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.
Google needs to add another dimension - tabbed interface. Categorize each site based on 'type of site
and have tabs across the top something like this:
a) Cloaked Sites
b) Directory-style sites filled with other folks snippets
c) Page is > 50% adsense script
d) Pages > 15 screens long
e) Pages you are looking for
Something like that anyway.
I've learnt from this thread too - that I need to know more about scraper sites linking to me. Checking my backlinks using "domain.com" was indeed enlightening.
And for my 2 cents worth, results I'm seeing in a VERY competitive arena are showing very relevant and very authoritative results. (Not mine, unfortunately). Some space in there for a bit of SEO, but top results are pretty good in my book.
[edited by: AnonyMouse at 8:57 pm (utc) on May 24, 2005]
I stand corrected.
You guys are absolutely right. These are new SERPs - that are similar to the pre-bourbon ones, but with a number of new ( previously sandboxed?) sites.
The SERPs have not budged in the educational sector as far as I can tell, nor in a couple of hobby sectors I'm interested in. It might help y'all to figure out what's going on if you could pinpoint which web sectors were having this problem.
Whatever it is, though, it's not a scraper penalty, and it's certainly not an authority-site penalty (unless I'm misunderstanding what an authority site is). There must be thousands of stupid scraper sites who have started linking to the major educational authority site of the organization I volunteer for over the past couple of months (rendering it impossible for me to check the site's backlinks anymore :P ), and Google results regarding it look exactly the same. My hobby site has few links to it but is still in the first page of results about its topic because the topic is obscure ; now it has somehow picked up a whole bunch of scraper links on a completely irrelevant topic, to the extent that it now has more irrelevant scraper links than real links. Yet it has not been banned either. It's still on the front page for this obscure term (and #1 for its name).
I'll be VERY curious to see if a good explanation can be found for why this update is destroying good sites in some corners of the web (I don't know Helleborine's site, but Danny's site is terrific, and I used EFV's site myself a couple months ago), and leaving other corners of the web completely, blissfully unscathed. I wonder if perhaps it just hasn't finished factoring some things in yet?
I think they're holding steady because they are the old results.
That's my impression, too. When I checked earlier this afternoon, one of the "stable" data centers that was mentioned showed results that were identical to those of a few days ago before Bourbon was unbottled (at least for the keywords that I've been monitoring).
I wish people could share what their industry is so we can see if these update changes are industry specific.
I wish people could share what their industry is so we can see if these update changes are industry specific.
U.S. Travel here... no changes with the SERP's I check - nothing much happened with "Alegra" either.
72.14.207.104 suits me just fine. cleaner results for my keywords. i vote for that to be the winner.
I like this one too. Looking the messages, nobody disagrees with this.
I'm in the web design/development area BTW and I have been dropped.
Bourbon with a twist?
I cant decide on that DC for deffo - no doubt when I get up tomorrow it will all be different
>no doubt when I get up tomorrow it will all be different<
Lets hope so ;-)
I need work :)....
(sorry for my english, tks)
I like this one too. Looking the messages, nobody disagrees with this.I disagree, and if you look at the messages you'll see many people feel those are just old results (pre-update).
I am also in US travel and see very few changes except on 64.233.163.104 where sandboxed sites are showing up. This is exactly what happened during Allegra. Then my sandboxed sites made brief appearances on certain DC's but were buried again days later. The difference I am seeing now though is that the datacenters with the sandboxed sites showing have more results than those without the sandboxed sites. That gives me some hope, but not much.
Look, the same volume of surfers are using Google today as they were before. If one site loses some traffic another one is gaining it.
We should be discussing here what the new algo adjustment is doing, how to do some google SEO to keep up.
Sitting back and moaning that you have a site that has ranked well and has now fallen back a little is not the answer. Frankly a good mix up is still required if you ask me. A number of very stale websites still rank high in google just because they are over a certain age imo. The sector im in sees very little change in the top 20 and its been like this for ages.
My own sites major keywords dont even rank in the first 70 on Google, i have to work on smaller keywords to get any traffic from Google and this is nothing to do with google SEO or content its down to age imo. I believe Age to be a major factor for top commercial keywords.
Some of you moaning should be gratefull of the free traffic you have had so far from Google, some of us here are not so lucky.
Good luck
You think the users won't notice? I think they will. Faster if we decide it's worth pointing out to them, as some of us are already doing.
