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.
After nearly a month of this Bourbon update, one thing is very clear: the SEs are monstrous parasites, leeching on the content of millions of individual authors.
I'm at a point at which I'm glad Bourbon happened and affected me as it did (negatively). It's given me a new outlook on the net as a whole and the need for self-determination by creatives.
Preferring one SE over another is like preferring to be shot to death or starved. Life goes on.
The real secret to their algo. Try this one on. It's just a wild guess but with the crap they are serving up in my opinion I'll bet the algo goes something like this. I'll bet they are simply monitoring a pre-determined spreadsheet of daily Adword and Adsense earnings. Twist the nob a little each day and whatever increases the revenue is the soup de jour for the moment. That it folks! Search Engine 101
In spite of the cynical favor of the overall post, this is a plausible possilbity. Google has a market valuation of around $80 billion. In their SEC filing, Adwords is the only source of income declared.
Compare...Time/Warner $77 billion, Merck $70 billion, Berkshire Hathaway $104 billion. These are corporations with long histories and very diverse income streams. Even consider Exxon/Mobil $380 billion...hard to digest adwords are worth 20% of all that oil.
My point with dealing with the consequences of bourbon...Google will never be what we are accustom to in the past. Pagerank, LSI, Hilltop, or whatever...there is bigtime pressure for them to perform financially. Only the naive would believe that from now on financial considerations would not factor into the equation of the algo formulations.
The irrational exuberance of wall street has been the worst thing that could ever happened to google. I predict a future thread on WW will be entitled "dealing with the consequences of the google bubble".
Take note: Not a conspiracy theorist...more of an Ayn Rand type realist.
I see stable DCs with few serps sets. However for my specific search, I see also that top 5 ranked sites are stable and the same on all sets of the serps.
Any of you have noticed the same?
I've lost about 80% traffic since Thursday.
Anyway, my site don't make me as much money as you guys, so I am not as stressed up.
Mini sites marketing technique - Outlet Sites Strategy
In affiliate program marketing several marketers have been using a very effective marketing technique. You create a network of small sites each covering few pages promoting one or few affiliate programs. Those mini sites don´t need to be linked to each other, but sometimes they might link to one "MOTHER SITE".
Don´t know whether such mini sites networks have been hit by Allegra or Bourbon.
What I´m suggesting here, or asking for your feedback, is creating several mini sites promoting your products/services. Lets call these sites as OUTLETS.
I can´t imagine that any Google update in future will be hitting all your outlets at the same time.
Ethically, I see nothing wrong in the "Outlet Sites Strategy". In real life you find several businesses with outlets. So why not do the same online.
The benefit of "Outlet Sites Strategy" is making your business less vulnerable to those Google killing updates.
Thoughts please!
Thanks
this is still going ... seems linke they have new filter in place: G
28 and counting
While I agree their product's quality (i.e. search) has degraded significantly, I have to put the blame squarely where it lies - with the spamming scumbags clogging up the serps with crap. Congratulations on becoming part of the problem.
Very true, WebFusion.
I would call this statement as the summary of all similar recent "Google update" threads.
Don´t know whether such mini sites networks have been hit by Allegra or Bourbon.
Yes. At least mine was. I have no more than a couple of links going from any one of my sites to another (and only where relevant to the visitor).
The "mother" site disappeared with Bourbon.
It has hundreds of organic one-way links to it from other sites. Of their own accord, Yahoo editors added deep links to some of the content in their directory (imagine!). It's been mentioned in major newspapers and magazines. No dodgy spam techniques used.
It's frustrating, but after several years on the net, I'm kind of used to the ups and downs.
Site is new (started Feb) and no professional SEO work was done, but I tried to prepare all by the book - keywords in url, titles, descriptions, mentioned on the pages and used in anchored texts. Some external links but not much yet.
I was about 60-70 before Bourbon.
After first wave of changes (about the time GG wrote to observe 64.233.161.105) I was at about 540 (in these DC that listed me at all).
Seems it wasn't end. Since yesterday (or two days ago) I was pushed down for another 300 positions. 880 it is now.
So either thay are still rebuilding everything, or it is next 0.5 of the original 3.5 (over 5.0 in total right now).
Thanks for feedback. Much appreciated.
>Don´t know whether such mini sites networks have been hit by Allegra or Bourbon.
Yes. At least mine was. I have no more than a couple of links going from any one of my sites to another (and only where relevant to the visitor).
