Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
This time I prefer to keep calm about this update. So instead of start a thread about how evil-ish is Google, I decided to start a thread to discover the cause of all this mess.
I'll try to explain all SEO relevant characteristics of my affected site (I have other sites not affected by this update), and I hope more people do the same, so we can find a pattern and act consequently.
Morphology:
The site is three years old, and is structured in folder, and every folder is about a different theme and they are not related.
Every folder has articles (unique content), a discussion forum, a links section and in some cases, photo galleries.
Most of the articles have a thread in the forum to discuss about it. And the first user comments are displayed under the article. After the comments, there is a link to the related forum thread, so the discussion can go on without disturbing too much.
The article has a link to the thread, but the forum thread has no link back to the article.
I run Adsense ads in all the pages of the site.
Inbound links:
4 of the subwebs ( folders) of the site have an inbound link from 4 different DMOZ categories.
There are some (maybe 3 or 4) link exchanges, but from/to related sites.
Outbound links:
All the outbound links are to 'good' sites. The outbound links are usually only in the links section, and some directly from the articles.
Inner linkage:
The main page of the domain links to all the folders of the site.
All the pages in the folders have a link to the rest of pages of the same folder.
In addition, the footer of all the pages have links to the rest of the root of the other folders.
Every folder has a valid sitemap submitted to google a few months ago.
Special folders:
One of the mini-sites (folders) is a 'free photo album' application, so there are a lot of pages with the same text, but with a different picture.
Other mini-site is a directory of hotels and restaurants of a city in Spain, so again there are a lot of 'similar' pages.
Evolution in the serps:
The last two months the number of indexed pages in google has been growing after being in the supplemental hell.
The position in the serps for a open broad of searches was quite good, always in the first page for my targeted keywords and variations.
Panic actions:
I know I should have stayed away from making changes now, but.... Today I've created a robots.txt that exclude googlebot from indexing the images of the free photo album site, and the details of every hotel and restaurant from the spanish city site.
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Any similarity with your affected sites?
[edited by: tedster at 8:07 pm (utc) on June 28, 2006]
Recently I joined Google Analytics, and I added a little javascript on the footer of all the pages for monitorizing the adsense clicks. It didn't work, but I forget to remove the script... Could it be the cause?
I doubt it.
This is actually the first update where my site has benifited. In terms of google updates my site has had whack, whack, whack, whack, yes!
The only major change to the site was to keep the URLs shorter for deep pages.
I really think that this is a bug similar to the one that caused the delisting of pages in the second week of March (the problem back then was that only the home page was in the index on the BD data centres,the only other listed pages being outdated and old supplemental listings).
I was wondering if those sites currently affected also suffered from the above problem? If so, it might be a clue that this is indeed a bug which will be rectified by Google. I hope so.
yep I got hit by that one as well but fully recovered after 3 days a friend in similar industry has also been hit by both "bugs"
Is there any semi-official Google ("Matt Cutts" etc) discussion of what's going on?
Okay, here's my theory, my site is several years old and very large, and content relevant something google likes. A lot of people having problems have the same scenario. Maybe Google takes these sites every once in a while and knocks them down a bit to see if they are still good enough to work their way back up through popularity with visitors. Just a theory.
What i cant understand with this update is that we have pages listing for keywords irrelevent to those pages. For example. A dedicated internal page to "blue smokey widgets" that previously ranked say 6 in the serps (PR5) has vanished yet in position 24 i see a page about "Red wotsits" (PR2)with a link to "smokey widgets" on it that has replaced it.
In a number of cases the page isnt even relevent to the search string, its like google listing anything anywhere for the site
My affected site is in a shared hosting, can it be a problem for googlebot?
My affected site is in a shared hosting, can it be a problem for googlebot?
No.
I also have many content rich pages with no affiliate links whatsoever and they have still been filtered - it appears to apply to the whole domain.
donelson
HELPPPPPPPPPPP confused another theory blown away
I'm unable to find a reason why google has dropped my site to the 10th page of the serps.
;-)
Col
p.s. Oh yeah, I once hurt a small mouse.
If I do a site:www.mysite.com -a -e -i -o -u I get 1600 results of supplementals with weird titles...
In my unaffected sites the site: command behaves as usual (no supplemental, no ghost pages...). Can you test it in your affected sites?
Strange as it seems, this behavior reminds me of that "Crazy Ivan" procedure in the movie "Hunt for Red October." In other words, an apparently bizarre act undertaken for a very valid purpose.
If I do a site:www.mysite.com -a -e -i -o -u I get 1600 results of supplementals with weird titles...
Yes. I see the exact same thing. Sites which took a significant drop show all supplemental with weird titles on that query. Other sites which didn't take a significant drop on the 27th show the expected results for that query.
Also, my homepage is missing from the normal "site:www.example.com" query.
It could be also that all of my sites but one are affected and I haven't noticed yet...
Or it could be too much alcohol in my veins.
Yes, our sites are behaving as pre-June27 on that DC as well, but...
Godddddam Google is still showing the 5 year-old DMOZ title for our site, Grrrrr!
How is any company able to give a FALSE NAME for your own copyrighted product?
our site is also behaving like pre27j
This really does look like a Google problem. Is anyone from Google reading this? Please speak to us!
The reason for the serp changes is the supplemental index being recrawled and dropped into google.
I will tell you what is Evil about Google: Their Supremely Arrogant Attitude.
I think the data on 64.233.189.107 is only on one or two other data centres unless someone can confirm otherwise so currently it looks like the cr@p im currently seeing is here to stay!
