Data Refresh - 2006 Sept 30

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System: The following message was spliced on to this thread from: http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3103271.htm [webmasterworld.com] by tedster - 10:58 am on Sep. 30, 2006 (EDT -4)

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From the looks of it, this seems like the Sep 27 data refresh that we have been expecting.

Toolbar PR update is also reported in another separate thread.

I would be grateful if the more experienced ones can offer their opinions on what this refresh is all about. I for one am happy, but how is it affecting everyone overall? My own couple sites have seen traffic quadruple.

Also one more question - a site really cant be worth the 100th page of SERPs on sep 29th, and worth top position on sep 30th. That just is not right, especially when I am talking about a site which has been completely whitehat, adds 10 plus pages a day, and is widely linked to naturally. If natural content sites can bounce so much in SERPs (meaning they could be on some fine line they accidentally reached and a little tweak somewhere throws it all off), I shudder to think what the data refreshes must be doing to your average online merchant or corporate website.

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System: The following message was spliced on to this thread from: http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3103317.htm [webmasterworld.com] by tedster - 11:00 am on Sep. 30, 2006 (EDT -4)

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About 70% of my Google traffic returned yesterday Sept. 29 and so far today it looks like it is going up even more. I didn't get back all my top keywords but I got back hundreds of lesser searched keywords. I'm not getting too excited yet because I don't know if this Google roller coaster is over or not. Did anyone else have any type of Google recovery yesterday? I hope you all are getting traffic back also.

After the last data refresh when my site vanished (again!), I went around looking for reasons, and found the same meta descriptions or no descriptions at all on several pages which I fixed. This is critical according to G1smd and a few others.

Now, I was anyway expecting the site to return to the SERPs with this refresh with or without the fixing I did, thats whats been happening for one year.

There are more pages to fix, and hope to do it soon. What would be interesting to see is will the site go back to the back of beyond even after the fixing of meta descriptions during the crest period till the next refresh.

(I want to kick all those who told me 2 years back that SEs dont look at meta descriptions, so dont bother to have them!)

Wibfision, whats a bad data push for you is a good push for me, and vice vera. I am doing whatever I can think about to avoid your situation with the next refresh.

I too believe we've seen another data push that started yesterday on the 29th (in my time-zone at least). So far I don't appear to have been impacted quite as bad as on the June 27 refresh, however it might be too early to tell.

I "recovered" from the June 27 refresh on Sept 16, so this was a very, very short return to where I was. Less than two weeks of good ranking and now I'm back at the bottom of the barrel again.

For one of my top keyword I see 3 sets of results. I get the best ones on 209.85.135.107 and 64.233.167.99.
DCs shows the way of the future?

<The following message was spliced on to this thread from
the thread at: http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3101449.htm [webmasterworld.com]
by tedster - 11:59 am on Sep. 30, 2006 (EDT -4)>

The June 27th horror is over!

Seems all my subdomains of my major income domain are now out of the filter.

In the last weeks, I felt after all the actions done sometimes like a witch doctor perfomring a rain dance in the dessert.

No idea what action or actions finally brought the success.
Maybe all of them, maybe none of them.

Here my long list:

1.) www not www. 301 redirects to right version installed
2.) cgi script returned form mail pages for not any longer existing calling pages. Now the cgi script checks, exists the calling page, returns status error 404 for not existing
3.) Sitemap page created for each subdomain instead of many links to subdirectories. This reduced for nearly all pages the number of links below 100
4.) In Google sitemaps preferred version www not www
5.) cgi script for formmail returned same title line as the calling page. Now returns only "Contact form" to avoid duplicate title problems

[edited by: tedster at 4:02 pm (utc) on Sep. 30, 2006]

jetteroheller

I for one also performed a long list including

6.) nofollow for https
7.) 301 php?query to friendly HTML

alas my site has all but disappeared with this update

One of my sites has recovered for most three word keyword searches. My other site that got hit in June still hasn't shown any improvement. But this latest refresh has helped me a little, so I'll take it.

A normal data refresh. A bunch of Adsense sites are gone again but a couple of other sites are coming back although not ranking as well as 2 weeks ago.

I think being affected in these data refreshes is more to do with Google's indexing capabilities than it is site content. I'll wait it out and no doubt my site will bounce back next time (fingers crossed).

I been watching incoming links before I had ten with a PR of 4 and know I have 180+ and PR dropped to 3. I guess it is the sudden surge in incoming links. I think the page rank should come up?
Most of my key word phrases rank 1-9 but the more competative keywords are still week.

A lot of my static pages (and their rankings) have totally disappeared, as shown in site: search where they all used to be at the top. Dynamic URL based Forum pages seem to be ok still.

[edited by: Nick0r at 10:46 pm (utc) on Sep. 30, 2006]

The serps are still changing for me.

If i search for my keyword phrase like after every 30-60 minutes, i get different results.

