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!
Our website was never affected by any of the previous updates (Florida, etc.). We're always at the top of our keywords. We don't suffer from sandbox - when we launch websites, we show up on the SERPs immediately (maybe not on the top 10 but at least in the top 20). We add quality content on a daily basis. Things were doing so very well.
Until Jagger. And we lost 70% of our traffic. Adsense revenues alone plummeted down from $15-20,000/month to only $3,000+ per month. Things hit us bigtime. And yes, we're whitehat. We don't even do SEO. We just never had any need for it -- because even without H1 or alt tags or whatever, we were at the top of very competitive keywords. So don't come here telling us to shut up because not everyone affected are those who play games. Even those who stay to the true and narrow path got hit.
or (with due respect) stupid unqualified posts in WebmasterWorld!
It would be very difficult to find page of SERPS unaffected by Jagger. I suggest you look around you, Even if your SERP positions are identical to pre-Jagger(which I doubt) your competition at least must have changed.
Finally it is not only a question how we build our website, but also who we have to compete with. Google wants to have the best results on top (at least that's what they say), but the best pages (I consider our page by far the best what Costa Rica is concerned) do not appear as top results.
If you put "Mary Peng Medical Equipment China" in Google our site most likely will be in first position like with hundreds other things on our yellow pages (who cares), but if we are looking at important search-strings where we compete with millions of results with thousands of dollars in business every day, it has been a constant up and down between first postitions and 3rd page.
I am writing this because I would like to hear an opinion on the following thought: We don't pay Google to be there, right? If the first results are frustrating for the searcher, maybe they more likely click on an ad, don't you think so? If the first few results give a searcher all he wanted, why should he then click on an ad? Are we paying for these positions? Or are we giving Google free stats on search behaviour with our site, Google Search and AdSense, so they can correct things by putting the best ads first? Why should they care for us, as long as people are primarily using Google?
I had this thought in the beginning of this year, when we were depending over 60% on Google and took a deep dip with that last update. We took off all AdWords ads and ad-filters from our site, implementing other marketing efforts and little by little gained our positions and traffic back. We eliminated all duplicate text as good as possible, which then was the big issue (for instance we had on every rent a car listing a similar text about safe driving). We also do not exchange links since over one year. Today we have three times the traffic and we only depend about 15% on Google and I think that's why the Jagger fluctuations (up and down) were less severe.
We also add daily new information and dozens of new pages to our 38,000 page site. So it is not only a question of white hat / black hat / body / links etc. I think one has to sit for a moment in Google's seat. What would you do if you were Google with all this information? I am 100% sure they have a whole department analyzing all the stuff we write in these formus.
Have a happy day
Jörn
Yep I had the same mindset as you do at one point in time. You will continue to think this way until it happens to you. Maybe, just maybe, you will get lucky and it not happen to you. Maybe it will. But how do you know with certainty?
Yes I am able to survive without Google. I am not stupid. But the financial impact of loosing a site or two that generates numbers, quite similar to alika, from google traffic can leave a funky poo poo flavored taste in the back of your mouth. Regardless of what percentage of your income that is. $250,000 is $250,000.
Even if you play by today's rules it may not be the rule of tomorrow. So I hope you are psychic and know what rules will change so you can know EXACTLY what to modify or else you can land in a very similar position.
Remember doo doo just happens and you may unknowingly be walking under a bird and you happen to look up with your mouth open and kerplop! A funky poo poo flavored taste right in the back of your mouth!
[edited by: arubicus at 10:05 pm (utc) on Nov. 21, 2005]
This didn't bother me at all. It was clearly just a glitch on Google's part, and it was temporary. We thought it was pretty funny, at the time: hey, maybe Google just didn't like our fic!
But it wouldn't have been very funny if it had been someone's online business that happened to.
If that site dropped some pages due to an innocuous glitch, I don't see why it couldn't happen to other sites too.
These directories did interlink: it was pretty needed as it was a year by year listing, 85-50 pages in each of 5 different catagories, counting 2005.
In the "old" days before Jagger & Bourbon, I beleive this helped my main index page google result.
(# 1 of 100,000,000 sites, for the past few years!)
I'm now number two for my two word key phrase with the disappearance of my sub-directories.
I can deal with that, obviously, but really miss the 70% of my hits from the sub Dir's.
I have made the interlinks within an iframe and hope that that makes the diff.
any thoughts?
Nice work 'zikos' making a fake name to hide under while you type worthless gibberish on the forum. You need to get out more.
I cannot believe anyone believes this. Bare minimum 5% of the sites on the Internet are significantly effected by Google's problems, with 1/3 a much more likely guess. Some problems of course are more obvious, but the ripple effect of links being devalued from pages with split PR, canonical issues, supplemental rot, etc etc etc, is very significant.
Before Bourbon I must admit I suspected the whiners had done something shady and that was why they were hurt by the update. Then during Bourbon one of my sites quietly plunged in the serps on all levels and pages. After much grief I found it had been 302 hijacked. That is just one problem that can cause such damage to a site. I think sometimes when Google changes its algo to get rid of spam innocent sites get caught in the net.
All I can say is that I will never take my sites' rankings for granted again.(one 9 years old and the other 5)
I'm hearing more and more about older sites getting this treatment and the only thing that I can come up with is that the masses of sites that were copying google listings were really the target of this update. As a result of hitting them, it would result in a sudden drop in links to my site and probably sparked off my PR0 and disappearance from the listings.
