Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
One thing to watch for: HOURLY fluctuations.
After years long slow advances, my main page reached #13 in Google for the main single KW.
Suddenly it dropped to #16, then 4 hours later it was right back at #13.
Same thing with a 2-word key-phrase. From #2 or #3 I fell back to #6.
4 hours later, like the above, it was right back.
Some of this is data center switching I'm sure.
Then again maybe they use old data while they polish up the new.
All in all, Big Daddy has not hurt my site yet (knock on wood). -Larry
[edited by: tedster at 6:48 pm (utc) on Mar. 6, 2006]
My site seems to have gotten hit hard by the supplemental bug as well. This is going to be a bad month for traffic. I hope G gets this resolved quickly.
Our site has not been hit with supplimentals, but one of my main competitors have. I guess I don't see the big deal. People are still going to click on his supplimental results, aren't they? Or does the typical searcher ignore them for some reason? I'm just trying to understand, thanks.
Yes, but this is not the case the that supplimental page has replaced the normal page - it is the case that the normal page no longer is in the index so the supplimental page is now visible.
Exactly the case. All good pages just dropped off the index for many sites. All that is left now are existing supplement pages plus what google has introduced for that site from its archives.
The problem is that supplemental pages rank very very poorly, meaning almost no traffic at all for those listings.
Problem seems to be getting worse for everybody as big daddy rolls out to more and more data centres.
GG seems to acknowledge the problem, but we could all really do with some feedback as to when the problem is likely to get resolved. I believe a week or so was suggested, which is a like a life time for me!
So if we cannot get out of the sup hell. What does everyone see as the long term answer? Create a new site from scratch with a new domain?
People are still missing the issue. The problem is not that you have all these supplementals. Those pages were probably already there or slated to go there.
The problem is that all your legitimate pages (that do not belong in supplemental) have been dropped from the index. As they are not in the supplemental index now, they will probably be added once they are recrawled again. So for all our legitimate links that are now missing, we should see them eventually come back as they are crawled unless google can do something quicker.
From what I understand, the people affected by this glitch are those that when doing a site:domain.com show only the main homepage in the main index, and the rest are supplementals that would normally not be seen. All the rest of our normal results are now no longer indexed at all. If this is not what you are seeing, then you have another issue here.
My concern is what about the ranking for these pages....it is probably going to be hard to get those pages back into whatever ranking they had if we have to wait for recrawls.
Thats my concern and that is what's happening.
"My concern is what about the ranking for these pages...."
Agree, thats the bigger issue.
Actually I am more concerned that these results are permanent after BD update is complete. Google has a history of making major updates and "whacking" sites from their SERP without any of them returning.
The supp results are prob permanent if they are supposed to be there. All the pages that were dropped, and are no longer in the index, should be readded once they are crawled
I for one have been seeing very heavy google crawling at my site. Unfortunately it takes a while for google to add pages to their index.
One of my sites has had 2672 hits in the past 11 hours. 32,123 from the 2nd through the 6th.
Compared to 301 hits for the entire month of Janurary. Nope, not a new site, a couple of years old.
Now, I have no idea where their storing this data in the interim, but I'm betting that it's going somewhere, and once they're done going haywire, we'll no longer be freaking out about this whole issue.
Instead, we'll have something completely new to freak about, when they shuffle all the rankings based on this new content they found, and we can no longer base it on glitch theories. :)
-Michael
[edited by: tedster at 8:46 pm (utc) on Mar. 7, 2006]
Matt claims we don’t need to be worried about supplementals beyond several simple steps he outlined on his blog. But I’m more concerned with the lack of pages because no pages = no ranking.
I’ve seen reference to another SEO forum as an example, but the only supplementals that I see for that site are those where the page no longer exists.
Can someone please send me an example of a site that’s showing supplemental pages in the search results where those pages still exist?
People are still missing the issue. The problem is not that you have all these supplementals. Those pages were probably already there or slated to go there.
Grinler, you've been quite on point throughout this conversation. However, what is one to do when totally legitimate pages (original content-laden pages) are not only supp'd but then dropped even further into the "Omitted Results"? These are not pages "slated to go there", but rather totally legit and original pages of content that Google wants in its index. Has there ever been a case of re-inclusion from the "omitted results"? I know that we're all really hanging on to the hopes here, but when I step back it just seems so far-fetched that Google would re-include our sites right where they were before (improvement seems completely out of the question, even though we were steadily improving before).
