Aug 17 - and now Sept 15 changes. What happened?

[andreww]

After August 17 i notoced that my site receive huge amount of traffic from Google. But yesterday all traffic has gone as it was before August 17. Any thoughts about this?

What changed in Google algoritm?

[gehrlekrona]

<This post was moved from http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3083031.htm [webmasterworld.com]>

Yesterday, September 15, Google once again scrambled their data centers so now my site that got lost in June and was lost for 32 months but came back in the beginning of August, just vanished from the Google earth again. Pages have gone supplemental and old cached pages is now in favor in Google.
I do NOT understand WTH is going on with Google. Sites that has replaced mine ar site with stolen content, blog-like sites with stolen content, sites that for some reason have some of the keywords on their site but doesn't have anything to do with the subject.
if you were looking for a cat in NJ then there are sites with NJ repeated in the body hundreds of times, nothing about cats at all. One I saw has "scat" and NJ but WTH?

[edited by: tedster at 6:33 pm (utc) on Sep. 16, 2006]

[Soze]

<spliced from another thread>

Seeing a big traffic drop today. Did some searches, many results gone. Happened sometime during the night. Some spots remain, others are non existant.

[edited by: tedster at 7:06 pm (utc) on Sep. 16, 2006]

[Ma2T]

I have also dropped down low yesterday, to able 20% of what I was getting before.

for many terms I was on the first page high results, now im low I can even be found.

Now the crazy thing. I search for my own site name (also domain name) and im result #7!, directory sites and sites that link me are ranked higher, so something must be wrong big time.

Unfortunately it's my main source of income :(

All I can think it is, is duplicate meta tag content. Many of the words were similar in the keywords and description tags. I have removed these and have my fingers crossed hoping for the return next month.

Big Disaster. Any other words of advice? cheers

[AustrianOak]

Ha.. right on time. Mid April, June, July, August and now mid Sept for yes another disasterous google algo update. In all of my sectors, since April there has been one thing certain - spam sites off all kind that offer zero unique or useful info keep rising to the top.

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm..

[Ma2T]

AustrianOak, weird huh? surely thats exactly what google does not want, it's like the changes they are making are having the exact opposite effect of what they want :@

[walkman]

I have NO idea.
Same site with zero changes keeps going from #1 to #50 from update to update.

[Frederic1]

Nice update for me. I have reappeared on many keywords.

Moreover there is a pagerank update for some sites. I am 100% sure because one of my sites I launched 6 months ago has dropped from PR5 to PR4 on the following datacenters :
66.102.7.99
66.102.7.104
216.239.59.99
216.239.59.104
66.102.11.99
66.102.11.104
216.239.57.99
216.239.57.104
66.102.9.99
66.102.9.104
216.239.53.99
216.239.53.104

This is not a rollback because the site has never been pr4 since it launched.

[edited by: Frederic1 at 8:41 pm (utc) on Sep. 16, 2006]

[icedowl]

According to the site:www.example.com results, my sites have once again slid into supplemental hell. I have fixed every possible means of duplicates and URL errors, done the non-www to www 301 redirects, and there is nothing more that I'm aware of that I can do from my side.

The cache date for one of my sites is September 12, 2006 - just a few days ago. The description that appears on the SERP is old and looks like it might be from the DMOZ description. The page title is not what is currently in use either.

And just to make me feel worse, it was only a few days ago that results were looking very, very good. It's all gone to the dogs and I'm crying.

[unreviewed]

I hear you walkman, my site is older than Google, small niche product web site, it never had a problem with G until September 2005, it stayed out until late March 2006, it fell out again late June, came back August 17th and now gone again September 15.

