Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I am the owner of a large < specialized topic > news website. We have seen continuous good traffic from Google ever since we started, 5 years ago. However, on the 27th June 07 our Google referrals dropped suddenly to around 1/7 of what they had previously been. It has remained the same for each day since. We are still number one for < our main keyword phrase >, but all our article rankings seem to have vanished.
We have staff, who we pay each month with revenue earned from Adsense. Obviously, with the drop in traffic our Adsense revenue has gone through the floor. So now we are faced with the possibility of not being able to meet our costs in the coming months.
I guess it is possible, if this happened at the same time last year to other people, that Google may just be using the holiday season to make some alterations to their servers (taking them offline?) or something like that. It really makes no sense, so that is all that I can come up with.
It seems as if this has happened to a lot of other people. So, my question is, for those of you who have seen this before - do the rankings come back? If so, how long does it normally take?
Thanks
A Worried Webmaster.
[edited by: tedster at 4:36 pm (utc) on July 1, 2007]
[edit reason] make specifics more general [/edit]
To summarize the changes I saw:
-less authoritative sites seemed to be competing for the top rankings with the normal 900 lb gorilla sites
-Sites that have fallen to oblivion in the past year reappeared in top spots
-New sites(~1 yr old and newer) seemed to gain serious steam
-Sites with old-fashioned reciprocal link type inbounds seemed to get a bump
I don’t know what these changes mean is going on – but I noticed this across multiple markets – and the first page results changes to new results and back to the old were in sync.
Anyone else notice these changes? Have any other factors they noticed during the shift?
Why is this happeneing?! :(
About two hours ago i had checked the ranking of the site for a particular keyword and it was on the 7th position on the 1st page.
After about 2 hours when i checked the ranking it had completely dissapeared.
There was a google bot visit after i had checked. ( i checked the logs)
What i find is that my all inside pages have got indexed but my home page has is not indexed at all. The home page was well indexed for last many months. and we have been having good ranking for few imp keywords.
What do i do. How long does it normally take to get things back to normal.
Please advise
Being a big site we also have many product pages in supplemental. In June we saw a big jump in traffic for two weeks and noticed many pages that didn't rank previously started to rank some were in supplemental while other were not.
On the 8th is when we saw the big drop and it has continued since.
Every thime this happens large sites suffer, because more and more pages become supplemental, but at the same time other pages can't get out of the supplemental index due to poor crawling.
SEOold, I think the big drop in visitors for large sites occures every time when Google needs their horse power for other calculations than crawling. They simply remove priority from crawling at that time.Every thime this happens large sites suffer, because more and more pages become supplemental, but at the same time other pages can't get out of the supplemental index due to poor crawling.
I have observed this with my large sites continuously when their our big SERP changes. They usually start with a large traffic boost and then dip down but eventually comes back around. So i can see what you mean. Is this something you have noticed with your own large sites or client sites?
Are u also able to see with any analytics that bots are crawling pages less then the usual or is this an observation that you have noticed with large sites in general?
You can also see this effect using the "site:" command. I know it's unreliable, but if you see less of your URLs in the index using "site:" it meens that Google dropped supplemental URLs from their index. This happens quite often for large site as explained if Google needs their horse power for different calculations. But of course it can also happen if some of your incoming high quality links are devalued.
[edited by: SEOPTI at 7:18 pm (utc) on July 12, 2007]
Both GoogleGuy and later Matt Cutts have mentioned several time that the folks at the plex see the summer as good time to try things.
You really don't need to be worry much for sudden changes. Wait until the end of August where things use to settle down.
It's realyl strange though, as there are a few select keywords that do maintian their rankings for no apparent reason.
But I'll keep my fingers crossed
I'm seeing major jumps or shifts up in...
- pages that have been 950ed
- one-word searches (with the Google Directory moving up)
- long-tail searches where I'd attributed prior good rankings to inbound links for modifiers rather than strong onpage optimization for those modifiers. Some of these had shifted down (some but not all were 950ed) and are now way up.
- pages in a site that had not previously ranked for the given searches.
It's way too early to say whether these will stick. It does appear, though, that Google is trying to fix some of the collateral damage we've been seeing for a while.
I found myself at 850, then 500, then third position. I also see other sites that are very small and not popular doing very well.
There is something going on, no question - so I'll just hang in there and continue to not react :)
[edited by: tedster at 10:04 pm (utc) on July 16, 2007]
[edit reason] moved from another location [/edit]
I am not judging however I saw some obvious spam and extremely low end websites way up while some parked domains strangely found their way on pages 2-3.
I haven't heard of any NL updates nor seen any changes in major eupropean countries - but it would be a very good thing that GG starts filtering the obvious spam going on over there and keeps spreading as if it was a best practice (after all... it works).
Anyways, it looks like big GG is testing, hopefully they will, one day, keep up with their promises: filtering obvious link buyers and understanding relevant/good content.
Well not so sure if they promised but they make it like if they did and for now I don't see where the improvements are overall.
There are many, many domains dropped from index in The Netherlands searching on the site:domain.com query. Startpages, sites with more whan one index where articles are beeing explained on pages. On top of that big 3 year old sites have dropped -5 or more. The articles of blogs and low quality sites are up.
Things appear to be back to normal and it was not a fun ride!
Just glad is all washed out.
As far as i can tell google is punishing websites that have indexes themself. And this should be a bad thing. Google must also list those lists in the SERPS. Users may want to find a list of certain things. Also i think google is punishing websites that have for example forum type structures, that way cartain posts will show up on the 20 post per page and 10 posts per page. (via the links users may want to click in dropdown box or elseway.
And most concerning i am that big sites that would be expected on page one are gone... or websites that are removed completly from index (site:domain.com command gived zero results).
[edited by: Gerwin7 at 5:47 am (utc) on July 18, 2007]
