Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
No they aren't (yet). I'm running a statistics site which is measuring things like this - at least in Germany there's still a share of ~80% for G, and this figure didn't change at all after Bourbon.
Whatever the situation with Google's serps, we have to live with it. These disparaging comments are of absolutely no use in helping determine what has changed and what can be done about it.
It's a poor workman that blames his tools...
1. - You can try to fight Google by removing you site from their index and banning their robot or playing black hat tricks.
This strategy seems to be one of "spiting oneself" or short term gaming. It's a fight that could go on forever.
2. - You can try to determine why Google no longer favors your website and figure out if adjustments are necessary.
In this second case, my suggestion would be to make adjustments if they seem to add to the user's experience. Over the long haul, this should be a website that all search engines would favor.
Keep the end user experience in mind first. That is where the search engine engineers are focused. If there are practical limits of the robot itself, help it along until they can solve the problem themselves. If you need to use a 301, then do it - the end user sees nothing different.
It's a poor workman that blames his tools...
Nonsense, nothing to do with tools and everything to do with a messed up broken search engine........most of us are just stating the facts.
Most of us have been in this business for many years and know a broken search engine when we see one.
Our insight may save others countless hours and frustration trying to figure out what might be wrong with their site while the real reason are adsense scrapers and messed up/glitchy algo.
Check out GG posts for update and mini update and further update (for almost a month now if not more).....this alone tells a thousand words about the state of affairs at the plex.
I think you have two paths in the road ahead:
1. - You can try to fight Google by removing you site from their index and banning their robot or playing black hat tricks.
Thats dumb, you shouldn't ban your site from Google or block their robot. Submit a sitemap, go along with every little request they make.
*But* if the SERPs are lousy in your area, tell your customers. The *least* evil thing is a competitive market.
The only risk is that the guys in the Googleplex are vindictive babies and will try to strike back at you, if that happens take screen shots of the serps and keep a log. Such action would only damage themselves.
If they think the serps are good, thats up to them, but their opinion has to stand up to scrutiny, you show your customers why you think Google has lost it and let them decide.
Everybody affected (naturally :) ) claims to be white hat, and it's probable that most are, but perhaps these sites are seen by Google as borderline "spammy".
I can only speak for myself and few others of which I'm familiar, and the sites were NOT seen as "spammy" by G.
I've no idea whether this is correct or not, but it is making me take a very careful look at my affected site for anything that Google might dislike, and I have come up with a few things (mentioned in an earlier post). But I have also now spotted something else that Google may dislike.My site makes a lot of use of thumbnail images as indexes, and in the best traditions of usability all thumbnails have a descriptive Alt tag. I have also provided a Title tag for non-IE browsers. The result is that on same pages where there is little natural text, the Alt and Title text is very significant and has a serious affect on keyword density. In fact using a keyword density tool, including or excluding Alt tags gives a totally different idea of what the page is about.
Perhaps Google sees this as an attempt to hide text from users but present it to SEs, and has a filter based on what Google considers acceptable. Who knows? But needless to say I am now removing all Alt and Title tag text just in case. Usability is all very well, but not at the expense of traffic.
As nobody has come up with any other explanation of the "lost traffic" phenomena, it seems to me that the most sensible action is to make sure the site is squeaky clean.
I wouldn't go making any changes. As many have pointed out on these threads; no one knows what G may dislike, so you could end up hurting yourself even more, then ALSO hurting yourself in other SE's. As I have also repeatedly pointed out, making a site "squeaky clean" will be of no help since G DOES NOT LIKE squeaky clean sites! I've said over and over again, when I search for my search phrases, the top G SERP's are LOADED with sites that violate G's OWN TOS!
As I see it, at this point, it appears we need two totally different websites--one for other sensible SE's, then one for G which has "blown a gasket"! The problem with that though is no one will know just HOW to make the "website for G" suitable for G! According to the SERP's, (and again as I've pointed out), make it blackhat and irrelevant and HOPE that it will show up where and for what you want it to show up! Which is not very likely to happen.
