Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Interestingly enough, I tested about 50 of the top domains and out of ALL of them ONLY Google.com returns a 404 error when you attempt to grab google.com/?abc.htm. Every single other one I tried returns a 200 (well except Amazon which returned a 302, a 301, THEN a 200). So that pretty much makes them ALL susceptable to this big problem.
Sooo Ya' think maybe Google used only their own domain to test and model that part of the algorithm and thus it doesn't act the same in the REAL world?
Can anyone come up with some code to put in an .htaccess to reject these type of requests and return a 404 while not affecting anything else, so I can get rid of this index listing already?
1. I tried to contact Google. Finially got the automated email with case # and replyed but still have not got an answer.
2. Implementated a 301 redirect to fix our 'www' issue. Inurl command now doesn't show the 'non-www' but it can still be found, but the cache is now gone.
3. I may still have 301 issues with url's using varibables which help me track conversions from affilates sites. I asked google about this, but now answer.
Any other ideas we can try. We are #1 on MSN right now, not too good on Yahoo, and lost on G with our keyword that describes our business.
Mike
They again lost all their google traffic starting around Thursday of last week (after recovering nicely from the bourbon glitch).
SERPs are full of the same crap seen during the bourbon update. Lots of scarpers when i do a search for my (unique) domain name. I get about 10 Adsense scrapers linking to me appearing right above my listing.
Same old crap is floating back up and we are really tired of this game google.
Every site which links to us (some higher PR, but most lower) shows up before ours which is a joke when I search for a keyword and business name in the same search box.
Google has problems, but they don't seem to care about any of us!
Mike
>It seems like the bourbon problem is back on for two of my sites.<
Many friends have reported the same. Its was therefore I still wonder whether a Mini-Update is taking place.
Ok. On my way to a short vacation away from Google and its crazy updates ;-)
Talk to you later.. and meanwhile wish you all a successful week.
Seems that Bourbon feedback has LEFT the building...
Just tried sending an e-mail and can no longer send anything to the Googleguy posted e-mail, so I guess we're totally SOL and on our own as usual:
They couldn't give a hairy rat's *** about what's going on.
[edited by: Clint at 8:39 am (utc) on July 4, 2005]
I know you think I would say this but most of the sites who now rank way above us are just not as relevant to the search term as my site, its not just sour grapes but I could demonstrate to anyone that less relevant sites are now being served (where I'm looking anyway).
All I want to know is what shoud I do now? Iv'e tried to do things corectly, I NEVER LINK as I thought Google wanted this organic thing to happen. I don't really do any deep seo as I don't know how to and just concentrate on the content, like I thought Google wanted. So should I start taking up all the link requests I get?. It was like two years ago when there were all these weird cloacked sites who seemed to link to us and were above us in the rankings, I thought Florida sorted a lot of that out. Now totally demotivated again.
Me too - Got a bunch of consumer reviews overnight to add. But feel like little point in adding them....OK might get one or two visitors reading them from Yahoo - but Google seems to have little interest.
What I need now is direction- What am I suppose to do
What do you do? For eCommerce I would highly recommend the 'buy new domains' strategy. We bought a lot of domains around our name & product group and a few wild cards when it happened to us, and as Google tweaks itself they keep bringing those domains (basically us in disguise) to the top instead of our main site.
We are now nowhere in Germany now in Google and top in Yahoo, so we sold a few test products to a German friend of ours and now that site is near top in Google for our product name. ;)
But also stay optimistic, we were bummed when we disappeared, then a month later Yahoo gave us great rankings and we had a record breaking March (nearly 3 times our previous record). Search engines change, some of the guys here got burned by Altavista but its swings and roundabouts, if your site is good it will float regardless of the algo/SE of the day.
All I want to know is what should I do now? Iv'e tried to do things correctly, I NEVER LINK as I thought Google wanted this organic thing to happen. I don't really do any deep seo as I don't know how to and just concentrate on the content, like I thought Google wanted. So should I start taking up all the link requests I get?. It was like two years ago when there were all these weird cloaked sites who seemed to link to us and were above us in the rankings, I thought Florida sorted a lot of that out. Now totally demotivated again.
Peter, it's useless. All those that went to the G webmaster conference in New Orleans are keeping all the details to themselves....apparently too stingy to share what was discussed. If they WOULD answer some questions, it would certainly be helpful to us. Most of us are like headless chickens, and G doesn't care. Doing "things correctly" is useless since G also obviously doesn't care about that either. What G wants NOW, as I previously stated, is irrelevant SERP's and blackhat sites. So, if you really want an accurate opinion on what to do, just have a non-relevant website with redirects, cloaked pages, "fake" pages, keyword spamming, and a link farm and you'll be on top. But then of course it would be anyone's guess as for what search terms you'd show up, but you WOULD be showing up as scraping some other RELEVANT site that SHOULD be on top. Sickening isn't it.
The industry? The subject matter? Links policy? PR? Duplicate content issues? Over optimization? Keyword density?
