Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
None of the sites I actively manage have seen any change, but one that I've consulted on has been decimated. Before October it was 3rd for some one and 2 kw searches. It dropped a couple spots around Oct 20th. Dropped a couple more on Dec 7th, then went to page 3 on Dec 20th. Is now fluctuating between page 6 and farther back.
This site has been up for about a year, and no real changes were made during this drop. All other sites in the serps for these keywords stayed in place except one - the #2 site. It was previously THE authority site, but had been moved and had a 301 redirect to the #1, new authority site. #2 dropped a little on Dec 7th, then to page 3 on Dec 20th. After the 20th, there have been a few days when the #2 site has moved back up and is now back at #2, while the site I've consulted on has dropped further, usually at the same time #2 moved back up.
While it may be that G has made no changes to the algo, I'm convinced they tweaked the weighting on some "filters" that resulted in these changes. Both sites were unchanged, yet bounced around at the exact same times. The dropped site had too much duplicate content and not enough good links from trusted sites. It was also heavily optimized for a few keywords.
I can't figure what factors caused the #2 site to drop and then recover, but it seems that G tweaked some things a little Dec 7th, hit the same things harder Dec 20th, then adjusted some in following days which brought the #2 site back up to #2. Hopefully they will continue to adjust and bring back the rankings for those who have been unjustly dropped...
[edited by: tedster at 9:57 pm (utc) on Jan. 1, 2007]
Fresh site: search results for 3 of my sites filtered on 17.12.2006.Everything is OK & no supplementals.
Check on this DC's:
[209.85.143.107...]
[66.249.89.107...]
[72.14.235.107...]For one of my most important search terms
Normal floating between 2..5
June 27th to September 29th not under first 100
September 30th to Nov 2nd floating 2..5
Nov 3rd to Dec 22th: floating 23..28
Dec 22th to 30th: floating 80..90Now: 26 at my google, 20 at all this 3 data centers, seems still no full recovery for me.
One thing that does look very odd is running a site command. Whats really strange is it doesn't seem to be affecting that many sites, just certain ones. We have other sites on the same servers, built the same way, ect, and no changes what so ever.
Theres been some sort of very definite algorithmic change or filter adjustment.
Do you made any changes to your site?
The only other thing that I did, was remove the google analytics code that I inserted about a month ago. Good luck to all. Like I said, I just hope it sticks. I've made a decision to diversify and get other traffic besides Google.
Theres been some sort of very definite algorithmic change or filter adjustment.
Agreed, and see the exact same thing across our sites. Only a few got hit, and the rest either stayed the same or improved. Very strange site: results for those, now showing index page at position 80+
The ones that got hit dropped over 100 positions in Google keywords.
Here's what interesting. Some of the competitive keywords for these sites, the websites still remain there. For others they are gon from the SERP's. Can't explain it as many of these sites have not had active optimization done in some time...
[edited by: CainIV at 7:30 am (utc) on Jan. 3, 2007]
Whatever is hitting these domains (apparently borderline cases) is pretty extreme. So I assume that whatever Google is tweaking for must be something they really don't like -- even if it's been present at the top of the SERPs for years.
In my case that tweaking leads to either good or zero traffic since that bourban update.
And that to a domain that has many page 1 spots at Google for various totaly different keywords.
For many other keyphrases where I consistently ranked in the top 10, I now can't be found in the top 100. What I find most unusual is how doing a search for the URL of many of my pages which have been well established for at least 2 years are now producing the "Your search - http:// example.com/folder/page.htm - did not match any documents" error message although some of these pages can be found for more obscure keyphrase searches. I haven't made any major changes to my site and for many of my pages, I haven't touched in months and I am entirely white hat with my SEO.
As a result of all this recent Google glitch/filter/algo change, my traffic has been cut in half and what was a respectable Adsense revenue now needs to be supplemented with something else. Most of my traffic for this site is now coming from Yahoo.
What gets me the most (after this experience and reading those of others) is how it seems like everything I've learned about Google SEO over the past 4 or 5 years is essentially USELESS. This simply cannot be approached with any degree of reliability if all my efforts can be dashed to pieces by this exasperating element of chance. Another site I'm building has survived this Dec Google slam but I find myself less enthusiastic about working on it ("What's the point?" keeps crossing my mind). I expect to be rewarded for working hard and continually taking the high road with SEO. Now, it seems like it's all subject to some kind of reverse lottery (a la Shirley Jackson) where if your number comes up, your site tanks and that's it, that's all.
