Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
No, that is zero sum game. The most useless posts here are from people saying the serps on some datacenter suck or are good because their own stuff ranks bad or good on that datacenter. Not only does nobody else care, there is someone thinking the exact opposite due to how their stuff is ranking.
In any case (repeating mantra from past several updates), a lot folks should consider that screw ups are not deliberate policies. Google has been a technical mess for more than a year now, just over two years really. Allegra was just a blip of an update, but was a huge technical disaster. Google also has a horrible time figuring out canonical pages, particularly when webmasters deliberately do inconsistent things.
This update seems to me to be another minor bit of shuffling, with the added "bonus" of a lot of anomalies, most caused by lazy or uniformed webmastering (meaning if you have been reading webmasterworld and haven't had a 301 on for non-www and www since at least last summer, you only have yourself to blame).
I see almost no changes in my niches, except... a HUGE increase in straight redirect domains. This tactical trash gets discovered fairly quickly but apparently a new tactic has been discovered and needs to be squashed; authority sites performing same as recently; sites still in the sandbox dumped back to pre-Allegra levels, while sites that got out of the sandbox with Allegra doing a bit better.
It's very similar, but NOT the same, and still changing little bits at a time in my word areas. But I REALLY like it. Just copy it to all DC's already G and call it a day!
Also, finally got a slightly-less-than-generic e-mail response from G and they CLAIM we have no "penalty" (we dropped 75 places across one domain). So either they made some major algo changes or they aren't done yet.
What if you're running a Windows server?
For me, it shows all old results pre-bourbon as others have noted.
So... either this means all the additional pages (backlinks) which help put us where we are rank-wise have not been added into the rest of the DCs yet...
Or G is permanently deleting about 43% of the previously known database (844/1460)!
Not that it probably wouldn't be better off for it, and not that I doubt 43% of the pre-bourbon results WERE trash, but surely I don't think they would go THAT far that quickly?
So I'm still holding out hope that 72.14.207.104 will prevail in the end.
I'm sure that's only part of my problem. I'm not great at being consistent across my site nor am I well-versed in all the intricacies of hosting, etc., though I did teach myself html, javascript, perl and some other stuff.
Maybe time to do more studying.
72.14.207.104
Positions similar to pre-bourbon but result #s are much higher.
for 3 important terms of ours on a site which has dropped huge on .com: we're #4/330,000,000; #7/188,000,000; and #11/303,000,000.
Normally those return around 30-100 million results only.
in as far as my little corner of the world is concerned, 72.14.207.104 is the closest I've seen to pre-March 23 days ever since.
I'll take it!
Well, funny to the extent that any of this is funny. ;-)
Just to clarify what I meant before, to avoid more stickie mail, when searching for the SAME keywords on EACH of the DC ip addresses, I found what amounted to 3 different sets of results, or "stages" of indexing I guess you could call them, with the indicated IP in set which were in the lead with the most results.
Hope that helps.
BTW, I checked them again more recently and many of the numbers are STILL going up!
They are the old results but with the sandboxed sites included. Google.com is indentical except for a few results showing sandboxed sites in a couple of niches we track. Not sure what that means unless they are on Google.com does'nt help much.
works for us
Still, on my keyword searches, my doorway page with deliberate typos comes first (pos #138), with my index page indented.
This is strange, because the index page holds all the PR.
Searching for my company name yields 52,700 results, a subpage comes up at pos #147 and my front page at #154. It's as if no PR has been applied at all.
This is for those of you who have had successful sites for at least 2 years. (If you've been at this less than 2 years, it's probably irrelevant,due to sandboxing, etc.)
THE QUESTION:
Have you managed to survive EVERY major update consistantly since Florida (Nov 2003) WITHOUT suffering a trainwreck at at least once?
Since I asked, I'll be the first to share. I've had one site survive everything - with minor dips - although I have no idea why when comparable sites have fallen.
Expanding your question a bit you've come up with a great line of thinking, and it would make a good thread of it's own. I hope it doen't get lost in this one.
We spend a great deal of time examining what went wrong. It might well be more helpful to look at what's worked well.
Yes, my two main web sites have survived every major update since pre-florida with no trainwrecks.
A few scares - this update and last December's, but neither were catastrophic. I don't use any black hat techniques. I think the shadiest thing I did was get listed in Bluefind a bunch of times! LOL!
Have you managed to survive EVERY major update consistantly since Florida (Nov 2003) WITHOUT suffering a trainwreck at at least once?
Yes, til now. (Florida bit us hard, took about 5 weeks of waiting, then things came back - we made NO changes during that time)
LisaB
SERPs are trash - Even when you can find one or two things.
Google would probably hold the view that books are more valuable than web pages, but book indexing's been done, and Google Print is a bit of yawn.
A few weeks ago, google allowed advertisers to step in and start picking sites that they did not want their advertisements to show up.
So they now have a decent idea with a large enough sample that vendor a does not like site x for a certain number of keywords.
Soon, they will have conversion data from the urchin migration to throw in as one of the knobs that is tweaked during an update.
