17 Aug - restored pre-27 June positions (mostly)

Really though, I took a hit on one of my decent $ phrases (#1 to the top of the 2nd page, so not too serious), but some of the stuff that is ahead of me now is questionable [doorway page type content seems to be thriving].

Cygnus

Our sites have a lot of pages with mostly pictures (from the Taj Mahal, Kew Gardens, St Pauls Cathedral, etc), but with only small amounts of text with each picture. And we had an AdSense ad at the top of each page. So perhaps G thought we were an MFA site...

My traffic was down by 30% - 40% after 27 June, and has now recovered today to being down only around 15% - 20% (initial estimate).

Perhaps the 27 June update hit G revenues too hard, and they're reversed some of what they did? (Black box physics, sigh)

The other one, that is updated daily, and has 500+ unique baklinks (over the course of 8 years) is still MIA. However, indexing has picked up and now I see less supps there. It could be becuase I have gotten some decent PR5 and 6 links in the last two months. Also, the homepage is indexed daily. I find this odd because with all those links, I still can't get indexed properly. What do I need, a link from whitehouse.gov's homepage?
I will remove adsense too, just in case. Simply not worth taking the chance. I am updating the site daily, only not to have enough people see it.

However related pages appear in top 10 SERPS but not the more specific page that actually is focused to the keyword phrase....very odd indeed.

no adsense on page.

not 100% sure I am explaining this well.

I have now dissapeared from results 100%. Wow.. for those spam/affiliate/link farm sites that have moved up ahead of me in my niche.. I wish to congratulate each and every one of you. Good Job!

............

More discussion also at: [webmasterworld.com ]

In his blog, Matt Cutts also confirms a data refresh happened.

[edited by: Frederic1 at 11:49 pm (utc) on Aug. 17, 2006]

Zero recovery from June 27. We are an original content site, 5PR, and nofollow affiliate link section. All pages are indexed in Google, and NOT one keyword referral for any since 6/27. Used to be top.

C

As far as we can tell, we're legit content with nothing spammy aimed at adsense- just original content for real readers.

The one possible probelm I can see are affiliate links, like CJ and Linkshare. They are nofollow and hand picked by us-- gut feeling that old Googlemeister sees these as skimping profits from adsense and in turn, refuses to acknowledge referrals.

Any thoughts on sites with affiliate links and then ignoring since June 27 and jagger before that?

I made no changes to my site during from 6/27 to 8/17.

My site has been online since 1999.

I've never run adsense ads on my site. However, I do have a lot of MFA pages linking back to me as a result of syndicating a bunch of articles I wrote. On the other hand I have a lot of high quality links coming in.

I suspect that those of us who got hit, got caught in some sort of plan to supress the rankings of junky MFA pages.

Right around late June, Google also made major changes to how publishers get charged for Adwords. Many people's adwords bids got jacked up by a factor of 10 or more. The net conclusion by people who have analyzed this is that Google was punishing certain types of adwords landing pages that in Google's opinion gave a lower quality user experience.

It certainly seems plausible that they did a two-pronged attack to improve the adwords/adsense user experience.

I still can't figure out what specifically though was tweaked on June 27, and then tweaked back on August 17th...

Primary site has been getting referrals directed to my webhost IIS address since late May, but it's really ramped up over the last couple of weeks, and it's really annoying.

Last time I saw this problem was years ago, and I was finally able to get it retified with a direct email. You'd think they could figure out the difference between a DN and host datacentre url.

Current algo? IMO it's a pretty mixed bag.

Overall ref.s are steady, still around historic levels, looks like localisation has been tightened up again, and noticed plurals/stemming now in use in titles and description (on my test and genuine searches anyway).

D/base/directory style sites, (in my industry at least) appear to be given the guernsey.

One of my regular control searches has *all* directory/d/base style urls/sites in top 40 results bar 1 result for an individual business, used to be much more mixed results. This has affected some of my pages adversely, improved others marginally. IMO it's not what people are looking for in my vertical market when they do a search.

But <shrug> waddya gonna do? Seen it all before, yawn .... stretch ....

Be interesting to see how it all shakes out.

Hooroo
JP

So I suspect the "Publicly Traded, revenue and profit-conscious, falling share price" Google decided NOT to have such a strong wall between "editorial" and "advertising" divisions...

Thus, we're back to the good-old (for Google) revenue generating model (which may antagonise some advertisers).

I suggest you all read this article which I think sums up the dilema that Google has...

[fool.com...]

I suggest you all read this article which I think sums up the dilema that Google has...

[fool.com...]
This was a very good article and really does peg a lot of the problems we have been discussing, which is really amazing for a non-web geek publication. The reporter really did their homework.

[webmasterworld.com...]