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!
Here is what I have seen from the sites I work with:
Removing or adding on page content has made little difference. In fact, it would almost seem google is very lenient in comparsion ot MSN and Yahoo in penalizing for onpage sutting and spam unless a report is sent in, because their algo doesnt rely heavily on on-page factors except for the Title in competitive phrases. This is why they wish people to report spamming so much...
Search excessive linking penalty in Google and look at the questions about too much internal linking possibly triggering a spam penalty.
Not likely, unless your entire page is spammed links. Some of the sites I web for havce 50+ left side navbars linking to everypage. Many of those pages link further explicitly in content to their target. This is simply good web hierarchy. However, I have seen some improvement in serps with sites who were previously linked from many pages to home using their keyword. The jury is still out on this one.
non-www to www. This is IMHO huge in this update, and lots of great work has been summed up in Google News by Dayo and co. Lots of sites I see that had no explanation of loss in rank have had or are now experiencing issues with this and supplemental listings as a result.
As one or two members pointed out, the meta description does seem to be an important factor to look at. Make sure each page accurately describes what the content is, without adding keywords. Use your keyword only once here and use it so it makes sense. Limit keywords to only one-time version of your keys.
I dont see any evidence showing that too many links leaving one oage causes problems, even though its in Google guidelines. Lots of #1 sites have resources pages with over 300+ links leaving them, many unthemed.
I dont see any evidence showing that an ODP listing changes anything. I have a top 5 web hosting site that has been online less than one year...
However, I do see that what many sites in the ODP have in common is length of time online as well as length of aged links.
Any thoughts?
i got to page 1 on G by fine tuning my site day after day after day, following peoples advice on here and incorporating the help of a page critic.
my results have gone, but the page critic offers no suggestions, in its opinion my page is perfect.
im not as hot on SEO as some of you guys, and to be frank, the jagger update forum is pretty hard to understand to a lamen like myself.
i dont know where to start, one minute im doing everything right, and the next everything wrong?
it happened overnight and i hadnt made any (what i would call) major changes to the site.
where do i go next? who knows!
What we did so far:
1. Clean up our resources page. After not reciprocating links for years, we started accepting reciprocal links and put an Add URL page. While we did not put some totally far out websites from our niche, we may have stretched the scope a little bit. We removed those areas that did not fit our core market. And we removed our Add URL page. No more adding links for us. We were #1 for years without doing recips, and when we started doing it, we got hit so bad. No more reciprocal linking for us.
2. Beef up pages that used to rank well, and now fell way down. We're updating the pages, adding more content.
Now, we are back on the first page at #6, and we are seeing an uptick in referrals from Google since yesterday (hopefully it continues). For our main keyword, the big boys -- some only marginally relevant to the keyword -- are still lording it up.
I think cleaning up is the right way. Jagger is a good opportunity to update the sites. I had lost so much traffic, I couldn't lose more. I never participated in recip. linking so that I couldn't correct. The cause of all traffic trouble is still guessing but improving the site will be step 1 to a solution anyhow.
Still thinking about how to get less dependend of Google (even for payed visitors they are for us number 1).
I dont see any evidence showing that too many links leaving one page causes problems
I don't think that many links on a page hurts your page. But after about 100 outgoing links Google ignores them so if you sincerely want to pass PR on to the pages you link to keep it under 100.
The same is true when you are linking to other pages on the same site. Less is better. So many links to other pages simply dilutes them. Plus who would even look at so many links so visitor wise it's worthless too.
Link to major sections of you site from the home page. On lesser pages link back to the homepage and to the other pages in that subsection. It's better for google and better for your visitors.
