Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I have seen some changes, none of my pages were listed in Supplemental index, however, those pages do not rank even when I type the exact title with quote.
Time here is 11.30 - 1 Aug 2007
[edited by: tedster at 5:08 am (utc) on Aug. 1, 2007]
I use Google quite a lot in my work but there has been a huge decrease in relevant things. You have to go way back in the results to even find anything close to what you were searching for.
Oh, by the way, one thing I have noticed with my site is that I see a lot ofpeople comin to the non-www site even though I have told Google I am using www and it also has a redirect in my .htaccess file. Not sure if they think I have a lot of duplicate pages, www and non-www.........
Like I said, can't figure them out which means I'll just leave it and do my own thing. One day they might catch up :)
my 2 year old site in a moderately competitive 1 word term goes from #2 to #50 yesterday. And my page at #50 is a sub page, not my index page.
I'd say it might be a penalty for anchor text or similar, though the whole serp is jumbled, and there are 6 new results on the first page, all from authority sites that have no relation to the topic and just happen have a page about the term (craigslist, sams club, bizrate, 2 travel forums).
I'll let it settle for a few days but this is one of the stranger ones i've seen.
I've tagged them as cheaply SEO'd because that's what they have in common.
I wonder if Google understands that older site, companies that have been there and more prominent for a few years never can have a clean backlink profile.
There are just too many scrapers and content stealers.
Maybe...just maybe Google should think about this one when establishing a backlink profile. Sites that are too "clean" in their profile are also signed by manipulation I think.
And of course, despites what's been announced I see no evidence at all that Google punishes link buyers nor can differenciate natural vs. unnatural links nor understands good content vs. spam.
They certainly somewhat penalize excessive on site link exchange but once again this does not address larger scale issues IMO.
I am glad to know these things when I search for suppliers, but there could be an increase in rip off reports soon as most people just trust what's on page 1.
I am not so impressed with tests (were they tests?) Google performed in the last couple of months. Authority sites more authoritative, tiny SEO'd players get a taste of heaven at discounted price, others in between just have to increase their adwords budget. hmmm...
Well whatever...I thought that Google would really do better. Maybe in september.
I understand the Google Directory has been updated. Does anyone know if the order you are in the list is the order sites are ranked or doesn't it matter?
In the categoury we are in, the Top sites have a pr of 5 (well if this is pr as I thought it was pr-1?) Our site is 4th from the top of the Pr 4 sites and we seem to have moved UP from about 8th. Our site is Pr 4 but we have many many pages at this same page rank.
If google directory has anything to do with it, well there must be alag or I am not reading it right.
I am thinking that this prolonged Dance is the sign of a major shake up, I have never seen it so unstable as this. I don't profess to be an expertso I have to hold onto some hope!
What a strange couple of months Yo Yoing up and down. The latest fall is quite alarming-just what is going on?
I understand the Google Directory has been updated. Does anyone know if the order you are in the list is the order sites are ranked or doesn't it matter?
In the categoury we are in, the Top sites have a pr of 5 (well if this is pr as I thought it was pr minus 1?) Our site is 4th from the top of the Pr 4 sites and we seem to have moved UP from about 8th. Our site has a Pr 4 (so will we go to pr 5 soon if directory shows us as 4?)but we have many many pages at this same page rank.
If google directory has anything to do with it, there must be a lag or it doesn't have any connection.
I am thinking that this prolonged Dance is the sign of a major shake up, I have never seen Google as unstable as this. Daily I see differant search result formats as if they are experimenting (as they have every right to I suppose as its their search engine) I don't profess to be an expert but I have to hold onto some hope!
2. why pages with ultra high keyword density but little occurences rank well? (this meaning almost no content but at 1 or 2 occurence for the search terms) I just don't think that those are valuable pages whatsoever.
I've noticed the same but when I do a "keyword density analysis" at Go Rank they seem to rank highly for prominence.
Cheers
Sid
Guess they say that this site is an authority site, so if they have a page about lamp post, even if the main theme is about cars, the we need to show them on the first page.
Sure looks like that. Sites with a bit of authority weight and a paragraph on a widget are considered more relevant than a site about widgets with lots of pages on topic.
Sure looks like that. Sites with a bit of authority weight and a paragraph on a widget are considered more relevant than a site about widgets with lots of pages on topic.
Hi,
Couldn't this just be coincidence. ie This kind of site just accidentaly contains pages that hit the mark in other ways, they just get the desity, prominence, keywords in anchor text, title, on page semantic web etc just right, not too much not too little. The fact that subjectively they have "authority" may be just a red herring.
Two or three years ago directories seemed to do particularly well. When we started putting outbound links, with our target keywords in anchor text, pointing to pages that had a very close match to our target topic we started doing well. The point is that the fact that directories did well was just a coincidence it was on topic outbound links that were doing the business.
Could there be something hidden in these authority sites that we are missing?
Cheers
Sid
I remember a while back Google had a known policy of pushing up bad sites to the top and getting their users to complain about them so they would be flagged and they could adjust their filters.
A "known policy"? Sounds more like an urban legend.
If they pushed the bad sites up, that means that they knew who the bad were. So why they need to be alerted--by jeopardizing the results no less?
After beening on the 1st page for 100's of results for the last few days we have now been knocked out once again.
Is any body else following our pattern.