Sometimes i show up in top 10 and sometimes not in top 100.
I am consistently watching the number of results for my niche.
Sometime the figure is 3,100,000 sometimes 2,900,000 and sometimes 3,210,000 and 2,85,000

My site shows up in 2 of these 4 cases.

My traffic from google is increasing from zero after sept. 30

Earlier i was getting all traffic from MSN, now BIG G delivers me some more traffic.

I've been seeing changes in the results as well with a top 10 site disapearing but on normal SERPs but showing up with the &filter=0 at it's normal position. The meta tag was duplicate and this was fixed and it came back yesterday with a cache date of the 27th, this was the same until this afternoon where the cache changed back to the 18th with the old meta tag and snippet and again disappeared with the same phenomena. Happening exactly like it happened a week ago again.

Anyone else experiencing similar phenomena and getting any results with handlings? I know even CNN is wavering with their cache result going from the 30th to the 27th just minutes ago but there is something that can be done to handle that happening.

I'm seeing something different from this data refresh than I've seen from other data refreshes. I wonder if anyone else has seen something similar with this data refresh.

Previous data refreshes that impacted me were on a site-wide level. Virtually every SERP I track was impacted, and impacted severely. Keywords I ranked in the top ten for were relegated to positions around 150-350.

After a short recovery from the Sept 15/16 refresh, this data refresh has also impacted my site differently. Only about half of the SERPs I track were impacted. The other half has seen no change whatsoever. The pages that were impacted were not pushed back quite as far. Instead of positions 150-350 they have been pushed back about 75-125 positions from the top 10.

Of course this leads me to wonder what might be different about the pages that were pushed back versus those pages that survived this data refresh. I've started a big spreadsheet to look at factors such as page length, keyword density, number of incoming links both internal and external, anchor text pointing at those pages, age of the pages, etc. The site is driven by a custom CMS so page structure (URL writing, title tags, H1 tags, etc are built the same way on each page). Therefore I'm just looking at the other factors I mentioned.

Hopefully I might be able to figure out what happened with those pages, but I seriously doubt I will see any significant trends or figure out what happened.

Just noticed that some 10-15 % (perhaps more) of one of my site's pages have disappeared from the index despite being linked to nicely.

And the rest of the site is back in SERPs with rankings as before. Will have to investigate why this happened...

Things are shifting around in our sector also - It's different from June 27th and we have seen a big jump in our reported backlinks.

It's going to take a little while for the dust to settle yet again before we know where we stand. Some of our pages have moved up and down as much as 4PR points just in the last 8 hours indicating fresh data is still very much in the pipe.

I did see a big boost in PR on some of our internal pages but not on the index page which I thought was unusual. Anyone else noticed this?

For my site, it appears that the effects of whatever happened on September 30th may have affected Google's interpretation of geolocation on the site. I have a .net site hosted in the UK. For example, a search on keyword1 keyword2 on the web results in position 3, whereas my site is nowhere to be found for the same search within the UK. However, this is only true for some pages, not others. My home page does not appear within the UK although the majority of the other pages do.

Despite still appearing for some keywords, overall traffic is down by about 75%, which is particularly worrying on the run up to Christmas.

For anyone else adversely affected on September 30th, can you see a similar pattern?

Yes, we're off as well. Got whacked bad in Feb 2006, got it all back August 15 2006, lost maybe 5% September 16, and now whacked all the back to our Feb 2006 numbers. The majority of our rankings are hurt, but not all (!?), which is curious. Some here seem to be indicating the DC shift has stopped, almost like Google has halted the move, which is consistent with my watch list. Some ranking are down 3-4 pages, some remanin in number 1, with NO difference between the pages in terms of layout, content breadth, style, etc. etc. Something weird is going on, and it is not obvious this adjustment is done, it is either not finished, or they are going back, or, heck, I don't know, it is an adjustment along lines not apparent.

Impossible to ever know. You just hang on and wait for the dust settle, stand up, pick up your things and try to move on.

But for sure, so far these past 24 hours, we are hurting bad. Traffic is off 50%. Damn. We had been so relieved since August 2006 and hopeful it would hold up for a bit.

Our site has tens of thousands of pages, our site is considered an authority site with google in many areas (double indented listings on many keywords), we've been around for years (1996). And, on the keywords where we've been pushed back from #1 to 4th page somewhere, the truth is, the majority of the listings above us suck.

So, this adjustment is NOT an improvement in SERP quality, despite our bias - it really is not better.

Thank you - writing this down and rereading it is healthy for my grieving process. On to the next step...

P.S. We are located in Toronto, Canada. The adjustments occured Saturday afternoon, and by Saturday evening, it was over. It all went down in about 5 hours. Since Saturday night, (it is now Sunday afternoon), there have been no more changes in any keywords we watch. We have a bunch where we reman in #1, and we are watching them, waiting for them to dissappear, but thankfully, they remain. Murphy's Law probably dictates that now that I've written this down, they will dissappear. Yes, this is depressing.

