My rambling thoughts on URL only

... and a new theory about excessive images

[NoLimits]

While I was escaping reality today in my easy chair, I got thinking about something.

Pre-Jagger, all of my articles ranked really high for many search terms in Google's content search.

Once Jagger hit, my pages disappeared into URL only land in groups of 10-15 pages at a time. I lost 99% of my Google traffic. Eventually the pages got their titles back but were all "supplemental".

In the last 2 weeks, all of my articles have started to generate traffic again... however it is all on the google image search. The CTR is much poorer than content visitors. Monitization of these visitors on this type of website seems virtually impossible.

It annerves me that my content went supplemental, as I did spend lots of time writing each article myself. But it angers me even more that the images from these "supplemental" articles are ranking extremely high in Google's image search.

I think that Google decided that because I have a minimum of one picture per article, and a few of the articles are not extremely text heavy (minimum 500-600) characters)that the images were the focal point of the page - and scrapped the pages from the content search but bumped them up in the image network. I wasn't getting 1/100th of the image referrals I'm getting now.

I will settle for whatever traffic I can get, but it's a crappy trade-off. Bandwidth-sucking low CTR visitors.

I vowed never to use a frame breaking script. I shall eat crow, as I installed one site wide today.

[texasville]

I experienced the supplemental content swat on my articles also. I figured out it was due to three sentences I used from each article to introduce the articles on the sub-index page. I complained to google on the site:mysite search. I used the dissatisfied box. It WAS on the test center data. But it had begun to migrate. About 3 days after my memo to them all the supplemental designations disappeared. Now it remains to be seen if this will be permanent, as I suspect that a huge update is going to happen shortly after Jan 1.

[Essex_boy]

1 Jan - Thats roughly when I suspect the same although for my money itll happen around mid jan

[Jakpot]

Why wait until 1 Jan? Sock it to us now!

[Dayo_UK]

Well we know that "Big Daddy" is coming in the new year....and MC has confirmed it involves different crawling and indexing characteristics.

Pretty sure that url only is a crawling and indexing problem - so all we can really do is wait until "Big Daddy" hits.

But as the test DC is no longer showing the results it is hard to judge progress on the supplemental, url only, 301, 302 and canonical issue.

[g1smd]

A URL-only listing can also be the result of a "every page has the same meta description" duplicate content penalty.

Seen that on a site and got the owner to fix it. Gone from just 5 pages listed on a site:domain.com search 6 weeks ago (before the "click to show the search with the similar omitted results included" link is shown), to 180 pages (out of 200) listed now.