Time to go out and get some new tin foil. :)
Can anyone confirm - cashed version of pages without "www" aka domain.com most of them dated end of April were used in this month algo run?
Thank you
I searched for my site day before yesterday: site:site.com = 11,300 pages.
I searched for my site yesterday: site:site.com = 11,300 pages
I searched for my site today: site:site.com = 468 pages
Here's where it gets odd...
When I got 468 results, there were only 3 pages of results listed, so I looked to see what pages where there... They were old and many supp./non-existent pages that have not showed since long before the update.
On page one 468 results.
On page two 462 results.
On page three 11,300 results and links to pages 3-13 of results.
It was like I switched DC's in the middle of my search?
I have had searches switch by a few pages before, but not 10.5K.
The large roll back many people have noted also leads me to believe this one might not be over yet, or maybe a test for the real deal in a while.
BTW the sectors I watch have not had any major movement. NONE.
Justin
Have you managed to survive EVERY major update consistantly since Florida (Nov 2003) WITHOUT suffering a trainwreck at at least once?
Yes, until now (unless you count the unnamed mini-update of March 23. That cut my Google referrals by at least 75%; with Bourbon, I'm down 90-95%.
Normally I don't see any changes at all during Google updates--at least for the keyphrases that I track. The one exception until now was Allegra in February, when my Google referrals increased overnight by about 30%.
ADDENDUM:
I just ran my log analyzer for yesterday (Monday), and it was a real eye-opener: For the first time ever, Yahoo was my #1 referrer. (Google was outreferring Yahoo by a ratio of 12+ to 1 after Allegra.)
[edited by: europeforvisitors at 4:13 am (utc) on May 25, 2005]
1) Big adwords advertisers increasingly unhappy and vocal about content network ROI.
2) Cr*p scraper/adsense sites, and other cr*p adsense sites, polluting the SERP's. (The latest volley from the Dark Side in the spam wars.)
Solution: Kill two birds with one stone. And get the advertisers - obviously the ultimate arbitors of taste - to advise you with their 'votes.'
Votes: a concept G is comfortable with. ;-)
How it folds into the mix, or when, I have no idea, if this is even right at all. Sorta doubt it could happen this fast, but tech implementation not an area of strength for me.
What I first noticed when all the shifting started is the home page disappeared. It had been showing the ODP description when Google added that feature back. I assumed it had fallen way down somewhere as another site page had replaced it for the second page in the two page listing. However, now when I search for the page Google can't find it whether I search for the non www version or the www version. Has anyone else experienced this?
I want to thank everyone for all the past posts which have helped me unravel the mysteries of the earlier updates. As hard as it is to hear another person's site is suffering, it also feels good to know your site is not the only one with a particular problem.
Librarian
Have you managed to survive EVERY major update consistantly since Florida (Nov 2003) WITHOUT suffering a trainwreck at at least once?
We're a six-year-old content site that has had steady growth throughout our history. Our story is pretty similar to EFV's: Forbes Best of the Web ... decent press over the years ... a nice steady base of users.
We've survived all the major updates until this one with one weird blip: We lost about 85% of Google referrals in the mid-December mini-update. We eventually traced our problems (or thought we had, at least) to canonical issues ... with Google penalizing us by indexing www and non-www versions of the site separately. Sp we followed GoogleGuy's suggestions, and in early March our Google referrals roared back (literally overnight) to normal levels. And they had been again growing steadily since.
They fell apart again with the Bourbon update -- again dropping about 85% in a day's time. It seems at this point like our work was a waste of time ... and that while we've solved an issue that never should have been a problem in the first place, we're again being shunted off into never-never land.
In a couple of the many varying versions of Google that are floating around out there, we're just fine. But in most of them, we're dead in the water. Go figure.
From the early posts in this thread, I get the impression that a lot of scrapers took nasty hits
in the Google SERPs with this update. The more recent posts are mostly complaints about dropped ratings,
whatever the cause. Its impossible to judge those without seeing the actual sites.
Scrapers tend to be dumb, lazy and/or illiterate, or maybe just have poor language skills (e.g. spelling).
Some are hasty enough to leave original links from the scraped pages, creating a nice data trail! -Larry
It obviously makes no sense for sites which have been well-ranked and well-respected for YEARS to suddenly get bombed.
I truly hope your sites make a quick comeback.
During the last 18 months that I've been lucky enough to survive without any MAJOR setbacks, I almost feel guilty when I survive and some of my quality (and long time) COMPETITORS get knocked out in this thing.
From a personal standpoint, I'm better off when they get replaced by 'lesser' sites. Still, I feel for them, because most of them are individuals who have worked their butts off for years and this is a major portion of what they do for a living to provide for their families - it's the old-fashioned idea of the 'American Dream'.
Unfortunately, the millionaires at the G-plex are apparantly oblivious to the fact that this stuff can cause businesses to close, and DOES cause companies to have to lay off employees.
I also realize every time it could just as easily have been me...
