February 2007 Google SERP Changes

[pinkopanter]

And here it is. 12:00pm CST My site magicly disapeared from Google's earth. 1st page for many majour keywords, now is no where in the first 9,999.

I think disater is about to strike. Good luck to everyone

[mattg3]

With yahoo being such a lame duck in Europe this is now like living on an active vulcano in a wooden house. :\

[c41lum]

Ever since the 20th of December <our> website has been in free fall. I have even taken to make 3 staff redundant. After a cople of days off i have finally plucked up the courage to have a look at the results and they are BAD! The only thing that I can think of is that we have affiliate links on our site through a comparission website.

<Sorry, no specific sites.
See Forum Charter [webmasterworld.com]>

[edited by: tedster at 12:24 am (utc) on Feb. 5, 2007]

[almir]

Matt Cutts keeps reminding us that they are doing updates and data refreshes closer to a daily basis now, rather than monthly. We could have these new threads starting everyday if we don't get use to this change at Google.

See his blog post from January 28th for this reminder.

Well, if you feel happy with " yes, Mr Cutts" , keep enjoying in it.

Data refreshes on daily basis doesnt mean that one site is good for #1 today, and so bad to deserve # 500 tomorrow, and then again so good to be #1 day after tomorrow.

There is no chance this can have anything with normal datarefreshes, but crappy refreshes with million of bugs, of course, and we are almost used on it.

Matt wants us to think that this is something cool and OK. Of course, he will never confess that this is problem from his company's side, and that they certainly know they are having problem, but still dont know how to solve it.

[mattg3]

If you switch a dynami system to more disturbance you get more artefacts. Like if you throw many stones in a lake instead of one. A stone is an update. Many updates will have more strange effects if there is any delay in going through the index.

My opinion is that what we are seeing is an incresed ripple effect. It started when the socalled daily updates were announced.

Before the sytem could settle into a steady state after an update. Now you have everflux. I think especially in borderline cases this effect will be strong. If you have strong signals of cr@p or quality in Google's eyes, the situation will be calmer.

[thecoalman]

My main site had been at 998 of about 1,540 for months.

ALL OF A SUDDEN: Starting Jan 24th I started to see results like:

338 of about 1,540
<snip>
34 of about 1,580

Just now it was - 19 of about 1,490

I've seen the same thing, don't have a specific date but that's about where it started, I'm down to 1 of 3 now and the three pages listed are the three major pages on my site. I'm beginning to wonder about this myself whether I should be concerned. Traffic has not decreased and has actually increased in this period but that has pretty much been the trend for my site the last couple of weeks.

I haven't hit the panic button yet because regular searches for keywords and phrases still return results for all the other pages.

[caryl]

thecoalman,

I did not panic at first because my traffic seemed uneffected - HOWEVER - I was truely concerned!

As I shared, this started happening on Jan 24th. On Feb 1st my traffic dropped to barely a trickle!

I don't know IF there is any real correlation between the two - BUT it sure is suspicious.

BTW - This morning my site:search is showing 6 of about 1,490 - If I click on repeat the search with the omitted results included. (which sets filter=0) my pages are there...

My pages that are returned with the omitted results are NOT supplimentals.

My traffic remains at a trickle :(

Caryl

[thecoalman]

My pages that are returned with the omitted results are NOT supplimentals.

Same here,traffic however is steady. If snyhting it has increased slightly since.

[dazzlindonna]

Caryl, is there any way that all those pages look like dups to Google? Same meta descriptions, possibly?

[caryl]

Hi dazzlindonna,

No duplicates! All have their own distinct and very different - meta titles, and descriptions.

All pages have different (same general on topic/theme - but very different) content.

This is one site (subdomain) of eleven subdomains total. They (all pages on the eleven different subdomains) are all basically the same layout just different content.

All that being said - only the one site (subdomain) is having a problem with the site:search results. The other 10 sites have been returning normal results.

I forgot to add to my previous post that my records indicate that this same 'phenomenon' occurred back on Oct 6th and 7th - it lasted only two days. My traffic was uneffected - but I basically was NOT getting any to begin with back then... :(

My records also indicate that it was being discussed back in October in [another forum]. That same forum has a thread discussing this again right now.

Caryl

[tetongolf]

We have the same thing going on here as well.

