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.
Clint...Clint...Clint..
When I asked you yesterday about 64.233.167.104 you told me that you liked it!
Should I expect to see a happy Clint today ;-)
Yes, so far. We can only pray it holds on this course. Once again, praise be to "St. Googliani" ;) (in case you missed it, patron Saint of Google). I think I'll make a statue and mass-market them. What do you think: polyresin, plaster of Paris, wood, brass, pewter, ceramic....? Maybe gold.
Seriously though, at the risk of acting prematurely, whom do we have to thank for this apparently pre-Bourbon (or in my case, pre May 21st) reappearance? I thank God, but to whomever else that may have done any "manual intervention", I think I can safely say a sincere and heartfelt collective "thank you" from all of us seeing good things, from the bottom of our hearts. I hope this is not a premature statement. <shudder> I also hope something will done for those in Dayo like predicaments who have yet to see any of their SERP's return. (Dayo, I've been on tranquilizers during the DAY for almost two weeks now, plus more heart meds, so I know exactly what you mean by your health comment. I really hope the best for you).
It is just when things are out of your own hands like they have been it can just get a bit on top of you.
At least when things are in your own hands you can take action and do something about it - I thought I took the necessary action ages ago!
>I thank God, but to whomever else that may have done any "manual intervention", I think I can safely say a sincere and heartfelt collective "thank you" from all of us seeing good things, from the bottom of our hearts.<
May I suggest adding to your "Thank You" list, our friend GoogleGuy who brought us the news about The Mother of All Dcs this morning ;-)
when i search for 'site:www.mydomain.com' google shows
Results 1 - 10 of about 92,800 from www.mydomain.com for . (0.52 seconds)
and if i refresh
Results 1 - 10 of about 93,700 from www.mydomain.com for . (0.52 seconds)
every time i refresh i see 'about x+900
i try 'site:www.anotherdomain.com' and it doesn't happen
Maybe someone can explain it to me
my site it's about 12,600 in other dcs
[edited by: jcmv at 3:46 pm (utc) on June 16, 2005]
Clint, as GG said it takes a few days for the results to propagate everywhere.
If you want to drive yourself nuts by checking Google.com every 10 minutes, go right ahead though :)
Yes, I've been watching vanilla google and it sucks, essentially, for me.
Just did a search for a 4-word KW phrase, for which I have a number of pages - not duplicate content, all original - any one of which would be EXACTLY what you'd be looking for with that search. No pages from my site show up in the first 500 results though many of the advertisers who are also on my site show up in the search as ads (you still wouldn't find what you're looking for by clicking on them, though related).
Whether by accident or on purpose is not the matter, the point is that THE MOST RELEVANT RESULT is not showing.
Until this morning. :-Ķ
Traffic has dropped by 2/3, and here is why: It seems that still all pages are being indexed, but search results previously on page #1 or #2 now show up on page #5 and further below.
Even worse, a search for "mycompany.com" (where "mycompany" is a unique, artificial word) - for which I was #1 for years (PR 6, if this still matters) - brings up a sub page of mine as result #40, with the main page "mycompany.com" BELOW of it (indented).
Many clean sites (linking to me with "mycompany.com" as an anchor) and plenty of scrapers are suddenly ranking better than the site they are pointing to - this is ridiculous. And needless to say that on Y! and MSN this search is still #1 ...
Since everybody seems to talk about re-appearance, why is this nightmare suddenly happening to my site?
Any insight or advice would be very much appreciated.
Peter
Clint:
>I thank God, but to whomever else that may have done any "manual intervention", I think I can safely say a sincere and heartfelt collective "thank you" from all of us seeing good things, from the bottom of our hearts.<May I suggest adding to your "Thank You" list, our friend GoogleGuy who brought us the news about The Mother of All Dcs this morning ;-)
Yes indeed. He was also thought of in bold below if he's doing anything manual:
"I thank God, but to whomever else that may have done any 'manual intervention', I think I can safely say a sincere and heartfelt collective "thank you" from all of us seeing good things, from the bottom of our hearts. I hope this is not a premature statement."
