Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
We have been wiped out after 5 previously successful years - the siege strategy is obviously working on everyone. 30 people are now out of work - mainly jounalists I employed - and I personally, along with the business, now facing possible bankruptcy.
This may sound heartless (although I certainly don't mean it to be), but perhaps you should look upon this as "one to grow on" and re-develop your business strategy so that it does not depend upon a traffic source over which you have no control what so ever.
I've learned the hard way that google (and every engine for that matter) has simply lost it's way in an effort to combat the overwhelming numbers of spammers/scammer/thieves, and blackhat innvovations, and has unfortunately been forced to throw the "baby out with the bath water" with the last 2 years or so of algo "refinements".
Building our site's brand(s)(and community "stickiness") has been a long haul, but has enabled us to look upon any free traffic thrown our way from google as icing on the cake, as opposed to a "make or break" proposition.
[edited by: WebFusion at 2:46 am (utc) on Sep. 25, 2005]
Is hard I know, but keep cool, your site looks good, dont will be penalized for a long time, ask for adsense team to forward your message techs to check.
5 years of our content has been stolen from us as we too tried to "clean up" our sites by changing URL's and taking OUR content and putting them on the sites
My english dont is very good, you changed your URLs to "clean up" your site? If yes, this is a really bad thing to do.
My site went from being # 1 for a very popular search term to #30. I really do believe that patience is the key with google in situations like this. I really don't think that google is out to hurt innocent law abiding webmasters. They are certainly aware of the unscrupulous copy-cat websites that exists.
There is nothing you can do to protect yourself against copycat websites. Google knows this, and if your content it unique, they will recognize this. I recommend that you do not touch your site in anyway. Just relax and everything will be ok.
My suggestion to Google is to have a list of instructions where we can prove the sites worth and the content ownership along with the history
Google listen to this suggestion! It's absurd that great sites are crushed simply because there is no quality review mechanism that is open to webmasters - rather it's a closed system where white hat sites are wasting money and time guessing at "what did we do wrong?", SEOs are scamming people more than ever, and the results are failing miserably in many sectors.
Working with webmasters to explain how to keep away from filters and penalties will, on balance, help the internet more than the secret society approach now in place where information flow is severely restricted and webmasters are left in the dark when site rankings are hammered.
The only problem with relaxing and waiting is that you are assuming that only Google can act and nothing you do can have an impact.
If the problem is duplicate content issues you have to locate the cause(s) and take action.
When you are trying to add content and features and you have a small operation people wise you don't need the added work of figuring out what happened and "fixing" what you can.
caveman is correct about multiple things happening, some of them have nothing to do with any changes that Google does.
There is no defense for some of the things that take place.
steveb has clearly outlined a duplicate content issue that seems to be taking out a lot of sites' pages.
There's another thing going on too. This other thing does not involve inflated pages, and it is not a dup content filter revealed by adding &filter=0. It is dropping certain pages from the SERP's for certain kw phrases only, while retaining the same pages' rankings for other kw phrases. So a given homepage or subpage previously ranking for 'kw1 kw2' and 'kw1 kw3' may now be ranking only for 'kw1 kw2'. Nowhere for 'kw1 kw3.' Or maybe no important kw phrases now.
It may happen to many pages of a site, or just some. It is not related to the dup content being discussed (though prior to investigation it may appear to be the same thing).
I am guessing that it is related to links and kw's, and it goes beyond the way a given query relates to the page that was dropped for that query. ;-)
>>reseller, please stop derailing the thread with tangents.<<
Iīm not derailing anything. Just have different point of views on whatīs happening. And your guess and suggestions are as good as mine ;-)
We both trying in good faith to analyze the situation and figure out what the he*l is going on. I said since the beginning (already on 22nd September) that its an update, while you described it as data blunders. Maybe whats happening is a mixture of both ;-)
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reseller
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msg #:600 5:47 am on Sept 22, 2005 (utc 0)
Good morning Folks
Wish you all a happy Update Brett
"Win this one for the Gipper" ;-)
I give it 5 stars *****
As to this morning, the following DCs (which I had already posted yesterday) are still of much interest:
64.233.189.104
66.102.7.99
66.102.7.104
66.102.7.105
66.102.7.106
66.102.7.147
216.239.63.99
216.239.63.104
Please donīt panic if you canīt find your site within the said DCs. We are still at the early stages of a possible update ;-)
Take care!