Regarding your alt tags for images....IF, IF you are SURE that is an issue: IE of course and NS 4.x see the alt tags fine. It's in NS 7.2 (and probably FireFox as well since both are Mozilla) which do not see the alt tags and you have to use "title=" for them. Since IE can also see the "title" tag, it would seem logical to only have to use the "title" tag since that would cover both IE and Mozilla and that would keep you from duplicating the text for both tags. NS 4.x doesn't see it, it can only see the "alt" tag, but so few are still using it, it should not matter.
Now I'm not sure, but the SE's that do use the "alt" attribute for keywords should also see the "title" tag the same way? If NOT, if they only see the "alt" tag, that could be a dilemma, and then I may just stick with the "alt" tag since IE is about 90% of the browser market. FAIK there may not be any SE's out there now that still use the "alt" text for anything. If that is the case for sure, then that would mean these tags are only for the visually impaired and for their text readers, then it would not matter if you did use both tags to cover ALL browsers IF, that's IF SE's are not seeing them.
Again, this is going on the assumption that G is penalizing you for KW density. On another thread, the general consensus is that KW density doesn't mean anything. Well, ONCE AGAIN I've had threads removed from my "flags" list and "my threads" list so I can't find the #@!#!% thread now to post the URL! I would say search for it, but this site has no search function! Ahh, I did find another one though that may help. [webmasterworld.com...] (I've also noticed our user's "posts" number has stopped working again. Mine has been hung on "184" for days now).
I have read every post relating to Allegra and Bourbon, and I am afraid yours is typical of the blame-Google category.
You talk about "our insight" as if this was a given, but what you say does not correlate with my perception. My site does not suffer from adsense scrapers nor from a glitchy algo. It is more likely being hit by some sort of anti-spam filter. But instead of just blaming Google, I am trying to understand what is giving my site a problem, so that if I ever get my traffic back I am not going to lose it again.
It also seems clear to me that they intentionally shake things up every update so fewer and fewer sites can rely on a decent level of traffic. They most likely benefit from having an index where no-one is safe and their statistics probably indicate that more people sign up for Adwords the bigger the shifts in the index. Every month I read messages from countless webmasters scrambling around trying to change their site because it loses most of its traffic. It's pointless, next month the algo will change again. You will either go up or down again regardless of whether you make any changes or not. You may as well sit still rather than chase your tail. Take up meditation and focus on your breathing rather than the PR meter in your toolbar.
In terms of why people dont switch to another search engine I think a lot of people have become so used to searching Google that if they can't find the info they are looking for they assume it doesnt exist on the Internet - of course those of us who cannot find our own sites in the top 100 when we type in their own unique site title know otherwise.
Ever since Google's index broke the 1 billion page mark, people have looked upon the size of Google's index in awe as the all-inclusive index. If only they realised they were actually only searching a subsection of it which excludes hundreds of thousands of artificially blocked sites, they might be tempted to switch to another search engine but then MSN's and Yahoo's indexes might be even smaller than Google's unpenalised unsandboxed index.
Normally a company with Google's degree of monopoly power would be heavily regulated by governments and it should be. OK you could argue that Google owns its own index and therefore should be able to decide who is in it and who gets excluded.
But for most people their search engine of choice is effectively 'the Internet' since it is the gateway to all sites on the Internet they are likely to find. Therefore it is not in the public's interest that an unaccountable profit driven corporation determine which sites the public can and cannot visit.
It is also not in the economy's interest that a search engine index like Google's is so volatile. It is absurd that sites can go from number 1 to not even in the top 1000 and vice versa. It's bad for businesses to have such unpredictable traffic levels. Hundreds of thousands of people have invested years building up their sites and their businesses only to see their traffic levels fluctuating erratically while Google play games with their algorithm, making it super-volatile to pressurise more webmasters into relying on steady traffic from Adwords.
By removing the tags I'm not losing anything essential, and keeping it simple never hurt. I agree it may not help me get to No 1 in the serps, but I'm much more interested in getting my traffic back, and once it's back ensuring it doiesn't disappear again.
I don't really see any point in sitting around. I did that the last time, and eventually my traffic returned. But it disappeared again, so I was no further forward.