About 1 month ago I came back full strength for about 2 weeks and died again, at around the time of a full site update including link count. I'm sure that this creates suspicion within google and gets me kicked.
I'm sure it's not spam as I have been watching a client website I built around 4 years ago, packed with obvious cheats, get higher and higher in the rankings.
I'm obviously not proud of this naive black hat attempt, but it does offer a good guage as to google's ability to pick up these sites.
I recently found a cache of my home page from Oct 25th, date in which apparently Google decided to add a few letters to my url. Suprisingly, what was indexed that day was www.subdomain.domain.com creating an instantaneous duplicate of my index, which that same day disappeared together with the traffic. A site that had been on page 1 for 2 years and has now also lost some of its pr.
I investigated hard thinking that perhaps a malicious webmaster could have linked to that page in purpose, being that I had misconfigured my server and left a backdoor opened. But in the end, I came to the conclusion -wrong one perhaps- that it was google who added the www to the url http:// subdomain.domain.com.
So far, I have been unable to fix this problem and the www is still in the index. My page gone.
There is a chance that someone did this to me, but judging from what is going on it is more likely that google IS creating the problems that Steveb has mentioned.
Most of my keywords are two and three word phrases and are number one and have been for years. 20 Million plus results for most. I don't really pay attention to the competition, but they seem to be doing okay as well.
The sites I own which dropped out of G way back in Allegra and Bourbon, never to return, had thousands of top ten listings. THAT's when you get tens of thousands of scrapers and 302's attacking and poisoning your domains. It is real. And I ain't no mealy-mouthed kid -- I'm 42, have a degree in English Literature and have been publishing on the web since February '96.
Google bugs are real. They bite sites with thousands of quality back links and loads of content. Why make fun of those publishers who have sufferred as a result of Google's growing pains? If your sites are successful enough and you don't have an alternate 'brick and mortar' existence to justify yourself to the Google gods then you are just as vulnerable.
your observation seems for me is the first usable hint of a problem. I have anchor texts on all may menues and pages and lately added special hotel menues on the hotel pages, of course with anchor text. I will have to look into this issue. Was your anchor text a excat repetition of your link, or did you add some keywords?
Have a nice day
Jörn
I agree. That was the day people were complaining that G was adding .html to the end of the URLs as well so that it looked like page1.html/page2.html. Then BOOM all disappeared. Personally, I think G went for the updated untested, created a big debacle, and quickly re-indexed to get the SERPs back in shape. Our site absolutely had no reason to get UFO'ed other than someone hijacking us or some external force beyond our control. Since then, G has been nailing our site for 15K plus hits a day man. To me it looks like G is back peddling and trying to completely re-index our site, moreover the entire Internet. Before we use to anxiously await their deep crawl, but now we can't wait for the crawler to get the hell outta heeeee.
I continue to feel G brought this on to themselves... Plus thier stock is at 410 today, I mean what the hell were they thinking, right?!?! Anyway, we came back at the tip of J3 which was early November. I think the update was planned, however, something major got screwed up and they managed to gracefully handle the situation by adding smoking mirrors, distractions, and most of all hanging us check to see if we stole our own cars, lol. UNLIKE anything I can say for any of us being graceful other than falling flat on our faces, with me being in the very front of the line. Getting punked the way we did sure hurt big time, and I will never create that much reliance on G or any single entity again.
any thoughts? comicsrus"
I have a site that has lost a key directory. That directory is travel related and is both heavily interlinked and has a great deal of duplicate content because of the template type nature of the pages and not because of the primary text in the pages.
Two other directories are not heavily interlinked. One has a lot of duplicate content, again because of the template nature of the pages and not because of the primary text in the pages. Both are performing well.
It appears that interlinking is affecting my particular site just now. It may, of course, change as soon as this update settles. And it may be something else that is making the difference.
In any case, I am considering an iframe that will take out interlinking. But does an iframe have any drawbacks as to how information is displayed in various browsers? Does it have any other drawbacks?
So in a nutshell I'm doing nothing but waiting to see what G does as IMH the problem is theres not ours the filter they are using is removing valuable content from there searches and I fail to see them leaving it like this
One other thing
This is more aimed towards UK webmasters, are you find the UK only searches very poor? the .com is bad but .co.uk is almost laughable
This is what OBono had to say
"I recently found a cache of my home page from Oct 25th, date in which apparently Google decided to add a few letters to my url. Suprisingly, what was indexed that day was www.subdomain.domain.com creating an instantaneous duplicate of my index, which that same day disappeared together with the traffic. A site that had been on page 1 for 2 years and has now also lost some of its pr.
I investigated hard thinking that perhaps a malicious webmaster could have linked to that page in purpose, being that I had misconfigured my server and left a backdoor opened. But in the end, I came to the conclusion -wrong one perhaps- that it was google who added the www to the url http:// subdomain.domain.com.
So far, I have been unable to fix this problem and the www is still in the index. My page gone.
There is a chance that someone did this to me, but judging from what is going on it is more likely that google IS creating the problems that Steveb has mentioned."
[edited by: zimba at 10:19 am (utc) on Nov. 23, 2005]
