Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
A site we have has seen decent results for over 2 years, all of a sudden today all SERPS have dropped for us by about 4-10 pages lower all at once.
This is very odd, we have worked very hard to put out decent content and relevant content.
Any reasons for this, is their some sort of weird dance taking place?
We adjusted the page two days ago to make it better for the reader and seems we got slammed very badly for this.
Google fresh date (on serps) shows a date April 24, 06 but when clicking on the "Cached" link on the results page it shows a date of April 18, 06
Curious to what the webmasters think of this out there.
In my professional opinion, I really feel they could CARE LESS over at the plex!
They are focues on Investors and only investors. Remember the 30 million lawsuit went to the PPC case lawyers only!
I feel the pain.
Let's all just hope they get their ducks in a row and do it with a show of expediency, or we're all losing.
There's a lot at stake here, and not just for individual webmasters. Google must be taking a huge revenue hit right now as well.
.::DC::.
I actually think this may be a bad thing as most webmasters would not bother optimizing for 'widget' and 'widgets', they'd just pick one and stick with it.
I actually think this may be a bad thing as most webmasters would not bother optimizing for 'widget' and 'widgets', they'd just pick one and stick with it.
Exactly. I've always opted for the singular as the plural contains the singular. Now you'd need to include them both to be indexed correctly? That sounds archaic to me. More work for everyone and more confusing for the "less than technical" average surfer that would consider searching for the plural (or singular) if the correct results weren't returned.
.::DC::.
site:mysitename.com
site:www.mysitename.com
On the above two searches your home/index page is always listed 2nd below a random internal page.
mysitename
"www.mysitename.com"
"mysitename.com"
"mysitename"
On the above four searches your site will be buried and most likely appear on page 3 or 4 of the serps.
Not too sure what can be done, but I have been using AdWords to expose the problem :
Due To Poor SE Results
We are not on page 1
for our domain name
MyWebsiteDomain.com
...I get the sense Google does not like the AdWord. If enough of them appeared they may get the engineers to address the glitch.
Silent_Bob I get 337 of my 356 to appear before that message so I do not think it is a common sympton. To date the common symptons would be:site:mysitename.com
site:www.mysitename.comOn the above two searches your home/index page is always listed 2nd below a random internal page.
mysitename
"www.mysitename.com"
"mysitename.com"
"mysitename"On the above four searches your site will be buried and most likely appear on page 3 or 4 of the serps.
Exactly the same with my website!
And nothing has changed yet.
I'm starting to be sure this is not a temporary G's problem, and that there is technically something wrong with my website. It's not even near to be HTML/whatever valid, but it actually never used to be. No 301/302/30x redirections by the way.
We've been very solid, even ranked 2nd in google for the only search term we care about lately, and now we are spiking between 7th and 2nd. Amazing what a difference it makes to our referrals.
I'm just wondering if anyone has noticed discrepencies between search results in internet explorer vs firefox. The strange thing is I use firefox when I do my seo, and now I have consistently better SERP results in firefox than explorer. But I think it's just the google servers.
I hope this settles down because I used to never bookmark pages before because I always knew exactly where to find them on google. Spiking doesn't help this at all lol.
I feel like I'm in the foreign exchange market again :(((((
hotel site been ranking excellent for 2 years, especially last 3 months. 30-50 keywords #1-3 and most obviously company name search #1.
Allinanchor for alot of the top positions also in top place.
26th April at 00:00. BANG, dropped 70% in traffic did a site:www.domainname.com and saw that I wasn’t banned, PR of 5 still was there.
However when I searched for my company name I went from #1 to page 4, and the same as all of my other keywords?
I saw that Matt C. said that google were starting to email webmasters with problems/reasons as to why your site maybe potentially drop; however I’m clueless.
What makes it worst, from what I can see my competitors seems untouched?
Any idea?
Other "duplicate content" problems occur when the same site is seen at www and non-www and/or can be seen at multiple domains. Fix those by using the 301 redirect.
I have the exact same problem.. and ideas?
Amazing!
It is like I just wrote that, wow!
We dropped, all our terms about 4 pages in serps or about 35 positions, all of them, just about.
How is this?
Competitors - small weird drops and then come backs (maybe 6-10 positions)
Site Pagerank - solid, no change.
Major Publicity: Yes, lots of press as of late, but also since 2004
Linking: had small campaign, maybe 60 one way linking pointing into us. Link campaign started Feb 06 till April 4 06, again not many. Before this last campaign, no campaigns for about 6 months or more as far as link gathering.
Site changes: Damn, yes, made decent change to homepage just after major press stories hit wires. three days later bam, all the big drops as mentioned above.
Date of problem: April 26 as well as Webmasterworld user "da95649"
Good authority: yes major news magazine sites, c¦net.
