Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
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.
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.
Matt, I would be very grateful if you could do that. Something has happened in the last week for sure.
We just have a well established information site and never do anything to it except add pages from papers our collegues write every blue moon, and none recently. It is the most boring site ever for anyone here at Webmasterworld probably, because it is all text, but on Monday or Tuesday it just sank away on most searches. It would be good to know why. Surely an accident of some sort.
Did you see the first post I made in this thread? I tried to offer some observations.
I have a site that ranked fine Wednesday, was gone yesterday, and came back today.
It seemed like the links weren't being counted yesterday, the allinanchor searches stayed the same, but the rankings were gone.
Today, the allinanchors are the same, and the rankings are back.
This was across most datacenters, I checked many yesterday and couldn't find the site ranked anyhwere, but it was indexed.
The site command yesterday didn't show the homepage ranked in the top 10, today the homepage is first for the site command.
I also explored the duplicate content issues, of those pages which lost ranks, most of the had unique content and only those pages show up for searches on unique phrases from the pages.
The really scary thing is now all of a sudden we have thousands of listings in the supplemental bin of death. Has anyone else seen loss of ranks AND pages being tossed into supplemental results?
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.
Hi Matt! Thanks for joining in so quickly! I hesitate to chalk it up to normal daily changes because of all these recent threads:
Datacenter Watch: 2006-11-09 [webmasterworld.com]
Massive change in SERPS - Nov 19 [webmasterworld.com]
November 28 Data Refresh? [webmasterworld.com]
And of course this current thread...
Sure, it may just be that webmasters are getting extra-frantic before the holidays, but there's seems to be no question that some SERPS have gone upside-down, ie., long-standing sites in certain sectors that have been hit hard with something like a minus 500 penalty on some datacenters. Even if it's only a temporary symptom of the usual index rebuilding, then it would seem very ill-timed to allow flux to affect websites just before the holidays so drastically and for so long.
Wonder what's gonna happen on Dec 16th?
I lost a lot of sites too but they were manual bans: promoting an online store with a self made article is a sin according to Google. Even if it's a non-profit student information site and the affiliate link was there just to help cover domain+hosting costs. Thanks a lot Matt.
Notes: Pages and subdomains removed (404) sometime during the last summer have reappeared in the index as supplemental. For me it doesn't look like a normal data refresh.
In order to make the pages a little more fleshed out, I decided to include the latest TWO user reviews, which caused a good 80% of the pages on my site to be updated. I did that 2 weeks ago. Anyone else who dropped did something similar? Is this a possible cause at all?
[edited by: SEOPTI at 11:19 pm (utc) on Dec. 8, 2006]
I am glad to see this as these two sites were of very poor quality and I always wandered why they were in serps anyway?!
[edited by: Pikono at 12:09 am (utc) on Dec. 9, 2006]
Yup, same thing here, I guess G doesnt like content anymore...
what did I do?
We just updated a lot of pages on the site too, possibly every page.
There might be something to that, but my site only dropped for a day, and came back the next.
It must be tied into trustrank or something too though, many sites update the entire site this time of year, and we're not seeing thousands of sites drop, or are we?
This site has a lot of high quality links, maybe that's why it came back?
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.
I reverted back to the old format as soon as I noticed the drop to #10.
Result : Seems my drop was self-inflicted. Going back to older version saw my site go back to pre-Dec7 rank. Hope everything works out well for all of you.
Also - we are having some weird things in our logs from GBot - read here [webmasterworld.com...]
We have regained our previous positions on main keywords, but still missing about 50% of the traffic.
Oh, and by the way, while I was looking trough the DCs - the links were updated on one of them (and we were down about 30 spots)...
Somthing is cooking...
The pages are there - a site: command shows them in the index, but a search for the key phrase or page name doesn't find them.
My data shows this happened on about Dec 3.
Client had renamed many pages during the summer which had been doing fine (once I got htaccess in place) and now they all seem to have fallen out of the search index.
12/3 was the lowest traffic, about 1/10th of the last 30 day average, with the last 5 days at about 20% of the 30 day average.
All we have ever done in fact is add pages every now and again to a pretty flat site, so even if I was going to try to chase Google I wouldn't know where to start! I feel we have done nothing wrong at all, so we will just sit tight and hope they can sort themselves out.
what I did is the following
html compliant
never exceeded on out bound links over 100
check to make sure out bound links are valid
checked my meta tags
checked my anchor
made sure I had a high percentage of text to code
looked for scrapers
checked my inbound links to make sure that they came to the right section.
checked my htaccess file and made sure it was right.
checked from overseas to make sure that my page loaded fast
checked my headers for any error codes.
then I went to webmaster tools and submitted my site, it passed with no errors.
mojomike
I'm guessing its a data glitch and not an update since we haven't changed anything on the sites other than add new products and Matt is saying no updates were done.
I hope its corrected quickly because I can't even begin to calculate how much revenue we've lost.
It got me too... on December 7th.
Dozens of keywords that I had on page 1 in Google were suddenly knocked back to page 5. No idea why.
Even my domain name got spanked. It's now sitting on page 3 (29th).
the thing is WHY do they do it when the holliday shopping season as at its PEAK.
What I see in my sector is that the 2 sites that are on topic and have 100+ hidden words on the page are back to dominating the SERP. One site was out for atleast a year, the other one 7-8 month.
#2 position is taken back (and well deserved) by a site that is old Authority on the subject. The problem is that TITLE and snippet belong to a different page on the site. The CASHED COPY shows Different Page, the URL its pointing is the correct URL.
