April 2007 Google SERP Changes

[madmatt69]

< continued from [webmasterworld.com...] >

So yesterday I had decent traffic for the first time in a few weeks - today it's the lowest i've ever seen it. Like since launching it 4 years ago.

No clue why...Can't put my finger on it at all.

[edited by: tedster at 5:42 pm (utc) on April 1, 2007]

[Bewenched]

In some of the results I have been watching it appears to me that keyword stacking is now back in style as well as duplicate websites (two of the very same site with different main urls in the top 15).

All of the top ten are stacked keywords repeated over and over and over again.. at least 10 times, then there's the shopping sites like ebay, msn, nextag, mysimpon and a bunch of VERY new websites possibly new links?

[microlinx]

Does anyone know (what a stupid request, shame on me) if that smiley face/ sad face voting mechanism in Google toolbar does anything at all?

Also, the spam report in sitemaps could replace all those grandma's, if they'd actually look at the data. Yes, I know, there are probably BILLIONS of spam reports being submitted daily, but maybe they could run THAT through a google algo to weed out common urls being submitted and check those first....

Wow! What did Ma put in my coffee this morning?

[Drew_Black]

In some of the results I have been watching it appears to me that keyword stacking is now back in style as well as duplicate websites (two of the very same site with different main urls in the top 15).

I'm seeing the same thing.

[Undead Hunter]

Happy Easter! We're out AGAIN today.

Now I'm getting really annoyed. This is the fourth month in a row that they've surpressed the majority of our high traffic pages. On for 10-20 days, off for the same.

So far we've been so high on the off days that each month has been working out to "average". But this month, if it holds down for the next 3-4 weeks won't be.

We were just spidered on April 5. I'm beginning to wonder, if I stop Google from spidering us via robots txt after we're in an "up phase", would that keep us up?

I can't find any rhyme nor reason for this.

Who else is experiencing this constant up and down rollercoaster? For how long?

[mattg3]

Who else is experiencing this constant up and down rollercoaster? For how long?

The madness started in mid January ... from 80.000 visitors a day to 9000, in the moment it could be easter it's around 40.000 ..

[Undead Hunter]

Not for me: I did a search for a specific term that's been knocked out every time our pages are knocked out, and boom. It's gone again.

I've done nothing each time, so its hard to say that there is X that I can do to effect these changes.

Thing is, I could submit pages to Google via a sitemap, make changes, but its not that these pages are missing, just supressed by 100 results or so.

[supermanu]

It is a nightmare...

My website is in the index but I can't find where since 29/03
The traffic drop, drop and now it is now ZERO

It was top of the search results for my specific keywords (2nd for 3 years and 1st in February)

I am so desperate... I have a genuine, clean website, no trick at all, good content and Google decided for an unknown reason to drop my site.

What I did so far:

- I asked for a reinclusion request... I do not think it will help as I have some pages indexed...

- I filled the form "not satisfied with search results"

- I posted this message

I absolutely do not know what I can do... HELP!

[Jane_Doe]

So no one has a plan of action?

I think it is very hard to stay high in the free serps forever when you only have one site. With a variety of sites sometimes you can see the patterns of what is changing easier. Plus, when some go down in rankings with major algo changes, others usually go up, so things seem to even out pretty well, at least income-wise, over time.

With a multiple sites at least some usually lose rankings with each algo change, so you end up getting lots of experience at making changes on how to bounce back relatively quickly and have a number of different sites to test your theories out on.

[edited by: Jane_Doe at 6:02 am (utc) on April 9, 2007]

[Crush]

With all these crazy threads I think it is about time Cuttsy or MR Lasnik came out and explained what is going on. I remember last time when the supp stuff started, they came in and gave us a "weather report". So Lets see what happens after Easter.

[supermanu]

I want to add some more information:

1. I do not have a Google Site Map (Used to have one but I removed it 2-3 months ago)
2. I use Google Analytics (seeing the new stats... I cry)
3. I use Google Webmaster Tools (seeing the old stats... I cry)
4. I use Google Maps to localize my office address
5. From 500 unique visitors /day it dropped to... 0 since end of March

When I use keyword1 keyword2 => no where to be found (was 1st or 2nd)
When I use keyword1 keyword2 keyword3 => 1st position in search result

Do you have the same profile?

[offroadvietnam]

I saw one of my competitors' site showed up #3 on page one 4 days ago but now no where in top 100. Many old sites with unchanged contents now ranked similar like 18 months ago. Does anyone think that Google is using the old results and testing new sites?

[Crush]

What is really funny now is the blackhat exploit. I could take a banned site, add it to a trusted domain in sub folders and get all the old serps back using your site.

[skyewalk]

Undead hunter -

yes my site keeps going in and out of this as well.

I don't make any substantive changes; my other site is organised very similarly for links, anchor text, content etc. etc. (it is different content) and has never been affected.

I think it is google data bug and is affecting sites randomly.

Other theories posted don't fit.

[supermanu]

Today my site is back at its previous position (2nd)

I sincerly hope it will stick like this! :)

I did nothing except approving Google Local...

