Dec 7 - sudden drop in rankings

Anyone experiencing the same thing today?

[moehits]

I have a site that yesterday ranked very high for many terms, today it is nowhere for any of them.

Things I'm seeing that changed, ...

In google sitemaps, it's saying many pages have low pagerank, or many pages have not been assigned pagerank yet, but the visible PR is very high across the site.

It has many high quality links, pr5 across the whole site.

The allinanchor searches used to show the site ranking high, now it is nowwhere for those searches.

[andrewshim]

Yes, seem to notice a change too. Was at a solid #3 for a couple of months before Dec 7 saw a slip to #10.

Thought it might be due to my changes to the homepage which altered the KW density a bit. But we'll have to wait and see.

[moehits]

This is an across the board drop, had 20-30 terms in the top 20, now none are in the top 100.

The sitemaps tool shows a total different pagerank than what is on the toolbar, it seems like Google either threw out or lost their links.

[sandyeggo]

This happend to me yesterday too - i went from #5 to #16, then i want to #6 and then #5 again all in the same day.
I think its just a shuffle imo - check the different datacenters for a better look at whats going on.

[newborn]

Whats the name of that new movie...BLACK CHRISTMAS, what does Google Claus have stored for us this Christmas a sock full of:
Disappearing websites
Dropping Page Rank
From Position 1 to 100

And a Partridge in a pear tree. I put up a site on October 10, G indexed all pages, then On Thanks'taking' day poof all gone except the index page.

Christmas is around the corner get prepared I am seeing a drop in traffic from Google for all my sites since yesterday. Remember the plan create a holiday subdomain.

[moehits]

This might have something to do with the site: command problem, the homepage isn't coming up first in a site:www.foo.com search, was there any fixes for that?

[bobosse]

Same thing here. I noticed a major drop in SERPs for a lot of our keywords.

I looks like the search result data has been shuffling since Monday, ups and downs, then our good rankings started to disappear gradually on Tuesday until Wednesday night when we lost most of our really good placements...that sucks

Hopefully it'll come back.

[peterdaly]

Interesting. I was thinking the same thing when I just checked my logs for today. I had some ranking that I gained in the past week or so that had slipped back.

Traffic for a couple keywords I have recent targeted and gained ranking in seem to be lost. Almost like a week roll-back.

My data isn't conclusive enough to mean anything, but it's another interesting data-point.

[Asia_Expat]

I saw an 80 percent drop in traffic yesterday and today all of a sudden. I hardly had any traffic in the first place but I was making forward movement but I was heartbroken when this happened...
However, I quickly noticed that I also saw an equal redustion in traffic from Yahoo also, at exactly the same time....... I use Google analytics, could it be a probelm there?
Looking at the forum 'who's online' feature, I have just as many guests online as before.

... Go figure.

[sparky74]

We have noticed a massive hit to our rankings, positions which we have had for 3 years.

Positions which have been held in the top 3 throughout all the updates. We have made no sudden changes...

We are a gifting business, so December is a key month, we have a large spend on Adwords and wonder if this is a way of making us up our bidding.

Interested to find out what categories everyone else is dropping for?

We have been ranked in google since 2002, our site is kept updated..

[Jez123]

I have been noticing google playing around with the gift SERPS for at least a couple of months. I think they rolled out what they tested.

I notice other areas also. My site has many SERPS from gifts to furniture to hot tubs and I am seeing some really odd results. Drops from some sectors whilst others are static. Either google is going to roll out more pain and suffering or I just can't begin to guess what they have done or why this time. I find it odd that one sector should be hit within one site without another being hit unless there is more to come...

[onetry]

I was completely banned from index :-)

Cool!

[jenkers]

for some of my search terms I'm seeing 6-7 times as many urls in the resultset. This has certainly affected the traffic to some of my pages but not across the board it seems (not yet anyway).

[yannickl]

Me too, very big hit on most (but not all) SERPs since yesterday, about 1/3 of traffic gone.

[weidi]

We also have been hit hard on December 7. Most keywords dropped significantly.
We had most major keywords in the top ten and the Christmas shopping season started to kick in nicely.
We are in the apparel gift business. We are running Adwords and we raised the bids and the daily spending just before this happened.
We also do spend money on shopping dot com, may that could be a other duplicate issue?
When I do a a site: search most results are in the supplements.
In October I learned that a lot of our pages are in the supplements, maybe because of duplicate content. At least this was my guess. So I changed most of the descriptions to make them more unique but now we ended up with even more supplements.

Any help or ideas?
I guess I'm at the end of my SEO knowledge.

BTW: As far as I can see most of my competitors are still doing fine, no drops there.

Happy holidays.....

[JoeSinkwitz]

It looks like I had a site get knocked from page 2 to 100+ for a pretty competitive phrase -- I haven't diagnosed the issue just yet, but it is looking like we have more scrapers popping in above where it was on the allin checks...this happened to me once before; I just went down the list contacting the site owner, host, and then filed DMCA complaints. The only problem is that it takes more time to get them removed than it does to fire up other scrapers.

If it is due to the scrapers, fine (well, not fine, but I can fix that); something else isn't right though...G might not be assigning data correctly, because it "feels" as though some trust factor in the data push is the reason things are getting wonky.

Cygnus

[Pamela2]

Our site too, with a couple of differences:

1. We slipped earlier in the week, on Monday or Tuesday I think.

2. We are still alive on a few Google data centers, including [72.14.203.99...]

What about you guys? Are you still on that data center, and did any of you start to fall earlier than yesterday?

