Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
who cares if the anchor text is "Click here!". Your going to rank for title keywords without one inbound anchor text!
And I have exactly the opposite happening. I have several years worth of links with the anchor text (my site name).
It's not like they appeared all at once. A few months ago the homepage started to be filtered out for the most common (and key) word. The page still does well on all data centers but gets pushed way down on in the serps on Google.com.
Site is #3 on ALL DCs for a very competitive phrase, but nowhere on www.google.com.
Yes, yes! The difference is this has been going on for some time for me and now it seems to be happening to more of you.
nobody else in my page 1-2 SERPs is having these probs
Me either, at least not with the sites that were in the top 10. There has been shifting but nothing as drastic as my situation.
"minus something" penalty back to bite us?
Sort if like the -950 except in this case the google.com result has been jumping all over from around -100 to not there are all..
Another strange thing is if I set it for 100 results then Google shows a far lesser page with few links at around -20 with the far higher PR and well linked homepage indented below the lesser page from the same site. It's definitely a filter of some sort.
most of us have one thing in common.......fairly new sites...am I right?
My problem is with a site that is over 10 years old.
I'm taking the stance that I will no longer worry about google.
I keep telling myself I should do that. My site has a great long tail and the one search term doesn't make that much difference. But it just bugs the heck out of me! It seems like I should be able to figure out what odd thing about my site is causing the problem.
[edited by: tedster at 8:26 am (utc) on Feb. 1, 2008]
Interestingly Google had dropped our site completely for our critical phrase (but not our others) in both our local and .com engine. It was a fairly new site, which came in at around 400 in the serps, dropped to 600, dropped right off and is now back at 500 but with a lesser page and not the home page. I have been surprised at:
a) struggling so much with a critical phrase when there are only 265,000 results reflecting
b) how pages drop in and out of the serps being replaced by lesser optimised pages instead.
c) how the number of results returned for a search have been bouncing between high, low and high again.
Starting to think I need to rethink my career path!
Anyone else?
I'm seeing big changes today in my sites (in AU). Big drops in really competitive keywords. I'm trying to figure out what sites have pushed me back, but they all look fairly legit.
p/g
I'm also seeing a big decrease in the number of pages indexed. In fact, I'm seeing this particular value (1,190) which is stuck in my head because my site stayed at that value for a long time. More recently, we had been over 1,300 (which is all pages).
For me, this signals sime kind of rollback. I'm hoping to see more movement in the coming days (fingers crossed).
Yes. A bunch of sitemap errors sprung up as well.
I noticed some site errors last night in webmaster tools too. mine were that there were pages in the sitemap that are now 301'd to their new location. Easily fixed, but a pain.
This has been going on for a while now. First noticed it in December and its now Feb. One week in the serps, one week out the serps, one week in the serps......
Am seriously wondering which set of results is going to eventually roll out....the ones that include us....or the ones that don't?
I have 7 on one site and 4 on another but WMT is not showing all of them and the ones that they are showing are not reporting any links in them.
In addition, I noticed that although Google is visiting my RSS feeds, they have stopped showing them in Google Blog Search.
This is significant because Google used to index the page in the search index as soon as they found it in the RSS feed, but this has not happened since Feb 5.
I tend to think that both of these issues are more of an error with Google and not with my sites.
Im seeing the exact same issue on two sites i monitor - most odd
Cant see any ryhme or reason for it either, other than some half baked attempt to push up adwords sales on sites that get knocked back?.
If it is a case of running different data sets for one week roll on and roll off it doesnt provide the end user with a reliable, stable search facility, so i wouldnt think thats a good idea or likely for the long term - unless it is helping income at google?.
It doesnt look like two sets of stable data to me. It looks like they are rolling back one old data set whilst tweaking the new data set and rolling it out again with the revisions.
This has been going on since pre christmas so its one heck of a long update if that was the case - perhaps this is the future of google search, ever changing data?
Rich
I tend to agree with you, they definitely seem to be rolling between 2 sets of data. Has me a little worried I have to admit because on the one set we're starting to drop out on more than just our critical phrase. Now have 3 targeted phrases nowhere to be found, before it was just the one.
