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]
just to add to the mix can anyone explain to me why, after going supplemental a week ago, i now find that all the g.com results are supp but none of the g.co.uk are?
In my opinion Google has done some extremely bad geotargeting. My .com in English is now listed mostly in the .de index, cause the ISP is in Germany.
They seem to have some algorithm which supposedly decides which pages are internationally interesting and which not.
The .de hosted also in .de seems unaffected by the recent massacre, as it makes sense that a German audience gets a German server.
So I guess since your name is chelseaareback you are from the UK and it has been decided that your pages are irrelevant for the .com and possibly all other English speaking nations, Canada, India, Australia, New Zealand and all the african nations and so on.
If it makes sense really depends what you do. For evergreen it's a bloody cheek, should you sell something that only makes sense in the UK it might be OK as your audience would be better targeted.
Problem is that Google doesn't seem to be able to decide what is what.
yes, am in uk and yes site is about uk - travel sector
which you would have thought might make me more of an authority on my own country than a site say in argentina about the uk
still, what do I know
which you would have thought might make me more of an authority on my own country than a site say in argentina about the uk
Well then I would say your case is broken geotargeting too.
yes, am in uk and yes site is about uk - travel sectorwhich you would have thought might make me more of an authority on my own country than a site say in argentina about the uk
Not necessarily. The Web publisher in Argentina might spend more time traveling around the UK than you do, and he or she may have a better handle on the kind of information that foreign travelers are looking for. Plus, what if your site (or the Argentina Web publisher's site) is hosted on a server in another country, such as the United States? It makes far more sense for Google to gauge "authority" by means other than location, such as inbound links from other sites (especially existing "authority" sites).
To each his own. I usually discard sites that seek link exchanges. :-)
My .com in English is now listed mostly in the .de index, cause the ISP is in Germany.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you are saying, but Google has documented that they determine which country/index to list you in by the ISP/server location.
From Google's help pages:
...crawlers identify the country that corresponds to a site by factors such as the physical location at which the site is hosted, the site's IP address ... your site's domain doesn't need to match the country domain for which you'd like it to return
I made a SITE WIDE change to my top include that had AdSense in it and replaced the AdSense with some other program which I might just get rid of as well...
So is it the AdSense or the site wide change.
I reckon it's the sitewide although the conspiracy theory is much more interesting to discuss.
What to do what to do
when AdSense is ruling you...
yes, I know. thats why I put "might"
what I really mean though is surely it doesnt make sense for G to think my british page on a british pub is less worthy for an argentinians viewing than an argentinian page on the same.
Well, I've delete all the Supplementals Pages for my website (using consoleurl tool).
Ok ,but you see any change on rank for keywords search?
Ok ,but you see any change on rank for keywords search?
No :(
chelseaareback, thanks and good luck to you too. Be sure to post if you get out of this mess.
Not necessarily. The Web publisher in Argentina might spend more time traveling around the UK than you do, and he or she may have a better handle on the kind of information that foreign travelers are looking for. Plus, what if your site (or the Argentina Web publisher's site) is hosted on a server in another country, such as the United States? It makes far more sense for Google to gauge "authority" by means other than location, such as inbound links from other sites (especially existing "authority" sites).
Both points are valid hence both should be in index, as there are many travelers that might want to avoid the stuff everybody else runs too.
Simply deleting pages based on ISP location is a ridicilous concept.
Adsense could be a factor.
Supporting evidence for or against that belief are obviously anecdotal, but it hasn't been my experience. I've got many, many, many pages with AdSense ads that rank high for searches with results in the millons or tens of millions of pages.
What might be a factor (and should be a factor) is the "AdSense tail wagging the dog syndrome."
Let's assume, for the sake of discussion, that Google is feeding examples of useful pages and junk pages into a computer and letting software determine profiles of useful and less-than-useful sites. A DMOZ or Wikipedia clone page that has three AdSense units above the fold (or blended into the left-hand margin) is more likely to fit a "made-for-AdSense" profile than a page of original content with a single AdSense unit that's clearly identifiable as an ad. And if the page includes the words "debt consolidation" and has inbound links from the same site's pages on "Viagra" and "mesothelioma," users aren't likely to miss anything when the page drops a thousand places in Google's search rankings.
(This may be an extreme example, but it shows how profiling is unlikely to be as simple as "This page has an AdSense ad unit, so it must be junk.")
