Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
If you run a web directory, feel free to post your experience here.
It's easy enough for me to find them with whois/IP. What would make you think that SE's wouldn't find them? How does Yahoo treat them?
i have had a human-maintained niche directory site since 1999. always ranked well until recently. site is not gone from index.. just dropped several pages. i tend to think that Google is sincerely working to try and eliminate the made for adsense scrapers.. and in doing so some legit directories are getting filtered/banned. if this is the case, i have every confidence that legit directory sites will be back in the mix.
let's just be a little patient with them.
they most likely are doing something that is in all (honest and legit) webmaster's best interest.
GoogleGuy?
thank you
[edited by: jgbmarc at 6:05 pm (utc) on July 29, 2005]
I'm getting a trickle of traffic from international google domains, but nothing from google.com. My site is starting to disappear completely from data centers. I see one set of ips that my site is still ranking well on. For the rest of you that had directories hit, do you still rank well on these ips 66.102.9.104/99
i wonder what's up with those DCs
at least in our case not true. Meta Tag contains directory and site is listed fairly on top of a www.google.com/alpha/Top directory with a PR above 4
one of my sites is directory - each page is SEO'd (in a very minor kind of way - strictly white-hat) for the subject it represents. All sites are hand-reviewed with unique descriptions of sites linked - but --- it is possible that someone could look at it and think it is a scraper site (it isn't at all but you can't always tell what other people see).
So far had no problems - G referrals and placements all same as ever. A great number of the pages still come up top in SERPs for the terms I target. Meta tags on some pages contain the word directory - not seen any adverse effects (....so far). I use description, keywords etc meta tags.
Software is bespoke by me....All pages are static .html generated from a db when new links are approved.
I do run adsense on a large number of the pages.
Site has been up and running on current domain since '98 - was running on a different domain before this.
There is no question of the following.
If you were in the bunch of sites hit hard on June 16th (or so) you again rank well on most datacenters but don't on the two referenced earlier.
If you were hit hard on July 22nd, you don't rank well right now except on those two datacenters where you still do fine.
I also note that in the current results on most datacenters that my pages now rank almost exactly where they did on June 16th. If a page didn't rank well on June 16th, it doesn't now either. If a page got indexed for the first time since June 16th or greatly improved its ranking since June 16th, it doesn't rank well right now, except for on those two datacenters.
Conclusion... some type of rollback to June 16th for all but the two datacenters mentioned in the earllier post.
Does anyone have a page that they created post june 16th that is ranking well?
---- Google filter/ban any site that have the term "directory" in meta tags ---
at least in our case not true. Meta Tag contains directory and site is listed fairly on top of a www.google.com/alpha/Top directory with a PR above 4
My wrong theory. Many major directories contains the term "directory" in their meta keywords tag and rank on top <snip>.
[edited by: lawman at 6:04 pm (utc) on July 31, 2005]
[edit reason] No URL Drops Please [/edit]
one of my sites is directory - each page is SEO'd (in a very minor kind of way - strictly white-hat) for the subject it represents. All sites are hand-reviewed with unique descriptions of sites linked - but --- it is possible that someone could look at it and think it is a scraper site (it isn't at all but you can't always tell what other people see).So far had no problems - G referrals and placements all same as ever. A great number of the pages still come up top in SERPs for the terms I target. Meta tags on some pages contain the word directory - not seen any adverse effects (....so far). I use description, keywords etc meta tags.
Software is bespoke by me....All pages are static .html generated from a db when new links are approved.
I do run adsense on a large number of the pages.
Site has been up and running on current domain since '98 - was running on a different domain before this.
My nuked directory has the very same specification but it was founded march 2004. Please sticky me your website url.
At least I hope tomorrow we are the same. :)
Does anyone have a page that they created post june 16th that is ranking well?
If you consider #6 out of 4.5mil on a competitive query ranking well, then, yes.