Absolutely no idea of what happened :(

Any of you got his/her website back?

[skyewalk]

Yes supermanu,

I've had my site back up in the rankings several times - and totally sudden and without doing anything.

I've then had it disappear again, several times.

[foxtunes]

Great to hear you guys got back.

Never thought it would happen to me but it did today. Great traffic yesterday, this morning almost zero from google.com although still getting hits from .co.uk, .ca, .in etc.

Had the canonical 301 redirect going for years so no problems there. Site is still ranking one for it's own name. I type in unique snippets from the site and the pages appear so no hijacking I can detect. Just disapeared for all competitive keywords in google.com.

The site is whitehat with content linked to by authorities universities/ newspaper websites. Hopefully just a brief hiccup, as I hear people drop out for days to weeks then reappear again.....But this is certainly going to be a white knuckle ride.

[supermanu]

Guys I hope your sites will stick too!

one thing I noticed during this crisis is that even though I had some pages in the index, the DEFAULT page or ROOT site would never show up (no matter the keywords I was trying) Only pages within the sites was shown, no www.domain.com or www.domain.com/default.asp

Same for you?

[gehrlekrona]

Seems like mine is back too.... keeping my fingers crossed that it will last a while until next time....

[300m]

Seems that Google did make some changes, I am now dealing with many pages dropping. Who else tanked this morning? I can not be the only one seeing this today.

[sjgreatdeals]

Same here, seeing lots of pages dropping, also seeing almost everyone of our compeitors dropping tons of pages too.

[300m]

Yep same here. Also mine are well aged domains, static pages, relevant linking, content and image updates every so often, all domains affected were 301'd last year during big daddy, etc. Just trying to put this together in my mind. Any one else see any kind of patterns they want to share?

[foxtunes]

"......Yep same here. Also mine are well aged domains, static html, relevant linking, content and image updates every so often etc......"

Same here vanilla html, rock solid rankings for 2 years, fresh content etc.

Glad to see it's not just me :)

[MrStitch]

I'm seeing a lot of these posts here lately with the -30 penalty, -450, -950, etc.

Is it possible that maybe you're sites are being flagged for something, in set blocks.

Example: Google found out that you did this one bad thing (god only knows what THAT is), and you get socked with a -30. Site B over there did it twice, so they get hit with a -60, and so forth.

There could be several things, from multiple angles, and could also be something that was never intentional. After all, it's just an algo, not a human edited directory.

I've had fair placement (until recently), and I can honestly say that it's all been white hat. Sure, I've gone on a linking campaign in my time, but how else is Google going to find me? Kept everything on-topic. Linked with relevant sites, and created no 'schemes'.

[300m]

I was wating for this. If anyone that is suffering today has any kind of stats from last year this time, you might see if the same thing happened (+/-) a couple of days)

[edited by: 300m at 1:16 pm (utc) on April 10, 2007]

[gehrlekrona]

Some sites go up and some sites go down on the same day. I have said for a long time time that Google is doing these "changes" by theme.
As soon as you add something to your site you might fall out of the theme that you're in. If you add a page with new keywords in then these might not "fit in" in the theme your site is in so then you'll be thrown out for a while until your site has been fitted again.
From what I have seen this is what happens to my site. Whenever there is a big change, I see new pages/sites count go up, and I have added new content. Even if "content is king", new content might screw up your ranking in the serp's until they've figured out that your site is the same and should be in that theme.
It seems like they don't count PR or something when they do these changes and then, after a while, they put in the ranking again and your site goes back to where it belongs.

[foxtunes]

Interesting theory gehrlekrona.....Actually for the last few months I've been adding less and less content. Used to be 3-4 articles a week now 1-2. So perhaps I've lost a freshness boost.

Also been writing about related industries, so your theme theory could be a factor.

But hey I'm writing for my readers not just google, and I've noticed some folks return to the serps in days, weeks without touching a thing.

[Undead Hunter]

Skyewalk:

Now we're REALLY messed up. We were out on Sunday, made 1/4 normal revenue. Yesterday I was searching for # 1 pages, couldn't find any of our normal 100 or so. Yet somehow we made 1/2 our normal traffic and revenue: I assume it came back late at night, after I was searching.

Today we seem to be back completely. Given the past 2 days, I'm not holding my breathe.

But normally if we are out, we're out for 11-20 days.

I can live with being knocked out for a day at a time! Much better than being knocked for half a month and wondering if "this is it".

Again, no changes, to anything. Was seriously going to make some. But now, I just don't know. It's hard to know what to do, given all this churn.

[foxtunes]

I just did a link:http://domain.com command on google. The affected site reports thousands of backlinks, but will only let me see up to Results 31 - 35....strange that has never happened before.

[300m]

Good find, just so happens that I am only getting 72 when I know I have thousands.

Others confirmed as well.

51 showing when it has thousands

224 showing when it has tens of thousands.

Looking like it may be a link related thing.

[foxtunes]

So you see it as well 300m. Perhaps google is refreshing data and hasn't factored in all the backlinks?.....It knows they are out there just hasn't got round to crediting them yet.