It really does look like a cover up job - I personally find that hard to believe - however, if you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth. (although I have not come to that elementary deduction yet! - he he)
>> I was back, then gone, back again, now gone again<<Clint, as GG said it takes a few days for the results to propagate everywhere.
If you want to drive yourself nuts by checking Google.com every 10 minutes, go right ahead though :)
Yeah I saw that, but what I can't understand is the changes back and forth.
Here's something horrifying. Have any of you checked your SERP's at MSN and Y? Try it on MSN. I've been dropped back several places in MSN just in the past few days! In one search, guess who is 1st now? That SAME WEBSITE in India I've mentioned several times before with the hidden text on it! In other searches, I've been dropped behind the big corporate million dollar+ sites. I have absolutely NO explanation for this, other than the 301 redirect from non-www to www is what caused it!
>GoogleGuy
msg #:472 June 16, 2005
annej, if things look good for you at that data center, I wouldn't go through and change all your relative links to absolute.<
Can we make GG statement more general and say:
If your site is doing well on Google after Bourbon Update, donīt change your relative links to absolute.
As such, we might add it to our checklist.
But then I wonder...
9:16 pm on June 7, 2005, I wrote:
I will call Google's algo officially broken when I see or hear somebody from their company utter the word, "seasonality."
[webmasterworld.com...]
It's post #455 in Google Update Bourbon Part 4.
On June 8, in a Reuters story about online ad revenues, this:
For their part, Yahoo and Google say keyword pricing is cyclical and have attributed search advertising revenue growth to volume increases.
cyclical ~ seasonal
Other stories about the report by Fathom Online use the word seasonal and a Yahoo rep said seasonal in a quote from another story.
Was it coincidence or a cunning clue?
From the evidence I am seeing, G's algo may not be broken, per se, but it is somewhat compromised. Consider that today, some people are saying their sites have returned to good SERPs, while totally new folks are saying they've vanished. Add to the mix G's new "site map" add-on, and you have more evidence that all is not right with the algo.
Add in GG's comments about reinclusion requests and spam reports from last week and the picture begins to come into better focus.
And Google's official stance on all of this: silence.
Six to twelve months from now we may finally know the truth. In the meantime, it's every man/women for him/herself
Annej - can you ask GG when Canonical URL issues will be fixed? ;)
Sorry - depressed, unhappy, etc :( - ignore me - I know I will be. Off to cool down again - I dont like throwing critcisim and really really appreciate what GG has done here for years - but getting really really stressed.
Even if they are still miles ahead of the competition, Google needs to reevaluate the basic concepts behind its algorithm. You simply can't target quality and reward garbage that simplisticly manipulates you and expect to make money forever.
If I recall all of this well, you named this update "Bourbon", out of cheering.
if you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.
There was an interesting story about conspriracy theories about a month ago - concerning a specific US election and the claims made by various proponents - which claimed that all theories have a bit of conspiracy in them, and it depends upon which you find more plausible.
To wit: a manual fix vs. a machine fix. Both involve some level of faith and conspiracy. If you believe that the algo "did it", then you believe the engineers tweaked or constructed the algo to do something. Conspiracy, just not evil or underhanded, basically, what the company wants you to believe. Easy.
If you think it was a manual fix, you have engneers scambling around in the SERPs moving things about with no parameters except to appease some people and make G look good. Not so easy to accept. Not the company line. Takes a little more of a skeptical mind to comprehend. It is, on it's face, however, no less plausible, though it is not what the company wants you to believe.
With no official word from Big G, we're left to wonder, investigate, speculate, question. A simple answer would quell all suspicion.
Similar to Watergate, whereas had Nixon just admitted that he knew about the original crime there would have been no story for Woodward and Berstein, no Deep Throat, no threat of impeachment, no resignation. Nixon would have stayed in office for his full term.
I wonder why nobody to this day gets this. Silence and/or denial breeds skepticism and distrust.
Since annj's site has now recovered and she hadn't changed her links from rel. to abs., what does that say? It never really mattered would be my first inclination.