This morning, I noticed an improvement in my rankings. Throughout the past week, I have made the following changes:
1) Changed META descriptions so they don't repeat on every page as much
2) Reduced META keywords on every page
3) Changed all page titles so I don't repeat my company's slogan on every page
4) Implemented a 301 redirect
5) Tidied up my links and removed any dead links
6) Found a couple of sites who were copying my content and asked them to remove it (which they did)
7) Re-designed my website footer so i didn't repeat certain words. ie, I design things so the footer had "blue widget design", "red widget design" etc etc - so every page had "widget design" showing a lot at the bottom
Obviously, I don't know if these changes affected my rankings today but thought I'd share them with everyone in case it helps...
Now and then, someone's post focuses on recips. Then, poof, the subject's gone again. I'd like to make a few comments on this issue.
Prior to Jagger, there was a PR update. I spent a while going through link pages on our partners sites and found that many link pages lost PR. This worked out to a PR drop of around 40 percent across the board.
Then came Jagger, which 'apparently' put less emphasis on recips (or links in general). So effectively we lost 40% of our inbound link PR and the importance of the links was also reduced. IMO these are significant numbers, so could have resulted in the dramatic drops many of us saw during (or just prior to) Jagger 1.
There will be those that say they don't have recips, but this could just as well relate to links in general, so they would still be affected by the large devaluation of their inbounds.
We have a simple equation to determine a fair link, which is to divide the page PR by the total links on the page. If this is higher than 0,1, then we will generally consider this a fair link, provided the site/link page is tightly themed and doesn't contain unrelated links. On this point, I found a few sites that had way too many links, and others that had totally unrelated links. As most of our recips have been up for 2 years or more, and I check these monthly, this scrambling for links seems to have happened during the past month; presumably being their desperate attempts to recover from this update.
I then contacted the offending partners and either asked them to reciprocate more fairly, or removed their links if they ignored me, or wouldn't comply. I actually only ended up removing 3 such sites, so I doubt this was a factor. However, I did remove 28 sites that had added many unrelated links to their pages (I did let them know and told them I would re-add their links if they cleaned up their pages). As a result of this, I saw a progressive and steady recovery of our site during Jagger 2/3.
I also added a .htaccess 301 (only our home page and one other main section page was affected), reduced the body keywords throughout the site and trimmed our meta keywords to ensure they relate to the page only (I'm actually still working on this one). These were all fairly minor edits as this was all pretty much on track beforehand. However, these on-site changes were all done during the past 2 weeks, and have had nowhere near as big an impact as the initial link cleanup I made.
I don't want to repeat the exact recovery pattern, as I have already posted this twice in the Jagger update threads, but I think it was 2by4 that mentioned he had not changed his site at all, yet saw the EXACT same recovery pattern as we did. This would indicate a knob-twist back from the initial extreme settings that affected both our sites, which has been uninfluenced by the on-page factors I have been working on over the past few weeks. This sounds a lot like link relevance to me.
I would also like to say that it takes a great deal of time and effort to establish valuable and tightly themed link partnerships. For those of us that do this properly, such partnerships are greatly valued -- by properly, I mean by carefully selecting tightly related links for long-term partnerships and spending time ensuring our link pages are of the best value to our partners, as opposed to just trying to get as many links for PR value as possible, without any true regard for link partners.
Therefore, it is somewhat concerning to hear that some people here are simply removing all outbound links in their attempts to recover from this update. I have also seen evidence of this with some of our links partners --or rather ex-link partners.
By doing this, you are causing a roll-on effect for everyone. Your partners are loosing PR/relevance from you, and when they notice that you've dumped their links, you'll also loose the return links. I do understand and agree with removing unrelated links, as you shouldn't have these in the first place, but removing all links from your sites after others have gone to the trouble of linking to you is pretty nasty. You also have no evidence that this is hurting you, and from the recovery I've seen, I would argue to the contrary.
What's been written in these forums so far is just speculation. By deleting all your links, this sudden reduction in outbounds could just as easily have an adverse effect. Also, if you're one of the people that deleted our link during the past week, then there's no way I'd ever consider adding your link again, which is a feeling I am sure is shared by many.
Just my 5c worth!