The "mother" site disappeared with Bourbon. <
Sorry to hear that. I read another post on this thread about a fellow UK affiliate manger telling that his affiliate business was also hit by Bourbon.
But there mightbe other reasons why some affiliate program sites were hit. Maybe not because Google is targeting affiliate program sites, but because of the other factors mentioned in this thread "Google-Updates Survival Kit" such as lack of 301 redirect, many 302 redirect hijacking, duplicate contents etc..
The reason I'm mentioning above is because I have several pages with affiliate programs reviews including very clear affiliate links. Some of those pages are still ranking very high for competitive keyphrases.
Its therefor I still believe that "Outlet Sites Strategy" mightbe one of the solutions to deal with Google savage updates.
A large reputable company in the US provided affiliate mini-shops in 100% style of your website but because they had been running off the same db many of those sites had been hit by this update and not just the shop but the whole site. The reason was many of these sites shared many of the same products. Its weird because the large reputable company itself was not penalised (but I guess the risk was there)
A typical movie site could split them up into Genres? I dont think I will do it myself becuase I prefer the one powerful website thats spam free :/
And you have to admit that this happens a very very very very small amount of the time. I don't know if 1% is the right number, but that is the neighborhood.
Hi Folks
I´m adding few resources to the list for practical reasons.
- Do a 301 redirect regarding yoursite.com vs. www.yoursite.com (canonical url problem)
- Do nothing as probably more changes on the way
- Subtle page changes and monitor SERP changes
- Removing 302 redirects
- Removing duplicates
- Create and submit a Google Sitemap (You want Google to crawl more of your web pages)
[google.com...]
- Optimize your site for other search engines (like Yahoo, MSN ..)
Keep working to increase non Google sources of visitors.
- Transfer your affected site to a spare/emergency site
An emergency site is an additional site with 1-2 pages of real content related to your affected site. You create the emergency site in good time, submit it to the majors (also maybe local directories) and leave it to age for at least 6 months before moving the content of your affected site to it.
Resources:
Google Update Bourbon Part 4
[webmasterworld.com...]
Dropped from Google - a checklist to find out why.
[webmasterworld.com...]
Further Google 302 Redirect Problems
[webmasterworld.com...]
301 for non-www. to www. not working, plus custom error stops working
[webmasterworld.com...]
Google Sitemaps
[webmasterworld.com...]
Successful Site in 12 Months with Google Alone (Brett Tabke)
[webmasterworld.com...]
Sandbox Question and SEO for Google
[webmasterworld.com...]
GoogleGuy's posts (Some posts and advice on Bourbon and other topics)
[webmasterworld.com...]
eval.google.com - Google's Secret Evaluation Lab..
[webmasterworld.com...]
Your comments and suggestions shall be highly appreciated.
Thanks!
>Reseller your Outlet Sites Strategy© makes sense but of course for each outlet you will need many more links.<
Thanks. The outlet sites should be promoted (also submitted to SE and SE directories) as any other sites.
>A large reputable company in the US provided affiliate mini-shops in 100% style of your website but because they had been running off the same db many of those sites had been hit by this update and not just the shop but the whole site. The reason was many of these sites shared many of the same products.<
With all due respect, there is no "value added" by those identical mini-shops.
You find the same on several of travel mini-shops too. And if I recall correctly, there was something mentioned about such sites in Google Evaluation Lab. documents.
Outlet sites have their own "value added" contents.
When creating a spare/emergency site should you not do any cross linking to main site or should you?
Maybe just outbound to the main site?
>Question:
When creating a spare/emergency site should you not do any cross linking to main site or should you? <
The emergency site is the site you are moving to it the contents of your affected current site. Through the periods of creating and aging and thereafter the emergency site shouldn´t have any link(s) to your current site.
However, after moving the contents of your current site to your emergency site, I guess there will be no harm in redirecting the visitors of your "old" site to your emergency site which at that time regarded as your main (current) site.
I'm gotten to the point - in one month's time - that what I've worked on for the past five years is now pretty much ruined. I did everything as close to the book as possible and my reward is abject failure.
Quite depressing and probably my only recourse is to establish some method to warn people of the dangers of dealing with Google.
IMO, the internet and surely my business would be much better off had these maniacs never been born.
He eventually used a stored bookmark for a legal site and got the results he needed. I believe Google is completely busted and worthless now to not only the average surfer but to professionals in a variety of disciplines as well.
