Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
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?
Most of the sites that seem to be having problems were well established sites, most of which I assume had strong page ranks.
There has been an argument for quite a while that page rank didn't make much difference anymore. I agree that it probably does not like it used to, but before June 27 if you looked hard at the results you could see that it still meant "something". Few to none 0 page ranks had top spots. Now there are lots of 0 page ranks in top spots.
Google has this law suit going on where they are being sued by someone for google giving them a 0 page rank.
Maybe, in order to defend themselves better in court, google has removed the page rank filter altogether to see what happened. That would explain a lot of things.
In court they could use the removal of the filter to show that page rank should not hurt or help a web sites listing -- or -- if the filter removal is a test and nothing but crappy results show up when the filter is removed they can go to court and show just how important the page rank is to their results.
Hmm. Just a refinement of my theory that Google is playing around with filters and seeing how things go with visitors when they do so.
There has been an argument for quite a while that page rank didn't make much difference anymore.
No, it's a high filter penalty.
As mentioned before, each page has one link to
cgi.example.com/cgi-bin/script.pl?formmail&by=domain-name/folder-name/file-name
The generated page has the same title line, but contact information and the form as content.
For certain searches, the cgi version comes in the first 100 search results with PR=0, but the original page with PR=3 up to PR=5 does not show in the first 100.
Deja vu - has the *qualities* of the 2nd Feb 05
own/manage few dozen big sites and numerous small sites
all WH, unique content, etc, etc
just over half of the sites have been hit hard
my observations........
1. google has a serious problem with spam (again), of the 1809 (dropped) main keyphrases (spread over dozens of sites/sectors) i have checked, all have some blatant spam/scraper listings in the top 10.
2. from what i can see, the "data push" which occurred on the 27th was either erroneous or incomplete. let's hope the next one (later this month) will either add the missing data or sort the corrupt data.
3. the screwy site: command is still having problems, although i think this is more coincidental, maybe having an indirect effect on some sites. i have some sites that are still "as they were" before 27th which suffer from the site: command *problem*.
4. the "4 page penalty" (penalty/dampening/whatever) seems to be *real* for numerous pages on 18 of our sites.
5. Some older sites have gone SUP while the index has a lot of crap that was SUP before the 27th. In a way it looks like G just simply doesn't have enough space ;o)
6. Pagerank (inc latest update) has stayed the same or risen for some of the sites that have been hit.
The last time this happened (for us) it lasted 3 months. I hope this isnt history repeating!
Dazz
Most of the sites that seem to be having problems were well established sites
I think that most (many) of the people that post to WebmasterWorld have established sites, but crappy sites have been hit just as well. This supports the theory that 6/27 isn't an update of any kind, but just an error. I mean, have you ever seen an update like this one? A real update was already going on at 6/27, see the datacenter watch thread and Google updates always have certain characteristics, but 6/27 has none.
Personally i have noticed that certain sites are not returning the correct page and seem to suffer a lower serps for that. For example where the sub page and home page had an indented listing for a term..now only the homepage shows when the sub page was far more relevant. This happens every so often. When the sub page is retruned serps are as in the past. When its just the homepage serps are lower.
So I turn to google my trusty serach source and guess what?
For key terms and obvious keyword combination nothing but junk, sites under consutuction, scraper sites, sites with nothing but links and all these on page 1.
The current index is really broken from a users persepctive let alone ours as site owners.
It is for this reason alone I still hold out hope that things will be fixed.
LP
The current index is really broken from a users perspective let alone ours as site owners.
this is true for an increasing number of searches. But this has been the case since BD hit nearly 7 months ago. What makes you think they are near to fixing it let alone that they even recognise a problem? Personally i think theres a SLIGHT chance they agree because they havent come out and said BD is what they envisaged and they always counter google is broke stories if they believe everything is fine. They make no comment if things arent to their liking. So as we are still in NO COMMENT territory theres still a slight chance they think it needs fixing. The question is, can BD be fixed. I wonder if the code is flawed to the extent that only a rewrite would help. To go from recognising networks and low quality inbounds to actually rewarding them makes me wonder if theres a fatal flaw. Since reading between the lines the way BD sees inbounds was a primary objective.
The last time this happened (for us) it lasted 3 months.
You were lucky! One of my sites was 6 months returning almost to the day and another was a year almost to the day. The one that was gone for a year returned the same day that the one that was gone for 6 months went again. I wonder why I always seem to get badly hit in these updates? (if that's what they are).
I am not expecting a speedy recovery this time - but I will not make any changes to the site this time, I am going to try my hardest to forget about it, even though it is my main earning, livelehood site, I will not let this stress me out to the degrees that I was this time last year!