Lets hope this is a temporary thing and that results return to normal. Week before last one of our phrases made it to #3, last week it was #77 and this week #3 again. I sincerely hope that after 2.5 months of this....they find a result to stick with. Even if its one I don't like at least I know where I stand.
This movement is confirmed on that site that keeps their finger on the the pulse of rank. Of course I'm hoping for more changes over the weekend.
I'm noticing a difference between singulars and plural search phrases. One client was performing very well for the singular and plural of a search phrase. The plural has retained it's ranking, though the singular has dropped to nowhere.
I'm thinking that there is some tweaking going on with the word-stemming or grammatical part of the algo.
Traffic seems to be down only marginally, starting in the last 24 hours, and I can't say that I've seen a rollback.
example:
i searched for how to determine parsal post rate to ship an item from one country to another and a freaking ebay listing comes up 5th place about a nude stamp. OMG.
I mentioned this in the last update thread, but it’s just appeared again on my site,
Almost 28 days to the day from the last time I saw them, my site: page totals are showing very similar but strange results on these DC’s
66.249.89.107
64.233.189.107
site:www.example.com 409,000 pages (was showing 512,000)
site:www.example.com/ (no*) 289,000 pages (was showing 196,000)
The only solace I can take in these figures is that both are getting closer to my correct amount the first figure is just below my total, but the second still worries me even though it has increase by 90,000 pages its way under the correct amount, my server adds the trailing slash to the domain so I would have thought that these figures would be identical or near as damn it anyway.
these only appeared for a couple of days last month and then I couldn’t locate the figures again, has anyone seen similar cycles, is this just an update to a DC where pages are being introduced to the DC or am I in for a shock, serp’s on both the DC’s are showing similar results for my site and for other sites that don’t have this happening.
Thoughts would be appreciated.
Vimes.
We have two technologies sites (directly) that only roll to the bottom of the first page and then back to the top again in pretty short order every time Google updates.
One site has a blog, while the other has it's own small (300,000 page) searchable index (technologies search).
Neither have links, per se', that would or would not be reciprocated. And though some services might be sold, these two deal mostly with providing technology information.
There are some service industry sites we manage, that dipped around the 5th, but are back to tops again, and have stayed, all relevant to their terms placing 1 thru 3 on the average. 4 of these are older than 8 years, and have survived well in the serp's through every update.
We manage some retail widget sites that are having somewhat of a rollercoaster ride though.
It's my opinion that Google treats retail widgets differently, because there are more of them.
Technology site types are fewer, so it's most likely more manageable for Google to deal with or otherwise rank them.
Though some of our larger client sites have fallen recently in the index, (and gone back up) their PR has stayed the same.
There were a few smaller sites, (semi-managed with 4,000-8,000 pages) that lost PR, but I attribute this to the big linking panic that's going on right now. They got the notion somewhere that "links" were bad, so both, over 6 years old, dumped all of their links. They would have been fine I think, if they just would have been resigned to riding this out. Neither one of them were penalised according to Google, in the first place. And neither one of them ever thought to consult with Google before dumping their links.
We'll see then. There are no plans to change anything on our end. Save for reassuring U.S. clients that Google is just doing it's Google thing, and things will return, hopefully, for the best, very soon.
I'm noticing a difference between singulars and plural search phrases. One client was performing very well for the singular and plural of a search phrase. The plural has retained it's ranking, though the singular has dropped to nowhere.
Hi Chico,
Same symptom here but more subtle and it started last August. The page in question is the site index page.
The thing that stands out for me is that none of the pages currently in the top 10 have the 2 word term say widget services in this plural form All are optimised for the singular widget service. The individual plural word services does not appear either. The plural widgets occurs only on 2 of the pages at a very low level.
It looks to me like the plural word "services" is acting as a poison word. Could it be that stems that are not in the current google semantic dictionary are seen as spam. Perhaps they are seen as an indication of scripted stemming making up stems that don't exist.
I'm off to remove the offending word to see if that helps, I've nothing to lose as noone actually searches for the stem form anyway. I put it in there after the Florida update and it worked from then until August.
Cheers
Sid