I love to come up with these examples... post-Bourbon, if you search for the Moonwalking One-Legged Giraffe Tour's Official site, http;//moonwalkingoneleggedgiraffetour.com, and type Moonwalking One-Legged Giraffe Tour in the search box, you're WAY more likely for it to come up #1 on Yahoo than on Google.
It's the... "site name penalty!"
Bravo, Google engineers, bravo! I feel sorry for those of you that won't have a job anymore on Monday. Cash the stock options right away, you'll have the last laugh!
It definitely isn't the same. I had one site that's been stuck in the sandbox for a year and it's #2 on that dc.
And for the people complaining about the people complaining about the update - from what I recall from the past couple of years, this *is* the whining thread. The serious discussion thread doesn't start until the update has settled, as now no one knows for sure what's sticking. There's only anecdotal evidence and complaining/cheering. If you want serious discussion, wait until that thread starts.
When very different types of results appear on different datacenters, there are always interesting things to be observed. These 72* things had never even been posted before the past few days (that I ever saw at least).
I agree, all the authority sites I follow are still ranked in the top 5 and this update seems to have erased many link farms on page one.
[edited by: sunflower12 at 11:21 pm (utc) on May 24, 2005]
It shows #1 or #2 on all dc's for allintitle, allinanchor, and allinurl. It's only a complete airball on the bad-rank dcs for allintext.
Correct. Cache Date/Time is UTC (Google calls it GMT). SERPS show Fresh dates in some US Time Zone about 6 hours behind UTC.
>> The interesting thing is the percenatge of people complaining about odd/unjust/unlikely changes who don't have the www/non-www issue consistent, or have inconsistent linking like relative links or some links to "/" while others go to index.html or default.asp?
I fixed a friends site in mid March so that everything redirected to non-www (the opposite of how I normally set things up) and so that all internal links ended in a trailing / on the URL (every page is an index page in a folder). It took Google 6 weeks to drop all the non-required pages and list only those without a www and with a trailing / on the URL. A week later (about 2 weeks ago) it started adding the other URLs back in (as URL-only listings), just a few at a time, every few days. Three days ago, it suddenly added ALL of the four variations of the URL back into the index, and did so for every one of the 116 pages of the site.
I think that if Google has fixed the 302 problem (and I don't see any evidence that the problem is fixed) then they have done it by totally destroying some part of the algo that deals with 301 redirects.
Tomorrow I plan to check with the host to see if a redirect is in place. The site is on an NT server which makes it harder for me. However, no matter which way I type in the address, with and without the www, the site comes up to the non www version.
I saw several pages back others may have a similar problem. Do I need to try to get a software redirect on to the site other then from the host? I see duplication problems coming up. The other thing I noticed was that the www version is actually out ranking the non www version.
Any comments would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Librarian
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example\.com
RewriteRule (.*) [example.com...] [R=301,L]
This will redirect the nonwww to the www. If you don't have an .htaccess file then make one in a plain text editor, name it .htaccess and upload it to your root directory. Sometimes you will already have one hidden in your files, depends on your host. If you upload it and notice that it is called .htaccess.txt, then rename it .htaccess.
Well about darned time. What do people think I have been saying many months ago. 301's were not acting accordingly since this supposed 302 fix went into place.
Does this site happen to be EFV site? I noticed on his site after his fix some of the same stuff started to happen. I noticed when looking at his cached pages of what is supplemental most if not all were cached last year. If the site you are referring to is not his I suggest look at the cached versions I can almost predict that they will be OLD cached versions.
If there are any other redirects on the site I suggest also an investigation into what google is displaying under the original url and new url. This is where I caugh google indexing the new page under the old url. This old url never seen that design.
Any external redirecting 301 scripts I have seen google index the page the URL is on under the redirecting URL.
I did notice that there were 4 versions of the index pages (with www trailing, without www but with trailing, www without trailing, and without www without trailing) each having different cach dates right before we disappeared. (last update) Google may considering these pages the same and if instead if finds a redirect it may get confused.
A couple of things to look at.
I have been looking into sites that are listed in google results and seeing if they or they do not have the www fix. Most don't but I do run across a few. I looked at what google is displaying under site: for those that don't and it looks as if google seems to index them as if they did have the fix. The 301 issue may be causing the problem -or- that google can and does understand the relationships between www and non www versions as well as the trailing slash index pages. If google crawls one and it is not there it may be getting confused so to speak since they are now considered the same rather than different as before.
But if this is the case then only those with the 301 fix (or massive 301's) would have a problem with a site getting dropped and to url only listings.
But I am not sure that it is the case as of yet.
