Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
We need to keep this thread focused on the followings:
- Changes on your own site ranking on the serps (lost & gained positions or disappearance of the site).
- Changes you have noticed on the new serps (both google.com and your local google site) especially in regards to the nature of the top 10 or 20 ranking sites.
- Stability of the serps. I.e do you get the same serps when you run the same query within the same day or 2-3 successive days (both google.com and your local google site).
- Effective ethical measures to deal with the above mentioned changes.
Thanks.
Same thought as for a year... what happens doesn't happen to everybody. People who it is happening to now weren't effected in February or december but others were.
Hauling out the dead horse, Google tries to get the canonical issues right. Sometimes they fail.
Three people got food poisoning after eating in a restaurant, but 100 didn't. The next day six more got food poisoning, but 75 didn't. The next day seven got food poisioning but 94 didn't. Just because some, or even most, people don't get food poisoning in that restaurant doesn't mean the others didn't get food poisoning in that restaurant. (On the other hand, if people don't take measures to protect their sites, that is like going back into that restaurant day after day... eventually there is a good chance you will be poisoned too.)
clint,
my business is similar to yours in that i have an actual inventory (manufacturer). our ranking on all the search engines is pretty good, but google has a much lower conversion rate...so google is not so important to us as it is you i guess.we have approached our marketing efforts in such a way as not to be so dependent on search engines for our traffic. therefore, should we drop significantly on one search engine (which has happened many times) our business is not dead in the water. about a year ago we dropped rank on google so far down in the serps we had no referrals from google for several months...and no adverse affect on sales. now we are back on top and whatever we get from google is just icing on the cake.
for what it's worth...i suggest you concentrate on diversifing the exposure for your products on the internet. IMO you are overestimating the value of google. you have to fish all over the pond instead of always casting your bait into your favorite honey hole. catch a few fish from many different places in the pond and you will have more success.
OldPro, like I pointed out, in my field there are no other ways of getting that much traffic and certainly no other way to get back what G has caused me to lose. I'm still on top of all other SE's (except of course for AOL & NS), I'm all over the internet in shopping directories and proprietary SE's. So I don't need to do anything SEO wise for other other SE's. I'm not about to fork over bucks for some crappy email address list and lower myself to start spamming people. That would only result in the possible removal of my ISP account and termination by my hosts. Not to mention give my business a bad name further making matters worse.
Yes, the "fish" ARE "all over the pond" but the fish are unaware of my "bait" which is google SERP's. That unfortunately is the most "tasty bait" to my fish. My bait is "contaminated" thanks to G, and according to their (which has been admitted) seriously flawed new algo. My fish only nibble on G-bait, my fish do not bite from other places. We are a victim of their success. If G would crumble, that would be great since everyone would have to use another SE (and to continue with the euphemism) the fish still must eat and they will have to eat elsewhere.
Hopefully all of this is academic and things will return to normal.
... eventually there is a good chance you will be poisoned too
lol, sounds like: "forget Google, they are just blindly shooting around. Only if you are lucky, you'll stay alive."
Is it really so?
Please change the restaurant in your analogy to "jail cell in solitary confinement" - you can't escape, you eat what the guard brings you, there are no menu choices!
I submit the site not just as a counter to the logic here, but as further evidence to investigate.
Maybe its just an assumption, but if you have a site like the one I'm talking about that "breaks the rules" but still stays in the SERPs, maybe there's something about the site that's "protecting it".
Or, maybe its not its time to get hit. Certainly for years we weren't, in fact, we were improving in the last 3 months. Then bang, nothing.
BTW, I moved one section of my site to a new domain, something that's been indexed for half a year but with no content. And if you search for keywords or even page titles in this section.. you will get the new site before my old one. However, the pages aren't ranking much better - there's no traffic coming in from them. This makes me suspicious about the content itself. But who knows?
I'm ready to go all Adwords now. Build in the costs associated with it to the bottom line, forget the SERP's except as a "happy bonus".
Here is my proposal of important much shorter posts:
Important tips that will get you from #30 to #1
[webmasterworld.com...]
How to do a reinclusion request?
[webmasterworld.com...]
Best way to *remove* pages from Google
[webmasterworld.com...]
