Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
A very interesting article (including comments by Matt Cutts) has been posted over at PBS. It may be possible that it is related to the December/January changes
[pbs.org...]
[edited by: tedster at 8:00 pm (utc) on Jan. 11, 2007]
The strange thing is that most of the keywords that I used to rank on page one, I now rank on page 50 and lower, except the very first keywords I ranked for.
Even 5 to 6 term keywords that I ranked well for has tanked.
I think the internal navigation links dial has been tweaked to cause this.
All of my pages with good external links are still holding strong (ish), but the pages with few links ( and Mostly internal links) have dropped off dramatically.
Might be a good idea to send each other our sites, to do some cross checking and see if there are any similarities.
What do you guys think?
Why bother creating good content when its just going to get ranked on page 5 anyway.
1 - have the results in your sector improved from say a week ago (irrespective of whether your site remains hit or not)
2 - have they settled down now in the sense that they are consistent
It would seem from the fewer posts that this topic is generating that there is more and more satisfaction out there.
From our point of view we have lost 75% of google traffic since dec 29th (save for 3 'normal' days last fri,sat and sun but must admit that at least the results in our sector make a bit more sense than they did 10 days ago
I'd say the results overall are worse; .edu parasitic spam abounds. I did come across a query last night that I thought would be really spammy, but wasn't, but for the most part I think the quality went down.
Cygnus
1 - have the results in your sector improved from say a week ago (irrespective of whether your site remains hit or not)
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But I would say they have not improved. Most of the top 10 in my sector is amazon, wikipedia, and ebay... The strange thing about the ebay serps is that there are about twelve entries for them, one for each country TLD.
2 - have they settled down now in the sense that they are consistent
No, I still have seen massive changes in the last 48 hours.
Whats the point of creating great info for searchers when google will only list it on page 5 anyway.
Yahoo, Msn and Ask results seem spot on at the moment. Thank the lord someone knows quality when they see it.
Likewise, sat-sun Ok then zilch
I pray this is a temp thing and will clean out this stuff
Maybe they are doing some form of maintenance or something is broken. It's Friday night and suddenly pre jagger like traffic is hitting in again, after the week showed post jagger results again. I get an adsense report send 3 times (yesterday twice), webmaster tools looses my verification. It looks to me they play an older index in for periods of time to work on the new one. The .com is totally unaffected.
subdomain
Don't have that
/geo-domain
What is that?
One thing that kind of bothers me is that I don't see a huge outcry from sites being hit. There's got ot be some sites that are REALLY happy by now, especially MFA sites, splogs and other sites that got the first page for a while, or however loing this crap is going to continue. I don't see anything good yet coming out of it and I am wondering if the sites that DID come back are still back or not?
If it is going to be the same as the other downgrades from Google, then this crap is going to last for 2 months, give or take......
Search engines suck!
I am out for 32 days, but 2 days I was back.
So there are 30 days and 30 nights of insomnia.
This is the only one site I left in webmaster tools.
The rest all recovered some of them after deletion from webmaster tools account.
I added a site to webmaster tools about four days ago, and now its basically tanked. I'm going to remove it and see if it recovers. Seems crazy, but why not?
same site but with multiple geographical extensions....com .de .fr etc....
the point is one domain such as ebay where clearly identified as the same site but with multiple geographical targetted sites gets all sites listed..not just the corect country for the search...
exactly what happens with subdomains..so now you get all the city widget sites making sites like
luxury.widgets.domain.com
because that way they know both the sub and the main domain can appear in the same results...kosher sites tend to go the
domain.com/luxury_widgets.html
and so get just the one listing (filters allowing)
i thought this was just a passing phase as it came with BD but its actually getting worse...
for all the talk of how easy it is to spot networks i see no evidence that BD is actually doing that....so add multiple domains and geo-domains to an already large network of sites and they are are getting stronger with each refesh for the serps i watch...
I've seen some "improvement" in UK, in the last hour or so. But still a disaster.
I had one kw in position #5. Today it was 22nd. One hour after it is 17th. Yes, that's an "improvement".
It is a complete mess. I mean the biggest mess I can ever recall seeing in google results. It's not because my site isn't there... b/c it's part of the 950 thing (which I think I have solved, we will see on the next cache, then I'll post)... but this set of results is far, far worse than even MSN. 20 real players in my niche should be at the top. Exactly 5 of them are there in the top 20.