Is this a fair summary of what we see happening:
1. Sites affected used to rank well for many keywords, and often for a long period.
2. Now those rankings have not just dropped a little bit, but effectively were sent to oblivion
3. The rest of the SERP where the site was removed usually shows only minor changes
4. The site: operator returns a bunch of Supplemental urls first, not the Home Page.
5. For those with a GWT account, there is no message that clarifies what happened
6. Toolbar Page Rank is still reported at the same level, and GWT Page Rank seems unchanged as well
Nail on the head. Profiles are what give the game away, not simply whether a page has Adsense or not. The big question is whether carrying Adsense features at all in the ranking algorithm or not. Google would deny this, but if you were running the show, would you make checking Adesnse pages part of the recipe or not? I know I would!
Quality pages clearly can carry Adsense with no penalty whatsoever. Marginal pages may do better without. But of course, this is all circumstantial, and I have no concrete evidence to support this...
2. Now those rankings have not just dropped a little bit, but effectively were sent to oblivion
.... Our site is fairly ok at the moment. But same has happened many times since the Bourbon update.
4. The site: operator returns a bunch of Supplemental urls first, not the Home Page.
... same thing
6. Toolbar Page Rank is still reported at the same level, and GWT Page Rank seems unchanged as well
... same thing
- Strange Webmaster Tools activity e.g. sites becoming unverified, message saying no pages are in index
- Ranking unusually high for some keyphrases i.e. while not being the most relevant result
- Google Image rankings relatively untouched
all points totally spot on for me
apart from 5 and thats because I dont know what gwt account is
I am also going to add that I KNOW this is nothing whatsoever to do with adsense.
I dont know what gwt account is
I think gwt = Google Webmaster Tools.
I removed a site with problems from GWT last week.
After 2 days in G index apeared 2 versions www and non www of domain.
After .htaccess 301 redirect to non www, site back to normal listing and ranking for all the keywords as prior 17.12.2006.
I don't have adsense on this site.
then no - doesnt apply - dont have gwt account
I've never had any problems with supplementals.
Whoa -- there's some feedback that doesn't fit the pattern!
Is there anyone else who is saw their December rankings plummet drastically by many pages, but does not see supplemental strangeness at the top of the site: results?
Yes, sums it up well for the site I've seen the bottom fall out on.
Is there anyone else who is saw their December rankings plummet drastically by many pages, but does not see supplemental strangeness at the top of the site: results?
How many of them don't have a GWT account?
In my case I recovered 4 sites not in GWT.
For 3 of them I'm doing nothing and one, as I written above, after deleting from GWT.
All 4 were hit on 17.12
[edited by: shogun_ro at 9:40 pm (utc) on Jan. 4, 2007]
Some of the sites I've see have many problems that just jump out at me, but for others it does seem quite mysterious. So I'm thinking those "jump out at you" factors that I see are not the operative cause of whatever hit these sites this past December
1. there aren't any, it's just a bug (which I don't think is true, considering the category-wide shifts, which looks like an update)
2. factors have come into play which we are not aware of (but so far have had bad results, quality-wise)
3. it may a combination of things (bugs and updates, updates of various kinds). There seems to be an actual update going on now, but sites have been dropping out since Nov 10th.
Things to consider:
1. does Google use the holidays (both summer and winter) to experiment?
2. if updates/penalties aren't directed at paid links, then what could be worse?
As for feedback:
All my pages are indexed, no problems with site: this time, but my homepage's PR is penalized.
[edited by: Martin40 at 9:30 pm (utc) on Jan. 4, 2007]
jump out at you factors
The kinds of things that other active threads are discussing -- thin affiliate sites, lopsided backlink profiles, duplicate url issues, bad "custom 404" handling, absence of unique title and description on each url, etc.
The odd thing about this thread's topic is what we mentioned earlier -- there's an almost surgical excision of these sites from the results, with those around them remaining untouched. I'm actively consulting on maybe 300+ domains, and so far only one of them has shown anything like these symptoms.
I can't even say for sure in that case because it's just a small information-only 4-page domain with no content changes in 6 years. It was created for a special purpose back then. It just happens to be owned by a client so I watch it. Used to rank well for the company name and it just went -300 or so in December..
So I'm hoping we can sort through the differences and similarities to the point where we have some clue about what the critical factors are.
[edited by: tedster at 9:33 pm (utc) on Jan. 4, 2007]