[gehrlekrona]

From what I can see from my site is that old cached pages are back again, spam sites are on top in the results and if it is not spam sites then there is something else that doesn't even have anything to do with the query.
Like someone said, it seems that every time google tries to get rid of something, it turns out to be the opposite. I have reported tons of sites that have stolen content from my site, and the only thing that happens is that MY site gets penalized. I had one site that almost everything was stolen from and was on tons of spam sites and I reported most of them and the only thing that happened was that my site disappeared TOTALLY from Google and has never come back, not even for a site: command
I'll never ever report anything to google again! You probably say that it is all coincidetal but it sure doesn't seem that way to me!
I am hoping that GoogleGuy or someone else from Google is reading this thread so they know that they, once again, have screwed up peoples lives and have some damn good explanation to why this is happening over and over again!

[donovanh]

I'm having the same issue.. both my main sites dropped from the searches today.

It's reassuring to see that others have noticed a change also, hopefully this will not be permanent. One of the sites in question has been well placed for a couple of years until today.

[dataguy]

My main site has had two periods of traffic fluctuations before, but never anthing like this.

Last night traffic went from about a thousand visitors from Google per hour to about 10. My pages are still indexed, they have just lost their ranking. This web site has not changed substantially for months except that we have gotten choosier about the new content that we allowed (it's a user-created info site) and we have recently added RSS feeds and links for our users to easily add their articles to social bookmarking sites. This has greatly increased our backlinks, which makes us wonder if this caused some sort of penalty. (We had been gaining about 100 natural, unsolicited backlinks per day for years.)

We're also wondering if the fact that we've gotten pickier about the content we allow has gotten some of the SEO's mad at us and one of them did something to get us de-ranked? I don't even know if that's possible, but I do know that our competitors who allow all kinds of user created content (pharma, mortgage, gambling) have not been hurt.

[Trisha]

Real bad here too - and I've just spend the past few months building content and working on getting links. It didn't help at all. No idea what to do now.

[Aforum]

One of my sites actually rebounded from the June 27th drop and I'm showing nice results for keywords once again.

I know its probably temporary but its nice right now. I feel bad for all those that got hit again.

[djsteve007]

Wow. I just had my main site disappear as well.. was climbing, and had made the top 10! I have not done anything shady with promotions or anything, no redirect scripts.. it's just vanished.. it still shows that it is in the index, but I can not find it anywhere in the search results that were pulling traffic a couple days ago..

In fact.. google appears to only be showing about 15 pages deep of sites for several keywords right now.. I wonder if it is not done with it's internal updating, or has had a hiccup in the process?

Sites that have taken those positions seems to have a lot of foreign language links that are not relative content.. perhaps it is wieghing the older sites with the search rank...

I am soooo tired of trying to chas the google dragon, I am so tired in trying to do what other people are doing, I am soo tired of changing my sites, getting there, and then having it all change again.

Google says make your sites users friendly, if that was all it took my sites would be in flash.. and google would never see them.. aw well, maybe the update is not complete, and perhaps google should come up with a way of only making completed databses appear public so we could have fewer ulcers..

my 2 cents..

[wanderingmind]

On sep 15, my main site (down in rankings since August 17) made an appearance in some DCs, vanished from them on 16th, and reappeared on 17th. No noticeable difference in traffic.

[indias next no1]

wanderingmind : same here

[Chard]

I'm just learning to live with it. I don't believe it's within our power to influence serps any more. I'm sick to death of sleepless nights and Google, so I'm accepting lower traffic and a lower lifestyle to go with it. Even little things don't seem to make any difference. Good example is this NOODP stuff. I got sick of seeing my site displayed on Google with ODP title and description and having it sliding down the serps. So I do the "noodp" stuff and yup, it restores my proper title and description within days, but doesn't make a blind bit of difference to my position. I read about guys who are a lot more savvy than me making all sorts of changes to no avail or to temporary avail, then Google arses about with things again and it's back to square one. The only consolation for me is that I can genuinely say (and it's not just sour grapes) that the majority of the results above me in the serps, for our very competitive search term, are not worthy of being there. Joe Public must notice this too, so I'm just hoping that it makes him search a bit further than halfway down page #1

[Northstar]

I noticed about a 15% increase from Google yesterday but today it seems to have gone back down again. Since I dropped on Aug. 17th I was sure hoping to see positive changes Sept. 17th but it doesn't seem to have happened. Like "Chard" i'm starting to except this Google mess cross my fingers and move on. Maybe one of these days Google will get this straighted out but till then I guess I will just have to settle for low traffic and income. I'm done with losing sleep and being totally stressed out.

