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.
Or maybe... the "best match for the keywords" penalty.
I'm not being facetious.
Let me know if you draw a different conclusion from the SERPs.
It seems Google just replaced the current PR by using the previous one. There are many posts in this thread reported this behavior.
Out of the 27 sites I manage NONE of them have reverted to the PR of last update. One stie that has been online for 3 years went from a PR 5 to a 4 with Last month's update but that site was PR 5 for over a year and hasn't gained any new backlinks since it went online so that is probably the problem there--probably just dropped a few notches below a PR 5. Several of the sites increased in PR with this update compared to last pr update.
I've seen a few go PR 0 for a few days with this update but bounce right back.
So I do not believe that a Rollback of PR is in effect with this update.
"authority site" penalty.
I guess it means top authority sites are getting hit this time?
What I am seeing is that my logo design that has 200 google backinks and 440 yahoo ones and that ranked for cu**om l*go de**gn is getting poundered to dust whereas another one that was hit 4 months ago is restoring its rankings. I havent done link building for the second one in a great while.
I never used forums guestbooks and similar junk for both - about 30% of the incoming links are one-way for both sites...
Anyone else seeing their sites penalized?
Anyone willing to share any ideas / comments on that?
[shareholder.com...]
Probably true unless for years your site already HAD thousands upon thousands of legit links, in which case the scrappers only help make your ranking higher, like two of our competitors. Sux don't it?
This update crushed my page views, so I'm back to levels worse than before I started promoting the site and dealing with Adsense. Kind of like working 6 months on a project and then without warning, it's over.
In simple terms, not happy with this update and dealing with Google has become a major pain in the behind. Besides income going from Zero to XX, now back to approaching Zero. Kinda, thanks for nothing...
ffas? irrelevant sites? forums / guestbooks?
It looks like to me that a lot sites that think they are authority/top sites have been hit really badly in the recent update.
My point is, if you think you are a top site you probaly aren't. The topsites/authority sites are nasa bbc,caltech etc.
If you have a small travel/entertainment/shopping and you think your 10,000 to 1 million pages are essential to the web, they are not.
If you earn money from the web and you are dependant on a google update, you are not a top site.
dregs33
Maybe the internet should just be limited to corporations and universities and approved by the government.
That should work out just fine for you.
As for me, I just want my check from last month and this. Adsense is history, so is my site, my business and my hard work. Sux bigtime.
[edited by: fearlessrick at 5:11 pm (utc) on May 24, 2005]
as far as "authority" sites: Google decides that, not me or you.
"Here's what I think happened: Google implemented TrustRank so it's looking for lots of high quality links and penalizes you for low quality links. If you're site is like mine, it gets scraped relentlessly and you unintentionally wind up with a bunch of low quality links so Google penalizes you. Obviously their first implementation of TrustRank isn't working well."
Since Saturday, the traffic from Google on our site has dropped 80% roughly!
It is the first time this happens in 4 years.
I have no idea on what to do to understand where the problem can come from. I haven't changed anything in the last weeks except adding content.
One thing a bit different we have been doing recently is adding english version of some of our content with the intention to provide 100% of our content in english on top of french.
What would you guys suggest I look at? I have checked the possibility for 302 things as suggested in another thread without detecting anything especially strange.
Thanks in advance for your help.
The site has been penalized for around 6 months maybe a little less or a little more. THere were also some sites that had this problem after me and they did nothing and got back to normal after a couple months.
Things that I did to might cause this problem:
high amounts of reciprocal links.
Has anyone had a similar problem to this? Does anyone have an idea of how to get back in? Remember, the site is not banned, but penalized instead.
Is this link update, occuring in the middle of a earthquake, going to lenghten and intensify the aftershocks?
Any geologists out there?
"Hey Larry!?"
"Yes Sergei?"
"Let's see what the Canadians think of these results?"
"Hey, that's a great idea, why not?
"authority site" penalty.
I have an "authority site", two domains, the largest (6 years) gained more G referes (5%-10%), another (4 years, related to my largest site) dropped 70% of G traffic, why? Good question, BTW... I dont care much, majority of my visitors dont come from search engines. Thanks a god. :)
If someone link with my site will use the first domain, automated scrappers sites will link with both...this is a problem to another domain that had few good backlinks.
(english dont is my native language, sorry)
They may fix this at some point but where's the guarantee that they won't just dump everything again and kick your A$$ at any time, for any reason.
Google Sucks! Screw them.
I agree with Eslou - we're just content people, not SEO geniuses. We followed the Guidelines religiously and weathered out every other storm with nary a blip.
Same here. Until recently, I thought a "canonical" had something to do with the Catholic church, and I assumed that 301 redirects were something you had to worry about only when you were moving pages.
The techies might argue that we liberal-arts types are guilty of "sloppy Webmastering," and maybe that's true, but if Google wants to deliver the most relevant search results for every keyphrase, it can't assume that Professor Whatsit at Johns Hopkins or Edwina Editor at romancenovelreviews.com spends an hour a day reading SEO and other technical threads at Webmaster World.
I guess it doesn't work too well when they removed most of my programming example pages from the index.
I have replaced Google site search with a link to Yahoo and an explanation why I did.
It is equivalent to a site search since I'm usually 1 or 2 for anything to do with this particular programming. And it is nice that they won't be hitting my Adwords ads.
On 72.14.207.104, I'm seeing identical numbers when I search on:
link:mysite.com
link:www.mysite.com
This is a big change for my site, which has always shown different numbers for inbound links to mysite.com and www.mysite.com.
Are others noticing the same thing, and is there any significance to this?
Very typically American to use .ca or Canada as a guinea pig.
"Hey Larry!?"
"Yes Sergei?"
"Let's see what the Canadians think of these results?"
It's understandable, since Canadians (other than hockey players) are known for being polite. :-)
Hopefully the start of a recovery (I have had a site go like that about 3 weeks ago - last pr update - but traffic is still pretty pathetic)
Lets us know if it spreads to the other dcs.
Rather than your PR5 for the www.
Its dancing though so you may need refresh if you are checking backlinks and pr on those dcs.
G seems to be having a spring clean - doing everything at once - good time for a hol GG too.
On 72.14.207.104, I'm seeing identical numbers when I search on:link:mysite.com
link:www.mysite.com
I see several hundred backlinks with www and none without
it.
This is actually one of the few DC's I can find my site at all.
