June 27 - we fully recovered from traffic drop

traffic dropped on March 30

[draxofavalon]

<Admin note: See also June 27 - changes are a complete disaster [webmasterworld.com]>

We have a CMS based site, on March 30 suddenly we lost almost all our traffic. Till March 30 we used to have 37k unique visitor a day, and in Abril we only had 7k unique visitors a day... same in May and June... and today we have recovered all visitors and all top positions in SERPs.

Since March 30 we did a LOT of changes to try to fix the site... 301's, nofollow, better mod_rewrite, more linking and backlinks, reinclusion request... none of them worked till today.

btw, we never used Google Sitemaps.

[edited by: tedster at 8:07 pm (utc) on June 28, 2006]

[StarryEyed]

"...and afterall my hard work and waiting I was "rewarded" with my positions returned! I should have waited it out I guess."

..last year at this time I too tried everything I could think of, even a reinclusion request, but gave up in October....This time I will wait it out and keep my fingers crossed that it is a one or two day glitch-not another 6 month problem for us...

wonder what we are being penalized for? When your site is on the "up and up" and you always try to follow the rules...this is hard to understand.

[europeforvisitors]

Sounds like my experience last year. I lost 70-90% of my Google referrals between March 23 and late May, and then everything came back (and then some).

Like you, I made some technical changes to the site (redirects of www URLs to their non-www equivalents in .htaccess, etc.). Those changes--plus a dose of patience--apparently paid off.

[G_Smitty]

My site has been online since 2000 and has also dropped from the rankings. The strange thing is that it does not include my complete site. Some pages are still ranked but most have dropped.

This is the same thing that happened to me last year on June 30th. It didn't come back until October. I hope it does not last that long again.

[dolcevita]

It is first time that happend to me since 2000.
Always by first 10 by various words.Now i'm not listed.
site: whatever.com still comes homepage on first place, PR is same 5 and by datacenter

64.233.189.107
66.249.89.107
72.14.235.107

i still have old position!?
STill do not know of this is google glitch for a couple days or the site is penalized by google after 3-4 years?!
I have 301 non-www to www for a year but couldnt believe that it could be problem.

[ari11210]

Same here, my site has dropped out of rankings. I was highly ranked for many KWs and am now gone. Hope it is temporary. Site is online since 1998.

[G_Smitty]

How many of us experienced this same drop last year at this time? Last year I believed it had something to do with duplicate filters and I worked on removing anything close to duplicate content. I am not changing anything this time around. Hopefully it is just temporary. I do not remember it being a wide spread problem last year.

It seems that many older sites are affected and it happened the same time last year. Any other similarities? My site has around 30,000 pages indexed and a PR of 6. I have not change anything other than adding new content over the past year.

[federico]

we lost 80% of traffic late Oct 2005
regained all Dec 27
lost all March 29th
regained all yesterday June 27

looks to me that with the exception of a small group of evergreen super-trusted sites, they have grouped everyone else in 2 macro subsets and are alternating them

[dazzlindonna]

we lost 80% of traffic late Oct 2005
regained all Dec 27
lost all March 29th
regained all yesterday June 27

Interesting...here's my story...

did NOT lose rankings Oct 2005
lost all rankings Dec 27
regained rankings Mar 16
lost rankings Mar 18
regained all yesterday June 27

[tigger]

>How many of us experienced this same drop last year at this time?

not last year but beginning of May I had a massive drop in traffic for a few days along with some other members

[JeffOstroff]

Have you guys seen the same thing with your site?

Back in 2004 we were in the top 10 Google results for all <topic> related keywords for our site, often in the Top 5. Then last year we slid down to 200-700 depending on the search term and the day.

Unlike other posters here, our problem was NOT one of being removed from the index, we just had poor rank, which is about as bad!

Even yesterday our ranking was 200-578 on a hand full terms I looked at last night.

This morning, those exact same terms are back in the 20-40 range, and many other of our terms have full recovered, and we are back to #3, #4, etc, on many of them.

I hope this sticks, because Google did this on May 16 -18th, then ended the party.

I expected them to send an invoice to my house stating something "you likey? you want to pay us $1000 for that rank?"

Not sure which of our tasks did it, or if Google just changed something on their end. I spent the last 3 months sending out DMCA notices to duplicate content sites who stole our content, in the past month I have had 150 scammer sites yanked out of the Google index, we found some 302 redirect scammer sites and got rid of them, did a few 301 redirects, installed code for the canonical www vs non-www although we did not have an issue before, so who knows what worked.

Let's all pray they don't mess with it again. Are you guys seeing the same thing?

<Sorry, no specifcs.
See Forum Charter [webmasterworld.com]>

[edited by: tedster at 4:36 pm (utc) on June 28, 2006]

[MrStitch]

Nope,

My ranking hasn't changed much at all, if any.

I'd like to knock a few sites off the search results because I don't think they are entirely relevent to the search term i'm using... but how does one go about doing that?

[ScottD]

For the longest time (ie a year) we have had a problem with our site, with few pages showing, initially loads of supplementals and then simply very few pages indexed. And most worrying of all when we did a search in google for site:URL the few pages that came out were not the most important ones and the home page could not be found.

Today the results came out exactly as they should - home page first, then the most important second layer pagers etc.

We are still only showing about 450 pages indexed and only 150 of these get shown as the rest are all "too similar", but that is an improvement on yesterday too.

We did a 301 redirect about 4-5 months ago and added a huge amount of content at the end of last year. It's all original content, and there is great difference between pages. It's a local travel site so each page might be on a different tourist attraction for example.

