Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Jagger is winding down and life must go on. If Jagger has been kind to your site, Congrats. But for the rest of fellow members who lost rankings or their sites dropped of the index, its time to do some thinking and decide on what to improve or change on your affected websites. Still ethical measures are what interest me most.
Some food for the thought.
After my site was hit by Allegra (2-3 Feb 2005) and lost 75% of my Google's referrals and hit for second time on 22nd July 2005 ending up with only 5-10% of pre-Allegra Google's referrals.
My site is now back to the level of around 50% of pre-Allegra Google's referrals and growing... until further. I say "until further" because who knows what the next update or "everflux" do to my site!
Before my site returned back around 19-22 Sept 2005 (very slow at the begining), I went through my site several times for months and did the followings:
- removed duplicate pages. In my case it was several testing pages (even back to 1997) which I just forgot on the server.
- removed one or two 100% frame pages.
- removed some pre-sell affiliate program pages with content provided entirely by affiliate program vendors.
- removed few (affiliate referrals) outbound links which was on the menu bar of all pages (maybe we are talking about sitewide linking).
- on resource pages, I reduced the outbound links to be less than 100 .
- made a 301 redirect non-www to www (thanks to my good Norwich friend Dayo-UK).
- finally filed a reinclusion request in accordance with the guidelines posted on Matt's blog (thanks Mr. Inigo).
Would you be kind to tell us how Jagger Update affected your site, and what do you intend to do about it.
Thanks!
It may be due to inbound links. If they are truly similar in name then some webmasters ading your links may have dropped the hyphen.
Your right Vince, I have run trace routes on a number of their site copies and they trace to the main superservers.org server.
Surely there's a case for questioning their motives and also their .org (non-profit making) status?
Cheers
Colin
Surely there's a case for questioning their motives and also their .org (non-profit making) status?
Wouldn't it be convenient if the company also owned a site about widgets. And then, all the competition sites bout widgets got their 'cached' copies indexed under superservers.org? How unfortunate that they would be hit with duplicate content penalties.
If they were truely non-malicious, they would have banned robots in their robots.txt file. Wouldn't have taken any time at all.
Its mild weather here. Maybe the spring is arriving, or a "duplicate" spring on its way. Great to be alive :-)
Tell us what changes you have done to your "affected" site to bringing it back again to where it deserves to be under the sun of mighty Google.
I don't have solid evidence, but I think that if a webmaster makes changes to the titles and description meta tags of several pages at the same time, those pages might get sandboxed.
Wish you all a great day and a nice X-Mas shopping weekend.
anyone else have any views on this I'm reworking an old site that still has some (v-poor)rankings on G and part of that is changing all the titles and description
I think it is safe to say that the Google algo looks at everything in a site and comes up with a score. Since every site is different, a given change will affect each site differently.
Every site owner has to look at his unique conditions and see what does and does not work.
Our traffic flops around as the google users see different pages that we either had on line or now have on line.
We have changed our 404 to tell visitors that due to Google having problems with their search engine .......
In relation to title and description tags, I change mine on the homepage, from time to time, to tweak the keywords, if I feel there is a better word, or another isn't necessary, and so far no adverse effect.
Off topic, as it may help some of you by offering this, for accessibility users, take a look at speegle.co.uk, a search engine powered by Google, but which has voice assistance plus audio news etc.
I cannot imagine why Google would penalise for editing tags. If anything, it shows a site is being worked on and hopefully improved.
If the words in the title or description are edited and no longer relate to words on the page and/or links to the page, then a ranking loss may occur. I'm sure google looks at this relationship.
"we can't process your request right now. A computer virus or spyware application is sending us automated requests, and it appears that your computer or network has been infected."
I now get this everytime I access google. Don't know if it's anything to do with above link, but just giving a heads up! Perhaps Google doesn't like the fact that I've started using the MSN toolbar...;-/ Anyone else?
I had multiple problems on my comp when I had more than one Toolbar. Whether it was a conflict or what, I am not sure.
I just tried the link and it worked fine.
What was happening to me was that parts of the window kept going black, and also at times the comp froze, but I then deleted all other toolbars, and it all worked normally again.
>>title and description tags
I cannot imagine why Google would penalise for editing tags. If anything, it shows a site is being worked on and hopefully improved.<<
If the folks at Google consider modifications in title and tags of pages as part of SEO tweaking efforts, I wouldn't be surprised if they included in the algos factors to devaluate such pages.
