27 June screwup - theory

[donelson]

We have a bunch of sites that have been badly affected by the 27 June screwup.

However, we have one site that is still #1 for the two main keywords.

I have looked at various theories, to no avail so far.

Here's another ---

Do any of you have badly affected sites in which the home page has AdSense with pictures right above the AdSense banner?

I have four pix semi-aligned above the three- or four-text AdSense listings.

Google actually wrote me an email a while back saying this was okay as long as the pictures were not intended to mislead visitors, just to "draw the eye" to the AdSense area.

BUT, the site I have that's not affected by the 27 June screwup does NOT have these pix above the AdSense area.

Yes, another screwy theory --- anyone else think this might be a problem?

[skweb]

Like all of you, I see no pattern and results are ridiculous. Plus, some of my websites are untouched. That reminds me of "Jagger." Remember? I am seeing many things that do not make sense - while there are some that are identical to Jagger, others are new. In summary, though, Google search looks like a mess - one indicator of an update.

So does it mean that there is a real update going on? Does it not mean we should simply stay tight and not go crazy till it is over - I see changes every minute in the SERPs (something that happens only in the midst of an update).

And by the way, the concern, worried, and tears this time are no different than Jagger. Today I did a search for "Jagger" at [webmasterworld.com...] and found that history is repeating itself.

[eggsle]

I have about 20 sites. Mostly well dodgey black hat sites that haven't been touched by June 27. All sorts of dodgey tricks and tests in use with no penalty....

My 'figurehead' site is whiter than white SEO and has lost about 60% of google traffic and adsense revenue. Some details :

multiple subdomains : www.widgets.com, forums.widgets.com, images.widgets.com and another subdomain that identifies my site so I can't mention it :)

I have about 12,000 pages of content, with 2-3 pages of content added daily. Google 'similiar content' kicks in at C.950 pages.

Content is natural english language, with a wide volcabulary and low keyword densities. I favour regularly updated natural language content that covers as wide a surface area as possible.

site launched in 1999. non hypenated domain, hyphenated urls, no more than 6 words in URLS. some repetition in directory and filename.

Directory Structure is flat with no more than 2 dirs deep. Deepest page is 4 clicks deep. Homepage is lite CSS static file with links to top level menus.

No duplicate content problems, always 301'ed non www. subdomains to www etc. Hand built CMS that creates static html files and dates them with author date so apache last mod is accurate to beat the scrapers and claim my content as my own as soon as it is written. Never had problems with supplementals or indexing / URL issues.

Multiple Yahoo and DMOZ listings, hand picked links sections, good mix of outbound and inbound links, wide variety of inbound link anchor text. EDU links, authority links, wikipedia etc. about 25% of my outbound links are reciprocated, lots of links from blogs, quite a lot of small paragraphs of text stolen by scrapers and MFAs. Not too much wholesale content theft.

Run of site footer with links to key top level pages and to 2 subdomains.

99% of site validates with cse, I regularly check outbound links can't find any PR0 or 404's or sites that look dodgey to the eye. Complies with all of googles webmasters guidelines except possibly the fuzzy doorway page spiele that could apply to most of the internet.

site:www.widgets.com doesn't show homepage. composite searches for top 10 phrases + widgets lists dmoz, yahoo, other sites, then one of my subdomains before my www.widgets.com listing about 40-50 serps lower.

Looks like my traffic has been 'clipped' by a 70/30 natural search traffic rule. www.widgets.com SERPS for lower value / niche searches are unchanged.

Quality in my niche is slightly worse since June27 with reappearance of some spammy hypenated domains, and a couple of sites with keyword densities of 10-15%

subdomains forums.widgets.com, images.widgets.com and the other sub haven't been affected at all.

I'm waiting for more info before reacting to june27. Have fired off reinclusion req, hassled my adsense acct manager and applied pressure thru a sizeable adsense acct I control in my 9-5 job but haven't got much back from behind Fortress Google except for the usual canned responses.

I've checked all links, removed some 404's and added a few more. validated all static pages and fixed a couple of lame little html errors.

I gave up monitoring DCs early July and concentrated on new content and a couple of new projects. I'm not going to do anymore for a few weeks apart from put my feet up and enjoy the english summer while it lasts.

I check WebmasterWorld and matt cutts every few days in case something surfaces that isn't about data centers, matts cats, his wife, his vacation, or latest linux experiences.

My instinct tells me that Google is tinkering / being evil again. If your site is whiter than white hang in there, things are gonna get better.

[Armi]

On

216.239.59.104
66.102.11.104
66.102.9.104

I have very good rankings! (domain with the 27th june problem)

[androvboy]

I play a pretty straight bat. But frankly I am starting to think I had better buy me some extra domains and start "black hatting" like mad.

Looking at the current results I think I can get some traffic - maybe more - with some experimental black hat sites.

I don't think google are playing the game, so why should I?

[b2net]

Google likes to do updates - or should I say data refreshes - on the 27th of every 3 months. Dec 27, March 27, June 27 have all affected my sites more or less. Based on the comments I read here it looks like this latest change has affected a lot of established WH sites.

It's a scary thought that the next data refresh in two weeks (or Sept 27) could see even more honest webmasters lose their site.

I do both WH and BH and the funny thing is my BH sites survive all these updates and Google has to remove them manually. A $10 domain with doorway pages can bring me good traffic for about two months so it's worth it. There's no guarantee any WH site will survive the next update.

