Google Update Bourbon Part 2

May 2005

[steveb]

Continued from: [webmasterworld.com...]

---

"We know how the webmasters feel about this update."

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.

[Powdork]

Have you managed to survive EVERY major update consistantly since Florida (Nov 2003) WITHOUT suffering a trainwreck at at least once?

Like LisaB my main site has weathered every update, sort of. I was out from mid November to mid to late December of 2003 for Florida. This was in the days of get your site to first place three months after launching it. Florida was thought to have pushed back young sites and then let some back in.
Site launched November 2002
Reached #1 for Keyphrases in March 2003

Suffered from missing index page in Summer 2003 (Esmerelda and later update). Index page went below 300 on most datacenters for 2-3 days.

Florida (Holy Cow). Gone from first 1000 results for 5 weeks. The mega sites ruled. Niche sites were drowned out by the huge influence of internal anchor on large regional or national sites. Unlike LisaB I made huge changes at this time. Seeing the opportunity, I moved my site from a niche local directory to a wide regional directory in a matter of a month with content I had been developing previously. Quit my day job to do it full time. By the January 2004 update (Brandy?)I was back in first for all keyphrases and the new content ranked well.

This site has weathered all updates since then though it hovers between 3 and 1 for its main keyphrases. For the past 6 months it has been very steady at 1 and still is.

The new content soon dwarfed the niche local directory so in June 2004 I calved it to form its own site (Idiot!). At the time, we still thought using a 301 to the new domain would prevent the sandbox, plus sites had just gotten out in May. The new domain to this day doesn't receive anwhere near the Google traffic that it did while on the old domain, though it is 10 times the site it was at the time.

[larryhatch]

" Have you managed to survive EVERY major update consistantly since Florida (Nov 2003) WITHOUT
suffering a trainwreck at at least once? "

Yes in my case. I have only one site, which saw slow rolling ups and downs over several years now, but
slowly trending upwards until I'm in the 1st three pages of G and Y for my main keywords.

It could be the quiet backwater of a niche I'm in, there isn't much sudden change in ratings.
Google's listings look OK. Most sites (definitely not all) ahead of me deserve to be there. -Larry

[Atticus]

Powdork,

Can you please provide the correct .htaccess text for redirecting www to non-www (opposite of redirect you previously posted)? I have always linked to and favored non-www, so I assume that's the way for me to go with the 301.

I looked around the web for this previously but I think I screwed it up, so any assistance would be appreciated.

Thanks!

[europeforvisitors]

I'm not Powrdork, but here's what I'm using for the last two months (thanks to a helpful member of the Supporters Forum):

Options +FollowSymLinks -Indexes
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.sitename\.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ [sitename.com...] [R=permanent,L]

(BTW, the backslash in line 3 isn't a typo, and ignore the underlining in line 4, which was inserted by the WW forum software.)

This has been working for me.

[Powdork]

Atticus,

I just tried this and it worked on one of my domains, but I am not fluent in Apache and screwing it up can really screw things up so I would wait for some more confirmation or at least watch your domain closely for ill effects and remove the code if you see any.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} www.example\.com
RewriteRule (.*) [example.com...] [R=301,L]

[edited by: Powdork at 5:39 am (utc) on May 25, 2005]

[lorenzinho2]

"Have you managed to survive EVERY major update consistantly since Florida (Nov 2003) WITHOUT
suffering a trainwreck at at least once?"

I'm also a one site guy - site has been live since '99, loyal user base, usually gets cited in a couple of newspapers / magazines per month, has been featured on ABC World News, etc.

We had one blip in traffic in August 2004 - we lost about 60% of our G referrals for one week. Ironically, I tussled with EFV on one of these threads when I took offense to when he referred me to the Google Guidelines as a reason for our loss in traffic back then. His implication (at the time) was clearly that only cheaters get penalized.

Needless to say, it gives me zero satisfaction to see his quality site suffering now - especially when it would seem to be over something so trivial to search accuracy as canonical urls.

Other than that one week we have been untouched by every update, including Florida, and have trended steadily upwards for nearly 6 years.

We have now lost about 85% of our G referrals, and for the first time in the history of the site, Y has become its most important referrer.

[Atticus]

Thanks EFV and Powdork.

I will try this on one of my sites and I'll report back with any positive effects.

Fingers crossed...

[jd01]

I think I can help with the Apache question:

To redirect to www: (To redirect to no www, just remove www\. from the rule and condition.)