25/7/2007 results re-appeared at prominent positions
8/8/2007 results returned to levels prior to 25th
12/8/2007 results back up again
13/8/2007 results down
14/8/2007 (around 1pm) results up
17/8/2007 down again
21/8/2007 back in.
28/8/2007. knocked out again.
There is some serious yo-yoing going on here. Its driving me crazy.
[mattcutts.com...]
If they pushed the bad sites up, that means that they knew who the bad were.
My new site (1.5 months) is having the same chaotic pattern. On the 8th sank in Supplemental Sand and is not coming out even if new pages do very well. All sunk pages have at least 10 IBL each in GWT and some have over 50. There was a 2 weeks period that murdered my previous very well performing original content.
No link exchanges ... mostly social bookmarking and specialized websites. I post open-source PHP among others.
I keep publishing new pages and hoping that in September Google will return to work and end this messed up period.
PS: I see something interesting. Dugg pages get indexed in a matter of hours. Not crawled but indexed. Before August it took about 1 day.
So I assume it is something else wrong not the real supplemental crawl behaviour pattern. I know they said they'll crawl supplemental index more often but ... come one!
The only problem is those pages have a cache date of 9th August. And have been crawled at least every 2 days.
Any hints? Any similar experiences? Any outcomes :)
I get what your saying. In my area though it looks shaken up. The results are lloking totally differnet every 5 days.
Has your site followed any pattern.
Mike
< moved from another location >
[edited by: tedster at 3:00 pm (utc) on Aug. 28, 2007]
On the other hand new sites with not so many links seem to suffer this. As when I 'Digg' any of my content pages it gets into index in a few hours. Had 2 pages indexed in 3 and 5 hours from post after 1 digg vote. This is way faster than it happened 1 month ago. It took half a day in July for indexing.
Hope it all gets back to normal soon as it is really bugging me.
PS: Any1 know the reason for this? Should we expect anything important anytime soon?
The fact that subjectively they have "authority" may be just a red herring
True, thats part of the rub i guess, there are too many variables
to draw conclusions, so.......onward through the fog!
As of today I've seen a record in low quality :).
Scrappers rank pages right below some of our site for our BRAND NAMES, it's a little upsetting.
2 things:
1. The less content, 1-2 occurences is a best practice as of now. Probably why Digg type of sites do so well. I personally rarely find a Digg post being anything else than cheap talk or spam. It's been the same problem with directories in the past...it happens all over again.
2. but also blog type of "things" rank well - blogs talking about anything but especially having low occurences of the keywords (I am not done checking on this one however, so not sure how GG comes up with this).
I don't need Google to send me to Digg type of pages, same with 1 mile long blog homepages that are totally unfocused.
For some reason the websites that have most difficulties are those I've worked on for 2/3 years. I spent countless hours to make them nice and write content. While those I've set up out of templates and wrote a homepage never updated in 5 minutes do well and are surprisingly stable (homepage only - internal pages keep fluctuating mostly).
Our corporate site also does not get crawled at all for 2 days or so. Since we've updated the content...........then I will have like others do....Digg my own site to get indexed faster! It's a weird world...
I am new in speculating about the reasons, but could it be that Google had server farms offline for a couple of months, which therefor have an old index? And maybe it brought those servers back online in August, and what we are seeing with this yoyo/deindexing is just those servers trying to reindex what they missed the last month but still missing a lot of pages? Could that also cause a spam penalty, because those servers would suddenly count all the backlinks that were collected over 3-4 month in one day, triggering a spam flag? I am giving Google the benefit of doubt, assuming they are not evil, although live starts to look lesser and lesser evil to me compared to this "beta test".
The other thing that is highly annoying is the recent change to show youtube, wikipedia etc. results very high in the results. C'mon google, if I want to watch a video I go to youtube directly or if I want to look up an encyclopedic entry I go straight to wikipedia. For me those "Google approved authorities" are just like spam, I want the search results without them. At least have an option in the prefs to turn them off.
Is any body else following our pattern.
Hi c41lum,
Yes but I'm right at the cusp for one (our most important term) and my yoyoing takes us from #1 were we were for a few years (with a couple of notable exceptions) down to #5. "Ah poor thing" I hear you say but we are in a small UK only niche and the difference between #1 and #5 is such that it might as well be #1 and #999.
We are only affected for that one two word term, if anything we are consistently stronger on 3 word terms and if I search for plurals of the term or reverse the words we go back in at #1 on Google.co.uk and #2 on .com.
One possible part of an explanation of what I am seeing may be a change in the semantic indexing element of the algo. If they were now adding an hierarchycal analysis of words that would explain why "authority sites" which use the higher level word extensively and are "about" the higher level topic that have a page on the next level down more specific topic which does better than a more specialised site which is stronger on the more specific word and less so on the higher level word. Not sure I'm explaining myself very well here but it is difficult to give an example.
Cheers
Sid
Moreover the site that does not exists is ranked for the first time ever!
Now I thought that was funny at first but it really starts getting me on my nerves now! Clearly the current results are totally wacked out.
When it disappeared, I mean it would suddenly rank at position 100 or worse. This is a highly-relevant and important site for its major keywords.
It disappeared several months ago and only today did it reappear in its traditional place. I guess we got caught in some kind of over-zealous spam filter. It's nice to be back, thank you Google.
