Very Odd - Big Drops in SERPS Today April 26, 06

Big SERP Drops - Odd Fresh Dates

[Hollywood]

Very Odd - Big Drops in SERPS Today April 26, 06

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.

[reseller]

jrs_66

"Does anyone know the Cutts email to report pages gone supplemental?"

Better to leave "the Cutts" in peace. He is preparing for a 6 weeks much needed vacation away from BigDaddy :-)

[Hollywood]

[Better to leave "the Cutts" in peace. He is preparing for a 6 weeks much needed vacation away from BigDaddy\

Waa waaa, who f in cares! - E-mail the sh__ out of him.

I'm done with PPC on Google, already getting more conversions switching over to Yahoo, thank gosh.

Hollywood

[edited by: Hollywood at 2:25 pm (utc) on May 16, 2006]

[Dayo_UK]

jrs_66

bostonpubcon2006 at gmail.com

Was the latest email address Google provided.

Reseller - I believe more than just Matt read the feedback - and it is very important that Google get as much information as possible to fix.

[catch2948]

Allright! Now I'm ticked off big time!

One of my personal sites, which has long held the #1 position for my main keyword (not super competitive), dropped to #3 this morning. The thing that is really making me mad is the following:

1. The new #1 site is flash with the only text being hidden keyword spam
2. Google is using that hidden keyword spam for the site description!

My god Googleplexers, did someone give you guys a bad bag of ganja, or what?

[Webdetective]

I'm puzzled why I'm not getting anything from Google given my pagerank, and regular googlebot spidering. I'm trying to figure out if I'm under some mysterous form of penalty, or else is this simply due to the extremely competitive nature of Google SEO. Is it advisable I ask Google?

[tigger]

they've had something with the current serps the spammers are winning big time, hidden text, crosslinking, keyword loaded pages all within one set of 10 sites I've just looked at

>Webdetective

you can ask whether you will get a reply or not is another thing - don't hold your breath

[phpdude]

Yup!

Big Daddy has been a "Big Flop" in my opinion.

A lot of innocent sites have been caught up in some type of new filter and demoted for no reason. More so than usual this time.

Also, the indented index page issue has re-surfaced.

[Hollywood]

Google is broken, they could care less and the algo is terrible, everyone seems to use Yahoo I speak with.

Nothing makes sense of a site that has major publicity to go from page 1 to page 4 on serps (Down 35 spots across the board)

Hollywood

[tigger]

>everyone seems to use Yahoo I speak with.

I'd like to think that was the case, but unfortunately for me at least its not and probably many other webmasters too - when G coughs we all lose out and thanks to BD today I've seen a 40% drop in traffic, so although you would like to think everyone you speak with use Y they don't from my stats

[Webdetective]

Unfortunately, the only search engine currently bringing my domain in question any traffic is MSN (I am also having a yahoo issue). Regarding Google, I only occasionally get a few hits from images.google.com, inspite of having a robots.txt exclusion for my images/ file folder.

[dangerman]

Exercise in futility? My 'communication' with Google thus far has gone like this:
me: (shortened version) submit query saying my site serps way down and that I have read Google Webmaster guidelines over and over, applied changes to my site where possible (give specifics).
gurgle: automated reply (4 days later). Please read webmaster guidelines. [google.com...]
[google.com...]
me:(shortened version) thanks, but didn't I just say in my email that I read these already. They give me no clue whatesoever.
gurgle:(3 days later)Thank you for your note. We understand your concern and have passed your message on to our engineering team for further investigation.
me: (think wah hoo big deal)
me: (losing patience, 6 days later) reiterate all my google problems, ask when i might receive response from engineering etc
gurgle:(2 days later, fastest response yet!)
We strongly encourage you to review our Webmaster Guidelines at
www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769. If you make changes to your site to comply with these guidelines, please let us know.

Anyone else receive same type/sequence of Google responses?
Question is, was the last email another automated reply?
Or did someone actually look at my site and find a problem referred to in this google guideline answer?

[konrad]

So, it looks I could be right when I said a few days ago:

I always thought, that if I were a programmer at Google :), I would implement this simple test:

if there is a link somewhere on website A to website B
and
vice-versa (back links)
and
the pages in both cases are named "resources" or "links" or ... a few other possibilities
and
Google can find one of the following on those websites: "links exchange", "add/submit link/url" and possibly other

then : let's ban both websites.

And that more anti-link-exchange changes could appear recently. Yesterday I looked at Matt Cutts' blog and what do I see?

Look at "indexing timeline" post.

An excerpt:

"I’d think about the quality of your links if you’d prefer to have more pages crawled. As these indexing changes have rolled out, we’ve improving how we handle reciprocal link exchanges and link buying/selling."