Anyone any ideas?
<edited to include more suggestions>
Yep, starting to wonder if WebmasterWorld is becoming a classed society - those who can afford to go to the conferences and those that cant (Even pictures are only available to those who went - lol - nevermind) Due to privacy issues - so no doubt whatever they learnt is not to be shared due to privacy issues (ha ha)
Sorry all - just getting really fed up
I think the central question is why some are sites affected by these massive swings but others are not. For example on June 16 some people have reported a large drop in Google traffic, and others have reported a large increase. But presumably there are also many sites that were unaffected. So what is the common factor that makes the affected sites so vulnerable?The industry? The subject matter? Links policy? PR? Duplicate content issues? Over optimization? Keyword density?
Anyone any ideas?
We've been asking that question for months now. Still no one has been able to determine any common factors. Many have stated they think it was/is not having a non 301 that directs non-www requests to www requests (or vice-versa), but that's not it since many that did not do a 301 redirect got back their G-SERP's (as of 2-3 weeks ago that was still true). FAIK they could be dropping again like us.
Again, if all those that went to conference that stated things like "Had a great time, learned an incredible amount....", "Learned just about everything I needed to know", etc., etc., would state what they are talking about, it would help!
I have seen the thread.
Just posts I have seen along the lines of "I learnt a lot of secrets but not letting on etc"
Well fine - whatever - but why post something so pathetic in the first place.
It is a bit like saying well "My Dads Car is bigger than Yours"
Oh well - I guess I will keep on waiting.
I know sourgrapes and all that :):)
Today I have noticed three of my old pages which were renamed are still in google index. Please suggest me how to remove those old indexed pages.
Thanks
Thanks but I wouldn't know how to do a scraped site if I wanted to. I think Google is decent at heart (well I like to believe that) but a few guidelines would be great PLEASE. I'm willing to show them my site so they can point out what I'm doing wrong, all of a sudden?
Peter, just look at the sites that have replaced you and if they are using YOUR text and or are linked TO you, that's a scraper site. Showing G your site won't do JACK. For one, they don't care, and even if they tell you all looks great, that still doesn't help since you're still screwed. That's exactly what happened to me.
You're probably NOT doing anything wrong, NONE of us that are getting screwed ARE doing anything wrong! People on all these G update threads have gone all over their codes and verified everything is whitehat, yet they are getting dumped. I'm NOT joking when I said make a blackhat site! I've submitted COUNTLESS SPAM reports to G on sites that have replaced me, and they just IGNORE the reports. So, like I said, on my new site I'm stuffing it full of everything questionable I can imagine (that I of course learned from looking at the top sites in G SERP's) to see if that helps. If it doesn't, I think it's "discrimination lawsuit" time. I think it's time for those of us that discussed going to the media (you know who you are) did just that. I bet the negative global media attention exposing the "corruption" of the G index (these spam sites, link farms, blackhat sites, non-relevant results, etc.), that are topping G's SERP's for countless phrases, WILL cause users to dump G and use other SE's, then their precious G stock will plummet and they'll be FORCED to do something about it. Desperate times call for desperate measures.
If these are HTML pages, just put a G-bot tag in the <head> tag:
<meta name="googlebot" content="noindex, nofollow">
<meta name="googlebot" content="noarchive">
(You may be able to put all 3 in one tag, of that I am unsure).
Or you can disallow the pages in your robots.txt file:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /FolderIfAny/PageName.extension
If however your new pages aren't showing up the old pages are, then I wouldn't mess with it since you're at least still showing up.
Already in robot.txt the old named pages have been disallowed.
Now my problem is, there are old as well as new pages in index. Google shows only when I search by taking snip of a page and old cached page will not show when I use site:www dot mydomain dot com.
Please suggest.
Now my problem is, there are old as well as new pages in index. Google shows only when I search by taking snip of a page and old cached page will not show when I use site:www dot mydomain dot com. <<<<<
Like I said: "If however your new pages aren't showing up the old pages are, then I wouldn't mess with it since you're at least still showing up." So, if your NEW pages are showing up HIGHER, then I guess it wouldn't hurt to have the old pages removed, but if the G disallow line has been in your robots.txt file for a few weeks, then I don't know what else you can do except for adding the bots lines in the old page's <head> tags.
As I understand it you renamed some pages, and now both the old names and the new names are present in Google. That is completely normal. Google can take a long time to get rid of obsolete index entries. Sometime after Google has apparently removed them, they can even reappear years later, presumably because there was still a reference to them somewhere in the Google system.
I would remove the entry which disallows Googlebot access to those pages - that just confuses things. Because Googlebot is forbidden to crawl them, Google now has no way of knowing whether the old pages exist or not.
I would make sure copies of the pages under the old name do not physically exist on your server, and if it does, remove them. Also if you created 301 redirects in htaccess when you renamed the pages, I would remove the redirects as well. Some day Google will try to access the pages, and then it will get a 404 telling it the pages do not exist.