This isn't only Supp hell, but for our site it's as though we're not even included in Hell. The site is not very big (only ~150 pages), but the drop in traffic is killing us.
I have another theory: My site in question made some dramatic improvements in the SERPS in the BD datacenters vs. where we were prior to BD. Could this be a theme for many others? Perhaps those of us who did things particularly right were relegated to Google Purgatory for affirmation? Just a thought...
This isn't only Supp hell, but for our site it's as though we're not even included in Hell. The site is not very big (only ~150 pages), but the drop in traffic is killing us.
No this is part of the so-called glitch. Remember we need to forget the supplementals here. The pages that we are seeing in the supps are prob legit for this situation. The main problem is that all our good pages have been dropped from the index, so now when we do a site:domain.com, all we are seeing are the supp pages that were normally never seen before. My site is just like yours...only my home page is shown and a bucketload of supps exist in the index. My 200k+ legit pages no longer exist in the index at all. Thats the glitch, not the fact that we are seeing supp listings.
I am the farthest thing from an SEO expert, but I am making the assumption that if our page is not in the supps, and simply dropped from the index for whatever reason, the next time they crawl it, it will be included again. I have no idea what that is going to do to rankings, but I am sure it wont be good.
Just to make people feel a bit better who are in the same situation as me... I have confirmation that my site is not penalized. From that and GG said, I dont think this is penalty related.
There must be some reason why some sites good pages have dropped and why some weren't affected.
Could it be regional, the type of hosting, something the affected sites are all doing?
Just like most I have home page indexed and producing very good search results while I watched my best pages drop drom the BD dc's day by day. Each day I lost another page or group of pages until only home and 13k supps remained. All junk - old forum pages, form pages, bad urls, etc.
This dc 66.102.9.99 and a few others has my normal 41k pages indexed and ranking as they always have.
Another thing - I don't see any non-supplemental results aside from home page. This is where my dismay lies.
"...but why's the rum gone?" - Jack Sparrow
Not always quite true.
For pages that no longer exist, the supplemental result is usually the old (by date) copy, and that will never be updated again.
For pages that do still exist but with changed content, the supplemental result is returned for content that used to be on the page, but no longer is, and the normal result is what is returnd for any searches based on the currect content.
For some pages where the page is now excluded by "robots.txt" Google has reverted to showing a cached page from a month or two before the page was disallowed.
Google are seemingly saying to me "Heh, we know you don't want those pages indexed, so what we'll do is show our users what was on those pages at a time when they were allowed to be indexed. Here is what the page looked like a year ago."
And, if that is their policy, then it sucks. The reason the URLs were recently (if you can call a year ago, recent) added to robots.txt was simply "oh #*$!, we don't need any of that stuff crawled, or indexed at all".
Can I get everyone to try these three searches instead/too:
site:domain.com
site:domain.com -inurl:www
site:www.domain.com
Tried..same for all three
The pages that I've got stored in the "Omitted Results" are all totally good & legit pages. I just haven't heard anyone else mention this at all.
Additionally, as many of us have probably already tried, I had already emailed the Gmail address from SES (SESNYC06 at gmail dot com), done the reinclusion request, and also responded to the auto-reply that a reinclusion request generates (as I heard was the best way to get an actual human to look at it). However, searching for another ear to whine at, I went for our AdWords rep with a sincere & desperate email. The AdWords Rep went ahead and fwd'd my email to her "User Support Team" marked urgent. I am thinking that the latest tactic might score some points, and so others might get ahead with that tactic as well (for those of you with AdWords reps).
For some reason, the AdWords reps seem to get things done (hmmm, imagine that). ;)
So where do I get my club ID card?
Hurry and get it, the wine and cheese bar is open. :)
I sent a email to G as well and got the autoresponse. I'm sure they are getting 1000s of these right now. Sure wish they would read a few of them.
It means they are considered to be "too similar" to the already listed pages: duplicate content.
Having the same title tag and/or meta description is enough to trigger it. Make sure that those tags are different on every page of the site, and that every one describes exactly what is on that page, per page.
Make sure too, that all your non-www URLs issue a 301 redirect pointing to the same page, but on the www version of your site. That's another place that duplicate content can occur, if you forget to set up this redirect.