[soapystar]

just spam inbounds..it still gets results..blogs...piad links...low quality cloaked pages and sites..articles written by yourself and placed on made for the purpose sites..forget organic...currently the infrastructure cannot recognise it in the competetive areas....thats why even the big buys now do it...without that youll be subject to micro filtering.....

[econman]

WRT to the comment about benefits from lots of inbound links, regardless to quality -- in my niche the major players have not yet pursued this tactic intensively.

The issue I'm still struggling with is whether it makes sense to adopt this tactic. In particular, I wonder how much risk there of "overdoing it" -- if a site that only has organic links wakes up one day and starts rapidly accumulating unnatural inbound links, will a dramatic increase in inbound links trigger filters or penalties which either damage the site, or make the exercise a waste of money?

Assume the site is not willing to take any risks with outbound links, so there would be no change in the historic pattern of only having useful, relevant outbound links that are interest their users.

Any insights would be appreciated -- especially if they are backed up by actual experience.

[soapystar]

its the old thing..if one way inbounds can hurt you then you can take down any site.....i can tell you that in my sector i have yet to see a single site that has benefited from BD that doesnt have spammed links..thats not to say its responsible for their rankings..though for 90% im convinced it does...

[tahiti]

Things look bad on my side as well. i got two websites ranking pretty well on my industry (big range of keyphrases) and now both of them are totally disappeared...site and links cache seems normal but the ranking just lost its spots. my wild guess is they changed their weigthing on inbound links.

one questions: for those that experienced significant drops on google, do you implement heavy link exchange? how does the dropped sites work on the link popularity side? appreciate for any responses...

[oddsod]

From the volume of posts here it does not appear that the changes are as far reaching as some previous updates.

[MrBlack]

I am seeing my websites still bouncing up and down the serps for my favourite keywords. I don't think the data refresh has finished yet.

[Thaparian]

My 3 months old site, generally pulls 30-40 visitors from google and now i am getting zero.

Google shows whole site indexed in google but huge drop in rankings for all related keywords.
It shows up for domain name only.
and if i search for www.domain.com it shows up #7.

Whats going on with BIG G?

Another data refresh/update or a penality to my site?

I didn't did anything tricky to rank higher.

IS THIS THING TEMPORARY OR PERMANENT?

[Jane_Doe]

I don't believe it's within our power to influence serps any more.

Look harder at the changes. It's like the OSH commercials - the answers are out there.

[Frederic1]

We are not supposed to manipulate serps

[dataguy]

one questions: for those that experienced significant drops on google, do you implement heavy link exchange? how does the dropped sites work on the link popularity side? appreciate for any responses...

I operate a large user created content site which for years accumulated about 100 natural links per day. About a month ago we implemented a few features which aided our users in adding links, such as RSS feeds for individual user content and easy to use links which allowed users to "tag" their content on some of the popular social bookmarking sites. The results was that we started getting about 300 links per day.

At this point this is the only thing that I can think of which could have triggered a penalty for us, though I really do feel that these new links are still "natural".

I'd like to know how many of the sites which were hit hard use the nofollow attribute in any of their links. We just started using them a few months ago on about 10% of our pages. I haven't been able to get a straight answer from anyone from Google about if using nofollow for outbound links can hurt a sites rankings, which make me think it can under certain circumstances. If your site was hit, please post whether or not you use nofollow. Thanks...

[edited by: tedster at 12:48 am (utc) on Sep. 22, 2006]
[edit reason] no edit here - admin error! [/edit]