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]
This is exactly what we're seeing as well.
64.233.189.107 pulls my index to the top like the others and i'm showing for all key searches - hopefully, this is the index that will return.
Looks like the last of the old DCs to me :(.
HELPPPPPPPPPPP confused another theory blown away
2. Sites that goes up and down are near a limit in what GG thinks it's a natural linking pattern; adjustments of the algo or the natural evolution of your linking make those sites go up and down .
I've always had a short fuse and a dislike for processed cheese. Could this be the reason why my website has been hit by Google's latest idiotic mistake?
Sure :-D
I have spent so much time optimizing my site for good search engine position but my time was wasted. I should have just been placing links in forums and wikis to get the top spots. That is the message I am getting from Google right now. Maybe they should add this advice to the webmaster guidelines since this is what works best now.
Sorry for the pessimism but the revenue generated by my site is in the toilet right now because there is no traffic so I am pretty upset.
It is all part of the supplemental crawl,
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.
(msg #:53)Here is what made me drop out of the index originally:
1. Title tags not being closed
2. Header tags not being closed
3. Href tag capitalization I had a capital A href instead of small a href
As I explained in the first message of this topic, my site has 4 dmoz listings on 4 different categories. Well, if I search the exact title of my DMOZ entry on 3 of the 4 categories, I'm on the top 10, but adding a single letter makes my site drop 800 or more places in the serps.
It seems that Google only likes 3 pages of my entire site... and not much.
"my site has 4 dmoz listings"
wow! you must be a DMOZ edditor I recon...
Just kidding.
No, I'm just a veeeery patient guy :)
66.249.93.104 as retrieved 1 Jul 2005
then I click here for the current page without highlighting.
again with the page on the browser I click from the Gtoolbar (info )cached snapshot of the page I get this
66.249.93.104 as retrieved 8 Jun 2006
Any ideas ....funny stuf init?
My site also has some affiliate links - but again it has lots of unique content. There are many sites around with more affiliate links and less unique content than my site, so I don't understand, if it is an affiliate filter, why those sites are not affected and mine is.
Are these sites using htaccess to make googlebot unaware they have affiliate links?
I mean, most people in this forum are here for one reason: to learn how to SEO their site. So, it stands to reason that if everyone on here starts complaining that the rankings are "trash" than they know they've hit on our SEO techniques pretty hard, because when most people here say the rankings are trash - that really means that their site dropped in the SERPS!
I wonder, just how much effort at the Google Plex goes towards thwarting SEO's, and how much of their ability to gauge their success on that comes from reading this forum and others!
Anyway, I got hit really hard in this one - almost exactly the same pattern as in the Mar '05 update. It took about 6 months to come back after that one, and even then I had maintained my boycott against Google by using Yahoo as my default search engine. I still do that today, and this update solidifies that decision.
The 64.233.189.107 DC has my old rankings, or at least did at last check, but I'm not going to obsess, nor make any modifications to my site because I know that my site as it is now is the best it has even been for its visitors. I think that IP is showing old data, so I'm not getting my hopes up :(
Damn - let down again by Google.
gauge their success by observing what we say here?
That's one good reason to report the positives here as well as the losses, isn't it? But seriously, I think Google cares mostly about their own stats -- whatever signals of end-user satisfaction they are using. And of course, whether they can devise algorithmic approaches to catch egregious spamming techniques.
Does anyone think it remotely possible that Google implement Anti-SEO filters (as was the main rumor for the Mar '05 update)...?
If my SERP experience is a result of these changes, then I hope these "filters" are improved or removed.
As my site (which is rich in 100% original content) sinks in the SERPS, one of my competitors who had actually once stolen content from one of my previously high ranking pages - (word to word) is ranking # 1 in Google search results
This competitor also has created almost identical sites of his own with similar content to his main site and interlinked them and yet he is soaring rich in the SERPS. The same competitor has built up one way inbound links by implementing a link exchange program where uselss outbound links are returned to his unsuspecting partners.
If these SEO filters are a fact then they are seriously lacking from where I stand.
Does anyone think it remotely possible that Google implement Anti-SEO filters (as was the main rumor for the Mar '05 update), and then gauge their success by observing what we say here?
That would be pretty unscientific. It would make a lot more sense to have a collection of benchmark sites (both good and bad sites, from Google's perspective) and see how they're affected by changes.
That isn't to say that a flood of SEO forum complaints might not provide anecdotal evidence that Google is on the right track. :-)
I don't know about this.
We have five main sites that are more than one year old. The oldest is six years old. The youngest is a year old. All have established page rank.
We use three different CMS solutions that generate three different page types. Only one uses meta tags. Three se page_name_is_this.html. Two use page-name-is-this. One uses nothing about the page in the name as it's controlled by the software.
All the sites have been well ranked in their areas. None of the areas are very competitive as their purpose isn't to sell things. One is a general article site with everything from widgets, to doodads, to how to whatchamacallits. The rest are specific topics.
One June 27, 2006 traffic to these well established sites dropped 90% from Google. Not one site. Not the newest site. Not the oldest site. All the sites. Keywords in which we were 1-10 on June 26, 2006 now show us not even being alive.
We are hosted on three different hosts, which we did for redundancy sake. We didn't want to have all our eggs in one basket. One of our sites needs its own server.
Our domain names are registered to the same company, though one is private through the registrar's program.
If you look for our sites in Google you see supplemental results ahead of our main sites.
All our sites are in Google Sitemaps, which if you look at now, still show the Query Stats as they were before June 27, 2006. It's funny. You click on the one that says your average position was number one, but you're no where to be found.
The impact of these changes is a shame for us not because we're selling something, but on one of the sites is was a place where people with a certain condition could find out more info and talk to others with it. That resource is now invisible to people who use Google. (Don't get me wrong, the adsense revenue has dropped, and that is a concern as well.)
I lay all this out to you to demonstrate, at least in my case, that we don't do anything in terms of SEO more than naming the pages.
I probably went on longer than I should have, but this is the first time we've ever been affected by changes in rankings like this. :) And I can tell you, it's not because of SEO practices.
All our sites are in Google Sitemaps, which if you look at now, still show the Query Stats as they were before June 27, 2006. It's funny. You click on the one that says your average position was number one, but you're no where to be found.
My Google Sitemaps data indicates I am holding top positions, yet I know in real terms things are very different.
As for the recent changes from the 27th. My prediction is that those sites that experienced a major drop (50%+, such as myself) won't experience a comeback for at least 3 months. Of course there will be exceptions, but those experiencing a 70%+ drop in traffic will probably be gone for a while, so be ready for the ride! That's mostly based on historical observations (history repeats itself!).
Considering that Matt Cutts has a lead role in the quality control and software engineering at Google, it would seem likely that he reviewed and approved the current changes before taking his vacation, no? If that is so, then barring public outcry or monetary loss (less $ income from AS or AW), then I can't see a reason to rely on them fixing anything or doing a rollback.
IMHO.
And sometimes it means the SERPs are actually trash.
(both good and bad sites, from Google's perspective)
All my sites are with the same self written CMS and very similar in the navigation construction.
All my themed sub domains of my main site have same layout and same structure.
5 very much down
3 uneffected
At one case even
english-theme.example.com uneffected
german-theme.example.com much down
I find it impossible to draw a border line through my main sites.
If Google has made these recent changes on purpose then they are going against what they have been telling webmasters to do all along.
I also believe that for every drop of rain that falls, a flower grows ;-)