Dont know if your law website example will stay (dont know if it is a big US website like an Amazon etc and therefore might be allowed to be posted here)
But intresting that they have a non-www, www issue - the only guide for traffic levels is really Alexa - not really shown that much of a drop off for that site.
I think what we should hope for, is for the G employees that are/were/are/were responsible for our sites getting trashed to find themselves in our EXACT predicament (loosing their jobs, loosing their businesses), i.e. shoe on the other foot. I've said before that I wouldn't wish this on ANYONE, but if they experienced the feeling for a month or so, that might open their eyes a little bit.
I've said it before and I'll say it again....if your "business" lives or dies based on the free traffic you get from google, then you don't really have a business. What successful business owner in their right mind would base their entire revenue stream on antother business which prvides them with free advertising? If you're going out of business becuase you've (probably temporaily) been lost in google's serps....then this is just the shot of reality you needed. NOw maybe you might decide it's worthwhile to take a mosre sensible approach to building your business, instead of relying on the "google lottery" of free traffic.In other words....as opposed to focusing your energy on hating google, channel it into finding alternative traffic sources that can allow you to give google the virtual finger at update time.
Our site disappeared for roughly 2 1/2 weeks at the beginning of this "update", which in turn caused about a 20% drop in business. Did we feel it? Absolutely. Could it have put us out of business? NO WAY. Too many other traffic sources (other engines/links/sites/bookmarks/forums, etc.) keep the visitors coming. Make your traffic multi-dimensional, and you'll be able to sleep at night.
Ho boy. First, if you're going to quote me, quote the FULL sentence. (I changed what you quoted above to the full quote).
I've also said it at least a dozen times and apparently I also have to "say it again". Just because something works for you, DOES NOT MEAN it's going to work for EVERYONE. No one is "focused on hating people" so DO NOT even attempt to twist my comments into that! I made no such claim, so knock it off.
Google is not involved in "Free advertising", they are a SEARCH ENGINE, and it is the obligation by their own definition, nomenclature, and charter that they INDEX ALL WEBSITES of RELEVANCY to the performed search (unless sites are in violation of something, but which doesn't seem to have affected those type sites).
Furthermore, just because a "20% drop" doesn't hurt YOU, you cannot say that it's not going to hurt OTHERS! Not everyone here is a millionaire!
How many damn times do I, and others have to say...(some of this is previously quoted text)....
The fact that G has 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. 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. At least in my field, when a potential customer needs to purchase a "blue widget", they are going to go online to a SE and, ~60-85% of time will go to G to search for said "blue widget". When they need a new [whatever], and don't receive/read the newspaper flyers and Sunday's "slicks" (ads), they are going to go to a SEARCH ENGINE to search for their product and they are going to use GOOGLE (AOL & Netscape) the vast majority of the time. There's no way around that.
Additionally: one can see the point about being "solely dependent on Google", but for most online small business owners, like myself, it was not originally like that NOR INTENDED! Before Google, there were a few decent fairly equal search engines, Yahoo was the biggest, and we ranked good on all of them. If you dropped on one of them, it was no big deal, you were OK on the others. Now, through no choice of mine, the G has squeezed out all the others to the point where other SE SERP's are irrelevant, and I, and millions of others now find ourselves in G's hands. I didn't ask them to take over the internet. G has just become so dominant that any simple downward move hits us in the wallet, and total removal is nothing short of DEVASTATING. I am aware that getting listed in any SE is a chance game, but I didn't want, nor expect it to end up being down to one SE. THIS is what has happened, THIS is a "shot of reality", and there is no way to change that. If one happens to be in a business which DOES NOT need to RELY upon SE SERP's, then they of course can toss around comments to the effect of "don't rely upon SE's", "diversify", "multi-dimensional" and the like, and call people idiots between the lines such as you have just because they get the bulk of their traffic and sales from G. Other "marketing techniques and methods" DO NOT APPLY TO EVERY FIELD!
Even though most of us during this G "update" remained on top for most (but not all) of the search phrases on other SE's where I we were at G, when you just so happen to have received the bulk of your traffic therefore sales from G, it stands to reason if you're not in them you're screwed. Even if one's business is based on the OTHER SE's, and even other marketing areas, when so few are using the other SE's and other "marketing areas" for MY FIELD and many others' fields, it's not going to help and never make up for the damaged caused by G. I don't think anyone intended to solely base their business on Google, it's just the way it happened due to their user-base. Those of us affected are sort of "victims of their success" in a back-handed way every time these updates happen that trash our sites.