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.yoursite\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [R=301,L]

In some cases you will need:
Options +FollowSymLinks

In other cases you will need:
AllowOverride FileInfo

So the file could look like this:
Options +FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride FileInfo
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.yoursite\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [R=301,L]

I use a negative (!) host, so there is a better chance of breaking any framing or other anomlies in the host, if it is not my site.

Hope this helps.
Justin

[MarkJH]

Found a way to do a non-www to www redirect in IIS via moderator Xoc's website - [xoc.net...]

Haven't tested it myself but I'm sure not everybody here uses Apache.

[reseller]

jd01 & EFV

THANKS to both of you!

You have helped the old reseller too ;-)

Dayo_UK has advised me for few days ago to make a 301 redirecting mysite.com to www.mysite.com. And I have tried few codes with no success.

So when I saw your codings this morning I tried few combinations of what you mentioned, and here is what worked for me to redirect non-www to www:

Options +FollowSymLinks -Indexes
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}!^www\.mysite\.com
RewriteRule (.*) [mysite.com...] [R=301,L]

[arubicus]

"RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} www.example\.com
RewriteRule (.*) [example.com...] [R=301,L]"

Yep but watch the trailing slashes in directory indexes.

This rewrite will redirect:

****.com/directory/ <- code 200
****.com/directory to ****.com/directory/ <-301
www.****.com/directory/ to ****.com/directory/ <-301
www.****.com/directory to ****.com/directory <-301 then redirects again (301) to ****.com/directory/

There are versions to keep it from redirecting twice

Main urls:

****.com <--- code 200
www.****.com redirects to ****.com/ <-301
****.com/ <--- code 200
www.****.com/ redirects to ****.com/ <-301

[jaffstar]

I am seeing phenomenal( I am 300 places up) results on:

216.239.39.104
216.239.59.105
216.239.59.99
66.102.11.104
66.102.11.99
64.233.167.147
64.233.167.99

Anyone else seeing this?

When I went home, these were on the .com, this morning they are not.

Anyone think these will filter across permanently to the .com?

[tigger]

yesterday I was fine today gone, we just have to accept the fact that G is playing around with various filters so until this all becomes stable we are all going to keep seeing results like these - frustrating YES!

[hoobieoo]

Same story..been puttering along nicely with a a PR5 site, 500 hundred or so pages - content rich, UK destination travel services directory, changed/updated regulary, site up since Nov 02, around 10-15K unique visitors a year, probably mild weekly seo tweaking.. then last Sat - BLAM - dissappeared of the face of the earth.. but more interestingly - yesterday when the full url was typed in - the description that comes up for the site is now the exact DMOZ description--so pay to look at this thread as well..

"DMOZ description showing instead of meta description?"

What do I/We do...pray I think...but from the sheer negative reaction and size of the reaction to Bourbon from others I would also say this still has a long way to go...

[reseller]

tigger

>frustrating YES!<

Very frustrating. First I lost 75% of Google´s referrals with allegra. Then recovered around 15%. Then this Bourbon thing took away that little 15% improvement and back now again to allegra level.

During the last year or so I started teaching basics of SEM/SEO principles to my youngest 17 years old daughter and using my own site as a "good example". Now I even don't dare to mention any thing which has to do with my site to her :-)

[Dayo_UK]

Mmmm - My theory that the 72... were deffo the way forward has been put on hold.

The 72s... show updated page rank for some sites which have been caconolized - and when this pagerank was dancing to the other dcs last night the serps were following.

Now the pagerank has updated to some dcs without the serps following.

But everything does not seem to be spreading to all dcs.

Eg we have some dcs with an updated backlink count from a couple of days ago and some dcs with the above mentioned updated page rank (for affected sites) - we also have some dcs with crawled data which does not appear on other dcs.

Add them all together and what do you get? (Well the 72 range has all those ingredients - but I would not bet on any dc I think from where I am sitting a couple more dcs have too - but they show different results)

[steveb]

Some really horrible results on 216.239.53.104 and 66.102.7.104. Showing the old backlinks on those datacenters so it is probably just a glitch for awhile but icko.

[jaffstar]

SteveB, this dc 66.102.7.104 seems to represent about 90% of the DC's. While 66.102.11.104 seems to be the remainder.

Weird how 66.102.11.104 popped into g.com last night.

[Marketing Guy]

Have you managed to survive EVERY major update consistantly since Florida (Nov 2003) WITHOUT
suffering a trainwreck at at least once?

