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.
Does this mean nobody thinks eval has something to do with what we are seeing?
"but is anyone watching [google.com...] to see if you are there"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...
Huh, and huh? First, who uses an IP address for a G search? No one. G users go to google.com to do their searches. DC's can only indicatate a possible "trend" or things to come. "Joe Search Engine User" doesn't even know they exist, he goes to google.com to do his searches.
Secondly, I see no purpose nor reason for your "chill" comment, let's check that again:
I see many mentioning DC's they are watching, but is anyone watching [google.com...] to see if you are there, then gone, back, then gone again? I'm again gone from there. I was back, then gone, back again, now gone again. What I find odd is that the OTHER hits don't appear to be changing!
Nope, still don't.
And what if they don't look good?! What if they're even worse GG?! Any recourse? Or do we all sit and wait forever for G to get their act together?
>>"GG If people think they are still getting Canonical URL would you still encourage them to send reports using... "
I think GG has long ago left the forum. He's afraid to show his face here anymore! Two posts in a week is HARDLY reassuring to many folks here. So long G hello Y.
What would YOU do if the telephone company, or the electric company or the gas company, etc. shut off your service for a month? Do it right or MAKE ROOM FOR Y!
Google's Evaluation Lab. More about it here:
[google.com...]
Clint, I don't think you've quite figured out how this works yet. When you enter "http://www.google.com," it doesn't send you to the same datacenter every time. So during an update, hitting "http://www.google.com" 20 times in a row will probably not give you the same result all 20 times. Hitting "refresh" 20 times and screaming "I'm out! No, I'm in! OH MY GOD, I'M OUT!" is going to give you a heart attack, man. (-: Relax, it takes a few days for the data to spread around to all the different datacenters. GoogleGuy said that the datacenter with your site in it is a keeper, so it will surely stabilize soon.
I'm a little puzzled and disappointed by that datacenter, because it looks like some lower-content sites got moved back up the ladder. To me it really just looks like Google gave up and rolled back the results to what they were in the first place, but I don't remember exactly what they looked like previously, so I could be wrong. And I'm glad to see the MIA sites are no longer MIA, and the SERPs still look fine in my area (if not quite as great as last week), so I won't complain.
It's worth taking a look at that thread - i think a lot of people have been pre-occupied with this thread - so didn't bother taking a look in there.
Certainly explains a lot of things for me.....
Helleborine:
I wonder if Clint recalls the existence of a rogue URL with cached duplicate content in the [clintsdomain.com%09...] (not real domain) format?
Has this been sorted out?
Apparently it HAS. If that is the exact correct syntax (%09), it has. Sites no longer come up with that on the end of them.
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 some 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!
Edited to say: I just now checked again after posting that and this is no longer the case with MSN search, it's back to what it was a week or so ago. "Bourbon" brewing for MSN next?
[edited by: Clint at 10:02 am (utc) on June 17, 2005]
Clint - Google.com just uses one of the IP addresses. It switches between the IP addresses found on various tools that you may have used - so Google.com can hit anyone of those IPs - therefore what you want is all those IPs to show your "Good" results - therefore watch the trends on those tools.
I must stress our positions have not been lost, however numerous queries are only returning a small % of the normal set of results.
Surely someone else must be seeing this problem? It's rolled out across all DCs too as far as I can tell!
To tell the truth that has been the least of my worries - I assumed it was probably just tightning of filters etc.
However you are right, when I track some of my referrals from Google I am the only result returned!
Personnaly I would say that this is really a work still in progress, as first signs of re-inclusion in the serps for my site are happening. So I guess helping the crawler with the sitemap file would be a good idea to maybe speed up this re-integration in the serps.
I was nowhere to be seen for the last 4 weeks for my best keyword. Now I'm back at 75 whooopy!
(never tought I would be happy about a 75, but lets see tomorrow maybe it's going to be 40! and then 15, and then....1! ;)
Alex
1) Next time I see thread headings like "Solutions to 302 Hijacking" I won't glance at it and decide it's over my head and would never happen to me anyway.
2) Without Google I lose about half of my visitors and my earnings.
3) Without Google I still have about half of my visitors and earnings thanks to people coming in through bookmarks, newsletters, message boards and just typing in the URL, links from other sites and search engines like Yahoo, MSN and others. I need to keep working to increase these non Google sources of visitors. Hmmm, how do you set up those "Tell a friend" things?
