June 27 - changes Part 3

[Scurramunga]

< Continued from: [webmasterworld.com...] >

I reported a day or two ago that my index page had reappeared again after being lost on June 27- Well now it's disappeared again.

I use sitemaps and the sitemap.xml file seems to be downloaded every few days. When my page reappeared it was listed under "site:www.mydomain.com" but now it's gone once again.

[edited by: tedster at 7:34 am (utc) on July 5, 2006]

[tigger]

>>> I also wonder if Google is giving priority to sites according to age?

not from where I am a friends site thats 2 years older than mine has been hit exactly the same

[whitenight]

Whilst google dont want to admit it i genuinely believe that they have a lot of bugs to sort out and that this infastructure isnt as effective as they think it is

;) Silence speaks volumes, doesn't it?

[europeforvisitors]

Big Daddy is a new infrastructure. Of course it's going to have bugs. But bugs will be fixed, new algorithms and filters will be deployed, and other improvements will be added over tim.

In short, Google can afford to take the long view, and Webmasters who rely on Google for their traffic need to understand that evolution isn't always a smooth process.

[M3Guy]

>>>I also wonder if Google is giving priority to sites according to age?

Doesn't balance I'm afraid

I'm seeing a lot of new sites popping up (top 10) in my sector, some that are simply graphic based pages with no text apart from the title and description and an 'enter' on the index page.

[kirkvan]

Our three sites that went down have been on-line since 1998, 1998, and 2001, respectively. White hat, helpful/updated content, and thousands of real non-reciprocated links the entire duration.

It's not about site age.

Best,
Kirk

[ontrack]

Actually, site age may play a factor in what we are, or better yet, what we are not seeing.

Before the 27th older sites did appear to have some clout, but since the 27th I'm seeing just the opposite. One site in the top 5 for a major term was simply an under construction page, can't get much "newer" than that. I think google may have removed the sandbox effect on purpose or by accident for some reason. My guess is that age will eventually have some clout again someday.

[camchoice]

From what I have been reading all over the net, (driving myself nuts) I must conclude that there is no red line in all of this. Totally random?

Infected are :
* sites in all categories
* sites with clean html
* sites with and without affiliates
* old sites
* new sites
etc etc

[colin_h]

Last year Google hit me to the point where I sold my business. I have now got a house in the country, a 1/4 olympic pool & tennis court and this year they've hit my personal hobby site in the same way.

I love you Google. You are inept, you are unfair but you are still my Google ... and I still love everything that you stood for when you first came into my life.

All the Best

Col :-)

[edited by: tedster at 2:20 am (utc) on July 6, 2006]

[lorenzinho2]

Is anybody seeing a specific page that shows up both as supplemental AND in the index?

In other words, when I do a "site:mysite.com -www" query, I see a ton of pages that are listed as supplemental.

Some of these pages are light on content, but some aren't.

I chose one of these pages that had decent, unique content that was showing up as supplemental, and searched for the page on Google and found it listed normally (not as a supplemental), and ranked number one for its key word.

So the same url, the same page, showing up as Supplemental, and as regularly indexed.

Google's supplemental listing of the page shows a corrupted title - a title that pulls text from a no longer existing vesion of the page and tacks it on to the end of the title. It also shows the page size as 43K.

Google's regular listing of the page shows the correct title, and a page size of 85K.

Just to make sure it wasn't a matter of different data centers supplying different results, I ran the tests on this dc: 72.14.207.99 and confirmed that a supplemental and regular version of the same page exist, but with different titles and page sizes.

Strange, huh?

[G_Smitty]

My site has been online for over 6 years and was affected in a bad way June 27th. I have another site that is one year old that is now at the top for it's keywords and phrases. I think something has changed that used to give older sites and advantage.

The thing about it is that it's not site wide. I still have hundreds of pages that were not affected by June 27th; yet I have hundreds of pages that were affected on the same site.

I cannot seem to find any patterns with the sites now on top and my site to suggest any type of Filter adjustments. I cannot find any differences as to why some of my pages are still doing great and some pages are not.

One thing that I have noticed in small numbers is that the Keyword density is less on the pages now ahead of mine. My pages naturally have keywords and phrases in abundance.

[ontrack]

Would love your opinions on something. In the past optimazation programs have always helped improve my rank, i.e., where you can get the percentage of your keyword in the text to match the percentage of the keyword in the text of say the top three sites for that term.

Since algorithms may have changed I've been tempted to try this to see if it could get me back on the first page. But, I'm afraid if this is a temporary glitch that when it's fixed I may have done more harm than good.

In short, should I change my index page to match what google seems to be wanting since the 27th or should I hold fast and true to my high quality page that did well in the past but not now?

[lorenzinho2]

G_Smitty, I'm seeing a lot of the same. Our big old site has had a number of long tail, non-competitive pages disappear or go supplemental, while holding solidly (or even improving) on other pages.

OnTrack, i would sit tight. There's enough weirdness out there still in terms of lost index pages and corrupted titles that I think stuff is still in flux. Also, the fact that there hasn't been a definitive post from GG or on the Matt Cutts Blog suggests that we're not looking at a finished product yet.