A week ago we might have added to your list, "change relative links to absolute." Today, we add the caveat, "unless you are now ranking well in the SERPs."
Ergo, ipso facto, and any other Latin terms I can come up with (mens rea, habeus corpus, caveat emptor), annj's site recovered due to some other means and we now have evidence of at least one site with relative links which ranks well in the SERPs. Insert big Question Mark wherever you please...
I'm beginning to believe that G (not necessarily GG) just wants webmasters doing "busy work" for whatever reason. Don't question the algo, don't peek at the code, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
Shhhhhhhh...
Looked at the source code of shopping.com lately? :)
On that topic, basic webmastering from years past never said anything about absolute vs. relative links. For hand-coders it was always a convenient shortcut and directories were supposed to keep things better organized. For the life of me, I don't see why any of that should have changed or should change just because G wants it one way or the other.
Most sites are just pages from a completely non relevant sites e.g printing, web design, taxi's etc and then within their site just 1 or 2 pages about a set financial search term, with ads normally from normal g or o sources. No content on many some with iframes that only contain the ads!No content nothing!
It is so fustrating that stacks of these sites are around again and of no use to the consumer. Leaving relevant sites languising on pages 2 & 3.
Have any of you found this in your sectors.
Annej - can you ask GG when Canonical URL issues will be fixed?
I don't know if he might have been addressing me because I asked about the problem in the Questions for Google Guy thread message #199. I suspect they can't tell when it will be fixed because it will take a while.
We all want Google to get rid of scraper sites and such and I think this was an attempt to do that but it hit a lot of good content sites as well so now they have to try something different.
I used to watch the old time Google dances each month and I remember the results on Google.com would jump around for a while so I wouldn't be alarmed about it yet.
Just a bit low when I posted that.
"Another thing I have noticed since the update and I hope I am not repeating anyone earlier in this thread is that on top money search terms esp in finance excuse the pun there is a new batch of spam".
Fortunately there are a lot of mature sites in finance.
Generally:
Think of the following. There are some "SEO-hawks" out there, that are sepcialists on driving pages to the top of the search engine results page (SERP). How would you fight such, white, grey or black hat techniques where SEO techniques are more important than content and customer service? One way is to randomize.
KBleivik
"He said that the only thing that did not lie was mathematics, simply because it could not".
[edited by: kgun at 6:57 pm (utc) on June 16, 2005]
There is no reason to ever watch "google.com". There is no "google.com". The only thing that matters are the datacenters.
And Clint, you probably should try to chill a bit...
>Reseller, I would have to agree with Undead Hunter. I can't see setting up emergency domains as a solution.<
Allow me to elaborate more. I see an emergency domain as a domain with 1-2 pages with real contents related to your present site. You create the emergency site in good time, submit it to the majors (also maybe local directories) and leave it there for at least 6 months or so to age before regarding it as an emergency domain.
I myself have 3 domains from 2003 which I use for different kind of testing related to subjects which are also part of my current site. All 3 are indexed on Google. The idea of emergency domains wasnīt the reason of creating the 3 sites at all. But now I can see that I can use them, if and when.
In a situation where for example a business site had been dumped by Google, you donīt have really many choices. Emergency situations require emergency domains ;-)
I am finding websites from friends on other forums also hit by this update and all of them are not aware of Bourbon or visit this forum. This is a big cock up and its difficult to understand why GoogleGuy has gone AWOL on us in this time of need....some people here have read all 566+ posts looking for why they had been hit.
Has anyone tried moving web hosting? (I will try and move next week)
If you're OK with the current host, I wouldn't do it.
Switching hosting too often triggers some additional Google's logic.
Has anyone herd from GoogleGuy after the 0.5 thing?
See message #472 of this thread.
>Since annj's site has now recovered and she hadn't changed her links from rel. to abs., what does that say? It never really mattered would be my first inclination.<
I "decoded" GoogleGuy lines to; "if it aint broken, --don't fix it" ;-)
But because there had/have been suggestions to change relative links to absolute, I thought of adding a point to underline "if it aint broken, --don't fix it"
