Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
OK, so after feeling really good to get our site back in order after the 27th of June "data refresh" I come back from holiday and find its all gone Pete Tong again.
The site: tool is NOT SHOWING OUR HOME PAGE FIRST. AGAIN!
Consequently, the home page is not showing in the serps. Again. Grrrrr....
Another data refresh required please Google. You're killing me.
[edited by: tedster at 6:17 am (utc) on Aug. 30, 2006]
On 8/17/06, the same SERP changes hit us again. Note: we were not affected at all by any of the other updates this year. None of our competitors with very similar sites were affected and I'm tracking 15 of them.
We're not doing anything outside of the Google guidelines. With regard to links, if anything we don't have enough of them and have zero from blogs, link sites, etc.
So I'm sitting here really scratching my head as I can't think of anything to change/fix. I wish we had the ability to run a poll on this forum as I'd like to compare notes with others. One question keeps coming up around our office though...
How many of the sites affected negatively on 8/17/06 are making good money from adsense? We have thousands of pages with adsense and each time we've been hit it's been at our peak revenue time for the year. We dropped from $200/day to $95 overnight -- OUCH!
Would love to know if you were hit on 8/17/06 and whether you're a big adsense earner as well. Anything else you can tell me would be appreciated.
Ducki
My problem was with:
Duplicated content
BL's anchor text focalized on few keywords
Mass upload of pages
Un-natural link growth
Hope it can help
Have you been adding content? Google could be looking that your pages are a bit stale.
Yes, google has changed a bit but remember the internet in general changes daily. Its growing.
[edited by: trinorthlighting at 2:04 pm (utc) on Aug. 28, 2006]
Make sure that every page links back to http://www.domain.com/ in exactly that format.
Another thing you can do, and this seems to help is to sign up for google alerts. Have google email you anything with your domain names.
thanks for the heads up on that .. busted to scrapers today alone and found a page that was orphaned on our site. Wish this was part of google sitemaps. That would be very nice. :)
Another thing you can do, and this seems to help is to sign up for google alerts. Have google email you anything with your domain names. Every day we recieve an email from google and we find the scrapers sites that are getting indexed in google. Sometimes they scrape our content and do a sneaky redirect using our titles and meta data and redirect to their page. As soon as we see it we report it as spam to google. Most of the time google takes care of it.
It was the only site of 30 that tanked 27 july.
Also the only site that had affilaite products, with no work done to about duplciate content.
I removed the pages 2 weeks ago
rnakings returned.
I think july 27 was a duplicate content filter dial turn up.
I don't run adsense and never have. My pages are dynamic and most all pages add new content every three days. I have over 10,000 link backs to my index page from individual sites with reciprocal links to us. I for the life of me can't find similarities for the sites that were affected.
Sometimes they do, just report it thats all you can really do. We make it a point to report the ones who scrape our title and meta data and do the sneaky 301 redirect. Google seems to kill those as soon as we report them.
Keep in mind though, if you use adwords your ad will show up on a lot of sites, if you do not like the site it is showing up on, exclude it in your adwords account.
instead of writing a reply post to this thread i can place just a "ditto" to your message. i am also in the same condition.
worried
Hold that data refresh Google.
We were deep crawled yesterday, and as of this morning we're back to page one..
Maybe this is a coincidence, but we were bumped down to page 4 as of Aug 17 with what appeared to be a filter of sorts and now all looks good again, so I'll keep my fingers crossed. Thanks for the advice.
Can anyone provide a checklist of Google over-optimization bugaboos?
I've done my best to create my sites for my readers, and now here he is saying that we're probably over-optimized.
I just wish Matt would give us a bit more direction.
The sites that replaced my top keyword positions are definitely keyword spamming and they are still listed.
Our rankings dropped on August 17th.
Here was what we found / guess at what happened.
One of our sites, is a phpBB site that has some Mod Rewrites to simplify the URLs. Apparently, Google was capturing the Mod Rewrite and the "regular way" to visit every post. We have 15000 posts on or forums, BUT Google was reporting almost double that. It looked like we got hit with a duplicate penalty. Also, due to a PHP error, all pages had the exact same meta description. The REAL strange thing, is that a different/related site on the same server, was also penalized.
We have since removed the meta desciption, updated the Robots.txt file, to tell Google to NOT double index, and the pages have dropped considerably. We added a site map, so Google, would find the "right URLs".
We are expecting the site(s) to recover over the next few days, since we "fixed" the duplicate penalty (almost 2 weeks ago, we fixed and we are seeing pages drop from Google index)
Also, can we assume, that when we do a "site" command, that after we no longer see the message below, that the duplicate penalty has been resolved.
In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the XX already displayed.
If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.
It seems there is a lot of discussion about August 17th and other sites and many were hit.