You talk about "our insight" as if this was a given, but what you say does not correlate with my perception. My site does not suffer from adsense scrapers nor from a glitchy algo. It is more likely being hit by some sort of anti-spam filter. But instead of just blaming Google, I am trying to understand what is giving my site a problem, so that if I ever get my traffic back I am not going to lose it again.
LOL, i have an industry site that used to enjoy top positions for thousands of trade related words on google for more than 7 years now. The site lost all its google referals at the beginning of the bourbon update and regain back the traffic 2 weeks ago plus approx 20%. On Thursday last week it again lost all it's google traffic (up to today's date) and when i do a search for the unique domain name i see 10 scarpers linking to me appearing right above me with snippets from my pages. 3 out of these scrappers no longer exist and generate a 404 when you click them from the SERPs, they all have a cache page 5-7 months old......if this is not glitchy then i don’t know what is.
I have another site with hijacked pages. I do a search for this unique domain name and i get dozens of crappy sites linking to me with snippets from my site. A couple of theses sites have my own page appearing when you click their cache link (hijack problem)......if this is not glitchy then i don't know what is.
You are entitled to believe what you want to believe...I’m just trying to save you the time and frustration.......do with this info what you like…..your time is better spent on the other engine. The problem most likely has nothing to do with your site and everything to do with Google’s bad state of affairs.
[edited by: max_mm at 2:01 pm (utc) on July 6, 2005]
Harry, EVERYONE is TRYING to "understand", but no one CAN. And, if your traffic does comes back (and I hope it does), you can unfortunately bet on it that you WILL lose your traffic AGAIN!
G IS to blame here! If you have read all of the posts as you say you have, then you should have seen all the posts stating G engineers have looked at sites that have been dumped and have said things like "no reason why your site should have been affected"! So, those victimized by this are certainly not to blame, so whom else does that leave? Google. For it is they that are harming totally innocent websites which have no business nor reason of being harmed in the first place!
We are all in the same boat here, (including yourself because you say you've been harmed). Because of this, this creates very emotional responses and understandably so; very emotional people. We are not "Vulcans". You have to accept that some are just not going to be as unemotional about it as you. Perhaps you niche doesn't depend on SERP's*, but with most of us here that is not the case (*and please let's NOT GET INTO the beated to death discussion again about "other marketing areas", I will not go there again ;) ), and it is those of us that are in the process of having our businesses destroyed and more because of all this that ARE going to be rather emotional about it. (And what "arthurdaley" just said is great).
Your attitude is very healthy, I wish I had it for I would certainly be healthier! Unfortunately, attitude plays little part in the big picture of this, and the bottom line is the same for all here: we've been seriously negatively affected and know not what to do about it, and, it WILL happen again.
Thanks Clint, but I'm not actually suggesting KW density is the problem. I just think it's a possibility that having so much alt and title tag text, although completely legitimate, it may exceed the value that Google expects as a norm and so trigger a filter. After all Alt tags, etc., are a good way of keyword stuffing. Checking the percentage of non-displayed text against displayed text would be a very simple thing for Google to do.
By removing the tags I'm not losing anything essential, and keeping it simple never hurt. I agree it may not help me get to No 1 in the serps, but I'm much more interested in getting my traffic back, and once it's back ensuring it doesn't disappear again.I don't really see any point in sitting around. I did that the last time, and eventually my traffic returned. But it disappeared again, so I was no further forward.
Sorry, sounded like you thought it may be related to too many dupe key phrases...and it still does! ;) I think "Keyword stuffing" and too many dupe keyword phrases are the same thing. You could be losing something "essential" by removing them, could be, but maybe not. That's another dilemma. You'd of course be losing the ability for blind users to "see" images, but it could also affect you in SE's--either negatively OR positively. Another dilemma. ;) At any rate, like I said if G or any SE for that matter no longer looks at the alt or title tags, it's a moot point. Maybe someone can clear that up.
I referenced the WebmasterWorld URL thread where KW density was mentioned because that tool checks alt tags as part of the overall KWD on a page, and in one of my posts I compared the top SERP's KWD and saw 0% on up to over 12% in the #1 spots for different searches. I did more tests after that and found 25% in the #1 spot as well. So, from what I've at least seen, there doesn't seem to me a lot that can be read into KWD and SERP's.
