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]
Could this be an evolution of whatever Google was trying to do with the Position #6 Mistake [webmasterworld.com] we saw in Dec and Jan? It's for sure that many of those former #1 results did not migrate all the way back to #1 when Google fixed the position 6 mistake. Instead they are staggering their way up and back down the top 5.
This is very hard to research, and I would have had no suspicions about the changes at all if we hadn't notice the position 6 thing back in December. But some new factor has certainly removed the anchor from long time rankings. I am still looking into the "Query Revision" idea - Google trying to improve SERPs that show a high likelihood of a second query immediately after the first.
Working with this idea a bit, I've noticed that it may NOT be a good idea to try to rank one page for all those "related searches" at the bottom of the SERP. I know of several attempts that were followed by a ranking drop a few days later. There's even one case where the url didn't rank well for any of the related searches at all. They added one extra term to the page and the page fell. In this case, the 2-month history of the url is: fell from #1 (after years in that spot) down to #6 in December. Then it began to climb back up: 4 - 3 - 2. But now with the related search term added, it's down to #5.
These are just one-off anecdotes, and they certainly don't prove anything. Just an idea I'm working with right now.
It’s wondering! My 2-3 sites having top ranking for last four to five months. From this month, ranking plays hide and seek. For this week the ranking is totally disappear and for those same keywords ranking was in top 10. I have not changed any content or design for my sites. I regularly update the site and using all the SEO Strategies. What is happening to my rankings? Anyone have any idea? The sites are UK targeted.
Thanks
[edited by: tedster at 6:42 am (utc) on Feb. 15, 2008]
[edit reason] moved from another location [/edit]
All seems to be back to normal (pre-Jan 30).
All SE rankings (including old competition) and traffic is back to normal as of yesterday. Seems Google fixed what was broken.
While we were in the valley we did a lot of cleaning up. We corrected a few sitemap errors, did proper 301 redirects for some possible canonicalization issues, cleaned up the code, parsed some bad content, found some sites duplicating our content - reported them, then submitted a very friendly reinclusion request.
Hope this sticks.
We recently included a new term on our homepage and our rankings are literally changing twice a week!
The curious thing is that the site cannot rank well for both terms at the same time. At each change in the serps, the one phrase puts us in at rank 5 (we used to be No 2), whilst the new phrase is sitting on page 3.
When the new phrases jumps to page one (rank 5), the primary phrase drops to 7 or 8.
I'd also like to point out something pretty spectacular.
One of the most common phrases for my country actually has a BLANK webpage firmly planted in the 4th spot. There are NO internal pages. The secret? thousands of one way links, links from wordpress and links that have been bought. i am afraid the link filter has been turned up high again in the algo. i really think google is a seriously cr*p search engine if blank sites are ranked high in the index.
BLANK webpage firmly planted in the 4th spot.
One site that is ranking number one for a phrase has that phrase on it... however the rest of the text on the site is gibberish. Literally... words spelled wrong intentionally and some spelled backwards!
The real kicker is that if you click to "purchase" the item ..... It goes to Amazon!
What is up?
Before that time when using the site: command we were rock steady with 1,280 pages in their index. Starting in February the number jumps around on a daily basis - hitting a low of around 1,130 and today showing 1,230. I see no reason that we wouldn't return to our former spots as we continue to get quality links to our content.
Working with this idea a bit, I've noticed that it may NOT be a good idea to try to rank one page for all those "related searches" at the bottom of the SERP. I know of several attempts that were followed by a ranking drop a few days later.
I'm wondering whether Google is suddenly more negatively sensitive than it used to be about onpage changes that involve modifiers to targeted phrases... even if the change isn't actually changing the targeted phrase, but involves changing an adjective that's adjacent to it.
One of the main ways Google scrutinizes "SEO sites" (sites optimizing for competitive targets) is how often they change, and what type of changes are made, I suspect. Are the changes natural? Many on-page adjustments aren't reasonably justified unless they're only for SEO.
I'm seeing sites that fiddle a lot are getting kicked.
Google probably has a ratio in its algo to compare the rate of new page additions to the rate of on-page editing of old pages. If the old pages get edited much more often than new pages are added (except for new internal links to new pages), it's a red flag.
p/g
If that's true then something else is happening to our site. We don't do SEO beyond the very basics and NEVER "fiddle."