More interestingly perhaps we've been spending about 2k per month on adwords driving traffic to the site, which equates to maybe 10k clicks so a noticable degree of traffic. Is this what has helped sort us out I wonder?

Also the site name has a "-" in the URL which has been in the forums related to the site tool a lot recently, which is partly why I thought I'd share this experience.

Mainly I wonder if anyone else has seen a good change in their results today? I'm not seeing the same on Google UK so far, so it's obviously not on all datacenters - which makes me very nervous.

Any similar experiences out there? Shall we break out the champaign?

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

See [webmasterworld.com...]

and

[webmasterworld.com...]

[tedster]

I also saw a big June 27 recovery to "normal" for one site that had lost almost all of their 100,000 pages on a site: query. In this case, there was never a corresponding traffic drop, so I had just written it off to problems with the site: operator search.

[anthoduff]

same things lost 80% from GG. Query site: return an another page than the home since yesterday...

"-" in domain name. 5 years old. 3 drop for me since 22nd sept 05.

[federico]

my take on this June 27: data refresh aka data push

as the words hint, an intended effort by G to reintroduce in the index/database a range of sites that, given their size or authority, should have been there in the first place but were filtered out for a mistake or another

[draxofavalon]

Query site: return an another page than the home since yesterday...

That was happening to me from March 30 till June 27... now we are like we were in March 29... exact same SERPs and site:command works fine.

my 0.2 cents: I'm SURE that the fix in traffic is NOT for changes we did... so, dont start messing around with ur site... just sit and wait :(

I hope G is really fixing things and not just playing around... I'll hate to be part of another "cycle"

[anthoduff]

Hi draxofavalon,

Me too for the drop of the 29th March, but because it's the second time that it happened to me, i decided to change my domain name extension from .com to .eu by 301 redirection... After that, my site returned into the serps by the 16 - 17 th of june, and the query site: fixed.

But since last night, droped again. I think is more an indexing problem than a penalty or something else...

Now, regarding your experience, I think I shouldn't have touched anything.

Google is killing us... once more.. and the most shocking thing is that Google doesn't communicate at all on the subject.

[asg2004]

Nice.

I really don't like to comment on these particular threads, as usually they're a hilarious combination of panic, paranoia and "why is Google so evil" diatribes, but for once, an update has helped us.

Obviously, I'm knocking on a forest full of wood here when I say this, but a site that was penalized (read as: totally out of the results) in April 06 is now back and better than before in Google starting today.

Still, let's just say I won't be breaking out the champagne for at least 2 weeks.

Good luck everyone!

[nippi]

I've got almost all my sites up in traffic by 60%. One site that was down to 90 pages, back up to 40,000.

WOohoo.

[Pyewacket]

My retail (non-affiliate) website is 5 years old and I lost 90% of my Google referrals on March 29. I can't even begin to tell you how that affected website traffic and sales but you can probably guess. I run a clean site and wouldn't have a clue how to do black hat SEO. But today I'm doing the Google Happy Dance! I have recovered all of my previous positions in the SERPS and more. My unique visitors today have already exceeded December 2005 numbers. I wish I could push the "hold" button and make the current Google algorithim stick. Yippee!

[dazzlindonna]

I wish I could push the "hold" button and make the current Google algorithim stick.

LOL, me too. Although the threads today makes it sound like most people hate today's changes, there are those of us who love 'em!

[draxofavalon]

In this DCs

[64.233.189.107...]
[72.14.235.107...]

the site: command still shows a big mess

In this other one

[64.233.187.104...]

site:command is working great and SERPs too

[Pyewacket]

Although the threads today makes it sound like most people hate today's changes

I know, I feel really bad for them because I know exactly how they feel - I've been living it for three months! I can't help it, I'm thrilled with today's results!

[RichTC]

Its the other way around for us:-

In this DCs
[64.233.189.107...]
[72.14.235.107...]

the serps results are great

In this other one

[64.233.187.104...]

the serps are not so relevent

However, it looks like 64.233.187.104 has won the race as most data centres are showing those results - im just hoping they change but i fear its wishfull thinking!

[Pyewacket]

However, it looks like 64.233.187.104 has won the race as most data centres are showing those results

If that's the case then I'm still good. Gosh, I hope so. My mortgage holder and I will be very happy if this sticks.

[tebrino]

Finally relief after almost three months of agony. Everything works perfect for me, correct number of pages and home page where it should be - first result of site command. I hope it stays this way or my mental health will be seriously damaged - again :-)

[G_Smitty]

Nothing ever sticks. I am good for about 8 or 9 months out of the year. The other months my site is lost in the Twilight Zone. I can live with this pattern as long as it does not reverse. It's funny but this has been the pattern for the last 5 years. I have learned to change nothing and wait out the bad few months.

[Pyewacket]

I guess I got spoiled because for five years I saw incremental increases in traffic and sales with only a couple of small dips. Christmas 2005 was so good it was scary. I sat on my high horse thinking that I was immune to bad Google karma because I never did any black hat stuff. But then IT happened. Thankfully I had enough alternate marketing to keep my site afloat for three months. This has been a nightmare that I hope, hope, hope if finally over. [Google karma offering]Google is good. Google is kind. Google is my friend.[/Google karma offering]

[Chico_Loco]

This all brings up the old theory that Google lists some sites at the top for x months of the year, make them suffer for the rest of the year, while giving others a chance at the top spots.

Anyone believe that - equality on the internet so that everyone gets a chance to monetize? It would be a good strategy to get more people using AdSense though, wouldn't it! I'm mean people that weren't well before would try to monitize their traffic by using AS (or YPN) once they get the high traffic levels once things switch over!