though, but the larger sites have 5,000 to 10,000 pages.
And the back side of this would obviously be that this is exactly the same technique used by the pseudo directory sites scraping bits of content from other sites and presenting it as a page only to get AdSense clicks.
Looksmart and altavista.looksmart.com are the biggest of them all.
For a keyword combination where a page from my site used to show up 5th, its not there in the first 100. In fact, a sub-page from my site hijacked by looksmart shows up 2nd (I mean the hijacker's site with my page shows 2nd) and its not even completely related. For eg: if you were to search for the keyword "fruit", its the page for an "orange".
I also tried putting the entire title of that page and searching, but that still showed up the hijacker's site 5 positions above mine.
Seems like Google is doing this major update to clean up the hijacks and its getting all messed up for now. Maybe in a weeks time, everything will be perfect. Keeping my fingers crossed.
Long ago I stupidly set the 404 error redirect back to my home page... In early january I added lots of pages and apparently did some internal link typos. So, yesterday i discovered the serps showed 7 copies of my home page - 6 going to invalid urls.
Do you think I could likely have been penalized for dup content?
I'm searching for anything that would make me think this dramatic drop is temporary.
I have a big shopping portal with thousands of product sites.
Iīm watching the following since the update yesterday:
The positions have not worsened but "on the same position" Google
shows less relevant sites at the first und second result of my domain.
BUT I donīt lost any positions (minimal changes)!
Bute the sites, which Google shows, are so irrelevant, they might never
appear at this place.
Also the query
keyword site: mydomain.com
shows first only less relevant sites at the first positions and then the
relevant sites of my domain.
Does anybody have similar problems?
Is there a declaration about this phenomenon?
<edited>Sorry guys, "And like that.... he was gone..." Looks like that was just a little datacenter hiccup.</edited>
Here is what I am seeing for a particular set of keywords that I have been watching:
There are 2 distinct sets of serps showing on the different datacenters. Both of these new sets are different than the ones showing prior to the update.
One set of the new serps=bad, one set=good (in my opinion).
I have just noticed, while looking at the good serps, if I add &filter=0 to the url, I then get the EXACT result that I call the bad serps.
I'm not sure what this means, if anything, but I am hoping that the bad serps I am seeing with the update are due to some filter that has yet to be applied?
