Update Saga. Part 6

[selomelo]

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Continued from:
[webmasterworld.com...]

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The same down-and-on problem here in Turkey.
But j3 goes on and off. No steady results. At least three different sets:

216.239.63.104 (I think with additional tweaks)
64.233.161.104 (still J2)
64.233.179.104 (J3)

[headache1987]

I don't know exactly about the dup penalty - I have 3,000 pages plus and many pages are for sectors of parts (ie 12 widgets - settings change which is two numbers, name of part(keyword ie widget-7) and then you have to tell the consumer of those 12 parts you can use this with a widget wiper but not with a widget enhancer if you use the widget wiper.

We soared to one and two on the "test" DC. It's still old cache so none of the changes (except one) has changed. I just started focusing on the things I know work - more links (related) and more content and freshness.

[MHes]

>I really wouldn't know how else to organise it.

Seems very good. How about your links in? Do you think the sites that link to you are of sufficient quality/relevance and are the actual links on 'links' pages or deep within good content on their sites? Have these sites also suffered? One of the big recent changes may be a more vicious assessment of the quality of links. This could have the effect that only a few high quality links in can turn things around.... however they take time to kick in.

[lee_sufc]

does anyone know why the results on sites like netscape / aol search keep flipping between the main Google serps and test DC?

[webdude]

mmm... Interesting. Could it be that G is now penalizing for dupe content that no longer exists but is still being returned in the supplementals? I had a site that was ranked #1 for 4 years running for a couple of very competative phrases. I haven't really paid attention to the site the last few months. I noticed a couple months back that I had inadvertantly left a userreference on all the links. In other words, I had a?id=oh2435lkjh2345lkjliuy3245 on every page. In fact, that is how all the pages were returning in the SERPS. Thought that that was gonna cause some major problems AND the site was framed. So I decided to redo the whole site without frames and by not changing any filenames (done that - never again). I took out all userreferences. So, now instead of...

[mysite.com...]

now all the pages are

[mysite.com...]

Only time it pops the userreference is when it goes secure for an order and I do not care about those pages.

So now, the whole site went supplemental. All the old pages are there and I cannot get rid of them. Home page disappeared but still has PR. If you do a site:mysite.com, all that returns is one page that does not exist any more and another page that has nothing to do with the site. Very strange. If you click "repeat the search with the omitted results included" I get 793 pages, all with usereferences on all. AND no home page or a couple of static html pages at all.

The only thing I can fathom is that my old pages are there, but the new ones aren't displayed because because G thinks it is all dupe content.

I may be all wrong on this and there might be something totally wrong with the site, but I have several other sites that rank very well and have no problems with them. It has beem like this for the past 2 months. SiteMaps doesn't help - nothing.

It looks to me that supplementals are definitely playing a major role in what is happening here. I sure wish G could figure out a way to get rid of dead content. I have pages from other sites in there that have not existed for the past 2 years. So what is the deal with that? I tried the removal tool, robots.txt, emails, 301s, 302s, 404s, you name it... can't get rid of those pesky pages.

[Miop]

< mmm... Interesting. Could it be that G is now penalizing for dupe content that no longer exists but is still being returned in the supplementals?>

Could be - the phrases for which I have dropped into obscurity are still referred with old supplemental pages.
I found that out when I did site:site gold widgetery and found that the referring page pointing at the home page was a supplemental containing the strapline (which I had removed. The new page without the strapline is still there, but it's the old page which points to the homepage.
My feeling is that the update (or whatever you want to call it) is not finished yet, as it seems to be halfway through 'reconnecting' the improved pages on my site to the home page. For me it is complicated by the fact that all pages on the site used to point to index/php, and now they point to the root page, so I'm hoping that in time, it will be sorted out.

[reseller]

webdude

>>It looks to me that supplementals are definitely playing a major role in what is happening here. I sure wish G could figure out a way to get rid of dead content. I have pages from other sites in there that have not existed for the past 2 years. So what is the deal with that? I tried the removal tool, robots.txt, emails, 301s, 302s, 404s, you name it... can't get rid of those pesky pages.<<

This is a tragedy that we keep reading about. Its a real websites and business killer.

Unfortunately no matter how many times kind fellow members post such sad stories, it seems Google either unable or unwilling to resolve the problem.

And more and more kind fellow members are going to suffer....

[Miop]

<Seems very good. How about your links in? Do you think the sites that link to you are of sufficient quality/relevance and are the actual links on 'links' pages or deep within good content on their sites? Have these sites also suffered? One of the big recent changes may be a more vicious assessment of the quality of links. This could have the effect that only a few high quality links in can turn things around.... however they take time to kick in. >

My site has around 3000 inbound links according to various checking programmes - Google only counts 19 of them, and one is a casino page which doesn't even have a link to my site on it!? Another is a diet site page. I didn't ask for either of those links.
I've never worked out how Google decides what a backlink is or why it picks the ones it does.
It's very annoying, like the way which Dmoz chose a description for my site without even using the kewyord 'widgetery' in it at all.

[Miop]

oh one more thing that I can see going on at the moment which seems a bit bizarre to me.
I have a page of eyebrow widgetery which ranks number 3, and using McDar, I can see across the datacenters that another page is showing for that on several of them but with a very poor ranking - I checked the page and it is a page of widget bars, one of which has the term eyebrow widget in the description (it's on the wrong page). So although the word eyebrow only appears once on that page, it shows up for eyebrow widgetery in preference to the eyebrow widget page!
Is that a highly sensitive over-optimisation filter in action or what?