We have taken up Matt Cutt's advice and will just proceed with the natural linking process - if we find a site/information/article/resource that is worth sharing with our audience, then we will link to it. If a blog/website think that what we are offering is worth sharing to their audience, then by all means we welcome the link. But to actively participate in exchanging links in an effort to boost PR, or simply for the sake of exchanging links, etc., that one we are no longer going to do.
We were hurt too much by this update and we're hoping that we'll recover enough traffic in the next few months by staying in the course of the very very straight and narrow path of SEO righteousness. Then hopefully the Google Gods will be kind to us again.
breif bio:
i work for a company that trades online via our e-commerce site. we sell a wide range of widgets, nearly 2000 of them. my home page used to rank position 4 on G for the term widgets. and blue widgets used to rank position 7 on G as did red widgets.
Back to my findings:
the blue widgest and red widgets pages are obviously sub categories of the whole widget range.
what i have noticed is that G no longer ranks these pages under these terms, if i search for blue or red widgets my HOME page is indexed by G for these terms.
i can see why, my meta keywords on the home page have these terms listed, as does the meta description. There are also mentions of these keywords on the home page (other than the navigation).
so my theory is - i should give each page its own unique theme. take away the summary style home page and gear it towards what my site is about (widgets). in the meta keywords and descriptions dont say we have blue widgets, red widgest etc, just widgets.
then the sub category pages (red, blue widgets etc) will hold more emphasis and are more likely to be indexed.
i think my home page holds too much of what we do and G is coming along and finding this page, picking out the keywords and listing it instead of the sub categories.
i hope this makes sense?!?!?!
any comments, more than happy to hear
so my theory is - i should give each page its own unique theme
Forgive me if this is taken the wrong way, it's not meant to be.
But isn't that WebMaster101? It only makes sense that each page should be unique and focused.
We had some very different Jagger reactions on our site I do not understand and that might be interesting to analize for many of us.
1.) Our site is the largest country portal of Costa Rica with over 38,000 pages and 55,000 pictures etc.
2.) Our main income producing pages are Hotels, Tours, Vacation packages, and Rent a Cars.
3.) Before Jagger we were in Position #7 in Google.com with 'Costa Rica Hotels' (Hotels is by far the strongest part of our web-site with over 19,000 pages) (now we are in position #23.
4.)With individual Hotel listings we also dropped a few spots, while we gained in other areas specially in the Yellow Pages where we offer free ads. If for instance you put in Google "Mary Peng Medical Equipment China" we come up in first and second position.
5.) We lost about 5-10% Unique Visitors comparing October with November so far, but gained in reservation requests and almost doubled AdSense revenues.
6.)According to Awstats we have over 110,000 different search-strings leading to our page per month.
How could I find out what are the reasons for the loss / or gain of positions. Could it be that on many pages I dropped the Keywords and Replaced it with 4 -6 words of "Abstract". Will it slowly get back to the old status, as it happened with the last update?
Have a happy day
Jφrn
It's possible that someone has reported your 38,000 pages as spam infringement. Maybe you should consider whether you need all of those pages, combining and filtering and duplicate content and reducing any cross linking that may be going on between similar pages.
No promises, but it's more likely that you've been reported by a competitor, than being algo'd out.
Best Wishes
Colin
p.s. Strategic Links = Spam & Spam is Bad
Before Jagger we were in Position #7 in Google.com with 'Costa Rica Hotels' (Hotels is by far the strongest part of our web-site with over 19,000 pages) (now we are in position #23.