4) I should always be aware that I could suddenly lose half of my income and budget accordeningly.
5) I really miss the good old Google dance days when once a month we watched the dance for a few days then it was over. So much better than 28 days (so far) of stress out.
6) There are some great people here who gave me tremendous support through messages here and stickies and I want to thank them all.
PS I sure hope the fat lady has about sung herself out.
Now I am a bit more chilled today :)
If I was a betting man I would probably say my site is improving. I mean I am getting crawled now and for a week or so - it just seems like the homepage is not ranked properly/correctly.
If the homepage aint right then the rest of the site is going to suffer. Perhaps I am just impatient - but I have waited a long time :)
annej - I pretty much echo that especially 1 & 6.
I remember ages ago a thread coming up that Google can not always distinguish between non-www and www and that a 301 should be put in place. So I quickly checked the results back then and saw that Google correctly identified by non-www and www as the same (I therefore took no action - if only I took action back then)
I guess I'm getting crawled too, because on main page changed from URL only to Normal listing without the supplemntal result tag... Only it shows now an April Cache, so I don't know if it still means that I'm being crawled...
Also I'm getting a little confused about all these 301/302/duplicate content/crawling/update thing. Could someone here check my site and tell me if I'm in danger of being hijacked?
Sticky mail me for URL!
Thanks
>4) I should always be aware that I could suddenly lose half of my income and budget accordeningly.<
Agreed. True and correct 100%. As sad as it might sound. And this is the same thing I read twice within less than 24 hours (a kind fellow member sent me a sticky to that effect yesterday. Thanks).
The only thing we can do is to be prepared, do whatever within our power to protect our sites, have an emergency plan ready, and as you mentioned correctly "working to increase these non Google sources of visitors".
Had a look and sent you a sticky.
Oops - forgot in my sticky - you can redirect from www to non-www if that suits your site better
PS GG - Same symptoms. ;)
The idea that webmasters have to scramble to change code, add a site map and other htaccess fixes in order to satisfy the unwieldy monster that is Google is simply unbelievable. Go ahead and give Google MORE control over your lives if you like, but I've always rejected authoritarian concepts which seek to dictate their rules to others.
I'll reiterate, if Yahoo and MSN are ranking you well, you have a choice to either make changes to improve on Google or find other avenues for traffic generation. I've said this from the start.
I'm right now at 101. In a few weeks I'm just as likely to be #3 as I am to be #300, so why should I bother? And in another couple of months, Google will just do this again, sending more sites into oblivion.
I survived Florida and Allegra (I think I did, not having paid much attention to it), but I learned quite a bit from Bourbon, and here are the main points:
1. Google will continue to fiddle with their system without regard to the welfare of webmasters.
2. Google is very secretive and has very poor public relations.
3. Search results on Google are not always the best nor most relevant (what an understatement!).
4. Webmasters need to find ways other than Google to generate traffic.
5. (thanks to oldpro for this insight) Google traffic is generally younger and may not convert well for everyone.
But you speak the truth :) - mostly.
Edit reason - had to put that mostly on
[edited by: Dayo_UK at 2:27 pm (utc) on June 17, 2005]
When Google does this again and hundreds of webmasters sit on threads like this for weeks on end (I'll admit to being guilty of that myself this time around), I hopefully won't care because I'll have divorced myself from Goofle, Grabble, Goople, Goober or whatever they want to call themselves.
I'm assuming a number of the people on this thread that are considering not going after good Google positions weren't making the kind of money that I was.. I was a UPS clubber with no advertising, that's pretty good profit all thanks to google..
I may not like what Google has done to my site, but to be honest, I don't have a dozen PhDs working for me developing the best way to rank in Google... Google does, and whether we believe it or not, Google is a lot smarter then we are. :) If it was an easy fix, it would have been fixed by now.
after all, it isn't google that provides the (any) content.
i thought the aim of google was simply to enable people to search the web?
this authoritarian, demanding attitude will stifle innovation since everyone now thinks that must program their sites similarly to satisfy god. sorry google.
if we did just forget about google and concentrate on good content, clean code then eventually google would realise it had to stop repeated algo changes, sandboxing, and penalising clean sites because it's search results would be less comprehensive than it's competitors.
google as a company is pretty screwed anyway! stock is vastly overpriced and it still relies on it's core search technologies which will be overtaken sooner or later by technical progress.
an msn guy said something very correct the other day. that 'search does not inspire loyalty'. it doesn't.