(no, that wasn't about my site)

Nobody said that, so I will: I was right :) Are there any awards for that?

Simply the more percent of your links are reciprocal, the bigger BSR ("Black Seo Rank", my own name:) you get. The same with simply linking to "bad sites" (with high BSR), even without back links - in other words linking to bad neighbourhood. And now G simply detects it more accurately.

Oh, and did I mention that I was right? :)

[JimLahey]

I have exactly 3 reciprocal links across my whole site to complimentary / similar businesses. I would doubt the April 26th drops are related to it.

[F_Rose]

JimLahey,

Any affiliate links?

[JimLahey]

Yes, I do have affiliate links on my site. All have the REL="nofollow" attribute on them. Not sure if this is a common trait of those affected.

[F_Rose]

We have lots of affiliate links with a javascript:void(0); to stop the bots.

Our site was hit very hard..

Anyone else hit and is an affiliate? Anyone hit and has no affiliate links?

[JimLahey]

dangerman - I get the exact same response with my correspondence with them. I have spent a total of 100K on AdWords over the last few years...still I get the robot response. Not sure if they actually do pass problems on to the "engineers" or just file it in the trash. I have moved to pg.2 for a mycompanyname

[Sweet Cognac]

Recently, like the past month, we tested REL="nofollow" on one of our sites, trying to keep gbot from following the submit links, preview links, and several aff links.

Within a matter of days, the pages dropped rank, and our visitors were a trickle.

We went back and removed the REL="nofollow" and all the pages recovered within a week.

You might want to try getting rid of the REL="nofollow" and the javascipt VOID and see if it makes a difference.

[F_Rose]

Sweet Cognac,

What about now, how is your page rank for your affiliate pages?

[Sweet Cognac]

My 3 affiliate pages are ranking 1, 2, and 4 for the same product. #3 spot is held by the company. Is that what you are asking?

My best advice is not to have more aff links on a page than text, or goog ignores the whole page.

[nippi]

Konrad

This comment

"I’d think about the quality of your links if you’d prefer to have more pages crawled. As these indexing changes have rolled out, we’ve improving how we handle reciprocal link exchanges and link buying/selling."

Does not mean Google are doing this
if there is a link somewhere on website A to website B and
vice-versa (back links) and the pages in both cases are named "resources" or "links" or ... a few other possibilities and Google can find one of the following on those websites: "links exchange", "add/submit link/url" and possibly other
then : let's ban both websites.

Its such a stretch.

So

No

I don;t think you are right. I think Google is working out ways to detect quality of links, but is not penalising simply for recip links. Ditto on paid links, or it would be a snap to buy them for someone else's site, and take it down.

[nippi]

ANd in any case, Matt Cutts post refers to recip links, with bad sites, not recip links with goods sites. he;s talking link with mobile phone sites, fish oil, totally off topic link swaps for link trading purposes only.

not recips in themselves, just recips clearly for the purpose of rankings only.

All my sites do recip links, very strict quality control, only relevant sites linked to, and having no problems at all maintaining high rankings and keeping pages indexed.

[jrs_66]

I think 'the Cutts' is actually going beyond spammy 'fish oil' links, I think he's trying to say the days of people getting 30 links per day is spam. This makes a lot of sense. I can't even begin to figure out how sooo many sites represented in this forum manage to think 10-30 inbounds per day is normal... it's got to be spam link exchanges. I'm glad google is being to target this. I'm not so glad, however, that i'm being caught up in the roundup.

[Play_Bach]

> I'm not so glad, however, that i'm being caught up in the roundup.

Yup. My sites are getting about 1/10th of the Google traffic for this month - not pretty.

[pontifex]

getting 30 links per day is spam

well, if that is the scheme, I am doomed! I have set up a huge file sales site, getting around 5-10 new merchants every day (independent musicians, authors, ebay image hosters, etc.)...

so, my site grows with around 1000 pages daily. sometimes good unique stuff, sometimes just a few new songs with 1 line description...

All merchants link to their products, sometimes with 100 or more incoming links per day. I was expecting a jump from PR6 to 8 in the next update.

I have spotted around 500 scraper sites of my content.

Today my site dropped from over 3M pages to below 300.000 pages in the G index.

I understand, that some pages are not worth being listed, especially if it is a photo of the latest biker meeting in montana...

But this drop is connected to some serious changes Google is up to. I am sorry, that I get up to 100 incoming links daily.

P!

[tedster]

Seeing that this thread's original topic was "Big Drops in SERPs on April 26, 06" I think we're wandering into much more general territory. Whatever happened specifically on April 26 is part of a much bigger picture -- and that's larger discussion that we can continue in other threads.

So, this thread is now closed.