I recall a fellow member mentioning (somewhere in Jagger update many threads) that he noticed that after editing the titles and tags of some pages, those pages weren't ranking for sometime.
When I read that post, I sent a sticky to that kind fellow member to repost the same in my thread "Gaming Google..." but unfortunately, he didn't do so.
[webmasterworld.com...]
I don't have solid evidence, but I think that if a webmaster makes changes to the titles and description meta tags of several pages at the same time, those pages might get sandboxed.
-S
[edited by: ssjxxx at 4:48 pm (utc) on Dec. 16, 2005]
Please. Others have said that changing the tags benefits them.
No one knows. Let's not throw people off course by making wild guesses.
Pages where I removed the strapline which have been reindexed are now showing up properly instead of url only. The only url only pages I have now are the ones which I have not got around to changing, genuinely duplicate content pages (glitch in my shopping software) and pages which G hasn't re-indexed yet.
Some of those pages are now at number 1 on G for the first time ever. Pages which are not ranking well appear to be over-optimised compared to pages which are ranking highly.
The biggest change which I am seeing is where the root/index.php issue is still being fixed.
On McDar, these pages show the site with the / at the end, and they are back in the index. It's not finished yet (bearing in mind that all pages pointed to index.php and G hasn't picked up all those changes yet. The more G links my pages back together, the higher the pages are ranking.
I can't tell if the pages I've changed radically are 'sandboxed' or not because they were dropped altogether and have just reappeared in the serps.
Still looks like a combination of Dupe/OOP/Canonical factors to me.
I would guess that perhaps those whose root page is indentical to their index.html/php page may be still having problems if they haven't done a redirect?
Edited to add...
Right after posting this I went back and noticed that some pages JUST changed. Weird.
Just returned back from an evening visit to my friend Frank. He is a good programmer working at an online bank. Among friends he is known for his own making X-Mas Danish cookies. I guess I need to do some cycling tomorrow to burn the excessive calories out :-)
Talking about tweaking tags...
According to some of your feedback, one can conclude that Google doesn't devaluate the pages because of tweaking the title and meta tags, mostly to achieve better rankings on the serps. Lets call it a kind of whitehat SEO ;-)
I hope you are right.
colin_h,
Thanks for the sticky. I’m still trying to figure out what to do about this.
needinfo,
>>> ...how come you're so confident that your sites will recover? <<<
The optimism comes and goes. Today is a bad day, but on a good day I would say the following:
Our main site has been progressively fine-tuned over 7 years to analytically match the most stable top-ranking gorilla sites in all on-page, site-wide and off-site areas. As a result, this site has enjoyed more than three years of stable serps along side these gorilla sites, and was totally unaffected by previous updates. None of these gorilla sites shifted during this update and the only thing that changed for us was about a 40% drop in inbound PR share following the pre-Jagger PR update, and a subsequent drop in traffic as a direct result of our tanking serps. Logically, once PR share has been recovered and traffic levels are back to their pre-Jagger levels, there will again be nothing to distinguish our site from these stable gorilla sites, so hopefully full recovery will follow. I see evidence of this every few days as we progressively (albeit carefully and slowly) build towards our previous levels in these areas.
On a bad day, such as today, I would say... well, actually I think that's better left unsaid.
vincevincevince,
>>> I've filed a C&D for all my domains. <<<
Did you get a result? I think we’ve established that they’re really not caching anything, so perhaps they’re just using the term ‘cache’ to cover themselves legally – i.e. you could argue that a cache is not actual copy, so there would be no behavior or action to cease or desist from. Actually, forget that, as it’s a dumb argument ;)
I think I’m going to go this way, but I'd be interested if anyone thinks I'm barking up the wrong tree here:
Access our site through SuperServers and go through enough of the site (perhaps not frequently accessed areas) to generate easily identifiable entries in our access logs. Do this several times through a 24-hour period to see if there is a range of IPs, or other varying identifiers. Armed with this information, simply block it in our .htaccess.
Google let loose this banshee without knowing what damage it would do ... and to think that they could advise on technical changes and their effect on serps is just wishful thinking.
....... They're as much in the dark as we are ;-)
>>...I was away for my birthday yesterday -- building bridges in a rocky marriage.<<
Happy birthday my friend. And Godspeed in building bridges...
Thank you my friend. I appreciate your kind words ;)