When I do a site:search, I get 1-4 results. When I click on the show omitted, I see all 1600 pages.

Google's webmaster console doesn't show any problems for our site.

Our site has all but disappeared from the SERPS, but strangely traffic has been ok, but not great.

Michael

<Sorry, no personal urls.
See Forum Charter [webmasterworld.com]>

[edited by: tedster at 6:04 pm (utc) on Feb. 5, 2007]

[plasma]

"I'm loving it"

[netmeg]

When I do a site:search, I get 1-4 results. When I click on the show omitted, I see all 1600 pages.

I'm still thinking the site command is not working right, or else they changed it. Most of my sites are display as filtered content right now (mine and my client's) and not as supplemental, and many of them are as high or higher than they've ever been in the SERPs. Traffic is down overall, on some sites more than others, but when I track back the logical (and historical) search phrases, they're still showing up in the same places they were - often #1. I'm also seeing PRs go back and forth still.

So, beats me what's going on, but I think it's several things, and the site: command doesn't seem to be even close to accurately reflecting anything at the moment.

[kevsh]

>>>
the site: command doesn't seem to be even close to accurately reflecting anything at the moment
>>>

I hope that's the explanation in my case: The site command has been virtually frozen of my 'problem' site for weeks now - no new pages added, still 90% stuck in supplementals, etc. Only thing changed is the cached date on some pages, obviously.

Oh yes, and still 950ed...

[macman23]

A site:www.example.com search for one of my sites on Google returns 1 result of about 1,870. Then it has the standard line below it:

"In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 1 already displayed.
If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included."

My pages are really not that similar and have different meta descriptions and titles for each one. I'm not sure what is going on with the Google results these days.

[Haecceity]

Matt Cutts keeps reminding us that they are doing updates and data refreshes closer to a daily basis now, rather than monthly. We could have these new threads starting everyday if we don't get use to this change at Google.

I agree with those that say this is something other than the usual daily shuffle. I'm used to seeing minor up and down movements in the top ten results, but today I'm seeing a bigger than usual reshuffle.

The most notable thing in my sector (single keyword, 47M results) is that one site that's been above mine and that is, in my expert option full of crappy misinformation has finally vanished without trace. Thank the lord!

Sadly, my site continues to underperform compared to my expectations. I think I should be in the top three (well, #1 to be honest) judging by the quality of the site, number of pages, backlinks, etc, but so far I've never been higher than 5 and right now I'm down to 10. This isn't a problem in any way since I get plenty of traffic, but I'd like to see my site get the recognition I think it deserves.

[keyplyr]

I just had 3 sites disappear. I think it is everflux and the sites will return within a few days. If not, I have my revolver at hand.

[almir]

I just had 3 sites disappear. I think it is everflux and the sites will return within a few days. If not, I have my revolver at hand.

Maybe you should prepare your revolver :)

I thought my sites would return in few days too, but only one returned after exactly one month, and other are out for 39 right now.

[nuthin]

I am having the same problems with a site that alot of you's are experiencing. It is getting filtered out hard. I'm going to wait this one out before I do anything drastic. Wouldn't suprise me if alot of data is still to be put back into the current index.

[katherinez]

Two of my sites have gone supplemental except for the index page. VERY frustrating.. cleaned up everything I could, made sure not linked to bad neighborhoods, took out a "tell a friend" script I had, looked at keywords to be sure they aren't the same.. took off disclaimer on the footer in case google thought it was duplicate content... everything I can think of... I have good content, white hat, helpful info... don't know what happened! Anyone else gone supplemental?

[Nostalgic Dave]

I noticed something strange last week that I had not seen before... the site: command showed several updated pages that came out of supplemental. I was excited to say the least, but a few days later the site: command showed the old stuff, those updated pages were back to the old cache and back in supplemental. Never have seen them re-appear, and now even worse my site is under some sort of penalty. Mostly nowhere to be found in the serps. Yesterday I noticed a newly cached page using the site: command, but those others are still not back in yet. Seems odd to me to see some fresh updated pages again without seeing the previous updates return, unless G threw them out for some reason?

[madmatt69]

One thing I have been doing over the last few days is consolidating pages that are similar, and slowly widdling down some of the links on my sitewide navigation to help the PR flow to the more important pages.

