Dec 7 - sudden drop in rankings (part 2)

[Trilitech]

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I was hit hard by the Dec 7th change and I know several others too. I'd like to get some feedback from those affected hopefully track down what our sites have in common so we can hopefully do something about it. Here's what I believe to be the relevant stats about my site. Please post some stats about yours and whether or not you were affected (positive or negative) by this change.

Type of Site: credit cards
Age: 2.5 years
Inbound Links:
- 50% from syndicating articles
- 20% bought
- 10% from link directories
- 20% "natural"
Outbound Links: Only one, but ROS exchange with an Australian credit card site
Has outbound affiliate links: Yes
Does url re-writing: Yes
Sub-Domains: One for a forum
Rank before: 1-5 for primary keywords
Rank after: 18 - not found for primary keywords

[edited by: tedster at 3:34 am (utc) on Dec. 14, 2006]

[OptiRex]

itloc

My feeble attempt at humour:-))...

[doughayman]

OK, here's a very strange phenonmenon:

- A 4-word keyphrase that I have ranked # 1 for, for several years,
does not show me in the SERPs

- Depending on the hour that I run the query, I get either 12 million,
4 million, or 7 million indicated as the total search return.

- In actuality (this was when 7 million was the estimated # of
returned links), only 663 links were actually returned.

- Google asks me on the last page if I want to include Supplementals
as part of the return set, and when I do, I only see 993 returned
links in total.

What on earth is going on? Somebody should call and wake up Matt Cutts, because if this is his definition of Normal, Google is in deep *hit!

Merry Christmas to all!

[tedster]

doug, I've been seeing that kind of buggy behavior for several months. I don't think it began with the Dec 7 changes, although it may have become more common this month. Sometimes it feels like at least some areas of Google search are back in beta ;)

Something has long been off with those estimated URL counts. Now new and very different events seem to be happening to the "omitted results" and "supplemental results" -- and the reports seem even buggier. I've even seen result sets that will give me an "omitted results" link on, say, page 7 if I jump straight to that page -- but if I click up through the pages one at a time, I can still get regular results for page 20, or 30.

This cannot be the behavior they were aiming for.

[doughayman]

Tedster,

Thanks for that information. Since I was only decimated on December 20th, I guess I wasn't cognizant of this anomoly until now.

In any event, I didn't get my Christmas "wish" (same one that many others on this forum were hoping for), but we'll see what the next week and the New Year bring.

Happy Holidays to all!

Regards,

Doug

[tedster]

Since I was only decimated on December 20th...

I understand - and that underscores the challenge we have when we try to make sense of things in our discussions here. We've got observations spread all over the place in many different threads, and that makes it almost impossible to get the big picture.

Here you and I are in a thread about Dec 7 changes, but we're discussing changes that you saw on Dec 20, and that I saw earlier in the Fall.

So I think it's time we took all the discussion about December changes into one thread, and locked this one. That way we may stand a better chance of gaining some insight.

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