October 20 Recovery - reversal of October 1 update?

One of my sites crashed June 27, recovered Sept 16, crashed again Sept 30 and made another recovery about four hours ago.

tflight - did you do anything between each stage to affect your recovery, or were your sites always static? Was your recoery due in part to something you did, or was it always just a change at google?

A real authority site for the keywords for one of my sites returned to the #3 position on the 20th after disappearing before.

It amazed me it disappeared, and even though it's a competitor, I'm very glad it's back now, because I couldn't understand how a site like this could disappear.

tflight - did you do anything between each stage to affect your recovery, or were your sites always static? Was your recoery due in part to something you did, or was it always just a change at google?

Hard to say. Since I've had a drop, recovery, another drop, and another recovery I have a really hard time believing it was any on-site factor. I add new content to the site daily, but other than that I have not made any significant changes to the site structure that I could attribute to the drops or recovery.

In other words...... if the site drops again in a couple of weeks I don't feel I have any specific information that would help me recover again.

My site lost its traffic on Sept 30th but has not regained it :-(

This is an up-and-down game taking place every 3 weeks.

My site recovered with a few keywords since about a week. The recover is slow, but I see improvements. Only all images disappeared from Google images search yesterday. I decided not to care anymore about Goole serps, since I don't think I can do anythig about it. Just adding some content to my site and see what's happening. The only problem is that since Google has almost a monopoly on the market for search engines in Belgium, I lose or gain a lot of traffic on every update since last summer.

Yes, something happened on October 20th.

One Site disappeared last month, and came back in 3rd ranking.
Another site that used to be 3rd ranking, now disappeared.

Not sure what happened, but something did happen.

Our rich content site did not recover. Also many No.1 spots, many inbound links, PR 5 and 8 years old.

Down in June, back for some weeks and then zero Google traffic since August.

Hi Helpnow

We have similar sites, and the opposite experience: today, we have once again lost most of our rankings.

History:
- our sites have thousands of pages, most are several years old, lots of quality inbound links, lots of quality content
- most sites lost all good rankings on the June 27 update
- we had built up some duplicate content between the sites (not within them) over the years, but fixed this in August and September
- regained all good rankings October 1
- seem to have lost them again today.

My site has crash and recovered and then crashed Sept 16th.

I was hoping for a recovery this month, but it looks like im still down.

It makes no sense, when I search for my own sites name, I rank #7, and sites that mention my site rank above me.

Another site with the same name now ranks #1, this site only has two pages index in google, the root with www and without. (Duplicate content), while my site has 500 unique pages.

My site has over 5,000 back links and a page rank of 5, this other site has zero back links and a page rank of 0 (has been running a while now)

Very messed up, I have done everything I can think of in hope of recovery but still nothing.

Just popped in to raise this subject and see someone was first!

On keywords we follow rather odd results actually - not a reversal as we were unaffected by the earlier updates. Traffic down yesterday compared with previous Friday.

Still investigating this one.

So this is the day when my biggest site tanks again :)

Well it has not happened yet. Shall keep checking. Been waiting for it for 3 days now.

And in case my rankings stay where they are, there is Oct 30 to come, the next dangerous date.

My biggest site has tanked again today. It was great for years on Google until Aug 27, then crashed for a month, then came back Sep 20-ish.. and has now crashed down again :)

$200 days on Adsense were good while they lasted.. will be back down to $20 again for another month I guess..

Yep, this looks like the newest of a long line of near-monthly data pushes. MC said it would be getting more frequent. This one was 20 days after the last one.

I've got a pretty major site which was hit Sept. 15th and this push hasn't improved things one bit. Fortunately I've got a few other sites to rely on.

I'm surprised how few comments there have been about the most recent data pushes... I wonder if fewer webmasters are affected or if we are just getting tired of discussing it?

I'm surprised how few comments there have been about the most recent data pushes... I wonder if fewer webmasters are affected or if we are just getting tired of discussing it?