I have not noticed any change in google yet, but at least it makes the site more usable and should be a positive change.

Ive also noticed a few changes in backlinks depending on the datacenter. Not sure if this is due to the new link data in webmaster central..

[JoeS]

My site was the No. 1 ranking for a specific keyword and had many other pages on high rankings as well.

But today my site has disappeared from Google's directory. Even if I enter the URL directly it is gone.

I have no idea what happened. Just last week Google Adsense invited my site for its Custom Purchase Pack and now it's totally missing.

[edited by: tedster at 12:41 am (utc) on Feb. 7, 2007]

[ALbino]

All of a sudden today we have random massive penalties on some SERPs. Some are just fine (top 5, #1, whatever) but others are well into the hundreds whereas previously they were in the top 10. That's not just a minor drop, we're talking like being steadily in the 3-6 range for several years and now all of a sudden in the low 300's. Another one I track that's deep just for fun is usually in the 110-130 range (and has been for forever) and today it's in the mid 500's. And yet other ones are just fine.

One two keyword combo I just checked on February 3rd was #7 and the time before I checked it was #6. Today? #424.

We haven't changed a thing. In fact, we haven't done a site redesign in like 6 years (maybe that explains it :) We're a PR6 page with thousands of inbound links that's been loved by Google since it's inception in the late 90's. I don't know what happened. Anybody know what in the world is going on?

[edited by: ALbino at 4:54 am (utc) on Feb. 7, 2007]

[tedster]

ALbino, that sounds like a variation of what people have been calling the 950 "penalty"

Google's 950 Penalty [webmasterworld.com] - part 1
Google's 950 Penalty [webmasterworld.com] - part 2
Google's 950 Penalty [webmasterworld.com] - part 3

[ALbino]

Looks like it tedster. Not good :(

Thanks for the links.

[tedster]

But you have confirmed for me what I suspected -- that this peculiar effect does not just throw urls to the end of the results, but it can potentially throw them around by all kind of different amounts.

That actually holds more water for me than when it looked like it was only an "end of results" effect. I think that you moved us one step closer to clarity on the issue.

[ALbino]

It's definitely not "end of results" for me. Looking over the links you gave me the "keyword1 keyword2" vs. "keyword1 keyword2 keyword3" thing seems to be true. 2 keywords has us penalized, but a 3rd keyword has us back at the top. So it's not page specific so far as I can tell. Other things to discount from reading that thread:

1) We have no affiliate links or advertising at all

2) We have no 301/404/whatever problems

3) Our site has entirely unique content created by us (though we have been scraped repeatedly, text as well as images as I mentioned in another recent thread)

4) We have no internal linking problems (it's been the same linking scheme for at least 6 years)

5) We don't really link swap, and the vast majority of our links are pointed to us organically

6) We don't do cross-linking with other sites. In fact, there's only 1 page on our site that has any outbound links whatsoever. And no, it's not called links.html :)

7) We don't over optimize (we have no H1 tags for example)

For as long as the site has been up we've been immune to the Big Daddy/Florida/Update of the Month effect. We've steadily moved up over time without a problem (we should count ourselves lucky I guess). We have no one targeted keyword or keyword combo that we derive traffic from, but rather thousands of keywords and combos, none of which we SEO to try and improve. I believe we have some sort of TrustRank because if you type in our URL you do get the the site along with the nifty little links below it to the major sections.

Anyway, I'd love to hear any suggestions for solving this. Reading through those threads I gathered "just sit tight and hope for the best" is the current plan.

[almir]

But you have confirmed for me what I suspected -- that this peculiar effect does not just throw urls to the end of the results, but it can potentially throw them around by all kind of different amounts.

That actually holds more water for me than when it looked like it was only an "end of results" effect. I think that you moved us one step closer to clarity on the issue.

I was always wondered why is -950 penalty took so many place to talk about, cause all my sites thatt dropped on the end of December has same characteristics as Albino's.

Keywords that ranked 1-10 went to 300-500, without any rules of -(certain number) penalty

[Pico_Train]

I have the same symptoms and all my remedies have been to no avail so far...

[bwnbwn]

I lost a 1000 pages in site:mydomain.com search so I am just going to start doing nothing as that seems to be working for the top sites from what I am seeing in the searches.