Clients: Nasa, White House Reps, End Users
Decrease in traffic: yes about 60% VERY sim. to Webmasterworld user "da95649" above.
Change to host: no, not for three years
Good host: yes we use the West___ company
Static IP: Yes
Spam: No
SEO: Yes, site is SEO'd but never hurt us before.. looking back 5 years
Online: 6 years, no sector changes
Text Links on other sites: tested a few just before the drop, but not a big campaign. One mistake the text link site where we had the text link add of ours appearing, they had two of the exact same text links (Ours) up next to each other, not sure this could do it but who knows these days.
Duplicate content possibility: I think not, 93% sure that this is a no.
That's all I can come up with now.
Facts that are odd
- Stories about Google data issues at plex
- Same EXACT problem as Webmasterworld user "da95649" above.
- Great site, we help some serious folks in a MASSIVE way, even help the military with issues of getting things back they get to be messed up, why punish us?
- Major Press, seems to not help.
- Spent thousands over the last few years in press, media, public awareness, end result Google F... us.
- Google is working since when?
- We have a client on 1st page results for the term "Consulting" yes, one word, can't tell which engine. We know good white hat practices
More beer! - Still sitting on sidelines and I ain't no broker, but I just may go back to writing NYSE/NASDAQ press stories to move stocks again if this keeps up.
mysitename.com
www.mysitename.com
search.aol.com, search.comcast.net, search.netscape.com, search.icq.com, search.att.net,
...I am buried on those networks for a simple search unless I give the complete [mysite.com...]
site:mysitename.com
site:www.mysitename.com
On:
mysitename
"www.mysitename.com"
"mysitename.com"
"mysitename"
- we are at the bottom of the first page(but there's very few sites that would use our domain name in their text, so this is a very poor position). Even a site called www.mysitenam.com (they missed one letter) ranks higher than us and its a blatant one page spam site with just adwords on it, solely designed to catch people who mistype trying to get to our site. Surely thats the definition of the kind of crappy site that google wants to filter out, not legitimate sites like ours.
Our site is virtually the same situation as da95649
and hollywood. We've actually been at the top of the serps for a long time, so it feels almost like google has knocked us down to give our competitors a chance for a while.
I dont think its a penalty. I think its a google glitch that needs fixing. Whilst its not really affecting us too badly at the moment, I'm hoping its not going to be a longterm issue.
P
"IS THERE A DROP 4 SERP PAGES EXACTLY PENALTY FOR ALL KEYWORDS ON A SITE"
?
[edited by: tedster at 5:50 pm (utc) on May 7, 2006]
ok so today when I punch in site:www.domainname.com or site:domainname.com my index is listed as #1 instead of #2 or #3 slots. How about the rest of you guys? Might be a sign of something..
Also.. still ranked for most keywords on pages 4,5,6 rather than my previous pages 1 and 2 for years.
...
Maybe is is a penalty just somehow delayed... but why?
my site is pr 5 as well. I've been gradually climbing in pages indexed, about 1 up every few days. I have about 25% of my pages indexed.. :(
ok so today when I punch in site:www.domainname.com or site:domainname.com my index is listed as #1 instead of #2 or #3 slots. How about the rest of you guys? Might be a sign of something..
Still my index page is listed second below a random internal page on that search...my indexed pages has stayed constant. I am still buried in the search for uniquedomainname search and every conceivable keyword.
I agree, although I wouldn't describe it as a glitch, more a monumental ballsup.
I think they've just cranked things down too tightly and have literally TTBOWTBW.
You'd think that someone at google would have the good sense to compare and contrast a serp of say, March 2005 with that of today and make some kind of rollback based on the observation ...
Its kind of ironic in that on the one hand they say don't do things to artificially inflate your search rankings yet, if you don't go out and get the right kind of links from the right kinds of places then you end up in search hell.The "www.mysite.com" example is a good indicator of how some sites have that trust whilst others don't. Perhaps its a whitelist thing too. Some of you may recall the eval.google.com thing. Perhaps its all as simple as that. A site that is marked as 'untrustworthy' can't rank for jack, no matter what it does, call it a sandbox with weights on!
Ok my site is still having problems.
when I do site:www.domain.co.uk i get 140 pages indexed
when i do site:jesmonddenehotel.co.uk I get 304 pages indexed
My pr 5 is pretty much spread among all pages
One thing I did notice is that when I do a search for one of my keywords, I have www.domain.co.uk/index.php on page 4 and www.domain.co.uk straight after it, in the next position..... not sure if this is of any relevance
One thing that is really annoying me is that I understand that for what ever reason you drop in serps, however for my own company name Im no where to be seen!
Im having customers find me via affilate website which is becoming very annoying, isnt there a way of contacting Google on this?
(love the keyword links at the bottom of the each page by the way :))
