Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
>>It could be true that search terms are filtered, but it also appears that whole domains are filtered as well.<<
Of course there could be "filtration" effects of many kinds.
But the changes since the 22nd Sept. are so extensive that its rather difficult to explain with the filtration effects alone.
All IMO OF COURSE!
[edited by: aliszka at 8:58 pm (utc) on Oct. 1, 2005]
I am for whole domains. We have been dead since Feb. 2nd. Not matter in what form or format we add stuff to the site, no of it will rank in Google. The "&filter=0" moves stuff way up the charts. It's a brain buster. I feel like I am following the rules but getting nowhere.
>>I am for whole domains. We have been dead since Feb. 2nd.
.......It's a brain buster. I feel like I am following the rules but getting nowhere.<<
I have just looked at your site mentioned in your profile. Shall sticky you few suggestions.
I noticed that I can get normal rankings by making a new subdomain for the filtered domain. If I moved one section from blue.widgets.com to red.widgets.com and set up a 301 redirect then I would regain some of my lost traffic. Should I test it?
try searching for the keywords on the home page (e.g. internal links anchor text) - you have to use &filter=0 to get wiseapple's site to rank at all in the SERPS.
This is different from the 'my site doesn't rank for it's own name' problem. For me, this shows that we are dealing with a set of filters - one is demonstrated by &filter=0, another is the 'doesn't rank for its own name'.
Yeah, me too so I dunno what you mean.
Dead is when you have a PR4-PR5 site for 4-5 years that has thousands of pages in the index but does not even come up for the site title. Dead is when Google referrals drop to maybe 5% of former levels. Dead is when you have 1,000+ pages of original content, no questionable linking strategy (tho lots of awful unsolicited inbounds) abd virtually none of your leywords come up. Dead is when your idex page has PR0 and the highest ranked internal page is PR2.
Clearly something has gone horribly wrong with this. I don't believe it is deliberate by Google, but an unanticipated result of some esoteric filter they did not think through very well (which doesn't mean their motive for doing whatever they thought they were doing was not naked greed).
If I search for my site title (always #1 SERP in Google and still #1 in every other engine) the first spot is occupied by something called OXiDE Search. Nothing on the page contains any of the keywords which seems to indicate the magnitude of the Google screwup (You can bet if this happened to EBay they would be fixing it pretty quick).
My only hope is that something similar happened 2-3 years ago. For one month I was nowhere to be found and all the top spots were spam sites, fake directories, etc. Next update everything went back to normal.
While like everyone else I am scrambling to try and alter things, I suspect its pointless. A few dead links here and there, maybe less good inbounds than ideal but certainly nothing that should have resulted in this.
Great timing tho. I do 70% of my business now thru April.
I see that having no effect now, meaning pages no longer regain their proper rank when using &filter=0.
[edited by: Tinus at 9:50 pm (utc) on Oct. 1, 2005]
A certain Google search partner has always had the results unfiltered (including last December when the same filtering method was widely deployed). Look in your logs and you will know who this partner is...
For example, &filter=0 still works on 64.233.161.105 but does not work on 216.239.63.104
Before May 21 site doing great.
May 21, 2005 Bourbon takes away 3/4 of my traffic. I do not even come up in a for my name. But strangely about 4 or 5 very major kw I still come up in top ten. Example: Tennessee Widgets, & Pennsylvania Widgets. My other State Widgets drop to around 500. I do nothing to site. Four weeks after the start of Bourbon some of my main kw searches rise from somewhere in the 500s to around the 300s. No help but offers a little hope.
June 30, 2005 My site comes back in a very big way, about 20% more traffic than pre Bourbon.
September 21, 2005, (hummm, May 21/September 21) My site is gone again, except for the same states which held on the during Bourbon and a few more. Another strange thing. My site has widget information broken down by state then County. I still come up #1 when a search is done for exampleCity widgets. The page this search goes to is about exampleCounty widgets, but dose mention exampleCity in some of the text. By the way, this time I only dropped down to the level I was at about four weeks after the start of Bourbon.
Two last items:
This time around when I do a search for my web site name (Widget Widget Widget) I am #1 and #2 with 22,700.000 results.
When I add &filter=0 I come back to the same place as before this non updating update filter thingie.
For what its worth, there it is.
Just talking about September 22 sites, are some people saying &filter=0 is still working for them?I see that having no effect now, meaning pages no longer regain their proper rank when using &filter=0.
I have never gotten this &filter=0 to work. I don't understand why not if it works for all of you guys.
It looked beautiful all those cached pages =)
shame the traffic is soo low?
Definately drop the filter is my vote!
It is strange that the filter results are now very different and I hope it represents what the results will be like once this is over.
Has anyone made any big changes to their filtered sites and seen improvement
Good question - NO for us after many changes.
I'm increasingly convinced that Google must manually remove certain filters, and is reluctant to remove them once they have been applied (or possibly it's just very low priority). In our case site:oursite.com shows our pages but we get virtually no G traffic - down 99% since Feb 2.
I'm pretty pissed at the emails saying "your site has no penalty" when obviously we, and many others here, are penalized to the extent Google no longer sends visitors regardless of the page's relevance.
I no longer think Google is being straight about "no penalty", rather they do have a site wide filter that effectively kills the site for all searches. I also think this in contrary to Google's own interests in showing the most relevant results.
