My site has been First Now vanished from Google

My site has been the first of its kind, I drop off Google

[sabine7777]

For the past year I have experienced periodically being completely dropped off Google. My site has been the FIRST of its kind and is in all the natural search results on the first spot. I'm just a small business, but since spet of 2004 I have been vanishing off of Google every 6 weeks or so--recently it has been more often and for longer periods. Does Google discriminate against Older sites? Are they doing it so that we will advertise with them? Any help, advice, comment from a desperate single mother of 4!

[linkjack]

I can't see them doing because of advertising reasons

Right. These "updates" come near the end of the quarters to match the season and fashion trends.

U$ 200,000,000.00 in advertising profits has absolutely NOTHING to do with it.

That's why we give Google plenty of free advice here, because they're out there to help us and be our friends.

[steveb]

"Must be a bug... I hope...."

Every example I've seen points the blame at Google re-adding millions of Supplemental pages, and/or penalizing pages that have too many Supplemental copies. Also, sites showing ridiculously inflated page counts are the ones effected, while I haven't seen any sites with normal page counts effected (though that might be a coincidence).

Nothing to do with an algo here. Lots of sites are being penalized because their content has been stolen sometime in the past two years, and Google insists on keeping the copies in its database forever, even though the pages don't really exist in most cases. (Other things can be going on of course too.)

[wiseapple]

That are three things about Google I have never understood...

1. Certain pages seems stuck in time. The dates Nov. 1, 2004 - Dec 2. 2004, and Feb. 05 - 2005 are the key dates for our site. All the supplementals list these dates as the cache dates.

2. Why are there inflated page counts? Not just inflated but wildy inflated. If a site has 10,000 pages the "Site:" command will list 100,000. What are the other 90,000 pages - links - etc... made up of? There must be a database record for these 90,000 elements? And if you submit a sitemap to Google with the exact 10,000 pages on the site - why does the count not adjust? You are telling Google exactly what pages exist on the site.

3. It seems common sense the there should be no difference between www and non-www (www.mysite.#*$! and mysite.#*$!). Why have a difference between the two?

Google has tons of computig power. I would suggest the following activities for them.

- Clean up supplemental index. Go out and find out if these pages exist any more. Get the junk out of the index. Do not worry about competing on size. Worry about relevance and accuracy.

- Do not see non-www and www as two separate sites.

- Get the inflated pages counts back in control. Why 100,000 for for a 10,000 page site? Why are some sites completely accurate - while others are way out of sync?

Just my thoughts.

[Salon99]

"Also, sites showing ridiculously inflated page counts are the ones effected, while I haven't seen any sites with normal page counts effected"

This could be correct Steve. We added an entire library to a section of the site a couple of months ago, and now it is hit.

The problem is that the library is very very popular, so we are not about to delete it again, whatever happens with Google.

The situation is a real mess.

[sabine7777]

Linkjack: you write: "U$ 200,000,000.00 in advertising profits has absolutely NOTHING to do with it." do you see how ridiculous you are sounding?, you are stating an oximoron fact! that sounds EXACTLY like why they bouncing the high ranking site Off completely--so they'll advertise and Google will make a profit--you said it yourself...Duh! are you a google exce or something?!, that's what you sound like. I bet yah, in a couple years, someone will reveal this on 60 minutes and this unethical treatment by Google will come to light--perhaps not yet illegal, because this is still the wild West...but let's wait and see how Judges out there like this unethical practices...why all these problem ever since Google went Public?, very clear--so they can increase profits...DUH...Capitalism--remember what that's all about...

[walkman]

plenty of changes in Google right now as I see...hang on.

I'm still holding up though, which is always good. I haven't gotten, or asked for a link in 3+ months. Not even to those directories that Google says is OK to add our sites to. I'm playing it extremely safe till I reach a certain amount in the bank.

[TammyJo]

I noticed a huge drop today in ranking for our major site. Dropped to page 2 for major keyword, which is as good as dropping off the planet :) Other pages have lost ranking, but some have stayed the same.

