Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
If you run a web directory, feel free to post your experience here.
I am much more intrigued that the sites which no longer appear anywhere in the serps still have upto date cache. Anyone familiar with the banning process know if this is normal.
But I have been in contact with a couple of webmasters and have seen some very high quality sites that have been dropped, mine included.
I don't think anybody is disputing that. (I acknowledged that possibility in my post, when I talked about collateral damage.)
For what it's worth, my own site lost 75-90% of its Google referrals for two months this spring, so I sympathize with owners of human-edited sites who have been whacked by the latest filter or mini-update.
[edited by: europeforvisitors at 5:11 pm (utc) on July 30, 2005]
"For the rest of you that had directories hit, do you still rank well on these ips 66.102.9.104/99"
My banned directory does not show on these DCs, nor any Google DC.
I started a directory site last month. very few entries ( less than 100 ).
it does not have good positions in google but is simply indexed.
but - in last pr update - its PR4 now ..
"For the rest of you that had directories hit, do you still rank well on these ips 66.102.9.104/99"
I bet those 2 data centers will efect all the other data centers by next week ,that's why Google keeps them one week now without any change.
Don't put your hope too high because those seems like old data. It was before google went mad, decide to index pages on my site that have not been touched for half a year, choke on it and impose a penalty on my site.
Does anyone know what it means when I cannot get pass the first twenty results using site: command?
What happened to my directory is exactly what happened to bluefind, when it was hit. I don't know what bluefind has done to get nuked from google index but the symptoms of being nuked were the same; PR0, no where for its company name, still cached in google, site: does not return any results.
If bluefind was nuked for duplication content or being involved in buying/selling links according to PR, why sevenseek (bluefind's clone in my openion and many other webmasters openion) wasnt nuked?
Thoughts?
Could also be just a problem google is having. One persons site was nuked a couple days ago and is now back.
Many of the sites affected seem to have automated link exchange directories. These are often used to deliberately boost link popularity and rank.
Bluefind has been back in google index but some symptoms of banning still exist. It's PR0, ranked 50~60 for "bluefind", has low number of indexed, etc..
If it's back though the obvious guilt of being involved in selling links according to PR, and duplication content, then hopefully mine will be back :)
[edit] oh, in an ideal world of course! [/edit]
See message #6:
[webmasterworld.com...]
"Because we have done some massive advertising, including buying links and banners from Internet.com and various other high PageRank, webmaster related sites, bluefind now boasts a very strong PR8."
"....and now we have a very weak & penalized site. Glad we could milk all those webmasters for a few months. We still made our money back from all the RX and gambling, and affiliate sites who fell all over themselves to hand us $40 a pop."
You watch, these guys will be at it again. If you think about it, they probably made a killing. Spend $40k or so buying links from high PR sites....get a few shills to rant about how they love your directory at this forum or that....and make $200-$300k before the PageRank rug gets pulled out from under you. Heck, they only needed 5000 or so suckers to fall for it....I'm sure they got at least that.
A lot of the people here who have been reporting that they have a site that has recently been delisted are also mentioning that they have multiple sites, and some that are on a separate sub domain (my site does this too).
We know that GoogleGuy said that they were about to implement something that would help alleviate the scraper site problems.
When I was at the WW conference in New Orleans, I overheard one of the engineers talking about how hard of a time they were having in correctly identifying scraper sites without mis-labeling legit sites. One of the webmasters spoke up and recommended that they check each page for any hyper links that are labeled "Home" and that point to a domain other than the domain that the pages was found on. Apparently this guy had one of his sites copied, and the person that copied the site never bothered to change the link to the legitimate home page. The engineer quickly pulled out his notepad and wrote down this idea.
Some of my sites have a "Home" link on a sub-domain that points to the SLD, in other words dir.domain.com has a link that says "Home" and points to domain.com. The one site of mine that was delisted has a graphic with alt text of "Home", and points to the main domain name. The top domain and the sub-domain are also hosted on two separate servers, using 2 differeint IP addresses. Is it possible that this is a heavily-weighted factor in determining which sites get delisted?
Can anyone else verify that they do or do not have similar linking on a site that was delisted?
Dont think Bluefind was ever totally removed from the serps. Bluefind IMO is suffering from a Canonical url problem more than anything.
