Has the removal of the 5 billion page site hurt you?

or am I the only one?

[dataguy]

My primary site is a pretty large site (> 250,000 pages of user generated content) and has done well in Google through Big Daddy and the subsequent tweaking until this past week. Honestly I'm not sure I had ever even seen a supplimental listing until this week. We've not paid a lot of attention to SEO since whatever we have been doing has seemed to work well.

Until Sunday June 18th at around 12:00 PM CST.

Sunday afternoon I noticed a sharp dip in traffic and when I investigated, all I could find was the post from Adam about the 'bad data push' and how they were working on fixing the problem. Is there some way that my site got trapped in this fix?

Something that I should add is that I use GoogleAlerts to notify me of when my site name appears in a new listing on Google, and for weeks I have been getting almost daily notices from GoogleAlerts showing the "5 billion page site" with content scraped from my pages. I don't know that any of these pages actually linked to my site, I never thought to look.

Now traffic is down 40% from the norm and I've also lost about 2 thirds of the pages that were shown by doing a "site:domain.com" command. I wonder if by removing this site caused the backlinks to my site to be recalculated, though currently a 'link:domain.com' shows the same number of backlinks as it has for the past month or so.

Just to be clear, I have no connection with the '5 billion page site' other than they scraped a lot of my content.

Any ideas or suggestions or am I alone on this?

[abates]

Google seems to have dropped a number of my pages sometime within the last week or so. The largest of my subdomains also has a great deal of pages listed as supplimental now. It could be related? I don't know anything about the scraper site you mention though, so I don't know if it was copying my content...

[BillyS]

>>GoogleAlerts showing the "5 billion page site" with content scraped from my pages.

I got a lot of those too. What a mess. All their brain power is distracted by beta launches. No one pays attention to search anymore and it shows.

[dataguy]

I don't know anything about the scraper site you mention though

It's funny how this was such a big issue that it required immediate attention at the plex but it has hardly been discussed here at WW, unless I missed it or it just didn't effect that many people.

[tedster]

All their brain power is distracted by beta launches.

It's a big company -- different brains work on different areas and they've been hiring a lot.

[netmeg]

On that same Sunday (June 18), some of my client sites went Suddenly Supplemental on account of the page titles going corrupt - somehow text from the pages was appended to the titles, and the meta description tags were ignored entirely. Most of the pages are still supplemental, today, on Friday. I don't know if this is the bad data push or what, but nothing seems to be happening as far as fixing it. It's not *all* of our sites - maybe 15 out of 200. I haven't been able to pinpoint why some sites were affected and others weren't.

Still more sites have completely lost their page titles and are only using titles from DMOZ.

It hadn't occurred to me that any of this might be related to the five billion page site, but it's an interesting thought.

I just want to get my page titles back and my descriptions read, though.

[wanderingmind]

I had reported some other sites that were doing the 5 billion page thing using text from my site (among others) a long while back. This was pre-BD, and after almost 6 months, G removed them from the index. Some of them still exist, and still keep popping up once in a while.

[FrostyMug]

how can i setup googlealerts to warn me if my site makes it's presense known?

[katheesue]

>There was a very interesting thread about that >site and other spamming activities but it >suddenly vanished from this forum.

There were too many specifics in that thread and the thread was removed as a violation of TOS.

[jonathannelson]

dataguy -

you are definitely not alone in this. one of our sites has close to 30 million pages in the index. we have witnessed about a 40% decrease since the same day you mentioned. our site: is also showing weird data...the numbers returned are all over the place. however, the number of backlinks has remained the same.

[dhaliwal]

i had a similar problem
the pages dropped from
2 million to half million now
traffic is lower by 30 - 35 %

[lorenzinho2]

< somehow text from the pages was appended to the titles

Yes! I noticed that too... on many of the pages that went supplemental, the titles displayed by Google were all screwed up.

[lorenzinho2]

And even stranger, the page text that is appended to the title tags on the supplemental pages, has not been on the site for about 3 months.

