Anyone else recovered from the 26 Apr drops today - 5 Jun?

[Silent_Bob]

My site has just bounced back finally from the big drop we had on the 26th April. I'm interested to know if the others (Hollywood, Jim Lahey etc..) who experienced the same have seen a similar improvement or if its down to something I've done specifically with our site.

[Nawaralsaadi]

we saw a big jump in indexed pages today, we slumped from 400k pages when this started and went down all the way to 500 pages few days ago, today we bounced back to 40k pages, still 10% of where we were, but much better then 500!..

[dangerman]

Good for you Silent_Bob. You got me all excited there for a second - quickly tapped in the name of my pre-26/4 glory website, duh, still sitting there feeling sorry for itself midway down the 4th page of results. What about a couple of key terms that used to hover in the top 3 results? Nowhere. Never mind, maybe it takes a while to hit the UK. But it's heartening to hear a good news story.

Out of curiosity, what kind of changes did you make? Not that I am inclined to spend a lot more time on this site at the expense of others right now.

[JimLahey]

Hi Silent_Bob,
Glad to hear your site has recovered! My site is still under the curse and I am contemplating a career as a sandwich artist. Can you tell me if the April 26th symptons have disappeared:

common symptons would be:
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.

...are those symptons gone? Also were there any communications with Google about the matter - reinclusion request etc? Looks like more have been recently afflicted with the index page second query:
[webmasterworld.com...]

[montefin]

Happy for you Silent_Bob.

Still mired in Supplemental results here.

Still vanished (as opposed to banished which I was assured was not the case) for best keyword phrase.

[Nawaralsaadi]

spoke too soon...dipped back to 500 pages this morning and traffic got a dive along with the dip..

[wheelie34]

I have a 1000~ page site, since the dropped pages saga started I was bouncing up and down between 360 and 410, last nights test returned 370ish this morning 6/6/06 I have a high of 612 so something happened overnight.

Tigger: any news on yours?

[dangerman]

JimLahey is right. Those are indeed typical symptoms and apply to me and many others. Guess it goes without saying that most or all internal pages with any decent serps will also have taken a serious dive into the depths of Google's bowels.

[Armi]

On all datacenters?

[Silent_Bob]

"Can you tell me if the April 26th symptons have gone..."

Jim - Yes, all those symptoms are gone. I'll detail the steps I took just in case they can help anyone else.

1. Put 301 redirect in place for non-www

2. Inserted new code into the site template to create different meta content & keyword tags for each page (previously they were the same for each page).

3. Removed anything the slightest bit questionable on site content (e.g. a couple of pages that could have been classed as 'for search engines', some outbound links on the homepage, and a sentance containing 6 keywords at the bottom of the page)

4. Put more unique content on the homepage in the form of an rss feed.

5. Submitted Re-inclusion request.

6. Changed homepage from default.asp to index.asp.

I think the most likely solutions of those, if any, were 1, 2 or 5. I dont think it was a spam penalty - more likely a duplication or canonical issue. I had no response from google for the reinclusion request (which I did both through sitemaps and the normal way), and only canned responses to two emails.

Number 6 was the one I thought would actually fix it for me as I found that an old affiliate link 'mysite.com/default.asp?&affiliateId=xx' was ranking higher than mysite.com when searching for 'mysite' (so I thought this might be causing a duplication issue). But the site bounced back literally the day after I did that which I'm sure is much quicker than google would have picked up the change.

It could be that the site would have come back had I not made any changes at all - I guess with google you never know. Mine is the only site that has changed in the serps I check on though.

[Silent_Bob]

"On all datacenters? "

I just checked and we do seem to be back on all datacenters, for now at least.

[Hollywood]

We are back to normal now as well.

We did these things

------ begin quote -----
1. Put 301 redirect in place for non-www

3. Removed anything the slightest bit questionable on site content (e.g. a couple of pages that could have been classed as 'for search engines', some outbound links on the homepage, and a sentance containing 6 keywords at the bottom of the page)

5. Submitted Re-inclusion request.
------ end quote -----

PS we went down fighting from every angle, I know as it was confirmed that someone took notice of this noise we made.

What's odd is we also had to remove about 6-7 words on the bottom of one of our sites pages due to a phrase that had been there for four years at least, it was about manipulating search engines, I had forgotten it was there.

But not sure if this was a penalty or not as of course no-one would confirm this from anywhere. I think it's still odd and hard to say exactly what brought us back, but I do know we made A TON OF NOISE about it.