Justin
Virtually everyone that was hurt on June 16th was back in full force on July 22nd. Virtually everyone who was hurt on July 22nd are back to their June 16th pages and serps. For those that weren't hurt either time, everything stayed the same. Thus, there was some type of "rollback" (for lack of a better word) for some of us which helped some and hurt some, but it obviously didn't apply to everyone.
BUT- the June 15th rankings that I was thrilled with are now back on the two datacenters with the same exact serps for me (and the sites around me) that mahoogle mentions in post #130 [66.102.9.104/99]...
there's no date or anything else associated with the link and snippet only for example:
LINK HERE
Snippet here...it.html - 27k - Cached - Similar pages
does that mean anything?
Regarding your snippet... there is nothing unusual about it as you would only see the date of the cache if it was last cahced within the past day or two. If you click on the cahced link you will see the date of your last cache. However, I can tell you that getting a fresh cache will not help you in this situation. I was hit July 22nd and the pages have been cached many times since with no help to the serps. But, for me and others hit on July 22nd, for the next few days after July 22nd, we all seemed to have reverted to vey old caches for a few days which have now corrected to current caches...
THANK YOU GOOGLE for checking into the matter after I inquired about the situation with an email... no need to reply as I have seen that you have been fair and made adjustments accordingly... Who could ask for anything more?!
Now to answer all the questions that you may have as best I can.
No, I did not receive any email from them concerning this matter, other than the one from Google AdSense team saying the would foward my email to their Customer Support team.
Yes I DID make a rather major change, but have no idea if that was helped me get back into Google's SERPs, if in fact my site stays in. The reason I say this is that I made the change at around 11PM my time, and then at Midnight it seems that Google has it pre-programmed to reinsert my pages (and probably some other publisher's web sites too - check your sites!)
What did I change? I juct observed what the Google Rep was looking at when he/she came to my site apparently in response to my inquiry. After examining the pages they went through, I concluded that a few of my reciprocal link pages were problematic, so I just deleted the entire reciprocal link directory I had (next I will probably have problems because I did that, but at least I'm back in Google!)
The problem was that I was using an automated script that peopble could submit their links for free, provided that they gave a link back to my site - the standard affair. It was template based, and I made various categories and seeded many of them initially with links to some sites that I liked, then over time other's added their own links. The problem (I think) was there were a few categories that I made, which nobody had posted any links to so that they remain virtually empty (except for one "house link" that I have on every page) and displayed 2 blocks of Google AdSense ads & a vertical row of Adlinks. Even though it was UNintentional... technically it WAS a violation of TOS.
So instead of going through and placing a few links in the empty categories, I chose to just delete the entire script (one of those $99 of the shelf ones).
The reson why> It was more hassle than it was worth because I still had to email people to tell them were their link was because the scripts navigation & auto response emails were hard to understand. Furthermore, I was always the one giving away "link strength" as none of the many people that asked for links ever had better Alexa rankings than mine. I caught quite a few never following through and providing the link back like they said they would. What NERVE some lower forms of web designers have!
And finally, that stupid reciprocal link directory with about 900 pages (data base driven and writes to static HTML - that's why I liked it) only received minimal traffic and even earned less AdSense $$$. I imagine because it was trafficked mostly by people looking for links to their new or faultering web site.
I apologize if I deleted links to anyone site that may be reading this message, but ultimately we must look out for ourselves first, before we can help others,
In closing, I hope this info helps & gives hope to others...
"All is right with the world..." so now I can actually SLEEP tonight... with one eye on Google SERPs to make sure my site sticks in there!
Do you see your site back for the first time since 22nd July on other DCs ... in addition to the two DCs that mahoogle mentions in post #130 [66.102.9.104/99]
Anybody have an estimate on when we will loose Adsense optimization? Our pages must still be indexed somehow since our adsense campaigns are relevant and not PSAs.
I am assuming that eventually we will loose that if Google stops spidering our page.
You'll probably loose a lot of visitors, but not Adsense optimization. The Adsense bot works independently from Googlebot.