My "yardstick" site (belongs to a friend), with three alternative domains pointing with redirects at one .com site where the content is located. All multiple domain, www & non-www, and index page, problems solved with redirects more than a year ago. All title tag, and meta description content is unique per page. The 70 Supplemental .co.uk listings (indexed before the redirects were fitted) were dropped out of the index a few months ago.

One year ago, various pages from each of the four domains were listed in the SERPs. Most were Supplemental, many were URL-only. Many also had duplicate or missing meta description tags. The redirects were put in at that time, and many (but not all) of the meta descriptions were fixed. The last dozen or so were fixed only a few months ago.

.

A site:domain.com search shows 184 entries:

- 168 www entries in the normal index, all of which are "200 OK". There are 168 pages on the site. Correct!

- 14 www entries showing as Supplemental - these are all pages that have been "404" for a couple of months, as they were moved to a different folder. Their new version, at the new URLs, all show in the normal index, part of the 168 above.

- 2 non-www URLs showing as Supplemental. These reappeared in the listings last week - right out of left field; having originally dropped out of the index more than 9 months ago. As they are Supplemental, and have been 301 for a year, they can safely be ignored.

The first Supplemental Result is 164th in the listings, just ahead of the last couple of normal listings.

.

A site:wwwdomain.com -inurl:www search shows 17 Supplemental entries:

- 14 www entries showing as Supplemental - as above. They are all "404" pages.

- 2 non-www URLs showing as Supplemental - as above. They are both "301" pages.

- 1 www URL that showed up as a Normal Result in the first search now appears as a Supplemental Result in this search. This is a "historical" supplemental. The snippet represents older content from many months ago, even though the cache date is only two weeks ago.

This is the only one that needs checking back on. One link to it from another site might fix the problem, so we already did that.

.

This "update" / "refresh" - no major changes to report; just those two Supplemental non-www URLs reappearing again. This site and several others like it, proved to me beyond all reasonable doubt that:
- the 301 redirects for duplicates of all types are vital.
- unique title tag and meta description data is vital.
- Supplemental Results for 301 and 404 URLs are dropped after a year, not sooner.

[edited by: g1smd at 8:51 pm (utc) on Oct. 1, 2006]

Helpnow, I feel for you. The only time my site lost traffic this year was June 27th, with it returning June 28th. At that time, from the number of posts on Webmasterworld, it appeared that thousands of other sites were affected. In a way that gave me hope that it would just be a temporary situation, which it turned out to be.

However, there have not been very many posts comparatively about September 30th which makes me concerned. If not as many sites are affected, I imagine that there is less impetus for Google to fix a "problem", although I am maybe being naive with that assertion.

Past experience has shown me that provided you have a good solid site, rich with unique content, at some stage it will recover its traffic.

really weird stuff in this update.

for a 500m results page

for google .com
1: Wikipedia from nowhere to #5
2: Im #7 for plural UP from #10
3: #21 for singlar DOWN from #12

for same in g.uk

4: dumped for #1 since 2 yrs to #10 for singular
5: no change in plural

Other major terms just vanished from serps

Site unaffected by any previous google updates

*sigh*

1: Wikipedia from nowhere to #5

I think what Google is desperately trying to tell us is that Google search is henceforth moribund [as it shows up soon in all searches] and we should use all wikipedia instead. ;)

helpnow, I am having the exact same results as you. I have had after august 15th, my SERPS were doing great, had the best month in September traffic wise, and now over the weekend, my traffic has once again (3 or 4th time now) crashed. My most popular page is now missing all together from the google index. This page has performed great for me, not spammy, no black hat, just a good list of information that many people accessed each day. It had been indexed well all summer even when others bounced back and forth. Now, it's not even supplemental like a lot have experienced. Just disappeared. Many inbound links to this page too.

Google, please get your act together. You do realize from reading this forum, how many people are affected by your 'data pushes' don't you? You have set the bar by being the best search engine, and many webmasters and business owners have come to rely on your expertise in the search engine business, in order to maintain traffic to their site. By default, you have inherited this position. It is now your responsibility to maintain it, especially now that you are being well paid for it, after going public.

it's all very stupid

OK, if someone typed in "what is a " then give them wikipedia because that is what they want

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

Please no wiki

[216.239.51.104...]

0__o

Has ebay.com sinked into supplemental for all but 120 pages?

Similar results stated on many big commerce sites on .com and .fr

Seems like the root index page for each sub-domain is listed and no internal pages - and they do all rank well for various phrases.

I assume that Google does not want to index a hundred million auction pages, 95 million of which have already ended.

[google.com...] gives a different story.

In a search specifically designed to flush out Supplementals, you get to see 870 results of about 18 million before you see the first Supplemental.