Like some of you, ours is an old site, just with information on it. We don't sell anything. I was going to put adsense on it a few months ago but didn't. Thank goodness.

[johnhh]

we crashed and burned on the 3 Dec - no reason I can see.

On [72.14.203.99...] all looks good to us.

[Pamela2]

we crashed and burned on the 3 Dec

Yes. About the 3rd or 4th we started to notice. But we have hung around on a handful of data centers, including that one.

We have made no changes in eons. Nor anything remotely naughty, as we couldn't seo ourselves out of a paper bag, and we know it. The site is just full of info, which must be good because of all the links coming in.

I guess we just have to sit it through and hope they sort it out.

[mojomike]

well the way I see it, it's the purging, it's been mentioned before and I'll summarise it.

the Google algo is getting better ( also the human element editors ). web masters that are not working on making there site better, and or are not focused on customer satisfaction are being weeded out. plain and simple, it's not our job to fool the Google ALGO, it's our job to guild the algo around our store to make the best presentation possible.

think of your web site as a store, then walk the web site store, that's the way I see the Google algo, I walk the Google algo and show it what I want it to learn about my store, I reinforce certain items so that it know that I have it. and I let engine do it's magic.

just think, WORD OF MOOUTH, if your site has not positive comments from 3rd parties is going to loose rank. if you don't get good links, you don't get rank. if you don't have customer reviews you won't get rank.

just my 2cents

[bkleinhe]

that's about what it's worth 2 cents...complete crap. This is just normal flux...your site will come back even if you do nothing to it. They always do.

[JoeSinkwitz]

1. [72.14.203.99...] does look good, but looks too different from what things are now for me to think it would ever stick (I've been wrong before, but just my thoughts).
2. I have to disagree mojo; this "purging" is not a hand-edit, not even close. I see it far more as a factor of G unable to accurately determine the correct content owner on a continual basis, resulting in wide swaths of collateral damage as it removes duplicate content.
3. Not picking on you mojo, but on your other point...if it were for user experience (which is extremely difficult to quantify algorithmically outside of stickiness and click-back percentages) and 3rd party ratings, a lot of the dropped rankings wouldn't be dropped. I've seen successful social network infiltrations on link bait that is then scraped by a student EDU account and get dropped due to the EDU being seen as more relevant.

All that said, sometimes with this much data going back and forth, things are bound to get mushed. I've seen some sites come back without changing a thing, and I've seen sites come back after changing everything -- just keep building content, getting links, and filing DMCA reports.

Cygnus

[edited by: JoeSinkwitz at 3:06 pm (utc) on Dec. 8, 2006]

[johnhh]

yep just sit it out - we were dead in October and came back strong in November.

Just getting on with what was planned..

Oh and getting a certain goverment site to correct those nice incoming links :)

JoeSinkwitz:you might be right on ownwership - note problems with site verification on Google Webmaster Tools

All factors are linked - some are more linked than others

[weidi]

Yep, we are still ok on 72.14.203.99

I just hope we come back on the other data centers before Christmas is over.

[mojomike]

Well I don't own any social type site. but use google's tools and they help, also I worked very hard to get customer referrals posted as inbound links, I think those things have something special.

Every time there is a Google dance, I move up a bit more, I now have a few top placements ...2's 3's ... as of this morning, when some of my keywords were down on the second or 3rd page.

I don't think I am that skilled, but I just followed what's said on this site. I have to associate my good fortune with someone tweaking the ALGO to give me a few points. The store idea is the way I think it out ( I'm a visual person )

I agree that many of a website comes back after the dance, but every month I have done a print screen of top 100, I keep seeing them vanish ( an some real nicely designed sites ) and I keep moving up slowly.

so, I just keep the course.

mojomike

p.s. I never take offense, we are here to share, sometime we just disagree :)

[insight]

I have watched the 72.14.203.99 data set for a few days now, and it looks like it's only on a handful of IP addresses so far. Just from some test searches it looks like there are three sets running around, with the third being only slightly different from the 72.14.203.99 set, like noticeable changes in indented listings popping in and out.

Anyone else see the 72.14.203.99 set gaining ground or is it on its way out?

[zegiv]

Hi evrybody,

Same lost of rankings appear on my web site on the last 18 November. No good news since that day.

I can say that since that day my web site ranks normaly on :
64.233.167.104
64.233.167.147
64.233.167.99
72.14.203.104
72.14.203.107
72.14.203.99

I lost 200 to 300 on all my kewords for all others datacenters.

I am waiting for my rankings come back...

[Umbra]

I've occasionally been visiting Matt Cutt's blog, and there's never any mention of the serps turmoil of the last few weeks. I could be wrong, but I was under the impression that Matt was a sort of spokesperson for Google and usually commented (however briefly) on major updates. Considering that sudden drastic drop rankings during the holiday season is a very serious issue for webmasters, then why isn't Matt following up? Either this update is only affecting a small portion of websites and therefore not worth mentioning on his blog, or Matt is pointedly ignoring it for some reason. Or did I miss something?

[ari11210]

To add to the conversation... The good rankings that I lost in June came back on Nov 17th, but have been consistent since then, including today.

[MattCutts]

Umbra, right now I'm not aware of any major changes yesterday, so right now I'd chalk it up to the normal daily changes in ranking as we refresh our index. I'll be happy to ask around, though.