Drowned in Sept Update - Now Back Better than ever - Anyone else?

Welcome to the forum, digiau.

Did you take any steps to fix the damage, or did you reappear as suddenly (and mysteriously?) as you got hurt. If you did take steps, what do you feel helped the most?

Did you bounce back on or shortly after Dec 7th by chance? I'm guessing you're on the positive end of what killed a bunch of other sites rankings. I'd appreciate it if you could post your stats on that thread if so.

[webmasterworld.com...]

Hi,

Thanks for the replies; I hope some others in similar circumstances can fill this out with more examples.

Hi tedster - okay we mysteriously fell into the -300 effect and got slammed pretty bad. I had searched for all the signals of what went wrong and I think some duplicate content issues were part reason.
*) Problem: content was spread thin across 2 similar areas plus that combined with poor seo: bad and near duplicate titles & meta & spammy keywords.
*) Resolved (we think so): built the titles & meta (keywords + desc) from the actual content being shown.
We aimed to pull everything from the content programmatically -
- meta keywords used Porter Stemming Algo (http://tartarus.org/~martin/PorterStemmer/)
- meta desc used key phrase extraction algo
- titles also used key phrase extraction - taking top key phrase with highest no. nouns present
There was of course a lot of testing to fine tune the algo and other techniques that may have helped us.

There are other parts of our site that were optimized, but they weren't as content heavy - so not much to talk about there.

Trilitech - we bounced back in the last 12+ hours, but since I am currently in Japan (helping my sushi addiction) so the dec 7th update might have been lagged. I guess there are always 2 ways this can go, just hope it keeps up.

Heads up guys hit bad by the update - things do come good, just be patient and build another site to two so you can sit on them when things go bad.

thanks.

Hi again,

I forgot to mention I had been using text link type ads and got rid of them 1.5 months ago. They cost a stack and did nothing but assumingly hurt me. I had paid up for them so with the remaining time left just pointed them to my competitors! This reminds me that Seobook blog or some other seo blog mentioned they knew of times when taking the text links off the site resulted in the rankings coming back. If that's the case then I have learnt my lesson and saved $600 a month - money better off on business.com and yahoo diretory listings.

Congrats to digiau. Though I am still struggling to get my 3-year old site recover from the mid Sept slaming, at least I saw some hopes from your posts.

Likewise dongjp - 3 year old site 70% reduction mid sept, as of yesterday a further drop 50% drop - not much left now before it's all gone.

BTW anyone still actually using Google?

Our 6 year old site been losing pages indexed since 12/03. Dropping daily. We are a retail site and this has totally ruined our x-mas season. Most of the pages that remain indexed are "supplemental". We have made no changes to our site. We had been recovering from the "big daddy" fiasco until now, this happens. Google, what are you doing to us and why? Help! It's just like someone turned the switch "off".

Thanks for sharing all the info, digiau and congrats on the recovery.

Two quick questions, if you please:

1. Did the number of pages of your site crawled by Googlebot reduce drastically around September (i.e. when your traffic dropped)?

2. Has the crawling activity now come back to pre-September levels?
If so, about when?

Hi Guys,

It's a pity no one else has posted some positive results.

Okay Web_Savvy :
1) Googlebot has been crawling the site continually requesting about 1 page per second since august and doesn't seem to want to stop. That speed is even with the Sitemaps crawl rate at 'Normal'

2) as above.

The levels of traffic are looking to be higher peaks than pre-sept. I shall enjoy while it lasts. The internet sure is strange place when you have direct income coming from the same place that supplies you traffic/customers, nearly a conflict of interest. The way it effects us in bad times we need to seriously be thinking about building our own networks of traffic refferals so we don't die when our rankings tank, of course that depends on your niche.

Please - there must be someone out there with some success.

thanks.

One of my sites that got hit this summer seems like it is recovering, but then it drops off the map again a few hours later. The results from different DCs seem to be all over the place. Another one of my sites is showing some signs of recovery too, but for some search terms it is nowhere to be found.

These are the most scrambled results I have seen from Google since I started tracking some of the SERPS almost two years ago. Are there some major year-end changes going on here?

I have not seen the same results, I have had very consistent rankings through the whole time that you are writing about.

Can you enlighten us on the tactics you have taken with you sites?

It's a pity no one else has posted some positive results.

As you'll find posted a lot in the adsense forums here, you could possibly attribute this to the human nature. When things turn bad, a lot of people come out shouting 'foul' or 'haaalp' but when things get better, only a few tend to come out and share.

Well, in our case, a site of ours that got hit in September does seem to have come back a bit. Traffic levels are nowhere near comparable to yours, but here it is:

Pre-September, it was doing about 3500 uniques a day. After taking the hit, traffic dropped to <1000 a day. Starting 13th of this month, two days in a row, it has crossed 2000 a day for the first time after September. (I know two days a pattern do not make - so we'll see how it goes for a few days.)

This site had duplicate title / description problems which we corrected only on the 9th / 10th of this month so I'm assuming the present traffic regain is not directly related to our changes / corrections.

HTH.

I haven't made any major changes during the time where my ranking fluctuated. The only change I can think of is that I reduced the number of internal links on a few main pages, but I doubt that had an effect.

Google says try to keep the links on any given page to fewer than 100. Does anybody know if that means external links only or internal links as well?