302 Redirects and Absolute vs Relative Links
[webmasterworld.com...]
Further Google 302 Redirect Problems
[webmasterworld.com...]
How do I please google after removing all 302 redirects
[webmasterworld.com...]
nofollow attribute
[webmasterworld.com...]
Duplicate Content Filter removal "&filter=0"
[webmasterworld.com...]
What to do when Google has both www & non-www pages listed?
[webmasterworld.com...]
Duplicate Content Penalty or Bourbon
[webmasterworld.com...]
Dynamic Pages Not Indexed by Google?
[webmasterworld.com...]
How to Encourage a Deep Crawl?
[webmasterworld.com...]
URL only listings- The Cause
[webmasterworld.com...]
How does Google Define a "Bad Neighborhood"?
[webmasterworld.com...]
GoogleGuy's posts
[webmasterworld.com...]
Questions for GoogleGuy
[webmasterworld.com...]
Hi Folks
I wish to bring to this thread a sad story posted on another thread
[webmasterworld.com...]
and do hope that it will add more energy to this thread to find technical ways to deal with the consequences of Bourbon.
Most contributors to this thread sound either prof. or in poses of enough knowledge of search engines in general and Google in particular. However these fellow members don't represent the majority of publishers out there who have been affected by Bourbon. It is possible that there are thousands of publishers who have lost their revenues suddenly and with no warning. Lets keep those publishers in our minds and hearts when seeking ways to help others out of the miserable situation Bourbon has brought them in.
Here is few snippets of what our new fellow member willie50 wrote:
Hello all, my wife and I run 3 websites each, they are all different, 2 are 5 years old, one of them, my wife's 5 year old site, today it has vanished completely from google, even doing a search for the domain name, the search comes back "Sorry, no information is available for the URL blah,blah,blah.com".
We are really hurting, mentally anf financially.
......
Thank you all for your interest, I will keep trying to make our sites better, more spider friendly, more content, and more information and purpose.
Maybe that is the cause of all the problems, me and my wife learned to do HTML in January 2000 as a prescription for deep depression, and it worked!, we tought ourselfs. So I will do everything in my power and limited HTML knowledge, to make it work again, but this time with the knowleged of all the good pointers at webmasterworld, this site is great.
Thank you again.
willie50
[edited by: reseller at 8:37 pm (utc) on June 14, 2005]
Google has a lot of datacenters (clusters of computers) that inreases every month. These computeres are loadbalanced and use red black trees to index web pages.
They use different filters to shuffel and reshuffel pages up and down the trees. Google may use AI to rank content.
Sorting is by radix sort (linear time).
Heavy use of dynamic programming and manual (adaptive) intervention is possible.
The rest is cosmetics.
My private guess.
KBleivik
Make it simple, as simple as possible, but no simpler.
Very well put. We should be aware that some haven't got the resources ( technically or money wise). We all lived happily together before Bourbon so we should concentrate on overcoming these problems forced upon us.
Private proposal.
1. Turn off the green pagerank indicator.
2. Consentrate on good content.
3. Submit, submit to portals, other (regional) search
engines etc.
4. Engage in reciprocal linking with related sites
and targeted anchor text.
5. Think of ROI when you use money on AD. You
should perhaps use some money on professionals
looking at your code if you are not a professional
yourself.
6. Content, content, simplicity, simplicity.
In the end, you should get better ranking by both Google and other enigines. Do never rely on a green indicator for your business. You would no set all your money on "Silent witness." Even that horse lost in the end.
KBleivik
It is too early to say what happens in the future. Time is also money and in the long run we are all dead.
I'm sure this is true of many "new users" here
However the good summary you wrote is quite correct from our point of view and reflects our "do it honestly" policy - I just hope all returns to "normal" for everyone.
The interesting thing is most people don’t get at the meat of what most scrapers actually do. I’ve studied them for about 2 years. Often times they link to a great many pages on a site. When they spot higher payout words they may quickly drop the previous links. In effect they are manipulating your rankings. You may rise or tumble independent of anything you do to help your site. It’s a monster that Google has lost control of. I see signs now that after the first 30 results it a pretty much a crapshoot where your site may fall. Google may not be broken but its arriving there. I see no way to control the junk unless you strike at what’s causing it. And unfortunately their profits rest on it.