If I were paranoid I would attribute our drop to getting a couple of links from the Yahoo directory last month.
Best of luck to everyone, I'm out of this thread.
I have seen this yoyoing before (the first time I freaked!), now I just watch it and do nothing.
But this time it was a bit long...
IMO its finished, everybody agree?
I'm seeing sites that fiddle a lot are getting kicked.
How would you tell the difference between a Google imposed fiddle penalty and something inadvertently done by the webmaster during fiddleing which directly affected the pages rank in the normal algo?
Cheers
Sid
I have been making these types of changes for years -- could it be that I am now being (unfairly) penalized for this ? My intent is purely to keep the numerical data current. Am I to sacrifice the value of my site by not fiddling ? Surely, Google has their head up their rear again, if this is the case.
Or is this part of another algo change once again ?
Most keywords 950'd & the homepage bouncing constantly from page 3 - page 5.
We came back for 2 days, SE Traffic Quadrupled & all positions were back to page 1.
Now we're back to two days ago, buried.
I added an "affiliate.htm" web page off my main page well over a month ago. This page allows visitors in my industry to become sub-affiliates under me. Could this be the culprit ? Here are some other issues that I'm starting to think may be causing me problems:
1) The "affiliate.htm" page has been spidered by Googlebot many
times in the last month + (at least 10 times) Google visits my
sitemap regularly (at least once every 2 days), and correctly
fetched that file on at least 10 occassions. However, the page
is still NOT indexed by Google;
2) Google is known not to like affiliate sites - is the direct page
reference of "affiliate.htm" bothersome to Google ?
3) Here's another issue that I brought up in another thread: I have
many different websites under my domain (let's call it
www.example.com). These are in the form of subdirectories:
www.example.com/sub1/index.htm
www.example.com/sub2/index.htm
.
.
.
www.example.com/subN/index.htm
I have pages named "affiliate.htm" under some of these other
subdirectory trees (the content of this page is totally different
from the one specified above). These pages too, are not indexed
by Google. Could it be that Google does NOT like page names
that named the same under the same domain, even though they are
located under different subdirectories ? Tedster seems to think
not, unless there are canonical issues at stake (which doesn't
seem to be the case here). Here's the reference to that
thread -> [webmasterworld.com...]
Any thoughts, please reply.
Thanks.
[edited by: tedster at 2:44 am (utc) on Feb. 21, 2008]
[edit reason] switch to example.com - it can never be owned [/edit]
Just wondering if many of the changes we have seen over the last year, including the #6 mistake could be linked to the Google bomb diffuser element of the algo.
If the "Google bomb diffuser" included a dictionary of words and terms, coupled with the ability to sense if the use of anchor text fitted with the theme of a site or page and then discount that link if it did not fit with the semantic theme of both ends of the link, that would go some way to explaining what I'm seeing. Exactly the same mechanism could be used to find any unnatural anchor text and back links.
If you then extended the "dictionary" (in August 2007) to include a wide range of commercial terms and terms that are heavilly spammed then I think we are most of the way there to an explanation of what has happenned since August.
If I'm right, then in our case, Google's spam paranoia has had a very expensive side effect that will take some time to recover.
Cheers
Sid
I'm seeing a HUGE infusion of affiliate sites that have some relevant content, but the majority of the page is giberish. It's very apparent that they are running content through some sort of program that swaps out words so that they dont have duplicate content issues with the original content.
Sad thing is that these pages are ranking VERY high!
Sad thing is that these pages are ranking VERY high!
I've always found that these sudden influxes are country specific. The UK had it for some time but it got under control. Which Google are you searching on?
Has anyone considered that Google may be performing tests trying to prevent a Russian Malware Attack that poisons search results that's been reported on various Tech sites for months?
I may by cynical but I've only seen reports of this that stem from software companies who benefit from raising fears of this sort.
Also to be honest it's complete tosh. So some kid has collected every virus and trojan he can find and has put them on a server so that other kids can get hold of them. Whats new about that?
I'm convinced that some form of link valuing based on semantic checking or source and destination is what we are seeing and the ongoing changes are caused by the folks at Googleplex playing with the knobs.
Cheers
Sid
Maybe google tought that i was modifying to much the old pages, and didnt bring any new pages.
I posted a reinclusion request as well
Do you think i will get reindexed ?
