Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I've wondered too as to why some search terms are affected more than others and some result pages are changing around while other barely move.
Has anyone seen any relationship between how popular a search the term is and how much movement is going on?
As to when it will end I don't think we can predict as nothing quite like this has gone on before.
[edited by: tedster at 2:48 am (utc) on June 1, 2008]
Regarding your comment on my second example, I think you are simply seeing different results than me.
[edited by: Mark7144 at 10:41 am (utc) on June 5, 2008]
What I see is:
#1 News results for Mr Murray
#2 Home page and site links for the sullen tennis player
#3 Homepage with query string
What I was eluding to re site links was the fact thet the site is authoritive and significant enough for Google to generate sitelinks for #2.
#3 Somewhere there must be some links back with this query string in them.
Cheers
Sid
Yes, there must be a link to it with this query string. Maybe I will link to my home page with a bunch of non-existent query strings in the hope of dominating the SERPs with duplicate content ;)
[edited by: Mark7144 at 11:19 am (utc) on June 5, 2008]
You can send a 404 or 403, or a 301 redirect to the correct version of the URL.
.co.uk results have gone crazy again this morning
I'm watching one site bouncing around like crazy , 2 days ago 41 , now 61 , 7 days ago off the index , previously ranking highly . Other sites around it are more or less stable. However , changes were put through this site that appears to have provided some filtering issues.
I continue to suspect a new algo over the last month has been applied and it is having trouble coping with some amendments related to content and linking.
Because the most common thing to happen is very bad. What you describe virtually never happens, so nobody should try to do that.
Yesterday's grey practices are tomorrow's penalties.
They only seem to listen when they realise have really broken their algo seriously. The rest of the time they take long lunches playing street hockey and dreaming of their next holiday.
Cheers
Sid
[edited by: Mark7144 at 8:53 am (utc) on June 6, 2008]
Sorry but you will never qualify for a job at Googleplex with that attitude ;)
Cheers
Sid
No
Between here and Webmaster Group you must have posted a couple dozen times on this. It will be transient, so give yourself a break and dont stress about it.
The #1 returns a 404
#2 does not provide what is being searched for and we are at #3.
FWIW IMO its much more acceptable,from the users point of view, to have a URL with a query string that does at least resolve to one that returns a 404.
If the guys at Google care about search quality at all they care about what users get not about being fair to webmasters.
Cheers
Sid
Why does it mean so much to me? I'm a few days away from receiving what should be the largest traffic boost of the year lasting 1-3 weeks.
If this isn't fixed in time then I will feel absolutely gutted that my annual traffic boost was considerably lowered due to a mistake in an update to the Google algorithm.
[edited by: Mark7144 at 10:00 am (utc) on June 6, 2008]
All the crap about "right good content get in bound links and google will rank you high" is crap, because you can easily buy tons of links from India scrape content and then get ranked higher than the original content provider.
Big 'G' shocked me as well. Serps dropped to 1/10th and so do adsense earnings. It happened Yesterday.
Just a point i need to clarify, is having very few or no outbound links can cause an issue. My site is a vbulletin forum and i use a mod to hide urls from guest users . ie. No outbound links in the page other than some copyright notices in the footer. Will this be considered as a problem?
Also I enabled my RSS feeds a few days back ( which i turned off last December after a -950 penalty) and i can see a few scrapper sites already indexed a couple of hundreds of pages and Google indexed them all.
It is difficult to know what is a problem and what is a coincidence. After a particular update a few of us noted that directories and scraper directories were rising to the top and sites that had no outlinks were sinking. I and a few others put some carefully chosen outlinks on our home pages and elsewhere this might be a similar issueges in the sites and this seemed to help. This may have been a coincidence.
I've noticed a few people saying that scraper sites and directories were rising to the top again and wondered if this might be a similar issue.
I'm never patient enough to try one thing at a time and so I can never really learn what works and what doesn't in the mix of tweaking that I seem to be constantly doing.
Cheers
Sid
PS I used to have links to the directory pages where I am listed on ODP, yahoo and Google directory using my target keywords. I was convinced that this was keeping us at the top for years and then after we dropped back last August I took them off because someone fed my paranoia about these being the problem.
In other words I wouldn't listen to me if I was you ;)
I'm really proud of our site, we get lots of link requests which I ignore (so not to upset Google) and we get emails all the time saying how great our site is.
So I am taking the approach, that if you cant beat them - join them.
Just off to source a indian firm that can get me 500 blog links a day.(Only Joking Big G don't slap me anymore please.)
Big 'G' shocked me as well. Serps dropped to 1/10th and so do adsense earnings. It happened Yesterday.
Note that we had a sudden flood of this kind of report - even from webmasters of large, well established and high PR. There's a separate thread about it, which maybe should stay separate to focus on the shift: Major Ranking Losses - 2008 June 4 [webmasterworld.com]
[edited by: tedster at 7:10 pm (utc) on June 6, 2008]
I'm a few days away from receiving what should be the largest traffic boost of the year lasting 1-3 weeks.
I guess Google is patting themselves on the back in your case with all the data gathering they do. Either up your Adwords spend or start spending with Adwords for those three weeks. As Matt Cutts ranted in some lesser seen posts. “What do they expect for free, nobody should depend on search results for a living.” Its evolved to “they” against “us” I guess. Of course it pretty well goes without saying Google can depend on the results for a living.
Anyway i have decided to disable that url hiding mod and switch back to the old forum skin. In addition to this i turned off the rss also.
Now i'm lurking though all my incoming links and requested removal of a few of them.
There's a separate thread about it, which maybe should stay separate to focus on the shift: Major Ranking Losses - 2008 June 4
Thanks tedster. I'm on it.
switch back to the old forum skin
This is one of the things that has caught my eye for a while. There seems to be an under current in some posts regarding the change of something especially images, usemaps, colors, gifs, navigation that utilizes hot spots, image labeling, etc. Makes me wonder if Google is having problems interpreting some design elements with their current algo or they’re intentionally flagging to inspect with a re-inclusion request.
Each year I change my site's template - starting from scratch so it has a fresh look and feel for the new year. I don't think Google has even blinked at it.
