October 20 Recovery - reversal of October 1 update?

October 20 update reverses October 1 update

[helpnow]

Today, we have regained all of our rankings.

History:

- ours is an authority site, ecommerce, thousands of pages, in existence since the mid 90s, lots of #1 rankings, most listings double indented, lots of quality inbound links, lots of original content, lots of content provided by manufacturers
- we inadvertently created some duplicate content issues in Q1 2006, which we discovered and fixed in June 2006
- site lost all good rankings end of Q1 2006
- regained all good rankings August 15
- lost all rankings again October 1

Just curious - is anyone else having this experience? Is this update specific to our site, or is there a major update going on?

For those of you who have regained, can you please share a quick synopsis of your recent history so that we may determine if there are any commonalities in our experience...

With each cycle of loss and regain, we struggled to remain firm to our vision of ignoring SEO, and focus on simply building a good site for visitors. Our focus has been, and continues to be: content, content and content. We have never allowed ourselves to get caught up with isues related to such tings as H1 tags, ALT tags, etc., we have never even actively sought inbound links. We have always just let it all happen naturally, and just - build - the - site.

[helpnow]

OK everyone, I really appreciate the status reports.

So, for sure, there was an update on October 20. My ranking reversal has held, and I am again back on top of the SERPs in many places, with all due respect, compared to my SERP competition on most of the keywords I compete for, where I belong. The sites above me are better than me, and I am sincerely better than all of the ones below me. For us, this set oF SERPs is perfect, and we deserve the rankings we have right now, whether they are #1 or lower.

I think we can all learn from each other by providing a quick synopsis of recent changes we have made to our site, and the effects the changes of August 15, Sept 16, Oct 1 and Oct 20 have had on our rankings.

With this information from all of us, we may as a group begin to see some commonalities, and from that, learn why each of us was affected, either good or bad. Because, whether this recent update has affected us up or down, all of us who have been affectd can learn from this so that going forward, we can try to insulate ourselves.

So, I entreat each of you, can you please post again what recent changes you've made, and the affects the recent changes have had on you, up or down.

<grin> Trying to make this a group learning session if possible for us all!

++++++++++++

August 15 - "all" rankings regained
Sept 16 - some rankings lost
Oct 1 - "all" rankings lost
Oct 20 - "all" rankings regained

Changes
- Fixed duplicate content issues June 1, screwed it up on our server and lost those dupicate content fixes July 1, then fixed them again Oct 4 when we realized we had lost them. (we were using the old httpd.conf file, we were idiots.<grin>)
- Other than that, have continued to add new content almost daily
- we do not engage in any SEO practices, so any good or bad SEO is an accident and a byproduct of our intentional active site maintenance - updating inormation and adding more information

Thank you all!

[johnhh]

Very odd - spent some time last night and today looking at this.

Some of our SERP positions have moved, but many are the same or better. Yet total traffic decreased drastically yesterday.

It could be of course that the DC's I'm looking at is very different from the rest of the Google users here in the UK. Never had a difference before that effected total traffic by this percentage - ever - over to the DC watchers I guess - Mr Reseller around?

[jetteroheller]

I just checked other data centers

[216.239.51.104...]

Here I have lost much search positions.

Not so bad like on June 27th

At one major search terms where I am under the top 5,
after June 27th not under the first 100
Recovered full on September 30

Now around place 25

So it seems I checked before the last good data centers.
Other data centers seems to have bad data for me.

[norbiu]

In the last week, 5 or 6 of my articles were just copied from the manufacturer's press release. I only do this when I write about quarter reports, but it's still dupe. Could that be the cause of my traffic drop?

[helpnow]

From my experience, duplicate content is hugely important, in its various forms.

I am not convinced that duplicate content = content copied from a manufacturer's site. However, if the number of pages in question are low, why take a chance? To the extent possible, rewrite that content in your own words. If you only have 5/5 pages, that is easy to fix.

My site is an old, authority site, and I have copied lots of content from dozens of manufacuters, without ever thinkign that was "bad". In addition, I have tons of my own original content. I have no reason / experience to believe content which is a duplicate to pages OUTSIDE your site is a problem. But that may be because I am an old site, so be wary on this point for yourself.

However, duplicate content INSIDE your site is a killer. This you must resolve now, if you have any. And make sure you don't - don't just shrug your shoulders and assume you don't. Investigate and make 100% sure.

I employ a number of people, and they all depend upon me, and I depend on google (probably too much). I screwed up months ago in the area of duplicate content, and it has made the better part of 2006 a miserable year for all of us here. I'm talking real-life layoffs, slashed hours, the whole enchilada. It sucked. And it snuck up on us in the middle of the night this previous February. What started as an awesome idea to expand the utility of our site, turned into a duplicate content nightmare, and it took us 3 months until we realized what the culprit was, and another 5 months to get our rankings restored. I am still nervous about this ranking fix being permanent, and I hope our site's damage is resolved for good, and that our site has not been flagged, etc. Hard not to be paranoid right now...

Please, listen to me. Look at your site intensely, and carefully, and make sure you have NO possible duplicate content. It IS important, and it will blow your rankings, and your traffic if you don't. Drop everything else you are working on: nothing is more important right now than fixing all internal duplicate content.

