Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Is this a penalty or a bug? Have any other sites been similarly affected?
I hope that you are right, but stranger things have happened. Unless you fully understand what Google's intent was here, there is no telling why they did what they did.
Very true doughayman. Sure don't want to give anyone false hopes either.
Their spiders have been all over my site using up bandwidth like a demented idiot just as though they can't seem to be able to collect anything or not knowing what to do with it!
They have to sort this issue sorted soon since I've already been receiving e-mails from AdSense advertisers who target our sites therefore not only are their enquiries reducing, my AdSense earnings are and the knock-on effect to that is Google's receipts.
None of the other so-called new top results have AdSense therefore they are committing financial suicide at the moment in my sector!
I am starting to assemble a list of things to try to get me out of this hole, but at this point, prudence is the overriding factor, and I'm just going to do nothing at this point.
I hear cries from a bunch of people, but this doesn't seem to necessarily be a pervasive problem -- not all the boards are posting this.
If the dust settles, and things do not revert back, then we should probably start comparing notes.
All my sites are evergreen, none of the pages have been changed in ages since once the information has been posted there is very rarely any necessity to change the information and only the index page has been changed in the past couple of weeks with some new factory production details.
There does not seem to be any logic whatsoever about what has been removed and what has been reinstated. All are built precisely the same around my own CSS template.
I have noticed some of my smaller sites and several trade customers' sites have been elevated quite highly. Another thing is that I seem to have had a lot of images removed from Google too...and those sites that have been elevated have their images, copied from my site, in place of my image results.
Coincidence?
Hard to say if this is a coincidence or not. During periods of frustration, it is very easy to over-analyze a lot of things. I've gone through dropped rankings before, but never anything like this (as far as I can remember).
Since I am going through an analysis and fact-finding mission at this point (but doing nothing), I have the following observances:
- For my MAIN site, 6 or 7 of the subordinate key pages are no longer
indexed. My home page, and secondary important page is, however.
I am not sure on the timing of the removal of this page from the
Google index, since I have been just looking at this stuff for a
couple of days now.
- The site:www.domain.com command is yielding approximately 15 %
fewer pages, and for some reason the Supplementary pages are
listed first now. Is there some significance to this all?
- My obliteration from the SERPs seems to be coincidental with the
updating of 100 or so pages of mine, to include a copyright
disclaimer. I updated the <LASTMOD> date on the these pages in
my SITEMAP - most of these pages hadn't been updated in about
4 months or so.
- As I mentioned in an earlier post, I have a single domain, and
about 9 websites which are in subdirectories (folders) below
the root. All 9 of my sites have been adversely effected of
late.
- My domain has been in existence for over 10 years.
- I have seen SERP drops before over the last couple of years, but
I always wound up bouncing back, doing a minimal (and probably
inconsequential) # of subsequent changes.
- My entire site(s) have been spidered several times over the last
2 days, but none of the spidering sources reverse DNS to
"googlebot". My sitemap, however, is read at least once a day,
whether I manually invoke this or not.
That's all I have for now, and I know it is not much. Not exactly the Christmas present that my family and I were looking for......
All the ones I have checked that have been demoted, nevertheless still there in the index, all have a cached crawled date of 20-28th November, all the ones that have returned now mostly have a cached date of 12th-22nd December.
Now just why that should be I have no idea however it lends more to the credence of an almighty GFU...insofar as I am aware my servers were not down.
I am off to my daughter's school, so I will check and report on my cached dates later in the day.
I do have to add one thing, although it seems to be obvious -- in the past, whenever I added additional content (pages) to my site, this always had a (small) upward bias adjustment on my rankings. To the extent that some of my pages are now "missing in action", may have an overall detrimental effect on my rankings, no?
GFU's seem to more prevalent now than ever before, so you may be on to something.
I will research more later.
Thanks for the update.
If it’s any consolation, these things have historically shaken out after a few days and everything comes back.
Does anybody really, I mean really understand what exactly happens with these “refreshes”?
Does anybody really, I mean really understand what exactly happens with these “refreshes”?
Simplistically I would query that if Google has introduced a new algo, does that new algo only display cached results from the index say, after December 1st, and all other cached indices are simply left to wallow until the next time those pages are updated by the new spidering.
Is this why I'm seeing the bot hitting me every two hours? Have they realised they've made an almighty GFU and are trying to rectify as quickly as they can without admitting anything to anyone?
Not that they would of course:-)
Interestingly for some of my keywords I am seeing a retail site I constructed for my sister's business only within the last few weeks, ranking at #1 for these keywords.
And these are my products!
One ecommerce client site completely tanked, and lost thousands of pages. I emailed them and asked if they noticed whether or not their orders were way down, and sure enough, they were, and the client had had no idea why. That site has a ton of issues, from multiple domains being spidered, duplicate content, duplicate titles and meta tags, and I've been bugging them for months and months to let me fix things once and for all. Now maybe we can.