[JeffOstroff]

To implement the Google ALerts:

1) Go to Google'sHome Pahe
2) On Top of the search box, you'lll see Google services:

Web Images Groups News Froogle Maps more »

Click on "MORE"

3) The next page that pops up, click on Alerts

4) In the search entry box, enter your site name example.com

5) In the pulddown menu select NEWS & WEB.

6) Finalize by clicking on the Create ALert Button.

Then Google will alert you every day of your site name appearing on other sites, or if it is the subject of a news article.

[dataguy]

My indexed pages have bottomed out and started climbing back up in the early Saturday morning... anyone else having the same experience?

[itloc]

@ Dataguy

I can fully backup that. Big change here. Do you think there is a correlation between our increased saturation and the removal of the 5 billion page(s)?

Regards

itloc

[toothake]

"one of our sites has close to 30 million pages in the index."
Good for Google if start cutting thoce mega usless sites ,and BTW may I ask you what was your subject that needed 30 million pages? another wiki? ...don't tell me that you sale widgets because not even TESCO SPAR or ASDA has 30 million items to sale ,....conclusion probably your 30 mils was another "you search for blue widgets in galapagos" scraper site .Keep the good job Google cut them B$%^&s

[wiseapple]

>>>My indexed pages have bottomed out and started climbing back up in the early Saturday morning... anyone else having the same experience?<<<

Notice this also... Pages started to decline a week or so ago. Now I see the count starting to go back up.

[wiseapple]

>>>My indexed pages have bottomed out and started climbing back up in the early Saturday morning... anyone else having the same experience?<<<

Notice this also... Pages started to decline a week or so ago. Now I see the count starting to go back up.

[dataguy]

Good for Google if start cutting thoce mega usless sites

That's alright, we'll forgive your ignorance, toothake. The site owners that I have been communicating with all have user generated content sites, and it's not uncommon for UGC sites to be quite large.... and they have nothing to do with selling widgets or anything else for that matter. Besides, with Google, having "30 million pages in the index" does not mean at all that jonathan's site has 30 million pages. My 250,000 page site shows over six times that amount normally in Google's index.

Back OT:
My site is now about 50% restored to the index this morning. About half of you who stickied me your URL's are growing as well, the other half is still shrinking.

[futuresky]

So lets get this clear - are the 30 million pages that jonathannelson states just one of his sites has/had in google all good quality user generated content?

[edited by: futuresky at 2:48 pm (utc) on June 25, 2006]

[wileystudios]

Some of my sites indexes were almost back to normal but in the last hour I had one lose it all and is starting all over again. This pattern of building then losing seems to never end.

[gcc_llc]

Exactly.

I started climbing about 2 weeks ago (almost fully indexed) and in the last 3 days its the complete opposite. I am slowly dropping pages yet again.

[jonathannelson]

futuresky et al-

just to clear the air here. yes, we have lots of user generated content. yes, we have millions of products. our direct competitor is froogle and yahoo shopping.

[shortbus1662]

I am experiencing the same thing. About a 50% decrease in traffic. About a 66% drop in indexed pages.

[blaketar]

I for one would like to know a little more about the "5 billion pages removed" comment? Are these google index pages, a large site, multiple spam/scraper sites?

Please enlighten me...

[BaseVinyl]

The sstory is here: [digg.com...]

[toothake]

"and they have nothing to do with selling widgets "
Well the same old junk sites(write a review about x place)really sorry for those lonely poor web sods out there ,they write fresh free content for you and they haven't got an idea about your revenues ,while other webmasters sit down there A%%% and write content by them self ,right? Mr dataguy...

[dataguy]

Do you think there is a correlation between our increased saturation and the removal of the 5 billion page(s)?

I can't say for certain, of course, but we monitor traffic hour per hour, with a weekly differential so we can tell within an hour when Google hiccups, and the hiccup began for us last Sunday at around noon CST, which is pretty much exactly when Adam Lasnik was saying this issue was being addressed, over at threadwatch: [threadwatch.org...] (this is a pretty good read if you have the time to read through it...)

[JeffOstroff]

I gotta wonder. What the heck does someone need 30 million pages for?

One of my sites has only 200 pages, the ither site has 31.

What could you possiblye need 30 miilion pages for? What kind of site is it?