My site seems to have overcome the filter and top level pages are getting there in the "pages from the UK" but the new bottom level pages are still ranked VERY low.
I've been trying to track down why a set of 9 pages with a lot of original content still have not come back to be fully index.
I discovered a school in UK has copied basically the entire set of pages, images and all - word for word table name, field name, the works. They composited them all into one huge page.
No wonder my whole site is wiped out :(((
Anyone live near Canterbury, I'll sticky you the site.
Do you have the link to the thread about what to do to make it harder for your pages to be hijacked (302'd). I think it was written by GG, but cannot seem to find it.
No big deal except for the first time I can remember it had a cache link in addition to a similar pages link next to it. Click the cache link, it shows a date of June 8, and the cache of the site it redirects to: otherexample.com
Go to otherexample.com, check its cache and it shows a cache date of June 12th.
otherexample.com still shows as the #1 site for this search, while the redirecting "site"/url now shows as #7.
Bad days down at the 'plex.
Don´t see much movement in the DCs. Still see few sets of serps.
People have been mentioning the trailing slash but not really seen that as a prob for Google - bad news indeed if that is the case too.
>Bad days down at the 'plex. <
Yes indeed.
I wish that Google engineers who are involved in Bourbon update come here and read the many sad posts of innocent publishers sufferings as a consequence of those engineers works.
Maybe they aren't aware that while they are "tweaking" the serps they are also tweaking the financial fundaments of thousands of publishers.
And please don't tell me Google owe those innocent publishers nothing and start talking about free lunch.
Google allowed publishers for years to promote their business for free on the serps. Publishers including thousands of Moms & Pops saw that as an opportunity and built their small business on the web accordingly.
With no warning and no transition period Google started killing what those innocent hard working publishers have built for years.
The consequences of Bourbon are beyond the limits of what decent human accepts. Don't be evil.
Not exactly free as we have to spend to create the content - the deal is ( or was ) Google want to provide users with details of where to get information. We publishers provide the content to Goggle for free at our cost.
A simple barter - we do all the work in site and content creation - they provide the traffic. Not any more...
Seeing some changes ( downwards! )on one of our newish sites that was doing well out of this, the very old site isn't moving much now - still doing badly.
they provide the traffic. Not any more
Mmmmm... that would be true if Google was the preferred search engine of say, 14% of surfers.
With at least over 50% of the search market cornered, they have inherited a social responsibility.
And a very important one at that.
With at least over 50% of the search market cornered, they have inherited a social responsibility.
Would that this were true. They are the epitome of capitalism and capitalism does not have a social responsibility. Make no mistake about it, their only responsibility is to their shareholders.
They'll probably start doing the same as Bill Gates soon, i.e. forming charitable trusts and donating money to what they consider to be worthy causes. That will take care of any "social responsibility" issues.
This update for my site is a true saga.
First of all we lost 30 positions in two days, then in the following week, we lost more than 100 positions for our best 50 keywords.
Today, not only my pages are all listed as supplemental results, but even my home page is not cached and certain cache are back to their NOV 2004 position.
This fact and the fact that all pages are supplemental tends to let me think that the update is really not finished for my site. Is it that the update is not over with my site, or is it more a penalty thing?
** Also I heard of a tool that lets you see the results of google without any penalty, can anyone point to that tool, or at least the name of the tool, I guess it would be a good way to determine the ampleur of the catastrophe, if there really is a penalty.
Thanks
Alex
Anyone else's MIA site doing better on these DC's? Our site was out of the Top-300 and now shows page 2/3 for many terms it was previously page 1 before Bourbon.
Call me a Canuck but I think making changes due to Bourbon is several weeks premature now... let this one settle some more. (Is it even over?)
now how hard or complicated is that?
This will bring back from the cold thousands upon thousands of innocent sites that are currently paying dearly for this false dup content stupidity.
Example:
http: //hijacking_site.com/redir.pl?goto= http://www.hijacked_site.com
note the “http://” appearing after the "?", this should automatically set a flag just like the “rel=nofollow” tag does.
Actually, come to think of it, maybe any URL with "http://" appearing twice should be flagged and not followed by the crawler to avoid the end content being indexed under the incorrect (hijacking) domain.