I'm seriously researching other methods of earning money online (e.g., click flipping). The search engine that basically has us all by the short and curlies has proved itself too unreliable.
Surprised this shuffle isn't getting more talk, pretty significant in the areas we watch. About as much overall change as we have experienced in quite some time.
Anyone else seeing this?
Yes Randle - looks diff to me too
I dont want to sound like one of those who thinks alls gone wrong just becuase my site traffic has collapsed (where some lose others gain etc) but the actual display of results seems to fluctuate between what I am used to and a totally new interface
Littlegiant - exactly same has happened to me since dec 28th. My only real thought on reliability (and the one I cant really fathom) is that if G considered my site so reliable before (and by before I mean every year it has been in existence) how can it now (with no chges made to anything) deem it so useless. Further (and I hope dont come across arrogantly) how can it ignore me so completely when, in some cases, several of my pages are the ONLY ones on the web on the subject?
I would be interested to know who has benefitted by the latest shuffle (or whatever) - good luck to you btw - would stop me thinking something odd was afoot!
I would be interested to know who has benefitted by the latest shuffle (or whatever) - good luck to you btw - would stop me thinking something odd was afoot!
I haven't noticed much shuffling for the keywords and keyphrases (some of them competitive) that I track. However, I will say that my main site's Google referrals have been up quite a bit in the past month or so as a percentage of total search referrals. Whether this is because of "long-tail" changes in Google or simply a decline in Yahoo and MSN referrals is hard to say. I suspect that it's a bit of both.
Outland88 said: I’m seeing article sites, scrapers, and pharmacy sites pop up all over in my areas. Multiple listings for About, Wiki, Amazon etc. Even Adobe’s own pages that merely mention the keyword are showing up.
I agree and I think this is proof that google got this algo update wrong.
What I have noticed is that in spite of the algo change I have noticed that my searches have been picking up over the last few days even though my search placement is still floating around 6 to 15 on my key terms.
What I think this means is that the sites that have moved ahead of me are not what people are looking for. I think this is further proof that google got this algo change wrong.
For me the page count drop hasn't been too bad, and acceptable in the holiday season. But the plunge in the ctr and the ecpm have been devastating for the site, and income.
My income has been 1/4 of usual, and no matter what I try nothing gets better.
Something has happened at Google, but I don't know what, all I want is for it to return to early December levels.
In the past, having to compete against microsoft was assumed and occasionally I'd get above them... but now with 10 sites with that kinda clout it easy to get stuck on 2nd page or below.
For six years G referrals have been 90% + of my traffic - even now after dropping adwords - today is 95.6%. Even though it seems my rankings on MSN & Y are better than G. To think someone is complaining about the ipod monopoly, what about search!
On google's sitemaps i used to see the list of keywords searched with average rank of 1-4. Now the average rank is 5-9.
I'm fine tuning and optimizing myself into oblivion.
Adsense revenue down 80% - even with 20% more content.
Someone is heavily shaking this huge Sieve of Eratosthenes [en.wikipedia.org]. Knock on woods your pages are viewed as prime-numbers, not dividable into other, older fragments. What will remain is a core of "trusted webpages", which have survived all tos and fros of pulling knobs. A good basis, then, to calculate pagerank again.
A search query on "the" currently shows appr. 7 billion results for me. If I remember correctly, I have already seen a peak figure of 22 Billion some time ago. Patience folks, Hercules has almost finished tidying the Augean Stables. Maybe by the end of winter;)
What I find so remarcable in all this discussion about sites vanishing from the index, is the fact, that for the kws I monitor the "number of pages found" by google has continuously been shrinking down to two thirds of the figures shown a couple of months ago.
It does seem that Google has finally flushed the toilet and removed obsolete URLs that it hadn't checked for 3/4 of a year. Maybe a Big Daddy thing. I doubt it's a factor in the current happenings, though. In my site's case it's clear that the homepage's PR has been penalized (or simply reduced, because my site is white hat) and all my pages are produced by the site: command. In fact, I not convinced the current shifts are SEO or spam related at all.
If you go up or down on Yahoo, then you take it in your stride, because Yahoo is Yahoo, but from Google you expect logic.