Hollywood

[dangerman]

Glad to hear that, Hollywood. I have also carried out the exact same steps, but to no avail. However this is encouraging, I will continue to make noise and won't give up hope yet.

[mibrahim]

Guys,

I'm noticing my site is adding pages, but slow. I also notice that inurl:mysite.com reports more cached pages than site:mysite.com

[Silent_Bob]

Good to hear that your site is back to Hollywood.

Maybe it is something as simple as a 301 error or google punishing sites for having keywords unnecessarily at the bottom of the page.

[AustrianOak]

Wow.. am I jealous or what. Went down with you guys on the 26th and still on results pages 4 and 5.

[hermosa]

I am still struggling. Pages that have been in the index for over 2 years are not cached (though they still have pagerank) and 1 has gone supplementatl as:

mydomainname.com

no www.

I re-did the home page to add important links. I took some overlap Google may have mistaken for duplicate content and put it on a single intro page:

mydomain.com/topicintro.html

and linked to the more specific pages

mydomain.com/topiccity1.html

mydomain.com/topiccity2.html

mydomain.com/topiccity3.html

mydomain.com/topiccity4.html

Stiil, I am hardly being spidered at all and the spider has not picked up my index or home page. It just keeps spidering the same pages over and over again.

Don't know if it will work but it's worth a try.

[Demaestro]

I didn't go down in April... I didn't drop much rank/pages until mid May.

Today I looked at my page impressions and they are through the roof, I thought I was looking at a weeks total rather then just today's and that was at 10:30AM this morning.... which is really strange as my audience is youger and my traffic usually starts after school hours. Maybe it is because it is summer.

Need to go through my logs to see where it all came from but I am very excited today!

BTW My approach to all this was to just leave it alone and wait.

[F_Rose]

To me the only thing that is changing is supplemental results..

Indexed pages remain 24..

On some data centers the 24 pages are the only ones coming up, on other data center app. 500 supplemental come up in addition to the 24 pages..

Talking about a site of app. 600 pages..

Any suggestions of what could be done to get this resolved?

[JimLahey]

I think the supplemental results issue and what happened on April.26 are unrelated. Most afflicted with it do not have problems with indexed pages...simply they will be buried on all possible search terms from popular to obscure.

If site is buried for:

youruniquedomainame

..and your index page is listed below one or two random internal pages on a search of:

site:youruniquedomainame.com

...you are suffering from "April26th Syndrome". However, Hollywood and Slient_Bob have given me hope there may be a cure.

[F_Rose]

The fact that we have dropped over 500 pages out of Google index not part of the April 26th Syndrome?

[JimLahey]

Is your site buried for uniquedomainname and your index page shows second on a site: search and you are buried across "all" conceivable search terms?

[konrad]

My site has just bounced back finally from the big drop we had on the 26th April. I'm interested to know if the others (Hollywood, Jim Lahey etc..) who experienced the same have seen a similar improvement or if its down to something I've done specifically with our site.

Good for you!

I'm jealous too, I went down on the 26th and still no improvement.

I did everything you did, Silent_Bob, except for reinclusion request, maybe I'll give a try.

Thanks for the info, it's somewhat optimistic :)

btw. In this reinclusion request form, you have to enter information about what you did wrong, what did you enter?

[Silent_Bob]

I wrote in the reinclusion request that I did not believe that I had done anything to violate the webmaster guidelines but may have unintentionally triggered some kind of duplicate content filter or had a canonical issue - but that I had taken all the steps I could to fix it. Good luck to all those still suffering with this problem.

[F_Rose]

How long after the reinclusion request has your site bounce back?

[egurr]

One of our sites is still all supp except index page. We're going to do nothing with it and just track it. It's an all information site with very few ads.
Several pages are first in SERPS in Yahoo and MSN.

[konrad]

So I filled the reinclusion request form too, I hope this will work....

[AustrianOak]

Let's keep this thread active.

I've noticed on my site, since the 26th I have been getting exactly one page added to my total listing in google using the (site: command) I'm still at about 20-25% of my pages only.. and I add about 10 pages of unique, fresh content weekly.

Anyone else experiencing this same phenomenon?

[Right Reading]

I had been stuck at a low number of pages for a long time. This morning my indexed pages doubled. This afternoon they tripled. If this keeps up, soon I will have to write a lot faster!

[dangerman]

Struggling to find any kind of pattern here.

My site count went down by half on April 26 and has reached a new low today. All the while, four new pages of original news content have been added every day. Still have most keywords out of top serps pages and site name wavering between pages 4 and 5.