Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Traffic and $ income are way down. I've experienced this before and eventually came back so I'm trying to focus on other things and look at the annual income picture rather than a daily picture.
This is the worst time of year for this. I hope it's corrected soon!
In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the ______445_______ (depending on DC ... 360 -500) already displayed.
If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.
All I see are shopping sites ebay junk and google adwords site. If I do a search for "buy oak hardwodd floors" the last thing I want to see is ebay, a shopping site, or a bunch of Google adwords sites, to me the search has gotten so bad 2 years ago It was much better.
Now all I see are redirects subdomains etc and etc, going from bad to worse..
I'll say this..my pr finally matches the pr shown in the google directory. I did, a couple of months ago, fix all the internal links to point to .com/ instead of index.html and just yesterday, I finally selected the button in webmastertools to show all my urls as www but I think it is too soon to see an effect from that. Still...woke up this morning to the new pr.
Here's my update: still messed up. (See my post on page 1 of this thread)
Some of our keywords were hit bad:
- #2 listing, (BBC is/was #1), we were shoved to page 2, top spot
- # 3 listing, indented double, shoved to page 3 second fromt he last at the bottom
etc.
But some have remained on top, with double indented listings.
And, these results have remained stable since Saturday night. I have seen some continuing flux in listings around us, but no fundamental shifts or corrections.
Again, ours is a real business, and yes, we engage in all the other stuff designed to insulate from a google hit, newsletters, off-line, we even manufacture our own product and sell them wholesale, but still, google is big and cannot be denied and a hit like this means the difference between a 4-day and a 5-day work week for about a dozen peopel here working with me.
And yes, it is BS, because I imagine, and this may only be partly true ; ), that this is all the reuslt of some acne-faced teen-aged boy in Romania running some BS Adsense sites with content scraped from everywhere, including us. I hope he enjoys his all-expense paid trip this week to the mountains with his equally acne-faced girlfriend while I franticall try to drum up off-the-grid business so I can keep my employees around for a full week, this week, and for as many weeks from here on in as this lasts. Yes, I'm bitter.
And for those of you who are quick to criticize, I'll swap you a day in my shoes any time. It's easy to criticize someone like us caught in this situation, but you try firing someone because your google rankings took a hit over the weekend. We used to be 90% dependent on google, we've whittled that down to about 50%, and still working on it, but it is the 3-point turn of a supertanker in the English Channel - not easy to do once you try to do it. You hire people, train them, and suddenly, resume #6 becomes Susan, with her husband Dave, and 2 kids Janey and Mike, blah blah blah. Once you're in this situation, you try hard to maintain it. So, yes, what appears to be a poorly thought-out update at google makes you bitter. SERPS really are worse right now. Dumb. Makes you that much more determined to get off the grid. Which in the long run, sucks for google because people like us with unique goods and content walk away and become less enthused about the internet and keeping our content up to date, while those acne-faced kids from wherever keep coming back because the cost-benefit works for them. Why should I employ writers to create content for the web that is just going to get hacked and stolen and dissappear in the SERPS, when I can redploy those resources elsewhere to make me stable profit. The glitter of the internet is initially enticing, but the ground is not safe enough to build a business on. And that loss of general interest and commitment causes a meltdown in overall quality. The internet and google need people like us, the original source of much content, so whacking people like me like this doesn't give people like me a warm and comforting feeling about the efforts we make in this direction.
Too bad. Too bad. It could have been better... The promise of google was more than this...
To everyone whacked, I truly wish you the best of luck. Focus on content and a good site (for what it's worth, this is the only way to ride out google storms: forget SEO and <H2> tags and <ALT> tags and all that BS: Just - Build - Content), and focus on other revenue streams - get off the grid as much as you can.
All of us should spend less time sitting here lamenting our bad turn (myself included - I am writing this as therapy to prepare myself even more psychologically for what I must now do), and more time on building our businesses in such a way that we could really care less if google is behaving the way we want it to or not. We all need to marginalize google so it accounts for 5%, not 50% or god forbid, 95%. If you are at 95% google dependancy, then you need to move fast man, because even if you are safe today, assume your day is coming and you will get whacked soon.
What really sucks is that I know I just wasted 10 minutes in writing this all down. So, off I go, back to forcing more of my business off the gird and to not care what google does.
otherwise can it - even as a user for other stuff, if I type in "personal loan" or virtually anything else, I don't want wiki
Well sooner or later some well meaning soul will enter an independent survey there.
I just realised when I was looking for HTML related stuff, wikipedia will invade on nearly everything sooner or later
;)
been wanting to do that all my life!
This made me laugh. It's just SO true, even where the wiki page is worthless (which it is more often than not).
They might as well stick wiki at #1 for everything and be done with it. I can then save eyeball effort by scanning down from #2 whenever I search.
Hope is all you can do because google does not make any sense when it comes to adding good data to the search engine. Only a stroke of luck will get you indexed properly.