Not if Google are not aware of the problem. GG asked for feed back on a canonical urls a while ago and got about 30 responses.
I can understand why to a degree (dont really want Google poking around my website - but if it is for the greater good - and my website is probably not at part of the problem that Google want to test the most (as fingers crossed it may be on the way out - but does still underline the length a site is effected ;)))
But such a low response might have lead to them thinking it is not highest priority.
I have read probably over 30 just by sticky over the last few weeks.
Anybody who read the posts on this thread can see that it has attracted the sharpest minds on this planet when it comes to dealing with Google updates. We just need to keep our energy focused on finding effective solutions and creative thoughts.
Our checklist is growing each and every day as a result of your generous contributions. And at the end of this thread we shall have our Google-Updates Survival Kit ready. Can you hear us Google engineers ;-)
Keep all those suggestions coming!
:) - But the majority of sites effected have one common theme.
IMO it has reached the stage where we need to give as much feedback to the G engineers to help them fix it. Ok - there maybe a way that we can fix - which is fine for everyone who reads WebmasterWorld (well fine for those who read and implement;)) - but not everyone reads webmasterworld and until this issue is fixed Google are not really deliverying their target of organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible and useful.
I might be barking up the wrong tree though - or just barking
Forgive me for not being the next person to jump on the "I'm not going to conform to Google" bandwagon.. but I'm going to do whatever it takes to get my Google ranks back where they were.... why? Because my equally as high ranks on Yahoo and MSN bring in 1/50th of the traffic that my google positions bring me.. that translates into money.. lots of money.
I agree with what most of fearlessrick said, except for the point on which you touched Kurt. Unfortunately, it IS our problem if we are not in G. It's not our fault (that's been made obvious), but if we are not in G, it's devastating for most of us and CERTAINLY in my line of work. I commented on this thread and Part 3 & 4 that I've had ONE SALE since May 21st. Yesterday after getting back in the G results, I got some sales! And, this is still with top SERP's in MSN, Y, AltaVista, etc., etc. Due to this BS that's been going on, we've lost God knows how many customers and will probably never see those lost customers again (in my case, lost to local chain stores and HUGE billion dollar companies). I lost A LOT of money this past month because of no one being able to find me in G. Sales will pick up again since getting back into G (thank God, and once again St. Googliani), but the damage is done and no way of fixing that.
I totally agree with what you're saying Rick, and I have the same attitude as you, Dayo, Helleborine, and many others here. I for one, as I assume like everyone else here, is SICK of it and fed up with aimlessly scrambling around like a blindfolded pee-wee football team in fumble drill trying to "decipher" what G has done each time. But until G crumbles, folds, or goes into another business, our life unfortunately WILL be "ruled" by Google unless we can figure out a way to get back the massive amounts of traffic and sales generated by G-SERP's. In some fields, that's not possible. I know it SUCKS and it should not be that way, but it is. It's going to take some kind of massive movement (which I believe we started here) to get G to change their ways, spread the word about what's going on, and hopefully for a change see some STABILITY TO GOOGLE. Someone commented that G likes stability. No, I don't think so. Stable sites were trashed in this update, and Google is about as stable as a "Tijuana crack whore on withdrawal". :) (NO offense to GG there, that's just Google's indexing methods in GENERAL). IMO, they have/had/have/had (where does it end) by far the best SE anywhere, and they are repeatedly shooting themselves in the foot with these quarterly (or whenever), updates which throw a literal monkey wrench into their and our cogs of success. It WILL come back to haunt them.
If we, as webmasters or small online business owners revolt against G, we are hurt. If the general public that uses G revolts and uses a different SE, then that's a different story--Google will be hurt.
I haven't been this stressed-out since my Dad was in the hospital for 3 months....and that's where I'm headed if this Google BS keeps up (Dayo and I with adjoining rooms ;) ). There, or some "state hospital with padded walls".
[edited by: Clint at 3:23 pm (utc) on June 17, 2005]