Are Yahoo and MSN really gaining ground following Bourbon?
Are there any reliable figures out there?
Helleborine,
I have no traffic from Google since Bourbon, and it seems that my traffic is increasing everyday from Yahoo and MSN.
Seriously though, it is because of ad revenue that the rankings are butchered rather than tweaked.
Big G gains twiceover: business has to revert to spending more money on adwords to appear on SERPs (on the right-hand side), and adsense scapers replacing the previous results provide further revenue for G when unsuspecting Googlites click on the results, realise they are sh1te and then click on the ads which are not.
Hmmm, good business strategy that? I think it's very short-termist.
Methinks G is going down the very road that previous top SEs went down some years ago and where did they end up?
Greed is Good. Sorry, getting mixed up. Do no evil.
You are referring to the downfall of a Altavista, purposely spammed into oblivion a number of years ago.
I have an honest question.
Could ill-will towards Google foster similar activity from webmasters against it? Is G resistant to the sort of attack Altavista experienced in the past? Or is it vulnerable in a different way, but that could be exploited? Are scrapers ruining G on purpose?
Yep! That's why you need TWO #@$%&@! identical content websites! Block all bots except G from one, then block G from the one that the other sites like! Then you have experiment over and over again with the G only site! It's more than sad, it's pathetic.
When I say "sites" I don't necessarily mean two domains, but you can create a "G" folder on your domain and block all bots to it except G bot, then block G from your other pages. Copy ALL of your content to that G folder the exact same way it appears now. Then you'll have www.mydomain.com/g/index.html for your homepage and so on for G. I have no idea if that would even work to "appease the G bot"....but like I've said before, desperate times call for desperate measures.
Did all of your traffic go away or just stuff you can isolate to particular group of pages.
There was a highly placed site in a very technical niche that went south and it was also a multilanguage site. I'm making an assumption that the site in your profile is the one in question.
I actually had a competitor do this. They replaced their index page with a bunch of garbage for about 4 days and then reshuffled their index page back in. Site went to 25 in the rankings after sitting at 225 for over a month. It was a casualty of Bourbon and the previous rank was 25. That’s a big gamble when you try things like that.
I am also spotting quite a few things that indicate Google is having a lot of indexing problems. What’s funny to me is Google is manipulating those rankings as much as top spammers do to make money. You could reshuffle those rankings continuously in any category and only webmasters would raise cain. As long as they leave what they have deemed authorities alone they’ll do with the rest as they please.
We could put a cute banner out saying,
Google user won`t find this page, better use Yahoo or MSN.
Yes, it's the site in my profile. Almost all Google.com and Google.co.uk traffic disappeared (about 60% of my traffic), and its across all pages. However I still get many referrals from Google imgres. The little traffic I get from Google search includes both English and Chinese pages.
The pattern is the same as when the traffic first disappeared at the end of March. It came back with Bourbon on about 25 May, and then fell like a stone again on 16 June.
A multilanguage site, eh? Something else for me to worry about. :)
Work on scoring high rankings at Y and MSN for competitive search terms. It's what I've focused on without worrying in the least about my rankings at G over the past year, and I'm making more and more money now. Ignoring Google will free your mind! Just pick the right keywords and you'll get the traffic from the other 2 big boys.
Just sticky me.
First, I was a web site owner who's site was clobbered on June 16th.
Basically I used to show up for thousands of industry related terms on the first page.. now I'm out of the serps for most, and out of the top 100 for my main search phrases.. well, so I thought.
My main search terms are something like "Blue Widgets".. That's what I optimize my pages for. That's what I'm ranked out of the top 100 for, though I used to be first page. Now, if I reverse the keywords "Widgets Blue", I show up on the first page. I've tried this with a number of my main search phrases and it's common throughout. So it appears as though I'm being penalized specifically for those search phrases, not the site as a whole.
I'd be curious to hear what others might have to say about this.
it seems to me that the most sensible action is to make sure the site is squeaky clean
And what in the world does "squeaky clean" mean?
How clean is clean enough?