- www.domain.com vs. domain.com (referred to everywhere here as "canonical")

- multiple URLs pointing to the same page (session ids, inconsistent variable structure in your URls, whatever) These are the hardest to detect because they may be right under your nose. Some of our pages had up to 30 possible URL combinations pointing to the same page. A total disaster.

Fix ALL of your duplicate content now. It is a cancer that will kill you.

Then, just work on content. Forget all the other SEO crap - those are temporary fixes at best, if they do work, and you will eventually get caught and your knuckles will get whacked.

Remove duplicate content, then build a great site for visitors with great content. Whereas with real estate the 3 most important things are location, location and location, with a www site, the 3 most important things are content, content and content. The rest will come. I speak from experience. Trust me.

[ichthyous]

What is the point of obsessively following every up and down that Google has made? My site has been up and down like a rollercoaster since Big Daddy. traffic down 80% since the beginning of the year overall. I decided to completely rip apart my old site and replace with a new clean one which Google has indexed nicely and very little problem with supplemental pages so far. I have spent months on customizing the php code so that it doesn't produce dup urls linking to the same page, no canonical issue, and no index.php vs. root issue. My code is validated, there's good content and a good amount of keywords, etc. Guess what? Still no traffic! The bottom line seems to be that Google has simply made a decision to focus on bigger, established sites with ots of of inbound links. If you don't have lots of IBLs you won't rank. There are just too many sites out there these days so Google has come up with a new heirarchy.

[helpnow]

ichthyous - I have multiple domains, some big and old, some small and new.

I am a firm beleiver that there is a reason why some sites go up and down. A position or two up or down, is the result of normal additions and updates.

But huge jumps should be considered a warning shot across your bow that you have trouble somewhere.

Why obsess? Because to obsess is to live it, to understand it, and with that, you may be able to glean cause and effect.

It took me 3 months of lurking at this site until I realized I had duplicate content. 3 months, can you beleive it!? If I gave up after 1 month, I may never have realized what we had done to ourselves, and I may have just jumped on the "blame google" bandwagon...

Why obsess? Because you may be able to discern why these things are happening to you, and if you can discern that, then you are on the road towards deriving ways by which you can stop them from happening to you.

In order to recover, you need to first know what has happened to you.

And yes, if we are all rats in a maze and it turns out nothing we do actually affects what happens to us, that nothing we do will ever determine if and when we get that electrical shock, well, that will be a sad day indeed, and then, yeah, let's all go sit in the corner and give up and wait and see what google will do to us next. But I don't believe we are rats in a maze with no control. Every time I slap the lever, I get a pellet. There is dependable cause and effect with google.

My experience with google is screaming at me that I DO control my destiny, and that what I do DOES have an affect.

I bet you that if I wanted to, I could drive my rankings to the deep depths in about a week. Now that I understand why it has happened in the past, I can protect myself from it happening again.

(What I worry about right now is, have I unearthed ALL causes, or are there other things problems I still have. My obsessing continues...)

Obsessing is good. What we do with our sites matters. Google is fair.

[jetteroheller]

Please, listen to me. Look at your site intensely, and carefully, and make sure you have NO possible duplicate content. It IS important, and it will blow your rankings, and your traffic if you don't. Drop everything else you are working on: nothing is more important right now than fixing all internal duplicate content.

- www.domain.com vs. domain.com (referred to everywhere here as "canonical")

My main income sites disappeared June 27th.

From June 27th to September 30th, this forum was my main reading material.

First I resolved this canonical problem by 301 redirects.
August 14th, I resolved this canonical problem also in Google sitemaps by the preferred domain.

But it took me until middle September to realize an other duplicate content problem.

Each of my pages has a link to

[cgi.example.com...]

And my script.pl just accesses the CMS database and uses the same title as the calling page.

So there had been 2 pages on different sub domains

[theme.example.com...]
and
[cgi.example.com...]

with exactly the same title line.

I changed middle September the title to "Contact form"

When I search for

site:cgi.example.com

about 55% of the first 100 show up with "Contact form"
about 45% still with the dublicate title line

I recovered September 30th, but have now suddenly 40% less Google traffic.

Let's hope that this is the reason for the current problem,
because this should disappear when all site:cgi.example.com shows up with "Contact form" as title.

After this, I will have cgi.example.com
with 10900 same title lines.

But I have no other idea to solve the contact forms.
People write for example "I am interested in this article"

When I do not have the URL with the "by" parameter, how to find out, what article

So the formmail tells

by=example.com/small-widgets/green-widgets

Okay, I am just thinking, the contact form could also work with the referer, but there are this strange people hiding the referer. There are this strange sys admins in big companies hiding the referer by firewall setings.

[walkman]

I see huge crawling so expect another shake up early next week around the 27th. Of course, just a hunch, but Google likes the 17th and 27th.

[JoeSinkwitz]

Walkman,

I'm actually seeing big movements for certain sites right now. One I watch finally cracked the top 10 for a coveted phrase, while dropping out of the top 1000 after being #7 for a few months on a different phrase.

