Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
To start with, I'm observing a site with around 1.1M pages , holding plentiful top positions with many keywords, that has not been effected by the alterations on Google.
What makes this site and others so special!
Does anyone have a similar story, and is this a sign that some sites can work well through changes made by Google?
Common factors are very hard to come by, except that
1. None of them built their ranking primarily through reciprocal linking (this does align with the G party line)
2. None of them use an off-the-shelf shopping cart or CMS system.
3. I've long been a maniac with my clients about unique titles and meta descriptions, plus unique urls, so this is another common factor.
Same here, i can't find reason why some site is affect and other not. I do have couple new that are not affect with this, couple older, couple small and couple with ton of pages.
I do however see some sites that have solid links but still have lost pages.
Almost all of 25 sites are in diferent sectors, the only pattern i can see this 4 sites are in the same server in a US datacenter, strange the others have equal robots.txt, haven't errors in sitemaps.
[edited by: tedster at 7:01 am (utc) on May 22, 2006]
text on these pages typically exceeds 3500 words
That's a lot of text, but now that you mention it, the sites I see with no trouble have pretty solid text components, even on individual product pages. And one that has struggled since Florida [!] has very sparse text on product pages.
I've been advised that the majority of sites have not been affected and I'd really think it would be in our interests to see if this is correct.
What do you think?
Tedster - but none of them use a lot of redirects, however.
Does anyone see re directs as a potential problem?
When I changed it any url being redirected would 301 to the final Url (i.e. only 1 redirect to correct) things did much better.
But MC did point out on his blog about sitemaps that redirects to redirects were bad...
Cut a long story short, you should be ok with single redirects, but change as many inlinks to the correct url.
It is non-profit information site with no ads/recips. PR4. About 400 pages, all indexed. Ranks well for many search terms (page 1, sometimes number 1).
It is Russian site, but Google sends me 40% of my SE traffic (another 60% comes from national engines). I think my ranking in Google is much better than in our national SE :)
P.S. Sorry for my English :)
P.P.S. May be we should think about the following question: are recent changes in Google algo were noticed only on English sites? Or are they language-independent? In the first case, may be there is some "bad words filter" or something like that.
1. High PR / lots of good links
2. Unique content
3. No or few recips
One site uses + to divide words in the URL, one site uses - to divide words. Both are fine.
Some sites have used link exchange, some sites have obtained incoming links from dubious neighbourhoods, some sites have regularly added content and some have been stagnating for months. No pattern I can see. All sites hosted on dedicated servers in the US.
A couple of factors:
1. High PR / lots of good links
sem4u - Are you seeing strong IBL's to inside pages as part of 1 to hold indexing normality on Google?
Has anyone experienced indexing normality of new content on Google following BD?
1. No reciprocal link campaigns and very few reciprocal links.
2. No shopping cart or CMS system of any kind.
3. All pages have unique titles. All pages have meta descriptions, plus unique urls.
4. All pages are straight html. No javascript but there is a smattering of CSS.
5. No dynamic pages.
6. Link out freely to pages which are relevant to the topic of the page.
7. All content is 100% unique including text, photos and illustrations. No duplicate content.
8. Stopped worrying about IBL's years ago and concentrated on developing content instead.
9. Site is 7 years old and has grown slowly from about 35 or 40 pages to 211 pages.
10. Has DMOZ, Google and Yahoo Directory listings.
11. Attracts links on forums and mom & pop/ personal sites on a daily basis.
12. Has several good quality (natural) links from authority sites.
That's all I can think of right now.
Has anyone experienced indexing normality of new content on Google following BD?
Yes. About 5 new pages were indexed the week after BD went online. No problem at all.
[edited by: Liane at 11:59 am (utc) on May 24, 2006]
sem4u - Are you seeing strong IBL's to inside pages as part of 1 to hold indexing normality on Google?
Not for all sites, but some sited do have multiple IBLs to inside pages.
Has anyone experienced indexing normality of new content on Google following BD?