Is this another update that needs a name? How about google Roulette :)

[skibum]

Seeing big changes here, somewhat of a rollback to pre-Bourbon update. It doesn't seem consistent across pages sites, page size, navigation structures, or type of content. Hopefully they'll keep tweaking and there will be more changes ahead.

[reseller]

TammyJo

>>Is this another update that needs a name?<<

I believe that its an update (also including alog changes). As to the name, I have suggested "Update Brett", but its our kind mods who have the final decision of course.

[reseller]

skibum

>>Seeing big changes here, somewhat of a rollback to pre-Bourbon update.<<

Not exactly, because we see fresh data on the serps. Maybe the new algos of this update are somewhat similar to those of pre-Bourbon.

[Venix]

21th May, we lost 99% of all Google traffic for our main site. 21th of September exactly 4 months later we got all our traffic back. I always believed that our site got some sort of penilty from all those scraper sites linking to us , since it didn't just drop to page 2, but more like page 458. What we are now seing is that alot of those sites that got a penilty in May are now back in the SERPS. But that doesn't explain why new sites are now dropping, so I guess it could be another update.

[mcavill]

Yeap, for a few of my more competitive phrases on a 3 year old clean site I've dropped from top 20 to 100+, some tweaking going on for sure. Hopefully it's just the start of an update and they'll come back :P

[coosblues]

4 Year old site - always ranked in the top ten for all my targeted keywords. Backlinks went up and now the site is off the radar. The set of serps I watch have totally changed, and I can only hope there is a major glitch with this update.

One thing. I'm not changing a thing on my site. I've had lots of scraper sites linking to me recently, but I've always kept the site squeaky clean, followed Brett's steps and follwed G's TOS. Still rank as always on all the other engines.

[mcavill]

there seemed to be quite a few posts to the september update that's not an update [webmasterworld.com] thread yesterday, so fingers crossed we're in the early days of a proper update and it'll all come good...that said, it might just have been the final twist in the non update, and we'll have to live with what we've got for a few weeks.

[shri]

I'm seeing two sites which have previously held top 5 positions drop out in the last 48 hours... might have been a manual check (in which case I'm not sure why they'd have dropped to 200+ positions and not be removed from the index).

Having said that we did have a dumb robots.txt go live a couple of weeks ago on one of those sites... so that might be an issue while PR and internal anchor get revaluated.

Also, have seen a shuffle in number of results returned over a couple of datacenters.

Something has definately been devalued in the last couple of days.

[cleanup]

This is an definately update as far as I can see. I am surprised there are so few posts here on the subject.

I have been seeing a real shake up in my sector (european travel)for about 24 hours now.

At the moment the update is looking pretty sad, I think this must have a way to go yet.

[reseller]

cleanup

>>This is an definately update as far as I can see. I am surprised there are so few posts here on the subject.<<

What? what do you mean by few? ;-)

We have been posting about the update (Update Brett) since 21st September! Take a look

[webmasterworld.com...]

[Dayo_UK]

Well I imagine the word on the street is that there is no update yet - otherwise it would have been named.

I am sure it is GG time to name it - keeping us waiting GG? ;)

[ct2000]

I think there seems to be a lot of sites that ranked top 5-10 on page 1 have dropped 10's of pages in the SERPs - I know that my own site is as "clean" as it can be and has been holding #1 for a number of 3 and two word keyword phrases for the past 4-5 years.

Yesterday these dropped down 200+ places.

The only comfort we can gain from this at the moment is that we are not alone!

Lets hope its just phase 1 of an update (possable 2 following the noupdate/update of last week) and its picking on the big sites reindexing/page ranking thier pages ready to dump in again sometime soon!

[cleanup]

Reseller, Yes I know and have read the posts. That thread as far as I recall dealt with some minor changes at the begining of September.

What I am taking about is much more widespread and started about 48hours ago.

On thursday you wrote

"Update Brett is still young and we mightbe looking at ONLY part one of the famous 3.5"

Perhaps someone can clarify for me

Are we seeing an update?
Since when?
If there is an unpdate then why no discussion thread here?

Thanks.