[Dayo_UK]

Yep - looks like a WH filter.

[wanderingmind]

June 27 problem for me too, but no improvement for me on those 3 DCs.

[Armi]

@ Dayo_UK

What do you mean with "WH filter"?

[tigger]

WH filter = White Hat filter, basically remove good sites

and it does look like its time to change the colour of my hat ;0(

[sandpetra]

If google doesnt play fair why should anyone else?

[Uber_SEO]

I've been keeping an eye on this thread, and thought it was about time I'd join in. I'v got two domains that have been hit badly by the June 27th update. They had excellent visiblity beforehand, and have now dropped like a sinking stone.

They're in the travel sector, and form part of of an umbrella travel company. The other sites under the umbrella have not been affected by the update, which is why I find it weird that these two have. All the optimisation is white hat.

I don't buy into Matt's comment about this just being a tweak to the existing algo, as so many people seem to have been hit hard by this.

Does anyone know the best forum for reporting these drops, especially in cases where you know you've not done anything bad. Perhaps I just need to keep my fingers crossed for the next update in a fortnight.

[Hissingsid]

They're in the travel sector, and form part of of an umbrella travel company. The other sites under the umbrella have not been affected by the update, which is why I find it weird that these two have.

Hi,

Do all of these sites target the same terms?

I doubt it. Could it not be a term based problem rather than a site based one?

In my own case all of our main target 2 and 3 word terms are unaffected but some other secondary terms have dropped from #1-#3 to #50 plus.

The terms that have continued to do well and the examples that have been hit all have one word in common so I can rule that out in my word based hypothesis. This narrows down the issue to one or two words.

I continue to hold to my hypothesis that the problem I am seeing is a specific sematic webs issue and therefore believe that what happenned on 27th was a change to the semantics algo.

Sid

[stever]

>> WH filter = White Hat filter, basically remove good sites

Thanks, tigger, that was good for a giggle at least.

White Hat = good site : the last desperate cry of the faith-based SEO webmaster...

[tigger]

well stever we have to try and laugh at something as we see our bank balances reducing at the rate of knots :(

[wanderingmind]

I am not panicking just yet; isn't the standard process something like after a month or nothing from Matt cutts, we have something like an explanation, and the sites bounce back?

[G_Smitty]

I noticed today that on www, www1 and www2 my site is back in the top 3 of the first page where it was prior to June 27h (For Popular key words and phrases). It is also that way on current results; however, all other data centers still have the post June 27th results.

Does this mean anything?

[SEOPTI]

G_Smitty: Which is your current DC?

[G_Smitty]

I typically am on the 3 from 64.233.167; however I am not getting the same results when I just use www.google.com even though it's normally the above data centers. The results for my site from www, www2 and www3 do not match any of the data centers.

[tigger]

I'm not seeing anything changing other than the odd movement depending on which DC I'm hitting - right now the spammers/black hatters have the serps

[soapystar]

right now the spammers/black hatters

i take it by "right now" you mean since BD?

:)

[Wibfision]

I haven't seen any consistent improvements either.

[peter andreas]

As some body has said this is so much like Jagger as we have dropped like a stone , its like Deja Vu. Site going since 98 ish, we strive to be WH, our site gets lots of compliments on forums, even a .gov link. We do not do recip links, but just link out where appropriate. I'm hoping everything will be OK though as it was last time.

[night707]

my site got wrecked down to zero G traffic by Bourbon in 2005, came back in winter and now this June 27 it`s back to zero once again.

Regular adsense client since start, G wrote "no ban, no penalty." All previous no 1 keyword positions are gone for a rich content site with many pr 5 urls.

Content and structures have not been changed significantly and I wonder about similarities between Bourbon and 27.

[SEOPTI]

Google still favors expiring domains, zillions of porn spammers using them. They punish WH sites but leave expiring domains in the index.

[edited by: SEOPTI at 11:28 am (utc) on July 13, 2006]

[tigger]

lets just hope this so called refresh can put this right LOL

[hermannen]

I still don't have ANY clue about what might have killed my site: it is perfectly white SEO..
Could it be the inbound links?

[Alex70]

<Could it be the inbound links?>

do you use the same anchor text for all/great-part of your inbound links?
If so well IMO it could be

[tflight]

For the first time since June 27 I can now actually find my homepage when looking at the results of the site:www.example.com operator. It is buried about half way through all of the page results instead of being at the top.... but at least it is listed somewhere now. Hopefully that is a sign of good things to come... I'll take any hope I can get.

[colin_h]

Lots of hope today. My stats are telling me that I'm getting more & more keywords each day now. It seems that my pages are beginning to drift back into place one by one, restoring them to their places of a couple of weeks ago.

I have another mad theory at [webmasterworld.com...] and would be interested in your thoughts.

All the Best

Col :-)

[egomaniac]

Here's a new observation...

Prior to 6/27, my home page used to sit show up at #2 or #3 for a competitive 2 keyword search from among 300M+ results (my site has been online since 1999, has always been WH, and has had this ranking for 3-4 years).

I decided this morning to see just how deep I needed to dig into the SERPs to find it.

At result 791, I got the Google message of "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 791 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included."

Upon clicking and rerunning the search, the number of results DROPS from 353M to 284M (shouldn't the number stay the same or increase?).

And then my home page shows up at #26 in the SERPs - before it didn't show up at all in the 791 results I reviewed.

Strange.