[walkman]

>> My site has around 3000 inbound links according to various checking programmes - Google only counts 19 of them

Google only shows (to us) 19 of them

[Miop]

<Google only shows (to us) 19 of them >

Ok...but why those? How can a casino or diet site be more
relevant than the thousands of widgetery sites which link to us? Unless Google doesnt understand what our site is about...

[reseller]

Miop

>>Ok...but why those? How can a casino or diet site be more
relevant than the thousands of widgetery sites which link to us?<<

I guess Google only shows a random snippet of your backlinks

[g1smd]

Two things that may help. Either:

- Set up a 301 redirect from all of the URLs with username to the same URL but without the username part included; OR

- Make sure that all of the URLs with the username in them return "410 Gone" as the status.

It may take a very long time for Google to forget about those pages, but doing either of those steps should help you in the long term.

[reseller]

Folks!

What happened to that lovely Test-DC? is it still alive, or have the folks at the plex just forgot all about it.

My theory is that the TEST-DC is only meant to test our patience, no more no less :-)

[cws3di]

Reseller, if you are referring to 64.233.179.104

The results there have been my default google.com all day today. I am in Central America. I would love to hear feedback from US and UK when (or if) this DC shows up as their default

.

[steveb]

Maybe it's just me but I can't get any allinurl: searches to work, when using the regular search? method. (They do work using the ie? search style.) That spyware message comes up, but everything is normal for all other searches.

[Left_Field]

Nothing in Google seems to be working correctly, allinurl only works sometimes, cache pages showing incorrect date, google directory has not been updated for months, old backlinks and PR showing on some dc's.
Google is really slipping.....

[barretire]

In the US the test DC has been live all day.. Visitors a lowing in again. Yee Haw

[McMohan]

Test DC no more has the test results.

[webdude]

g1smd,

I've thought about this but I am at a loss at how to do this . The userreference pages that G crawled and included are random. The SERPs show those 793 pages with different userreference numbers. A lot of them all pointing to the same pages. For example, I have pages on the supplementals that look like this...

[MySite.com...]
[MySite.com...]
[MySite.com...]
[MySite.com...]

All of them pointing to the same page. The site only has about 100 pages on it in all. G shows 793 pages all with these random userreference numbers. NONE of the newer pages list at all. Neither does the home page which has not changed nor the static .html pages.

I suppose that I could figure out a way to check if the ID exists and if it does, do a 404 or a 301 to the page without the userreference. I'll have to check to see if this can be done.

No reason for the home page to disappear, though, as far as I can see. I think that I tripped a filter so bad that the site just disappeared.

Oh Well :-(

[King of all Sales]

I just discovered what looks like proof positive that a human at Google has reviewed my site. As part of our site, we operate a blog. A few minutes ago, I did a search of my site - widgetstuff.com.

The first entry is Widgetstuff.com, the description, then the url, www.widgetstuff.com.

The second entry is our blog with the correct url, www.widgetstuff.com/blog/ but the title reads Widget Stuff Blog.

The only problem is that the title of the blog is National Widget Blog. Nowhere do we now or have we ever called it Widget Stuff Blog and those words have never appeared together in that order.

IMO, a machine could not have put that together. It looks like a human reviewed it and made that entry.

Also, much of what is written is analysis of political news and events with plenty of references to both the Democrat Party and the Republican Party and liberals and conservatives. Our analysis more often than not leans towards the conservative but is respectful of everyone.

My guess is that a machine could easily make the assesment that that a given piece is of a political nature but would not be able to sort out what the angle is - too many subtleties. But the link for "Similar pages" reveals a number of links to local Republican organizations but none to Democrat organizations.

Again, it looks as though a human has made that determination. BTW, if you do a search on a political subject on Google News in the US, the first page is almost exclusively liberal leaning sites like Daily Kos. Prior to the update, there was usually a pretty good mix of liberal and conservative sources.

[cbpayne]

I doubt it was hand edited - are you sure thats not the title of the site that they pulled from DMOZ?

[reseller]

Good morning Folks

Life is great.. life is wonderful and they promissed a sunny day. What else anyone could wish :-)

>>cws3di
Reseller, if you are referring to 64.233.179.104
The results there have been my default google.com all day today. I am in Central America. I would love to hear feedback from US and UK when (or if) this DC shows up as their default<<

>>barretire
In the US the test DC has been live all day.. Visitors a lowing in again. Yee Haw<<

So the folks at USA have been seeing yesterday the results of the test DC [64.233.179.104...] on their "default" Google.com . While we in Europe still see the real thing.

Maybe Google is testing the patience of population of that great nation USA. Who knows :-)

[King of all Sales]

cbpayne-

The blog is not listed in DMOZ.

[reseller]

SpamRank - Fully Automatic Link Spam Detection

Talking about buy/sell backlinks and link spam. Here is a very interesting reading about a work in progress. I'm posting the link to download the pdf file of an .edu site which I'm not related to in any way.

[airweb.cse.lehigh.edu...]

Just for your info.

[Dayo_UK]

The test DC is not visible anymore.

Hopefully when it next comes back it is worth looking at. Mozilla Googlebot is still active.

[reseller]

Good morning Dayo_UK

>>The test DC is not visible anymore.<<

Did you mean: not visible from Norwich :-)

Because its very visible from where I'm.

[Dayo_UK]

Well the DC does not show test results when accessing it anymore then.

Dont think it matters where you access it from.

Unless what you see is different from what I was seeing yesterday.....

[lee_sufc]

i don't see the test dc either -this is about the third time it has happened lately

[reseller]

Dayoooooooooooooooooooooo

Good news, maybe.

The test DC shows updated cache right now!

Or is it old news for the population of Norwich :-)

[Dayo_UK]

>>>The test DC shows updated cache right now!

That because it is no longer showing the test results :/