THAT, is a "shot of reality" as you put it. I can truthfully say you bring up some valid points. However, your niche DOES NOT equal my niche or everyone else's niche. Your customers are not everyone else's customers. Your other "marketing methods" are NOT going to work for everyone else. If you were not adversely affected by this G update, then I don't understand why you are here. You cannot be objective to this thread and others that have lost a lot, if you were not in our positions. Telling people it's "your own fault" or similar serves no purpose but to infuriate others and exacerbate their frustrations. I could be diplomatic here and say "I thank you for your suggestions", but this area you bring up has grown very very tired, and the way you word it is a bit adversarial and condescending.
[edited by: Clint at 12:56 pm (utc) on June 18, 2005]
But there mightbe other reasons why some affiliate program sites were hit. Maybe not because Google is targeting affiliate program sites, but because of the other factors mentioned in this thread "Google-Updates Survival Kit" such as lack of 301 redirect, many 302 redirect hijacking, duplicate contents etc..
I agree - my mother site has no affiliate links (that Google can follow).
I suspect many, many affiliates have been "killed" in past months by the SEs because, to be honest, many many affiliates have sites with no original or meaningful content.
In the commercial keywords I cover, Google is doing a good job of weeding out crappy affiliate "spam". Unfortunately, a lot of darned good content sites got weeded out, too.
We have had no drop off in Alexa rank - even though traffic is actually way down - still.
My conclusion is that we are still in the middle of a big rebuild of G's index. In fact it would do Google (and all webmaster) much better if they'd build their index "behind the scenes" and simply switch over to the new one once it's finished - but facing the really huuuuge amount of data they are dealing with this probably is not possible.
So what happens when searching a half baked index? It's not that a RELEVANT site suddenly has dropped in serps or is missing - it's that LESS RELEVANT (but already processed) sites temporarily have more relevance and are outranking others. Temporarily.
The advice I'm giving to myself (and to everybody else who's facing major losses) is to stay calm. Something is still brewing for sure, just check your favorite search term from time to time and watch the position of OTHER sites, not only yours. In the meantime your site might have gained (or lost), but this is true for many other sites too. Nobody can tell right now where everything will end up when G has finally finished.
Am I just whistling in the woods? ;-)
Peter
Posibly not - I think we may have another stage to go through which may be evident next week.
Whether this a new filter on sites being crawled now difficult to say - also difficult to say whether the SERPS wil change as a result.
The feedback I am getting is that a lot of .co.uk domains seem to have been hit harder relative to .com ( hosting place doesn't seem to be a factor ).
However, it [a class action suit] would generate a lot of negative publicity which would certainly get everyone's attention.
Unlikely. How many people outside AOL are aware of the AOL volunteers vs. AOL suit? How many people outside About.com are aware of Levinson et al. v. Primedia et al. (a lawsuit by nearly 100 former About.com "guides")? For that matter, how many members of the general public have heard of the most important writers' lawsuit in living memory (in which the Supreme Court ruled for the writers), Tasini v. The New York Times?Just as important, attorneys don't take class-action suits on a contingency basis unless they think they can win or reach a satisfactory settlement. I doubt if they'd regard a desire to "generate a lot of negative publicity" as sufficient grounds for investing time and money in a lawsuit.
IMHO, trash talk isn't a viable strategy for "dealing with the consequences of Bourbon Update."
I wasn't even the one that brought it up in the first place. However, since you brought it up, if you must continue with the topic; it most certainly would generate negative publicity if the media got their hands on the story, and if one were to involve G, they WOULD get their hands on it.
Although they may not admit it, we all know that lawyers all the time "invest time and money in a lawsuit" to "generate a lot of negative publicity", that's how they make a lot of their money. But, this has no place on this thread.
I think patience has been exhausted just as revenues have been dashed. For reasons known only to Google - and quite possibly not know to them if their algo is twisted, misaligned, malajusted or just plain broken - search results for many, many terms are simply not relevant. This has resulted in a discernable loss of traffic and the resultant decline of revenue for many sites.
Concrete answers would be appropriate. Apologies would be reasonable. Instead we get the occasional post by GoogleGuy who tells us just what you did, "stay calm." Meanwhile, our livlihoods are being destoryed.
It's like telling a terminally ill patient that everything's going to be OK. Yes, it will be, when the patient dies. All worries will be gone.
Getting away from Google is now a viable option. Maybe even more viable is getting into another line of work.
From our sites perspective it seems to have returned to the problems we had experienced March 23/24 and had recovered from around the Bourbon update time.
