June 27th, August 17th, What's happening?

Pages are vanishing and reappearing -- even whole sites

[DeROK]

< a continued discussion from these threads:
[webmasterworld.com...]
[webmasterworld.com...]
[webmasterworld.com...]
[webmasterworld.com...] >

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Hey everyone,

I've been reading through the June 27th/August 17th threads, and I was wondering if somebody could make it more clear as to what's actually going on?

Like many of you on the board, my site got trashed in the SERPs on June 27th only to recover a month later. At the time, I thought I had incurred a penalty and went through painstaking detail to remove even the most minute possible violations. I thought that correcting those problems was the reason that I recovered.

So needless to say, I was pretty upset when I got trashed again around the 17th when I knew my site was in total compliance with Google's guidelines. After visiting this forum, I now see that I was not the only one who has been experiencing this type of problem.

Here are my questions. If any of you can shed some light on these, I would really appreciate it.

1. Why is this happening? It seems like some kind of update, but why are certain sites getting trashed when others are standing firm?

2. Can I expect a recovery similar to the one I had in July?

3. Is there anything I can do to fix this, or am I completely at the mercy of Google on this one?

Thanks for you time!

[edited by: tedster at 6:25 am (utc) on Aug. 22, 2006]

[Ride45]

g1smd,
Webmasters will always perceive "Going supplemental" as a penalty.
In the literal sense, it should not be a bad thing or penalty. Google is simply "cleaning house" and removing pages that are simply cluttering the main index, or just not needed in the main index because the content/pages are not unique enough.
I had over 40K pages in the main index and yeah I was always wondering why.. the 40K pages just didn't need to be there.
So the fact that the number has only been cut down to 3,500 pages in the main index with the others all going supplmenental is not a bad thing in my opinion.

Yes for me, the reality is a penalty - I no longer rank in the top 5 for competitive keywords where I had sat confortably for the last 3 years. Now I am on page 5 - I run an authority site, yet 4+ pages of sites rank higher than I - and it's been about 5 days (my panic threshold). So it so happens there is a penalty at the same time as going supplemental. Yet if I do all of your suggestions from the last 2 years than if all works, with one deep crawl, 40K pages should retrun back to the index and the penalty would be lifted and I would return back to top 5 in SERPS?

[g1smd]

Indeed, I agree with most of that: [webmasterworld.com...]

< discussion continues here: [webmasterworld.com...] >

[edited by: tedster at 3:40 am (utc) on Aug. 29, 2006]