How about this?
--no alt or title tags
--no h1s, h2s, h3s, etc.
--no meta tags whatsoever
--no attempted use of popular keywords, just write the first thing that comes to mind, even if obscure
--no outbound links
--no inbound links
--no Adsense, no affiliate ads or links of any kind
--black text on white background
--text all the same size, large, but not too large
--no using divs to reposition the most important text first, the boilerplate last in the document flow
--and so on...
Leech the site of all SEO, intentional or otherwise.
Would Google like my "squeaky clean" site then, do you think?
I agree, I think a mass letter-writing campaign in the US to congressmen and senators may be in order.
Kurtpdx, I've noticed the EXACT same thing. I think they may be doing a different algo on top (or top money) search terms.
Well folks, looks like I'm outta here, after 10 years doing this SEO thing for the same company. Despite being on top of G for as long as G has been in existance, all our Google index cleanup effort over the last month, and beating my brain over what could have suddenly changed, just as we thought things were about to turn around, we dropped yet another 100% just last night in major keywords, on top of the two prior drops. Another employee and I had lunch with the boss today and because of the massive, widespread drops in G rank and resultant drop in clickthru and recent, as well as, expected future declines in paid client advertising revenue the company can no longer afford our salaries anymore, so we've been "laid off" (yeah, you all know what that REALLY means longterm :). As I told him, I think I've done everything that I or anyone can possibly do to make the site SE friendly, and that the rest is up to G to catch up on and fix. I don't blame my boss, In fact I'm surprised he held out as long as he did considering July 4th weekend would normally have been the 2nd largest peak period of the year for our site and industry and we were pretty much out-of-play for all of it. He needs to think about the content writers, other employees and the company as a whole as well as the 100 or so clients who rely (in some cases, solely) on the publication's site for internet exposure in their niche. If the publication ends up having to close down altogether, many of those companies will probably have to fold or turn to the single big corporate competitor (who seems to be guaranteed all three top positions (under different domains) for our niche these days by G, except uh-oh, THEY don't run Adsense, oh darn) and pay an arm and a leg for far less exposure. If anything, I DO blame G for (as usual) putting out a faulty product, before it was properly debugged and causing months of turmoil and downtime for whole industries. I'm sure I'm not the first or only casualty of their f*@#$-up.
The site still has way better Y and MSN rankings than they ever had on G, but most advertisers and their advertising agents, only seem to watch G rankings these days. In online publishing, it's not about selling your own stuff, just as in print media, visibility/circulation/readers is the key and without it you don't get advertisers. It's rather futile to PAY people (via PPC) to find and read your publication (although we do anyway on a very limited basis) when you're already paying to create it and offering the most free, accurate and up to date info there is anywhere (esepecially compared to the supposed "authority" corporate sites G seems to prefer, who just don't care about the readers or their advertisers), and then charging the lowest rate in the industry to advertise in it, so that more can benefit from it from both sides.
I'll probably be going back to C programming full time (almost same pay, far less stress :), so I won't have much time to work in the internet SEO area anymore, or to stop in to the forum. I suppose G and Adsense will miss my daily spam reports, but oh well, THEY can afford to PAY someone to clean up their db. But if things turn around before TOO long, I may get "un-laid-off". But I'm not holding my breath for or expecting anything good to come out of G anymore.
Good Luck All... you'll need it.
See Ya'!
Mike
Indeed I have posted this before... Google's market share indicates a monopoly and as such they would normally be regulated. But the government dare not stick it's fingers into the internet because the can of worms it would open trying to create regulations would certainly be worse than the current situation Google proliferates. Google will take care of themselves and in time they will lose market share like other engines before them. As mentioned here previously, focuses are already shifting to search engines that are accountable. And I dont mean to share holders only. Google has share holders to please now... does that make it a relevant source of information or a marketing entity? The later without a doubt. The alternative search engines are the same.
What will the government do? My guess is they will create a search engine for the "people" and monopolize the cash for themsleves LOL. That's how you regulate internet search traffic offer a regulated alternative that can be easily controlled.
This is all speculation but it's just something to make you go hmmmmmmmmmm....
