Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
[webmasterworld.com...]
My website has plenty of outbound links, but they are on relevant pages. The problem my site has always had, was a lack of "inbound links." I got tired of searching for people to link to me (with all the spammy sites around) and gave up. So my pages have acquired some links naturally I guess(and I'll bet I still don't have more than 30 inbound links for the whole site) Still have a PR4, which I've had since it disappeared in Nov.
[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 8:54 pm (utc) on May 27, 2005]
(I have to say, I don't understand the comment about people's livelihoods depending on ranking. I understand that they do it, I just don't understand why anyone would base their financial future on something over which they [rather obviously, judging by the reaction to Bourbon] have little or no control. But that's just me.)
Thanks again Google for bankruptcy & homelessness! Hopefully they'll catch wind of this and start using Yahoo's feed....or one of their own.
That's a bit harsh.
You placed all your eggs in one basket - a basket you have no real control over.
I've had good established sites drop and it is always temporary.
Logical fallacy there, Clint. Just because YOUR site wasn't dropped because of faulty HTML, doesn't mean NO sites were. Every time there's a change to the algorithm, pages disappear for more than one reason. This update it may be true that www/non-www issues, faulty HTML, sites being hijacked, and sites being caught in an anti-spam dragnet are *all* possible reasons for falling out of the SERPs. It could also just be that the update isn't finished yet and sites related to data that hasn't yet been processed are ranking artificially low. Time will tell for that, but as to other possible problems, I'd imagine they're all worth investigating and fixing in the meantime.
It is not unreasonable to expect some level of consistency of your site's rankings when they have been consistent for 4,5,6 or 7 years and you a playing by the rules. Everyone expects that one cycle you might be 5th for a handful of keywords and another cycle you might be 20th - but this ALL or NONE update is absurd.
And, it is no more unreasonable than when I worked for a company to expect to continue to work for the company if I was a good employee. I wasn't constantly looking to have 3 job offers in my back pocket 'just in case'. So, when you do get a pink slip one Friday you say that I should have had an evening job at Burger Wopper? Just in case? Come back to the real world!
I can name several common things that are happening.
Some are caused by common server setups.
But these things are being triggered and the triggering is I suspect intentional.
What is the real problem is that cleanup is a real pain.
In some cases it appears that Google itself may have reverted some data thus reversing some cleanup efforts.
It only takes one little error in a complex system to produce tons of garbage as a result.
BTW, GG if you are reading this your NaN answer had me rolling on the floor.
I now invoke rule 4:
rule four always take a break from the computer.
Netmeg, very few people have any real control. It is a matter of degrees.
[edited by: theBear at 3:40 pm (utc) on June 3, 2005]
(I have to say, I don't understand the comment about people's livelihoods depending on ranking. I understand that they do it, I just don't understand why anyone would base their financial future on something over which they [rather obviously, judging by the reaction to Bourbon] have little or no control. But that's just me.)
It's quite simple. It's not that anyone is purposely or intentionally basing "their financial future" on anything, it's just the way it happens. The fact that G has, (HAD) such a massive user-base, makes other SE's and traffic areas/methods almost irrelevant. Whether or not G is 60%, 85%, whatever, is also irrelevant. (G+AOL+Netscape probably is about 85%). The fact is, and remains, they are huge and at either 85%, 60%, 50%, etc.; huge enough that when one is deleted from G, spells doom for most of us.
When a potential customer needs to purchase the infamous "blue widget", how are they going to go about doing this? They are going to go online to a SE, and, ~60-85% of time will go to G to search for said "blue widget". There's no way around that. If one is trashed in G (who's business relies upon SERP's), there's really no way of making up for that. Perhaps you are in another field that does not rely upon SERP's, if so, you're lucky. Most of us here are NOT.
G is the only SE that has to throw the proverbial "monkey wrench into the wheels of success". Apparently they've never heard of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". They had by far the most stellar SE on the planet, and it defies logic as to why they would (apparently) jeopardize that. Hopefully, ALL this of which all of us speak will turn out to be all moot points....if things get back to what they were.
I don’t recommend doing nothing though cos obviously it’s a Spam update! I have taken out my affiliate shop...though it could be my duplicate pages from my Accessible version that I have robot excluded… who know just take action and move on.
[edited by: Johan007 at 3:42 pm (utc) on June 3, 2005]
(I don't know this bbs system well enough to know how to quote with the boxes)
No, it's NOT just the way it happens, it's the way people allow it to happen to them. They may luck into some good rankings at first, and make a little money off it, and suddenly they think they're entitled. And then when the algorithm changes and their world comes crashing down, they don't have any alternatives in place. Most enterprises in the world do NOT rely so heavily on SERPs. If you're selling blue widgets, and waiting for the customer to MAYBE find you in Google or another SE, rather than making sure that he's aware of you before he goes to look, then you have other issues.