[edited by: Martin40 at 10:20 pm (utc) on Jan. 3, 2007]
So what if Google detects a negative correlation between Adsense and quality? Would they penalize the use of their own ad programme?
Ain't gonna happen, because things are never that simple. (After all, THE NEW YORK TIMES and THE WASHINGTON POST use AdSense ads on their respected Web sites, and assuming that all pages with AdSense ads are of low quality is like assuming that any page with the word "hotel" is a boilerplate affiliate-booking page.)
On the other hand, the presence of three stacked and blended AdSense ad units in the lefthand navigation bar of a DMOZ clone directory probably wouldn't be regarded as positive "signals of quality" by the Google Search profiler.
When I was still immersed in link exchange, I found myself discarding sites that use Adsense.
To each his own. I usually discard sites that seek link exchanges. :-)
Some are MFA's
I would not generalize adsense sites together, because some are very good!
Sorry, but that logic is flawed...
At the extreme I could argue there are only good and bad sites. So if it's not bad, then it's good.
If we agree there are shades of black and white, then all the statement tells us is "isn't bad" - nothing more.
Dec 7 - sudden drop in rankings
[webmasterworld.com...]
Dec 7 - sudden drop in rankings (part 2)
[webmasterworld.com...]
Dec 2006 Google Changes - Data Refresh or Penalty?
[webmasterworld.com...]
Dec 2006 Google Changes - Data Refresh or Penalty? (part 2)
[webmasterworld.com...]
Dec 2006 Google Changes - data refresh, penalties, or what? (part 3)
[webmasterworld.com...]
Matt Cutts said: 6:40 pm on Dec 8
Umbra, right now I'm not aware of any major changes yesterday, so right now I'd chalk it up to the normal daily changes in ranking as we refresh our index. I'll be happy to ask around, though.
Matt Cutts said: 6:54 pm on Dec 8
frakilk, not that I know of. It's been a pretty quiet month as far as ranking changes go.
Matt Cutts said: 5:14 am on Dec 11
Hey folks, I asked around and I don't believe anything new went out Dec. 7th, or the few days before that.
After that early comments there was nothing to hear from Matt Cutts.
I think he asked around and someone told him what's happen and also told him not to talk about too much ;-).
[edited by: Fox_Mulder at 6:43 am (utc) on Jan. 4, 2007]
There are several similar examples and it would be interesting to find out why Google loves them some much.
[edited by: engine at 9:45 am (utc) on Jan. 4, 2007]
[edit reason] No specifiics, thanks [/edit]
Remember Part 1 and Part 2 of this topic, when some of us are talking about their website, some people doesn't use Adsense but have lost their rankings like the others.
Now Google only list my home page (only the url, no snippet) for the site: command (it doesn't list it before).
If I use the filter=0 option, it list all my pages (only urls, no snippets). On some datacenter, it only list my home page when I use the no filter=0 option.
If I use the "Search in French" option (My website is in french langage), it list all my website pages with snippets and the home page first.
For the "Web" search site: give me 2290 results.
For the "Search in French" search site: give me 3240 results.
Why this differences between the 2 options?
Why this differences between the 2 options?
It does seem that Google has finally flushed the toilet and removed obsolete URLs that it hadn't checked for 3/4 of a year. Maybe a Big Daddy thing. I doubt it's a factor in the current happenings, though.
Fact is, that the index is shrinking. I'd rather suggest that google is working on many aspects: broken links, deleted pages, as well as duplicate content and surely many other factors. So to me your wiped out babies - as white-hat as they may be - are definitely part of this process. Due to googles scalable approach some of the "filters" are not perfect. (I hesitate to call it a filter if a patent like the one mentioned is applied: yet, we have no real denotator for these new parts of the Big Daddy infrastucture) A great pity for those of you who "did no evil", but of primary importance for google:
Every single percent of superfluous material in the index is pure money for google: Assuming the have a quarter of a million pcs running, it would mean to maintain or save 2500 extra computers.
I'm sure the googlers have carfully followed the threads Fox_Mulder
mentioned, even if noone posted actively. Seems as if thru December every single week a new "filter", "patent" (or whatever you may wish to call it) has been added/exchanged in the infrastructure, and I believe that the googlers are intensively observing public feedback in order to gather information about how to fine-tune these new "pipes."
OMG, could one of the mods plz start a thread on how to call them?