Since this one came on a Friday evening in the USA it could be that many people haven't discovered it yet due to the weekend.

I just noticed it today, although yesterday was normal for me, then at midnight when my traffic usually dips, it never came back. I am at 1/6th of my traffic. I never saw a "crash" in any of the other updates.

yes, there are fewer comments about data pushes. quite possibly, they are affecting fewer webmasters. The wild swings for many sites might have been the initial stages of whatever G was trying to do.

So far out of the sites I work with, I see one domain with a change that might play into some pattern. It enjoyed 13 competitive #1 positions (all different urls) for more than a year -- and 12 of those just fell to #2 on Friday Oct 20th. The one ranking that did not fall is also the least competitive of the bunch, but it still converts nicely and we intentionally target it.

This is a domain that has always been close to the edge for on page keyword stuffing and keyword-in-backlinks duplication. If #2 is the worst fall that happens, I'll take it. Sometimes in the more distant past much more drastic problems have come down the line for this domain.

However, this is the first time in over a year that these rankings have faltered, so this recent data push is not a "reversal" of anything as far as I can see.

My constant swinger site got it rankings back on Oct 1. Since then, to avoid a swing back, I have been working on the in-site duplicate content issues (not over yet). Seems I have escaped a fall in rankings yesterday, but that doesn't necessarily mean it was because of anything I did, and there is the 27th-31st data push which would come soon.

And anyway, it all could be Google tweaking its stuff - but better to follow very tight rules so I know I have done whatever is needed.

(My sites anyway never target the #1 position. It's always 2-4 word phrases, and I am usually happy being somewhere in the top 10 for a very large number of combos.)

My main blog recovered and taken 1st place for very nice search phrase.
I've done many improvements to that site (see the other thread about wordpress and dup content issues). Google indexes 100% of my site now and I've done everything to eliminate every possible way of having duplicate content there (including cannonical issues).

It works excellent!

It seems our site somehow crashed yesterday, or day before.

Before - 80% of traffic from Google, yesterday only 45%. Strange.

perhaps sites come back because google is comparing clicks before and after...if click thru after binning you was no better...or worse for the new top ranked sit than google can now class your old position as legitimate..perhaps they have a system of flags in place where they want to compoare before and after data for selected flagged sites...

I'm not sure how these "pushes" work. I still rank for all of my major kw's but traffic has dipped to about 60%. Don't know what to dc to check to see where the change is...how's this work?

I lost heavy, but I do not know where.

On June 27th, I checked all my usual top positions from my main site with all the sub domains, and they had been all gone.

I recovered full on September 30th.

Now I lost 50% traffic from Google on my main sites, but I do not know where.

I have still all my top positions. So I do not know where I lost all the Google traffic.

After checking my usual top position searches, I checked my referer log file from October 14th and checke the first 10 searches of the day.

All positions still in the same range.
I mean I can not know where I had been on October 14th within 1 to 10. The referer can only show, that I was in the first 10 and when I check now, I am also in the first 10.

So since I have the same search positions, it's complete mysterious where the traffic is lost.

Something big has rolled out as of friday for our sites, all are down 30 - 40% across the board with regard to Google traffic but many of our top positions are still in place, same as they have been for 7 years.

I think we are seeing a reversal of pr that was calced this summer back to a lower pr rank which is pushing down 3 term plus serps which would explain why our top tier serps are still in place.

Ahh the annual christmas update right on time:)

which would explain why our top tier serps are still in place.

Take Your referer log file from the time before the update and take some random entries.

I did this by checking the first 10 referer log entries from october 14th

There are no known top posistion searches, but also here, all the top positions are still there.

So when I check over a wide range of search terms, no top positions lost, only 40% Google traffic.

My traffic was at 4000-4500 users per day. On October 20 traffic dropped to 2900. On October 21 it was at 2500.

Why is Google doing this?

I recovered 50% Yesterday. Down since March 27th.

Why is Google doing this?

Don't think about it, google is just broken since last year. Wait & see.