It never ceases to amaze me how many ecommerce clients are so dependent on their websites for sales, specially this time of year, and yet will devote so little time, thought and effort to the maintenace of the source of their income stream. But that's a topic for another item.
I have tracked one page which has a 12th December crawl date and after drilling down to only 28 results it still does not appear in the results although it is supposedly in the index!
What a GFU...something more amiss is occurring. Yesterday, Thursday, I was down 66% compared to average and how my other sites performed. Today I seem to be at about 50% in comparison.
To say I'm puzzled would be more than an understatement.
My main pages, which showed up high in the Google SERPs before December 20th, were indexed (cached) between December 14th - December 16th; hence, pretty fresh, and not stale.
Some of my other meatier pages are missing in action - not in the Google index at all, and that is worrisome.
Still, really no solid evidence of anything that I did wrong of late.
Doug
Speak for yourself. Some of us have been crushed!
Now with this recent, (whatever it is) I have got hit really hard again. Dropped down to number seven, and all my major pages disappeared in the search results.
I noticed one night about a week or so ago, everything came back, for about an hour. Then disappeared again.
I noticed yesterday, that ONE of my main pages, other than my home page came back again where it normally was.
What really burns me up, is that Google will not say what is happening, so all of us are wondering what is going on. Why can't they say, okay we made changes, and you may or may not come back where you where? But they say nothing, which makes everyone start scrambling trying to figure out what is wrong with their sites, and trying to fix them. So, what we do, does it hurt or help in the long run? Sometimes, if you change ONE word, it can help or hurt.
I first noticed my traffic went WAY down on Dec 07 2006, like others have posted. But, that doesn't mean it wasn't starting before that. I just didn't notice it until then. It may have dropped a bit for a few days or even more, but nothing major. Then Dec 07, it was almost non existent from Google.
So, what I am hoping is, that is some kind of updating, and we will maybe all come back again, some day.
Another thing I really don't understand is, a lot of webmasters use google adsense on their pages. A lot of those sites have been affected as well. Some of them with a lot of traffic before this. If theirs sites are affected, then their earnings go down, so Google's earnings go down as well. Make sense? Not to me.
In my opinion, I think it's something we have to wait out again, and again and again.
I'm sure a lot of you think that okay, it's a free listing, they don't charge you to be in their index, so, get over it. Optimize your pages, etc.
I have optimized and optimized, and it still isn't making any difference. That is why I think this is a major update with Google, and they are just not talking about it.
But, again, in my opinion, even giants fall. It may take a while, but!
Poor Google. Their bungling is even dragged out over a period of time rather than just an instant thing. It's like they have two choices in front of them, flushing or drinking, and they just can't stop themselves from bending down to drink.
I used to use Google for my start page, search results, etc.....but I have now switced to another serch engine.
I think it's something we have to wait out again, and again and again.
Well, one thing's for sure, we can't do a darned thing about it!
G won't admit to mistakes even when they've made huge GFUs...they'll not reply except maybe with the usual canned responses which are the biggest load of crock ever written.
They really do forget who provides all this quality information for them to spider for free and deliver to the waiting world. They don't construct these sites and write these pages, we do, and if all they do is start serving up a load of invalid or low quality information then people will move their mouse elsewhere.
In the past couple of days I've had to resort to Y! MSN and a few others since I could not locate information that USED TO BE on G.
I'll give them a few days to sort out their mess, if they cannot then I do have some ideas up my sleeve.
Remember, it wasn't all that long ago that Yahoo owned the Search Engine community.....
Google keeps getting such negative results, and do NOT listen to webmasters, which are the MEAT of their business.
So, I'm not going to keep scrambling for them anymore.
To me, I feel like Google thinks they are God. Sure, they have lots of money, have their hands in a LOT of deals, but, if a lot of people would finally say, okay, that's it....then what would happen?
Think about it...
on a site:domain.com the first few listings are supplementary pages.
Can the gurus please tell us:
What do we do now?
Wait till everything is sorted out at google's end?
or
Try to play around on our side. If yes, how?
Thanks
observer
more spam in their index that I have ever seen
I'm not seeing spam, I'm seeing irrelevant, invalid, poorly written, invaluable pages of no use to anyone and none of them are even using AdSense so there's not even anything to click on to get away from the garbage to a possible relevant site.
It's weird, it's gone through this specific site as though it knew precisely which were the high-earning AdSense pages and removed them manually yet still left me #1 for all the less frequented pages.
Certainly something is in a huge flux because a site I launched only last weekend has already come into Yahoo! and MSN in the top two positions and is already on the second page of G.
That ain't normal by any G standard!
The one that achieved a better ranking now registers a PR of 0 according to several *unmentionable* google ranking tools. Just a few days ago it was PR3.
That ain't normal by any G standard!
May be we should allow for all possibilities.
It could be that what happened since 20th December has been a Bad Data Push!
Accordingly our friends at the plex are working now on "Reverse Bad Data Push" if one may say so ;-)