Community sites
Bots
Buy Traffic
Black Hat
Get your own affiliate program
Viral Traffic
Email Spam
Offline Advertising
Prayer.
In the last 11 years we've designed hundreds (if not thousands) of sites. However, the only one which has been penalized by Google (two years in a row now) is the one which I've pushed the envelope on SEO on.
Could it be that Google's search quality team has finally caught up with all of us who are or were penalized?
I guess my question here is -- is there anyone here who's site has not been optimized for SEO that has been penalized. Of course there could always be dumb luck (as in bad luck) which could lead you to over optimize a site but in my experience, over optimization comes from having a basic understanding of SEO and utilizing it.
What if Google is simply coming out with a major update or algo shift every month in an effort to weed out SEO over optimization. Matt Cutts basically stated that if you've been penalized then you need to back off the SEO. I for one did this and my SERP's are back.
Could it really be that simple? Seems likely even if they're penalty filters seem a bit strict. I guess that's one way to clean up the web in a hurry!
Thoughts?
Ducki
Today i see the previous data moving back now showing on 6 - 8 datacenters.
Whilst at one stage the new data was on almost all of the DC's ( shown by Mcdar) it was still on minority visibility with the older data showing about 70% of the time ( estimation that could be wildly wrong btw).
Anyway it looks like the data push may be rolled back -
Any thoughts?
Cheers,
BB
Certainly, I mention the key words in the right places, but not in an unnatural way. If I write a page about blue widgets then clearly the title will contain Blue Widgets. There are no tricks, cloaking, hidden links, repeating of key words or any of that sort of thing going on.
I thought that these "data pushes" did not involve algo changes? What does everyone else think?
Generally when a data push or PR update happens, how long does it take to settle down.
I have been seeing this changing for atleast a week now.
Thanks
use of all the meta tags.
<h1>.
Small page size.
Keeping content near the the top of the code.
Keywords distributed evenly througout the page.
HTML Validation.
These are all the things I did when I redesigned my site and seen my traffic drop by 30%. The original site was built in frontpage, and sure it had relevant titles and descriptions as do most pages on most sites, however at the time I didn't know about code bloat, <h1>, or validation so these were never a consideration.
Any new sites I build are going to just have relevant titles, descriptions and articles that are wrote for the user and not the search engine. I am not even going to consider any other factors.
I firmly beleive this is the way forward.
TD
> we're updating our algorithms frequently,
> so pinpointing when specific changes are "done"
> or fully propagated is not a doable task
When I put together the following:
1. Matt Cutts' comments.
2. Emails directly from the search quality team.
3. My own experience
I get a firm notion that if your site is penalized, it's like a headache. That is, it's a symptom of something wrong that needs to be adjusted. Google wouldn't penalize for fun, they penalize to get our attention and by putting our pages at 900+ they ensure our full attention is what they have. I was irritated at first as Google won't tell you what's going on. Finally I got someone to respond and what they said was... well, let me let them say it:
> I've verified that your site hasn't been manually penalized
> in our index, so all aspects of the ranking change can be
> attributed to changes in our algorithm. I realize that
> that, unfortunately, doesn't lend itself to an instant fix
> for you... but since we haven't penalized your site due to
> Webmaster Guideline infractions, you have the full
> opportunity to improve your ranking via garnering relevant
> and trusted links and through increased valuable content.
There are those who say to just leave your site alone when it's been penalized and it will come back. Maybe it will. Maybe Google just does this every once in a while to see if you'll change things up and then they turn off the penalty filter. Then again, Google has done a major update every month for the last what, five months? Sounds like they're getting serious and this "might" have been what Big Daddy was all about -- the ability to quickly change their algorithm to remove spam and reward good content.
I frequently see people saying that their site fell out of the listings a long time ago and has not returned. My advice would be for you to start changing everything. I understand the feeling is that you once had a site with great SERP's and you're afraid that if you change everything and Google rolls back the filter then you'll have lost all that work. So, keep a backup copy just in case.
My point here is this. Your web site is sick (according to Google) and they've got it quarantined. You have the power to change that so why not at least try. I did and my SERP's are back. I stripped my site of my primary keywords enough that I thought it wouldn't matter if I get the penalty removed as my SERP's will suck. Amazingly, they're the same. What, keyword density doesn't matter anymore? Can it be?
Honestly, I don't know. I'm making educated guesses here. I looked at two sites last night for members here and on both of them the keyword count for their primary term was obsessively high. Could that be the problem? Could be but I really don't know. I just know that when I've got a headache I know something is wrong and I start trying to figure out what it is to make it go away and not come back. In this case, we're talking about much more than a headache so I'd advise everyone who is penalized to start making serious changes.
This is Google's game. If they penalize your site, it's time to change it so that you can get out of the penalty box and back in the game!
For what it's worth.
Ducki
