Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Over and done with?
All done all through?
What can you do to measure or check if you have duplicate content or not?
For example
site:www.google.com shows clean listing, best I have seen in google for about 2 years,
[64.233.179.99...]
I still see lot of supplement results in this D.C, One site we monitor site: shows 1400 results and almost 600 pages are supplements
But the other D.C is completely clean of supplement which is a huge step forward,
About 2 weeks before Jagger started, our serps became volatile. One day we'd be ranking as normal, and the next day we'd be 20 or more pages down for many of our key phrases. We'd previously been very stable, even throughout previous updates. The site's been up for 7 years.
As Jagger was also preceded by a PR update, my first stop was to check all outbound links, to ensure none of the sites were under penalty. There were 1 or 2, so I removed those links. Then the update really got under way and we ended up out of the top 500 for all our key phrases. Again this was in-and-out on various DCs, but about a week into the update we were off all DCs.
The site was certainly not over-optimized, but I went through and dropped all meta keywords to around 3-4 per page. We then reappeared in the 400s for most of our key phrases.
Although everyone recommended sitting tight until the update was over, this was taking forever, so I looked closely at the sites that were still ranking stably throughout the update.
Looking at the ranking pages only (generally the home pages), most had very little keyword usage in the body text. In fact, most had an unusually low amount of body text. Although we have a fair amount of text, I duplicated the averaged keyword counts, although the comparative weight would have been way down.
Three days later (this seems to be the norm across Google, MSN and Yahoo for our site), we were back in the top 50 for most of our key phrases.
I then looked at site-wide comparisons. I think many of us use keywords across our titles to establish a site-wide theme. Many of the sites I checked did this, but in a very limited way. What I mean is that titles were using 1 or 2 words of a 3-word phrase, but then included ballpark-related words. This was contrary to general belief that a fairly high keyword match across titles needs to be in place to establish theme. Anyhow, I went through our entire public site, trimmed down the title keywords and replaced some keywords with related terms -- this is actually a lot harder than it sounds!
Three days later we were back in the top 30 for most of our keywords.
I then looked at outside factors. I found that the pre-Jagger PR update had dropped the PR for many sites linking to us; actually dropping our PR share by 30 percent. Although this wasn't enough to drop our green bar, I do very much believe this had an effect on our serps -- I know there are those that argue against this. Some site content that I added just prior to the PR update received PR4, whereas it would previously have been PR5, so I can see that the amount of PR we are distributing has fallen.
I have now replaced most of the PR we lost and our serps seem to be about a page down from where they were prior to the update.
I also added a 301 to resolve a minor www/non-www issue, which related to our index page only -- PR was/is the same on both the www and non-www version, but no other pages are affected.
The changes I made have dropped our serps slightly on Yahoo and MSN, but that’s a welcome price to pay for recovery on Google. As there has been so much flux during this update, it’s pretty impossible to determine what, if any of the above changes have had a direct result in our recovery, but this is what I did and it may help someone else confirm what they are seeing.
<edit> Forgot to mention the meta description -- It seemed that many long-term sites with the keyword/phrase at the beginning of their title, keywords and description were gone, whereas those that placed this further into the description were okay, so I did this also. I also matched description weight as best I could.
[edited by: LegalAlien at 4:20 pm (utc) on Nov. 11, 2005]
Google.com shows 3,150,000
?
Not even close.
I'm holding off making any sitewide changes right now till everything settles! will that every happen god only knows! its all a guessing/waiting game and right now the last thing I want to upset is my Y/MSN traffic as thats the only thing that is keeping me above water, albeit a fraction of my G traffic