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steveb
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msg #:587 7:45 pm on Sept 21, 2005 (utc 0)
Some cataclysmic changes on 216.239.53.104 and some other datacenters. Lots of pages lost. Maybe it'll pass, but looks like one of Google's huge data blunders is underway.
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[edited by: reseller at 7:10 am (utc) on Sep. 25, 2005]
you are not the only victim of these Google search thugs, who do not care at all about quality content or publishers.
For several keywords our site had been on 1 or two and still we are offering the by far richest and most valuable up-to-date content.
Various complaints had been sent to Google support, but they still perfer to put fully outdated and exotic language content on page 1 whilst our stuff has become unavailable at Google.
We now recommend Yahoo search and started to prepare a new directory for quality publishers, to give users a chance to find all them good pages, that thugs at Google are cutting out for whatever reasons.
Google Search has become to arrogant and they will get punished for that sooner or later.
Hope, that yahoo will learn from that ...
Since then, SERP of 50% of them is different from the others, yesterday 11 of them are similar to 216.239.37, now 14 of them. I think, the SERP of 216.239.37 will be the final SERP of all DCs and of google.com as well.
In some cases it incorrectly flags the original along with the copiers.
The copiers aren't ranking inplace of the original because they don't have the links / trust / whatever the original does, but due to the negative points the original is filtered out.
IMO the issue is how to get rid of the negative points.
I'm not going to do anything for a few days as these things often bounce around for a bit, but I see a few ways to sort it:
1. Change my content - a bit wrong to have to do it, but probably the quickest and easiest way
2. Contact the copiers and ask them to remove my content - yeah right, don't really think that'll work
3. C&D / DMCA - slow and quite a painful proocess
4. Spam reports - I don't usually do that, but hey it's costing me $$ so why not. From what others have said, a bit hit and miss
Assuming it is duplicate sites / pages that are causing the issue, what other approaches are people thinking of doing to try and resolve it? or are you just going to sit it out?
I wish it were true that Google was going the way of Alta Vista, but it's like the jerk at work that never gets fired. You all know that guy. He's a total SOB, but somehow, it's the guys with families that get fired/laid off. Never him. The jerk keeps his job.
It's like living in backwards country.
The spammer gets top ranking, and I get sliced off at the knees for writing original content.
Yes I would like to know what options there are.
I would rewrite the pages if I thought it would work (and keep working) but what I really dread is that a site attracts a penalty and keeps it, like in Yahoo.
I too am hoping that Google sort things out as they have tended to do in the past, I still have confidence, although I have never seen the SERPs so screwed before.
If any webmaster with a good original site want help/tips send a stickymail with URL, my english is very bad, but I will try be useful in my free time :)
Yes, for a while... just noticed my other content site has gone too...totally different subject than my five year old site with no linking between them.
Google support is atrocious. Little point in e-mailing when you go in circles with the cut-and-paste reply system they have going there.
If I rewrite all the text in my site will the filter see this and not exclude the site?
or is the site in someway now marked as a duplicate for all time?
It would be interesting to know how long it takes until a site is back after a dup content penalty.
And nutsandbolts is right, contacting Google is a waste. Better off contacting advertisers if Adsense is shown/used.
I blame Adsense. If they had quality control measures, most of these sites wouldn't have the financial incentive to steal copy.
If I was a business owner, at least I could shoot the guy that was trying to rob me.
So do you think Google controls its SERPS by the use of filters and algoritm only?
If so could it be possible that this can be rectified by a rewrite in real time (ie the usual 2 or three days it takes for Google to pick up changes)?
Other members here have impied that it takes at least until the next full update, which is what I would suspect.
[edited by: cleanup at 9:17 am (utc) on Sep. 25, 2005]
I'am not sure the "other sites duplicated content" is the reason for lossing SERPs.
Because:
1.) Many webmasters have an original content.
2.) I checked the search result with different keyword and I found sites in the top 10 who use a same content!
3.) &filter=0 is primarily used to remove duplicates but, as I read in forums, Googleguy hinted that it may do other things as well (but nobody don't know what those other things might be)
I suggest everybody check with "site:" command, how many pages indexed by Google at the moment,
and how many pages do you have in fact!
I think the "dog is buried here" (or not:)
I have more than 183K in google index, but in fact I have only 25K pages ...