This is most propably a drop that has to do with the the new algo. If you would have been reported for spam etc. you would have been banned. You still rank pretty ok, so this could not be a ban.
breif bio:
i work for a company that trades online via our e-commerce site. we sell a wide range of widgets, nearly 2000 of them. my home page used to rank position 4 on G for the term widgets. and blue widgets used to rank position 7 on G as did red widgets.Back to my findings:
the blue widgest and red widgets pages are obviously sub categories of the whole widget range.what i have noticed is that G no longer ranks these pages under these terms, if i search for blue or red widgets my HOME page is indexed by G for these terms.
i can see why, my meta keywords on the home page have these terms listed, as does the meta description. There are also mentions of these keywords on the home page (other than the navigation).
so my theory is - i should give each page its own unique theme. take away the summary style home page and gear it towards what my site is about (widgets). in the meta keywords and descriptions dont say we have blue widgets, red widgest etc, just widgets.
then the sub category pages (red, blue widgets etc) will hold more emphasis and are more likely to be indexed.
i think my home page holds too much of what we do and G is coming along and finding this page, picking out the keywords and listing it instead of the sub categories.
I think that you are on the right track with your ideas here. I had a similar issue, and I tightened up my home page to basically make a statement about the topic of my site, and then lead to links to the main pages of each sub-section, with a description about each one. As well, I added to the content on each sub-index so that there was no confusion about the specific subject of these pages. This seems to have worked well with whatever changes Jagger I, II, and III have implemented.
It also makes sense for your visitors. Use home page to describe and introduce your site, then provide a description of the different categories or sections available, along with a link to the main page for each section. Reflect the importance of these pages in the navigation for your site - so that each page points to home, plus each main section home page, whether you call them "bluewidgets/index.htm" or "redwidgets.mainpage.htm" or whatever.
Currently, my home page is PR6, and it leads to about 10 sub-section indexes that are all PR5. This is working supremely well for me, with both my homepage and the relevant section page being listed on page one in many very competitive google serps right now...which is where I truly believe that my site belongs, given my observation of the competition. (Ok, I think I should rate ahead of some shady slim-content contenders, but that's another issue.)
Only you know how much worth your site has, and where you feel it belongs in Google serps. Be honest with yourself...but my sense, after reading your post, is for you to go ahead and tighten your home page as I said, and create a theme for your main sub-pages, as you suggested; it seems to me that this will make a lot of sense to Google and will be indexed accordingly.
Tighten up your meta descriptions also, as you alluded to. For me, a site slogan that incorporates a lot of my key words is the main home page page meta, then on main sub-pages, I tighten it further, to include a keyword rich slogan pertinent to that page, almost as if this was a subdomain or a domain of its own.
I could be way off base here, but I don't think so, so I'm offering this advice purely because I owe something back to the ppl of WebmasterWorld who have been so helpful to me.
Apologies for the length of this post.
Do you find that Jagger pays more attention, to what was before, to the keywords/keyphrases within <title></title> and metatags "description" as well as within the file name?
Or is it still business as usual in that connection ;-)
Thanks.
I think that J3 is a very strange beast that has been beaten senseless, but still refuses to comply. The results that I see on the worldwide DC's differ hugely from those that are appearing on my local Google (UK & US).
There seems to be alot of [simple] spam getting to the top. This may have been there always and maybe when my site got banned I just became conscious of it.
I don't see any great changes over the past few days, a bit of flux, probably due to the confusion caused by webmasters totally re-designing and rapidly removing link partners. But all in all I think this is it for this month.
I'm so calm now ¦-)
>>There seems to be alot of [simple] spam getting to the top. This may have been there always and maybe when my site got banned I just became conscious of it.<<
If one of the consequences of Jagger update is to deal with more spam sites at the top of the serps, then we might as well start thinking of reporting those spammers to Matt & Co. And best way is :-)
Don't wait to send Jagger-related spam feedback; I'd send that now. Using the keyword "Jagger3" at [google.com...] will get someone reading and checking it out.
>>I don't see any great changes over the past few days, a bit of flux, probably due to the confusion caused by webmasters totally re-designing and rapidly removing link partners.<<
Regarding reconsideration of linking as a consequence of Jagger update, I guess some of the folks have misunderstood what GG & Matt are/were aiming at!
IMO, GG & Matt are/were questioning whether purchasing or exchange links works to achieve better PR and rankings on the serps.