Just like last time, using "keyword" brings it back. Here we go again.

Cygnus

[ianevans]

Just looked today...the tiny amount of original photos we still had listed in Images after the July massacre was just halved.

[jetteroheller]

Just checked my referer log files for an important search term of my site.

Some entries start=20
Some entries start=10
Some entries without start parameter.

From my computer, I see it at place 4

Seems different data centers return different search results for the same search term.

[Cluttermeleon]

I lost all my widget review positions on 20th October - they have gone from the index and the pages themselves are no longer cached, even though they have PR of 4-7 and previously ranked on page 1.

I think this is due to duplicate content. Basically, because I review thousands of widgets I have a template that I insert the widget name and reviews into and the rest of the text is duplicated from one widget to another.

[norbiu]

How much will it take to recover after deleting the duplicate content? Until the next update or sooner?

[walkman]

>> How much will it take to recover after deleting the duplicate content? Until the next update or sooner?

hope that Google doesn't have a set penalty for certain infractions, i.e., regardless of what you do to clean up you will still be penalized for x number of months.

[norbiu]

Thanks!

Anybody knows when the next update is? They do this thing monthly, right?

[tedster]

There's no such thing as a monthly update any more -- and really, there hasn't been for a couple years. Google will "refresh" their data, or "push" new data quite frequently, but on their own irregular schedule with no particular predictability. So everyone should just save their keystrokes on the topic. Also Google won't call any change an "update" unless it involves major new algorithm factors. It's all become quite complex and fluid. Time for a new way of thinking on our part too, I'd say.

[jetteroheller]

It seems more and more data centers change to a version, where I have bad results.

Using the Google toolbar or just typing Google.de, I see great results for my page.

Checking by IP address, the search results are not so good.

[CainIV]

Ranks are back for the biggest site for me.

Was issues with dupe content on-site across the entire site. Fixed about three weeks ago.

Difficult to tell whether this was the defining factor, however there was possibly some kind of push and adjustment on the 20th as page by page my rankings are returning.

Other sites I own are still tanked. Mostly those are ones that went down in August.

[ProTalker]

There is still some movement. And it's completely bewildering me.

I posted earlier that we had regained our rankings on October 1, only to lose them on October 20:

* It remains that only some of our sites were hit; there are duplication issues across the sites, but not within them, and these issues were fixed by a NOINDEX tag last month;
* For common search terms where we were no.1, we have remained no.1, but the "long tail" has been completely blown away.

Latest News
* On certain terms (some of the "long tail"), inexplicably, we returned for most of Tuesday and Wednesday;
* However, the entire "long tail" has gone again today (Thursday 26).

[norbiu]

Interesting. From what I've seen, my traffic is down by 40% but my earnings are only down by 10-15%. The CTR is higher than it used to be. Looks like the missing traffic was just untargeted garbage.

[rden17]

on the 20th, my site:domain.com returned 3-fold increase in pages, and with that my traffic and earnings were 3-fold as well. Best I have ever seen.

on the 25th they are now starting to slide away again :(

I have kind of gotten used to these swings of google's - give, take, give, take, but this was the biggest give and take yet.

GGRRRRRRRRRR

[Vimes]

Hi,

I'm seeing different SERP's than yesterday looking a little like they were.

Anyone else?

Vimes.

[helpnow]

No change for us in the SERPS since Oct 20.

[ichthyous]

I saw a huge uptick in traffic on Tuesday and when I checked my ranking I was ranking well almost across the board. I was hoping that this was the update i have been waiting for for weeks, but the next day I vanished again. Not sure if this is Google or if it's just the fact that I have recently replaced my old site with a new one and made constant changes to improve it. I have seen a definite correlation between the number of 404 errors google is showing for the site and how far down you get dropped. I think Google penalizes your site if you have a lot of 404 errors. I don't have any dupe content issues with the new pages and they are indexed cleanly and deep, even though I only have a PR 4

[tedster]

The discussion is now wandering a bit to general and more recent SERP changes. Does anyone have any further comments about the October 20 change?

[skweb]

Across half-a-dozen domains that I manage, I am seeing a lot of turbulence (rankings changing constantly, huge swings in traffic on smaller websites, and some spam at the top). Generally speaking, based on past experiences with my websites, it only means that G is simply adjusting the rankings. Again based on history, just doing nothing is the best thing - eventually, my rankings have always come back and traffic stabilizes.

[plasma]

- we inadvertently created some duplicate content issues in Q1 2006, which we discovered and fixed in June 2006
- site lost all good rankings end of Q1 2006

Did you remove the wrong duplicates, i.e. the ones that ranked better?

[ProTalker]

More changes again today, Sunday 29 October. A couple of our sites have recovered for certain higher ranking search terms, but not the "long tail". However, we've lost one or two higher ranking search terms on one site which has never been hit before, so I'm not sure of the net result.

[edited by: ProTalker at 10:47 am (utc) on Oct. 29, 2006]

[tedster]

Thanks everyone for looking at the Oct 20 changes. Since only newer changes and analysis seem to be rolling in now,it looks like this particular topic is done.