Big drop in Google ranking - June 27?

from first page PG to dust speck in the distance

[Armande]

My Dutch content site seems to have suffered a big drop in Google ranking. This must have happened a few weeks ago.
Several of my articles did really well, PR in the first 5 hits, or at least on the first page. Now they have dropped several pages. At first I thought I must have been blacklisted or so but I can't think why. The only thing I could come up with was that I added alt texts to a few images on the site. I can easily change that of course.

I looked into it and I cannot find the reason at all. I signed up for google sitemaps but it does not report any errors or faux pas'.

So I don't know where to look now. Any input very much appreciated!

[edited by: engine at 1:33 pm (utc) on July 21, 2006]
[edit reason]
[1][edit reason] No urls, thanks. See TOS [webmasterworld.com] [/edit] [/edit][/1]

[F_Rose]

Have you guys dropped in rankings or lost your pages completely in Google's index?

[Soze]

Just today I lost all my rankings on the quality pages. Crap pages with low contentare still where they were. I don't get it.

[gosman]

Same her Soze.

Lost my #1 position I've held for 3 years to be replaced by a site that just regurgatates a suppliers XML feed.

We have 3500 uniques pages of content.

Just drives me crazy these nonsense updates.

[F_Rose]

"Just today I lost all my rankings on the quality pages"

Have you suffered any major losses on April 27th or on June 27th?

[Soze]

F_Rose, no this site was launched in early July. Has been enjoying great success until this morning. Funny thing is, it is on a subdomain of my pr7 site.

All listings disapeared. They got bumped way down and replaced with my root site that makes only one mention of the keyword. It seems that all the content pages are being hit with something. They are the only pages that lost rank. All other pages stayed where they were.

I really am interested in how everyone elses pages, which were dropped, were organized in terms of url. Were they all in the same directory of the site?

[edited by: Soze at 1:39 pm (utc) on July 27, 2006]

[vstevens]

Me too? What gives? Rank went up for other the updates in April and June and yesterday home page dissapeared from #3 & 4 spots for one of our best KWs? No changes have been made?

[gosman]

F_Rose.

I lost my top keyword ranking on the June 27th fiasco. But this returned 3 to 4 days later.

Fingers crossed this is just another glitch.

[Nick0r]

While I've had this problem for one or two pages for many many months, today I've noticed two pages that got this problem a week or so ago have now been reverted back to their original status (and rankings), thank god.

So yes, this may be a temporary glitch, although I'm sure I can't be the only one who's had the problem for a long time now.

[Soze]

Nick0r, are you refering to the pages that drop to the end when you did site:?

I think it is a definate sign of what might be happening.

I really hope if bounces back in the next couple days. It has been doing so well lately. However, I have a bad feeling about it.

[Asianne]

This is definitely a glitch - and I hope they realize the error:

1. Google is now referring to backlinks from 2years ago - even if those links do not exist today or have not existed for over a year.

2. Google is now recognizing backlinks from ads purchased through Yahoo and MSN partners. (This one got me snowed - a competitor has received 700+ back links from paid advertising. )

3. Google is ignoring any new backlinks it recognized in it's last backlink update. The backlinks have reverted to old.

I was up all night researching this latest data refresh, if you were dropped, you might want to try running a link:www.yourcompetitorssite.com on google, you might be surprised at what turns up.

In any event, this update/data refresh is very buggy, I'm sure Google will fix it over the next few days. I wouldn't do too much to change your current websites at this time until everyone is reporting a non-buggy update. Any major changes out of fear or panic might cost you more in the end. :)

Patience may just be the key to getting past this craziness.

[Armande]

Patience, the very thing I am so good at. NOT! :P
But you are probably right.

[yummybanas]

This looks very interesting. Thank you Asianne for doing this research.

[Nick0r]

Yes Soze, see page 2.

[carlitos]

Nothing yet. I've read 100's of posts about this June 27 syndrome and I can't make an informed decision as to what I should fix on my site.

Has anyone experimented changing stuff on their site and getting any positive result?

The only common thing I've found is that most of the affected sites have a drop of aprox. 70%

Now that Google is in very good and agreeing terms and with the Chinese government ... maybe it has hired a few thousand chinese to manually decide which sites should be affected.

A few years ago I was very enthusiastic about G: young, fresh, unpoluted, bright, unbiased "academic company". My feelings are more inclined nowadays to position G as the old Microsoft which by the way is getting some face-wash with the Bill Gates foundation thing.

My 3 unrelated cents

[skippy]

Looks like update allegra comes back for a second time. Lost a site in that one and lost the same site today.

[eglobalhealth]

Our site, enjoying #2-#5 rankings for our top 4 key terms, disappeared from the SERPs on July 25th, whereas all was well on July 24th?! Noted our site was cached around the 24th. Watching the SERPs today, I have noted that key terms are jumping from not being listed in the top 200 to being at 102 and 108, etc. over the coarse of a few hours. I just checked it and now some terms (not all) are in the 70's where as others are still not listed in top 200. I looked at various data centers and not really noting huge fluctuations but there are a few differences noted across the board...would everyone agree this is the Dance? About how long does it take for results to return to normal (what ever that is)? We have not changed anything on our site to penalize our site...any thoughts on this recent update are appreciated.

[HieroHero]

what annoys me is not that my 10 year old site filled with 300 pages of quality content has gone from a #4 rank to nowhere overnight..but that its been replaced by all these websites that are just articles on the subject.. so the results are now rubbish while I suffer. why google why?

[Alex70]

not affected after any 27th..site completely gone...

[kidder]

A whole new batch of webmasters and sites getting a work over...

[HieroHero]

why are newspaper articles.. from online editions of newspapers suddenly all over the results?

[loneduchess]

We too have the same problem. The page at the bottom of the list was # 1 in Google for over 6 months, has now disappeared.

[BillyS]

While I had been relatively unaffected in recent weeks, there looks like there was a pretty significant change for me today.

[uptil7000]

We were #1 for our KW for 4 years. All was good yesterday and today we are nowhere to be found. What the heck is going on. Have not changed a thing.

[calumniate]

noticed a huge change this morning on some of the data centers.. me and 3 competitors got wiped from our 2nd, 3rd and 4th rankings. nowhere to be found lol. Could it be a keyword density update? hope not lol

-russell

[Soze]

People who lost rank, are you seeing less Googlebot hits? Mine are way low since july 27th.

[texasville]

Just curious. Have any of these dropped pages gone supplemental?

[Soze]

Mine have not.

[uptil7000]

No they have not gone supplemental. Just gone.

[rrl]

I have a large network of websites that have all been steady in the rankings for up to five years. Starting this week, they started dropping to the second page and today some have fallen out completely. These are quality sites that comply with Google's guidelines. The new sites in the rankings tend to be small or just random.

So in my opinion, I wouldn't make any changes for a while. This happened to me once before and I really didn't do a lot (you don't want to chase your tail) and within a couple of months, all of the sites gravitated back up.

[rrl]

One other thing, I just checked various data centers and my sites are mostly where they were before the update with the exception of 2 or 3 datacenters.