[camchoice]

I have only changed some stuff which G might think is spam and I improved the site with new quality content as usual. Im not making any crucial changes yet. All the DC's are still changing heavily on every second search I do. I'm waiting untill the DC's are more stable, then I will make the decission.

[ontrack]

Sounds like some good advice lorenzinho2, thanks.

Does anyone know if Google has taken on some new management lately?

I was a business consultant for several years and one thing I saw that could mess operations up faster than anything, was someone new who wanted to get noticed so they came in and made a bunch of changes for the worse, with the end result being an operation that was better off before they joined the team to start with.

[Maria444]

...should I change my index page to match what google seems to be wanting since the 27th

What does Google seem to be wanting Ontrack :)

[Lemon]

On December 27 my traffic dropped. (3000+ referrals/day to 300/day).

It has pretty much stayed that way until June 27. Now I went from 300/day to 3000+/day again.

I'm cautiously optimistic...

[ontrack]

Hi Maria444, a lot of the pages that are doing good since the 27th have the keywords mentioned in their title, description or content over and over again to the point of practically being spam, thus making the new high ranking criteria appear to be a high percentage of keyword repetition in the title, description and throughout the document.

[G_Smitty]

a lot of the pages that are doing good since the 27th have the keywords mentioned in their title, description or content over and over again to the point of practically being spam

I am seeing the opposite.

[kidder]

I agree with the fact that no one from Google has said anything about this screams loudest.

[rhshinn]

Well, I survived major updates over the past couple of years, but this one put me somewhere beyond the 200th result (where I stopped looking) for 17 search queries where G's own Sitemaps Statistics indicate that my average position had been number one.

There *may* be some hope for me, because 72.14.207.99 shows me as number one for those same queries as I type this, but if I don't pick the data center I'm still lost.

[Pass the Dutchie]

I have 4 sites with individual domains and IPs, all working the same niche. They are optimized independently using the same white hat methods.

It seems that the age is not a factor with these sites. Since the 27th June (update?!) the three year old site has dramatically dropped in serps, the six year old site remain unaffected, the two year old site has been bumped up in the serps and the 1 year old site has come out of it's sandbox happy as Larry!

The site that got dropped had three internal broken links one of which was on the home page (doh!) I hope that this is the cause. Google might be clamping down on bad html especially broken links.

Other than that I cannot see why one site has been affected and the others not. I know there are 101 factors and it is very possible that I am overseeing another cause but after reading all these 27/06 posts imo none have explained my dilemma without putting it down to a glitch.

[M3Guy]

72.14.207.99 seems to be showing a correct site:command, but the results IMO are still trash.

Can't beleive that GG and MC have been so quiet about this almighty FU

[ScottD]

Ontrack, I really don't think you should change the URL of your home page or site structure or do anything drastic. Assuming that your site is good and clean then Google has the problem, not you.

[camchoice]

Is anyone noticing that the cache of the main index does not go beyond 26th?

I know from checking logs and google crawl check that google bot came by several times after that date. Normally it dont take so long to show a new cache.

The date of 26th is also very interesting ;)

[malachite]

Is anyone noticing that the cache of the main index does not go beyond 26th?

I'll quote myself from msg #28 ...

"I've seen some (small) positive changes since 27 June, with pages cached on or since that date showing up "correctly" in the index, across a range of DCs."

I'll not quote what I said in msg #28 about "age related" index improvements ;) as it seems my theory's been disproved! Back to the guessing game ...

[petehols]

Hi Camchoice

My cache I am seeing is for the 29th June 2006 so I think they are starting to get the cache a bit more up to date.

Pete

[tigger]

I've got a couple of clients sites that are showing 1/7 but the bulk are still before 26/6

[androvboy]

We got really nailed badly on this update. Funnily enough I only have one site (of 4) that relies on google traffic - part of our business plan I guess you could say.

Site is only 1 year old so worried it could be age related, but others are saying this is not the issue.

We do not give any outgoing links to ensure not tripping up with a bad neighbourhood etc, so that is not an issue.

We were doing quite nicely, bouncing around on page 2 for our main keyword.

We are now basically back in a "sandbox" style position at about #180 on the results!

I am frustrated. Ironically the "widgets" we sell are hard to obtain for customers, and our site genuinally deserves to be up in the TOP 10 for google visitors on the keyword. When customers find us - they love us.

My frustration is seeing all the total garbage results and sites ranking in the 179 results before us.

Also all these dramas end up encouraging people to run more and more websites to cover their arses!

These days your strategy needs to be to run maybe 10 different websites selling the same products, so that when the algo changes you can survive.

And yes it would be nice not to rely on google for traffic, but it is often only economic to "buy" some visitors. We all need some organic visitors to make money.

[donelson]

I would be willing to bet that if you call Google as a SHAREHOLDER and ask to speak to a representative, and ask them why their revenue has suddenly dropped, you'll get an interesting reply!

( You might also ask your local newspaper etc to call them with the same question)

I cannot believe that this screw-up hasn't caused a siginificant loss of ad revenue (AdSense etc)

[ontrack]

My index still does not show in the site:www.mysite.com search, and my rankings are not in the top 5 like they used to be, but - the index is slowly climbing back up, i.e., 84 to 58 to 38 to 37 to now 31.

It's kind of like when a new site is working it's way up the ladder through visitor popularity.

Anyone else seeing this pattern?