They didn't talk about purchasing or exchange links as a way of generating traffic!
Here is what I read on a site mentioning a recap of PubCon coffee talk Q&A with Matt Cutts:
-
Q: Lets go back to text links.
A: Best links are earned, not sold or traded. You may not get what you pay for. He said, if someone is selling text links, they should give you a free test trial to make sure it works. They have both manual and algorithmic approaches to detect paid links. He said Google.com gets emails asking to trade links. The guy who came up with the pixel homepage thing, that was creative.
My traffic was up and down for the past month or so and it seems as though I have lost a lot of google traffic.
I don't target specific keywords so I can't check the various DC's. My site is database drived with mod_rewrite and has been virtually untouched for two years or so.
I forgot to mention I took a hit on 9/22 but was on the way to recovery?
I noticed that a lot of my internal pages are now PR0. Not every page is PR0 but the majority seem to be. It all appears very random.
I couldn't figure out what caused it but then I remembered my host was down 2-3 days last month because of the hurricanes.
--Would a site being down for 2-3 days cause PR0 so quickly? It's funny that google can rememebr pages that have been removed 3 years ago.
--Are there any other steps I can take to further diagnose things? inurl: site: etc?
--Is this just a toolbar PR thing? Maybe google has the PR correct?
--Is there a way to determine if it is a jagger issue or if it's not related.
--Should I just wait it out and wait for google to get it right again?
Thanks,
>>Small mention - making title tags more unique seems to have helped a bit. But also...
I may be noticing now that G likes title and description tags to be a fair bit different to the title tag.
Evidence? Home page was Dmoz entry only when I had identical title/description tags - have replaced that and have got proper text showing now.<<
Thats very interesting observation indeed!
>>I may be noticing now that G likes title and description tags to be a fair bit different to the title tag.<<
Did you mean here the title and description tag to be different of each other and fair?
Thanks!
I mean that for each single unique page, title and description tags should be same theme but different wording (description tag being more complex but within the theme of the title tag), and each should be different to every other page.
I used the term 'fair' to mean 'quite a lot'.
It's very basic SEO really - it just seems to matter more now (for my site at least) than it ever has before.
From my point of view, all seems to come back to the possiible duplicate content filter. First the www v non-www issue, and then meta titles being too similar due to strapline, and then meta titles being too similar to meta description (for a single page). It's as if they have been refining things as they have gone along through Jagger 3.
Sites at the top in my sector either have very unique pages and metatags, and/or have so many inbound links that their position has held firm (or are using black hat techniques to spam the index!)
Hope that helps somebody!
Thanks for feedback. Much appreciated.
>>It's very basic SEO really - it just seems to matter more now (for my site at least) than it ever has before.<<
It seems so. Time to take another look at Brett's 26 steps, I guess ;-)
Successful Site in 12 Months with Google Alone
26 steps to 15k a day.
[webmasterworld.com...]
Yesterday, traffic was about only 20% down from our typical weekend traffic pre-Jagger. I don't want to start jumping up and down as it might be a fluke, but I'd like to know if others are seeing traffic gains with this last Jagger update. In our main competitive keyword (2.47 billion results), we're back to #4 with 3 very very big companies, 2 of which are only marginally related to the keyword. We used to be either #1 or #2 (often #1) after a national magazine focusing on our niche (that mag is now #3). Hopefully it will stick and our traffic will improve more.
Have a happy day
Jφrn
I bet only about 0.1% or less of pages get 'dropped'. Of course those are the people who complain, so it seems far worse then it is. Is there anybody here who has NEVER seen erratic behaviour of their pages on Google? I am sure it is 99.9% of us, because 99.9% of us have never had this happen, ever, and probably never will.
If your pages are 'disappearing' or moving 'erratically', you know the reason why more than anyone else here. Stop complaining and get some nice content pages up and get rid of any 'tricks'. You will be glad you did and won't have to stress over 'dropped' pages or stupid 'updates' again.
