Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I'll offer my symptoms as well and put them in chronological order since it appears I have patterns similar to many, but a few smaller differences.
Before June27 everything had been running smooth for a very long time. No significant changes in SERPS had ever occurred. The only "weird" thing I ever saw was about eight or nine months ago when during a PR update my homepage went to PR 0, yet all of my internal pages retained their PR of 3-5. The next PR update "fixed" this and my homepage went back to PR 5 as it had been before.
Otherwise all indexing was normal. Page title in the blue link, multiple lines of snippet text from the page in the black description, etc. Using the "site:" command showed normal results, homepage listed first followed by other pages in some semblance of order. I've never previously, nor currently, have any problems with "supplemental" pages.
June 27 during the evening I lost 95% of my traffic from Google and disappeared in the SERPS.
After June 27 traffic is still way down. Yesterday I saw a tiny increase in SERPS but no increase in traffic. Today I'm down a tiny bit in SERPS from yesterday.
Looking at the "site:" command there are two huge differences. First is that my homepage is missing out of about 700 pages. It isn't listed at all. The second big difference is that most of the pages are listed with the meta-description as the black description text rather than snippets of the text previously used. Pages are still cached.
If I search Google for a specific phrase in quotes that only appears on my website, the page is returned in the search results, however again the description text is just what is in the meta-description and no snippet from the page itself.
June 29 - Googlebot went on a deep crawl of my site, crawling pretty much all of the 700 pages in the site. The crawled pages are not yet showing in the cache.
[edited by: engine at 4:13 pm (utc) on June 30, 2006]
PR remain the same.
4+ years old site.
It seems we have a pattern here.
A bug OR
Update is not done yet!
site:sub.example.com
All sites have a news.htm in the root, beside the index.htm in toot, the most linked pages.
The site: command showed at all effected domains not one index page in the top 10.
At the not effected domains, either index.htm or news.htm was on top or place 2.
Some index.htm from folders followed mixed by pages in the folders.
Here some more observation/changes to pre-27 June
It seems that they start to play with contextual - singular vs. plural words
and they not handle it well in this "update" or whatever we should call it!
My domain is .com and very much Global, but when I go to Google.ca and
search for Canadian pages only, I am on TOP for main search term.
There is nothing Canadian about my site except my server hosted on a
Canadian company. Here is another Poor IP resolution.
There are local businesses that have been ranked down and I am on TOP
with not a single content about Canada and no .ca domain.
One theory was, that pages are indexed www and not www.
I noticed that several of my effected, but also some not effected domains are both indexed.
In installed 30 June in htaccess
#<AID>
# FollowSymLinks is needed for mod_rewrite, without you'll get
# 100% 403 errors
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.sub.example.com
RewriteRule ^(.*) [sub.example.com...] [R=301,L]
#</AID>
Now the
site:www.sub.example.com
shows only at 1 domain still some indexed with www.
All other www indexed pages have disappeared after 2 days with the new .htaccess
But while checking, I found something else very strange:
site:sub.example.com
showed on place 1 and 2 pages with the correct title of the pages, but this pages had been removed in the year 2005.
Clicking the links shows like expected my customized error 404 page with "Error 404" as title.
Place 3 and 4: root index.htm and news.htm
Because of a server error I did have a duplicate content thing, until yesterday (addon domains redirecting to the main domain, so Google indexed the same pages for two sites).
What worries me is that there seem to be sites that get hit by this bugdate periodically, which begs the question if it's site-specific after all.
bugdate periodically
exactly as i have been saying. You can look at a site and watch the same pages fall to exactly the same pages for different serps.
currently im looking at a site fall to the exact postions it was in at the end of last year..and at mid points for a couple of other refeshes...and i know eventually it will be back at spot 3 where it always is. ( i think, its not my site and if im wrong i aint bothered :))
One thing I would like to know: how do you go about linking to your own sites? If I understand Matt Cutts correctly, this can easily trip a paid link filter.
Last June went one of my clients bancrupt.
I removed his domain and my entry my client reference page on my internet promotion site.
Now I discovered at a search
2 pages from the June 2005 removed domain
The last year removed client reference page.
So there seems to be year old pages not existing any more in the index.
One thing I would like to know: how do you go about linking to your own sites? If I understand Matt Cutts correctly, this can easily trip a paid link filter.
Sure, if your other sites are affiliate sites or obviously made-for-AdSense sites about real estate, mortgages, Viagra, and diet pills, and if you link to them from every page of a site on an unrelated topic.
If you link to your other sites naturally and with self-restraint, and if those other sites aren't likely to trigger spam alarms, you shouldn't have anything to worry about (at least in my admittedly limited experience).
Clicking on one of the results shows:
Account Terminated
i can kind of find comfort in the absurdity of the situation.
Now i can rest easy , this is for sure an incomplete/buggy update..
So how long before we hear from MC about bugdate?
The results on some of the 72s are completely different for a site:domain.com search for some domains I follow - so whether this is the first stage of trying to solve a certain problem is the question and whether the sites which fell out of being top on a site:domain.com check return I dont know.
"has anyone also noticed the lack of any hyphenated domains in the 20"
Its an interesting one. I notice for example on a number of our sites we have say a page dedicated to "small pink widgets" that is say a PR5 internal page with the page named as /small-pink-widgets.html.
Google ignores the dedicated page and lists another site page that is not dedicated to the subject but contains a link to that page that says "small pink widgets" - the only thing relevent about the page it lists is the anchor link on the page!
Meanwhile i do notice that in the non competitive search term areas google will list some of the dedicated pages.
On the face of it the new results index looks a mess to me but hey WDIK
Still waiting still hoping
has anyone also noticed the lack of any hyphenated domains in the 20
Many of my internet promotion clients domains ar hyphenated. They are not effected and continue to have good search results.
I've read through this thread and can't decide which June 27th changes you are talking about. The reason is there isn't just one "change" there are at least three different data/algo sets out there on different data cantres. Different data centres will be serving your default google.com searches at different times so how can your broadly discuss changes like theres on Google when we know there are at least 3 different Googles.
Subjective examples of the 3 different data types.
[72.14.207.107...] For me the best results for a long time.
[64.233.167.99...] OK for some terms variable for others.
[66.102.11.99...] OK for some terms poor for others.
So which changes are you discussing?
Sid
I've read through this thread and can't decide which June 27th changes you are talking about.
We don't know what the changes in the algo/data are, but we know the consequences: large drop in serps, in all DC's, for some sites.
72.14.207.107Those are all terribly bad for all our websites, except one.
64.233.167.99
66.102.11.99
66.102.9.104
216.239.51.104
66.249.93.104
Two of our websites (previous positions 3 and 8) have now disappeared Completely from ALL google listings. The deleted sites are content-rich, non-commercial websites - virtual tours with lots of text, pictures etc.
"has anyone also noticed the lack of any hyphenated domains in the 20"
Seen a few but not many. Could be a real problem for me as I usually use one hyphen in my page names.
Previously it was on page 1 or 2. Some weeks ago the same thing happened, then it came back.
The only odd thing about it is that there is an underscore in the page name.