Yes I have just had a new site indexed by Google. 121 pages have been crawled after I used sitemaps and gave the site some forum links and a PR4 home page link.
I have about a dozen recip links, but the sites that are ahead of some of my sites have hundreds, sometimes thousands of recips. A couple of sites have more outbound links than some directories that I submitted to.
How old are these sites with thousands of recips? I am betting that they are at least a couple of years old. If so they seem to be trusted by Google as a 'good site' which will be difficult to knock off the top of the SERPs.
13. Have not submitted to site maps.
How old are these sites with thousands of recips? I am betting that they are at least a couple of years old. If so they seem to be trusted by Google as a 'good site' which will be difficult to knock off the top of the SERPs.
When I searched for "wholesale widgets" last week, I had to go to page 3 before I got a company. The rest was all directory listings.
I am curious to know what percentage of scraper sites get indexed. There are some out there that appear to have no inbounds and all outbounds.
Vince- what kind of pages were they (product, informational?)and how long did it take. Were these pages that were deindexed or suplementaled.
I've long been a maniac with my clients about unique titles and meta descriptions, plus unique urls, so this is another common factor.
Are descripitions really that important? I got rid of mine so that the body of text being searched for is displayed in the Serps?
<No spam examples, please! See Google Forum Charter [webmasterworld.com]>
I feel this is why google has decided to lower ratings for recp linking....
Big daddy has hurt many websites.... both good sites that may have alot of dup content from navigation items. and bad sites...
I find it a bit funny that many people here are complaining some of which have spent an hour or so scrapping other peoples content....
And those of us that have spent 1000's of hours making a site we feel people will like....
In my opinion is link your hearts content....
Links are good.... they are like little billboards, if you have to buy, sell, trade them do it....
I'd rather have 1000 links bringing me 1 person a day then.
And to be truthful.... google was good a few years ago.... when it was simple.... before google their was yahoo.... their will be others.... but links will with stand them all....
One last comment... I find it funny we all complain to the serps, yet they are all simple another website looking to make money.... so they need to watch out for number 1.
Remember links are good....
Besides if you had a ton of links, and the serps drop you... Guess what... you still have the little billboard pages... linking to you.
Besides when was the last time you linked to a site like the one i posted above?
[edited by: tedster at 5:58 pm (utc) on May 24, 2006]
Are descripitions really that important? I got rid of mine so that the body of text being searched for is displayed in the Serps?
A snippet from the body text is still possible, especially when the meta description doesn't have the keywords. But yes, since late last year, having a unique meta description seems much more important for Google. It has even fixed indexing and crawling problems for several sites I work with. It didn't used to be this way, but it seems to be now.
However, as with all things Google, if what you have presently is working well for you, then I would not automatically suggest changing.
Site 1: has almost 300 pages. the majority of dropped pages are 2 levels deep. I just found out this site was involved with dishonest (in Google's eyes) link building scheme for last few years before I took it over, trading too many links and gaining links too fast. Not sure this is the reason for the drop.
Site #2: has only 14 pages. Dropped down to 2 pages. They were on a shared IP address and other site's titles in same IP kept appearing in their title. This is fixed now, however this owner refused to trade links with anyone she didn't know--however linked to magazines and newspapers publishing articles about her business--which were all reciprocal in google's eyes.
So both of them were involved in too many reciprocals. One has a shopping cart the other not. Both have unique titles and descriptions. Both have been online for 4-5 years and had decent PR ---EXCEPT the first site is showing PR 0 on all pages in the Google toolbar (but normal PR on other tools).
Has anyone experienced indexing normality of new content on Google following BD?
I have a small text-oriented hobby site, about 150 pages. The index page is PR 5. During the past few weeks I've added three or four new pages, linked from the "What's New" section of the index page in addition to their normal hierarchical linkage.
All of them were indexed within three days. One made it within 24 hours, because a Googlebot found it a half hour after I posted it.
Do you mean that Google re indexed them and they are restored in the rankings?
The "fixed" was in reference to the dedicated IP addres for the one site. Neither site has had all their pages restored.
