Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
After catching up on this thread I've come to the conclusion that my pages are just too similar to Google though to the visitor they won't. (not for any underhand tactics, just how the pages are arranged and the type of site it is)
The pages that are doing well have slightly different or additional on page text, as slight as it is, this seems to be a factor. Today I will experiment with 3 sections of the site and take it from there. I will happily report back any positives I find.
There are some far more obvious candidates for the cause of the Google bug (or bugs) that are entirely in line with the Big Daddy changes that Google have confessed to.
We know for example that their crawlers just don't crawl like they used to. The code has been completely changed (loads of opportunities for fundamental bugs), the crawl-priority metrics have been changed (loads of opportunities for fundamental bugs), and they have introduced a new cache to try and reduce bandwidth usage (again, ample opportunity for fundamental bugs).
The only hope for progress is if Google can somehow be made aware of the problem. At the moment it is all too easy for them to just dismiss all of our grumblings as the death cries of a bunch of evil spammers.
The other hope would be for the Press to finally wake up start highlighting some of the issues. They can't ALL be shareholders, surely?
Exactly the same here. I'm now going through and adding anything I can to try to push my missing pages over the google threshold - whatever that might be.
Sad thing is, I'm now not coding for the users - just for google, but what can you do? - Can't hang around for 6 months waiting for google to either fix its bugs or change its 'too similar' threshold, that's even if the problem is either of those, and not that we have simply been deliberately excluded.
I ran several tools over my pages and the outcome was a high % of similarity.
So i have just under 10% of my site showing up in the index and over 95% of these are marginally different to each other, very small.
If I change 100 or so pages in a simillar style to those indexed then over the coming weeks I will know if that is the problem or not.
What is there to lose? After just under 6 months of zero traffic from Google to a hundred positions returned at the expense of 1000 pages of my site I personally have nothing to lose. The additional and altered text will fortunately be informative so it won't look out of place.
Big drop in traffic! Scary!
GG...thanks...have sent you my email.
Do try and keep up. This isn't a ranking issue. The pages are missing altogether. Are you seriously suggesting that Google are deliberately "trending" towards not listing any commercial sites at all? Are they a search engine or not?
> different crawl priorities
So, as Matt mentioned in Boston, the total number of spiderlings we will see per day on high value pages, should drop by about 2/3ths?
One of my non-commercial sites, all unique pages, has lost about 30% from index.
My blog has lost all its indexed pages bar the categories, archives and feed etc. Al posts have disappeared.
I have numerous sites and I can see no pattern at all. It cannot be a planned result, either a fault or they are gradually rebuilding the index
However, I have sevreal sites three of which I watch, 1 is info based now supplemental, one is ecom now supplemental and one is info and ecom.
Which is interesting as this site vanished and has now started to make a come back.
Over 90% of these pages are generated on the fly from a database which feeds into one of two different templates so they would probably fail any loosely bounded content similarity test. The other 10% have the benefit(?) of several years worth of effort at providing a 'consistent user experience through out the site'
Throughout it all the inbound has pretty much stayed the same, rising steadily from Monday through Friday and then dropping off to slightly lower levels on the weekends.
So, with this one site at least, I can't see where anything has really changed other than the different reported result counts from time to time.
It makes me believe that everything is still indexed properly but my query may be hitting different servers showing cached results in different stages of being updated with new results.
It would be interesting to see how results differ between servers but I am not sure how to select any different ones by IP address. Has anyone already tried this?
Mine dropped from 600 to 123
Phah! 500,000 down to 44,300 right here! All turned supplemental after two years of good rankings. No I ain't spam, no I ain't scraper, no I ain't MFA and no I ain't an espotting affiliate .... even those are still ranking better than me! ....
... unless Google has raised their unique content filter to "must have at least 90% unique content" I don't have an explanation.
I suspect it is a bug in a new alogrithm that will iron itself out soon.
I also sent an email
Some points of interest perhaps?
- Pages have no meta desc/keywords tags, just unique title tags.
- Pages use full title tag as URL
- Recently secured my previously Open dns servers. (long shot, but thought I'd mention it)
[edited by: lawman at 5:58 am (utc) on May 6, 2006]
everything being hit and hit really hard in the "G"ut.
Thanks GG ;)