For those of you who think rankpulse is somewhat valid... its showing today having the second greatest change in result positions in the past 6 months.
I have four subdomains with totally different content. All were put in blackhole on Jan 14/15. Two of them came back with first page ranking after two days. The other two are still no where to be found in SERP.
Subdomain 1, 2, 3, 4 (1 is the oldest, 4 is the newest):
1 and 4 still in blackhole
2 and 3 recover after two days
1 and 2 had new content added in the past two months, 3 and 4 were just updated (no new pages added) - so adding new content does not seem to have an effect.
1 and 4 has gone from PR5 to PR4 in the recent PR update. 2 and 3 are unchanged (PR4).
2 and 3 have anchor text beginning with "A" or "B" for incoming links, 1 and 4 have anchor text from "D" to "S". I notice that many link pages arrange links in alphabetical order, so those beginning with "A" or "B" are in pages with higher PR.
I am not sure, but I think if your incoming links are placed in more prominent websites and webpages, your site can recover more quickly.
Also, I don't think it is possible to get multiple listings using subdomains with identical content now. My subdomains used to share a few articles (not main content) but these articles are all in the supplemental results now.
One key phrase I am checking has a site that is either #26 or #30 (It's actually my wifes site so that's good for her!) but I am usually at least where she is now.
It I try to find my site then I am at #150 where she is at 26 and I am at #251 where she is at #30.
It is kind of steady so I don't expect any changes in the near future. For me it usually takes about 2 months to recover.
One thing I am wondering about is, How many of you are using rel=nofollow in your links to other sites?
I am also seeing almost the same sites on the first page as I did the last time Google F-ed up.
So, something's gone wrong with this latest tweaking, and the old index is showing while they work out what to do. So wait and see.
I call this the Alzheimer Update: "We forgot some of your pages";
[...]
"Oh wait, we remember!";
I did a search for "blue widgets in Michigan" without the double ticks to see if anything has happened to my SERP's
Of course everything was like yesterday, #*$!ty!
So, I added the double ticks to get the exact result with only pages that has "blue widgets in Michigan" on their pages and to my surprise I get tons of spam pages, guestbook spam pages and God knows what and the SERP's stop at 87 pages and get this Message:
"In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 87 already displayed......."
WTH is this all aboout? Have they gone totally mad?
Last two weeks were the biggest on record for us, both revenue (via AdSense) and traffic. Traffic was up 10-20%, revenue more like 30-40%. Looking back I have to wonder if our AdSense eCPM's were so high because competing sites were knocked for a while, and didn't have as many impressions to show! *L*
Example of how far we are out: Yesterday I ranked # 1 for a search for my real name, as I've had since we started. Today, na-da, I have to add our domain in there to even find it. All manner of junk sites and irrelevant sites are in there instead.
Weirdly, we still rank # 1 for our domain name. We still are showing the same # of pages as before (unlike the Bourbon update, when we couldn't even rank for our unique domain name). The cache in Google is from Jan 17; in previous updates, its been all over. I can put the exact article title, and not come up with anything. Only if I do quotes, and put all the words do I get it (and then I do, with no other results).
I assume because they clearly turned the spigot to "on" over the past two weeks, we're now on "off" for some time.
We're a 9 year old domain, 3 years of new content, PR 5. Have slowed down adding content. Did make a change to page layout two weeks ago, removing the top nav bar. There's fewer redundant links on our page... but the fact the cache in Big G showing Jan. 17 dates on recent articles leads me to believe its something they have clearly done, rather than our changes which have tossed anything.
Not much to do but wait and see, I guess.
A quick random check, and all the results are the same for us across the DC's I looked at.
If I didn't see all these other results here, I'd start to question our design change as a factor in this.
We're a large authority site and have been dumped this morning on all our major and small targeted keywords. Where to turn next, I'm really lost on this one. I guess just wait and hope.
WTH is that?
Added! Here's what I found about Error 501:
Resolving 501 errors - general
This error should be very rare in any Web browser. It is more likely if the client is not a Web browser - particularly if the Web server is old. In either case if the client has specified a valid request type, then the Web server is either responding incorrectly or simply needs to be upgraded.
So I guess Googles web server needs to be UPGRADED?!? Do they have a Server Problem? Is that why we get all these weird results?