I'm running this directory from 1998 and my content is all human edited, I personally review sites and links are not direct by redirected by a cgi I use to track numbers of hits.
Since 22 July referrals from google decreased causing lost of 40% of incoming traffic.
I'm also running adsense. I joined adwards for a couple of months, last winter.
My domain is always on G, and googlebot is still crawling my site in these days. My PR is unchanged 5/10.
Is so sad to see all the hard work of the last years be destroyed in a sigle day.
Dont think Bluefind was ever totally removed from the serps. Bluefind IMO is suffering from a Canonical url problem more than anything.
They are in the SERPs, but the homepage has PR0 which indicates a penalty, not just a filter. Another problem they have--which may also be the case for many directories that were banned at 28/7--is that many of their categories just show empty pages, only linking back to the homepage. Google might have interpreted this as an artifical way to boost PR.
Did any of the directories that were banned three days ago have a large number of empty pages, to be filled in the future?
I know - still think Bluefind is a canonical url problem though.
Did any of the directories that were banned three days ago have a large number of empty pages, to be filled in the future?
Not mine
I know - still think Bluefind is a canonical url problem though.
Maybe now it is. But when it was completely banned, it was a real ban; PR0 with no single page shown in serps, bluh bluh bluh. I had my notes written then.
I'm newbbie in this forum, I own about 25 directories in different languages PR7 to PR5. Just one, the one with more traffic (about 8000 in alexa) has been penalized.
Day after day i'm less afraid about what Google do. Traffic on my websites is 95% from other Search Engines and from users coming back to my websites. I see Google giving every day worst results at searches, more and more spam websites or websites with very old and obsolete content at first positions there.
Why webmasters still looking at Google as the internet God?
Webmasters did place Google where it is and webmasters can remove when we want.
It is not the standard: [google.com...]
You might be thinking of the URL remove console and the Add URL page. I have never seen a re-inclusion automation as I believe you must use google support or email Google's webmaster addy with 'reinclusion request' in the subject.
Day after day i'm less afraid about what Google do. Traffic on my websites is 95% from other Search Engines and from users coming back to my websites. I see Google giving every day worst results at searches, more and more spam websites or websites with very old and obsolete content at first positions there.
Why webmasters still looking at Google as the internet God?
Webmasters did place Google where it is and webmasters can remove when we want.
you're a special case. Most of the webmasters receive 60~80% of their searching engine traffic from google, and that's normal as 60~80% of internet searches are being done using google.
also mentioning that they have multiple sites
Yep, seeing more and more of that whether the people first admit to it or not. Multiple sites/network using same or similar content or sites using other duplicate content such as feeds, dmoz content, or have "link" directories. The link directories could be unimportant except for the quality issues could identify them as scraper sites. I have yet to see one that does not fit into one of the above (not saying they are not out there).
[edited by: The_Contractor at 12:53 pm (utc) on July 31, 2005]
The best and most loyal return users are the forum participants and the community which has grown around that. But real content pageviews come from search engines, and as Google being the natural search engine for most Internet users, it's hard to discount them.
Return visitors are not necessarily where the money is, as they are here for one thing and eventually become blind to advertisements.
OFFTOPIC:
Scanning through logs since this whole thing occured, most are Yahoo! referrals and I have found that there are a lot more Yahoo! users with the Alexa toolbar installed that Google users. Just an observation.
ONTOPIC:
Google is still THE defacto search engine. I've read that Google has 52% of the US search market, but the US is so very small compared to other countries where I would believe it's much higher.
This loss of Google traffic is going to kill a lot of us. Let's just put it that way.
I don't hink that Google manages more than 50%. In fact some competitors working with Google only have not better Alexa positions as I have in similar websites not working with Google.
I believe you would be wrong. Last believable estimated numbers I read, Google is serving 68% of all searches through it's domains and partners. I guess it may depend on what part of the world you live in. I'm sure certain areas could be 40% while others could be 80%.
Alexa, you're joking right? Alexa's numbers can be manipulated so easily it's a joke.
I still thinking that work for Google is a big mistake.
Arent we all?
But still you cannot ignore the largest source of free traffic. I optimise for google, I care about google, I panic when google bans me (as the case here).. But when there will be another empire who would care for google? got the idea?