Yup, for several sites - in fact in most "bad" updates my rankings have improved. (*touches wood*).

This one for example, it looks like my backlink count is going to settle 10% down, but I'm up from 8 to 5 on a pretty competitive term (140 million +).

Traffic levels are fairly constant - most other pages performed reasonably well pre-update, but there is a noticable increase in Adsense earnings.

Not seeing many changes in my lead top 10 - all fairly big names who have ranked their consistently for years.

[vivalasvegas]

I know I'm not the only one reporting this - if I do a search for a long string of text on my home page, although the text is original, my website ranks #85 or worse. I see this for different websites that I work with.

[Dayo_UK]

>>>>Some really horrible results on 216.239.53.104 and 66.102.7.104.

Pre update? - look a little bit like the 72s....

Steveb - what dont you like about the results on that DC compared to the 72s (or dont you like the 72s either?)

[RichTC]

Just after midnight (UK time) i noticed some superb results on .co.uk now they have vanished and back to how they were previously.

[ann]

I see my main site is sliding up and down by one and like someone here said, the sites above it are quality sites and worth their ranking.

I think I discovered why mine hasn't been improving too much over time....

I have had health problems for the last couple of years, hosp, etc... and not able to really do much at the computer but I have added (this month) 14 new pages of content and yesterday morning got a shock!

I did a search on my url and boy! I discovered that Google had actually picked up my cgi links page. Had a cgi run classified ads site awhile back and had to do an entry page just to get something in the engine.

Anywho, I looked at my links script and got another shock, loads of links...doubled, tripled, unrelated sites such as real estate sales, off shore web design companies etc. when I had deleted all of those from about 7 categories...up all night lol

3 hours sleep and went back into the admin page and started visiting the sites that were left looking for links back. You would not believe how many scraper sites I ran into, including one that that had ripped me off! She had my horoscopes and gave me credit by name but no link. to add insult to injury that was all the content she had on her "page" except for three links to other astrology websites.

I was so boiled I fired off a cease and desist letter immediately!

I still can't believe it...steal my stuff that I work hard to create and then rip me for a link!

Ann

[reseller]

I see these two DCs reflecting the same updated backlinks result as that on google.com at the moment:

64.233.183.99

64.233.183.104

[Venix]

I have checked out the 72.14.207.104 that everybody is talking about at they are definitely not pre-bourbon. I can live with the 72.14.207.104

Does anybody at all find the new SERPs any good at all. And I am not talking about wether your site ranks gret ot not, but if anybody can find the SERPs usefull?

Personally I have never seen worst results. As always I am doing alot of research each day on different topics, and since this last Google update I can't find anything with Google anymore. It's become completely useless. It now only works for very broad topics. I can not see where Google is going with this?

[nixonuk]

Newbie alert before I start ok ;-)

I run a very niche website and for the last 3 months or so have been no1 for over 100 keywords related to my Niche.

I dont use any naughty tactics ( I would not know how) and have been chugging along. The latest updates have pushed me back to pages 5/6.

Now I dont mind competition its healthy at the end of the day, but the sites that are now coming up are not even related to the keywords!

I am still in no1 spot on the 72s. Can I ask what this IP address is about (sorry did I say I was a newbie).

My heart goes out to all of you that do this for a living mine is just a part time salary.

[TravelMan]

On 72.14.207.104, in the kw's that I follow im seeing sites that have been knocked out on other dc's, in their 'rightful' place, whereas other dc's appear to show the same results with the exception of the removed sites ( relegated authorities?)

eg

dc 72.14.207.104

1.sitea
2.siteb
3.sitec
4.sited
5.sitee
6.sitef

etc

other dc's

1.sitea
2.sitec
3.sited
4.sitef
5.siteg
6.siteh

etc

sites b and e are missing on practically all kw's worth ranking for. A clue maybe?

Anyone else seeing this?

[RichTC]

Certainly on the co.uk results, currently G has an obvious bias towards sites linking out to other sites on the same subject.

For example pages about widgets showing links to other widget sites.

Very poor frankly. Directory sites ranking high.

So currently to rank high you just need to link to three or four competitor sites on the page you want to push and bingo

Google can do much better than this - lets hope this isnt final

[johnhh]

TravelMan:
we get the same; 72.14.207.104 is Ok for us we lose out in the others

From a user point of view 72.14.207.104 gives better results. At the end of the day Google needs users = more traffic = more ad revenue.

[seoindia]

How long will it take for the update to get over?