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]
Only common theme thus faar seems to be Age of Domain. My content doesn't change all that much - maybe that's the combo they are hitting.
I'm sure this update is not about thin affiliates
My sense is that the algo may have shifted up a number of notches on a number of factors. So thin affiliates alone may not be a single factor , but part of a combination of factors.
All i can say is it's something pretty significant in Google's attempt to quality control results better. It has to do with content and link profiles , but the finer details of the filtering continue to elude me.
Factors that may resist the vulnerability in this recent fall are likely built into the historical trust profile of the sites, but there has to be something that has pushed the sites involved in the June changes over the edge. They may have been pushing the limits of Google's tolerance.
[edited by: Whitey at 1:44 am (utc) on June 21, 2008]
Given the dramatically increased spider activity then my money is still on a 'bad data push' type event - so I lost the vast bulk of positions for one Google cycle. Let's see if it sticks.
One thing that is clear from my recent logs is the very large number of times that Google is spidering pages with the construct of example.com/search.php?c=#*$!X&q=SEARCHTERM&search.x=1&search.y=1 - the give away being the co-ordinates of the mouse in the search box - all top left and same position! That is to say NOT generated by a human - the effect of this being that Google is turning my structured site into an array of search terms. I am not concerned given the size of the site then just about any dictionary word / phrase should return some content for Google to chew on. It will be interesting to see how this progresses but early signs are that the traffic is back.
I doubt that we will ever know what actually happened on 4 June to wreak such havoc on the chosen ones. I must have just been hit by the +950 filter.
About 10am EST 90% of our traffic disappeared. It was all at once. I run a script which shows real time visitors to my site and watched them go from 70+ to about 5 or 6 in a matter of minutes. The only visitors were repeats and msn, Yahoo etc.
Started trying to figure out what was going on and, first, checked to see if pages were still indexed - they were.
Began running queries - more and more specific and couldn't find the site for any of the normal keywords or combinations thereof. Could only find the site with one obscure keyphrase which isn't searched often.
Got scared and started trying to figure out how to tell my wife that 90% of our income disappeared.
Turned off the computer and took a break.
Returned 3 hours later and traffic was back to normal.
I thought it was some sort of a hiccup until I read this thread. Now it seems it may have been a filter that was applied and perhaps tweaked. Evidently the site in question was on the edge of whatever was being filtered.
Perhaps google has a new mind reading algo and was so concerned about their loss of adwords income from the adsense on my site and the dramatic effect that that it could possibly impact on their stock price in the long term that they decided to let me back in!
I did not get out of jail on this occasion but Google dismantled the jail around me to set me free as I have just sat sitting in the exact same place for the last 3 weeks and did nothing other than to tell Google that my site had a UK focus.
Looking at the cache dates on the now visible pages these are a mix of post and pre 4 June and so I can find no evidence to support any other conclusion other than MY DATA WAS LOST FROM THE GOOGLE DATA SET and after a basic full re-spider then I have slotted back into the original unchanged algo at my original position. Google screwed up their data and they are still trying to recover it but that is just my view.
So, no penalties, no algo changes, just a plain old 'we screwed up and lost your data' issue.
“Google screwed up their data and they are still trying to recover it but that is just my view.
So, no penalties, no algo changes, just a plain old 'we screwed up and lost your data' issue.
”
[edited by: SEOPTI at 7:19 pm (utc) on June 21, 2008]
northweb
confuscius
As the June 4 fiasco has affected a lot of sites with traffic then I thought that it would be interesting to compare the traffic profile over time as reported on a well known RANK website. I have looked at a number of UK centric websites - the one thing in common is that they all rank within the alleged top 5,000 most trafficked sites in the UK - the shape of the graphs of about 1/3 of the sites that I looked were very similar and show a clear effect on 4/5 June. The other interesting aspect to the shape of the graph is that virtually every affected site is showing a significant increase in traffic during the second half of May running up to the drop, so it is as if TOO MUCH TRAFFIC has been going to the most popular sites and then some sort of brake filter has been applied indicating an earlier algo change with the undesired traffic effect from Google's perspective and then a deliberate manipulation of search results as a consequence that some large advertisers were getting too much 'free' traffic.So, for once we have an INDEPENDENT means that we can all use to see this effect - in fact, I see no reason why we should ALL not try to find as many examples of the graph shape for as many websites as possible and post them all over the web, just to grab Google's attention, as I believe there has not been one single word from them on what they did on 4 June.
anyway, I thought it was a fluke after we recovered, but I know I guess it was not. ;-(
Does it seem like the singular and plural are being treated differently to others? I have seen significant swings in 'widget' vs 'widgets', 'widget for sale' vs 'widgets for sale', 'widget maker' vs 'widget makers', etc.
Hi,
This is starting to sound like Google may have extended their phrase based "dictionary" to include more specific commercial terms. There were a few reports earlier in the year that using a plural of one word in a two word term brought sites that had been dropped down the serps back near the top.
It would be interesting to hear if this is the case with this round of changes.
Cheers
Sid
Any idea why we would see such dramatic improvement all of a sudden, even on pages that haven't been touched in a while? Anyone else seen dramatic changes in the past 2 weeks?
(Can it be that SEO is also a lot about luck? We employ the same tactics for both sites, but they have different navigations- could that affect things?)
Thanks as always!
[edited by: tedster at 1:15 pm (utc) on June 22, 2008]
[edit reason] moved from another location [/edit]
That would have been my input regarding plurals. Currently for my main keyword singular I'm number 13, page two, as a plural it's number 3, page one.
Lovejoy
Yes, navigation differences could well be a factor. Without posting specifics, can you give us more of an idea of how the navigation differs on your two sites?
I'm thinking about leaving the web business once and for all ... I'm in the business for more than 10 years but with this Google monopoly there is no chance than to rely on these ignorant and arrogant people who don't respect our content.
No change as far as the June 5th slaughter for a site which from one day to the next went from rotating wildly between pos 4-11 to page 16! Can't believe its a penalty and if it is a penalty then Google is getting worse at separating what the user wants and what Google 'think' people want. If only we could 'show' Google the kind of feedback we get about our site and the service we provide.
Not only you, I'm finished completely, they put 16 of my sites in the -950 box on 4 June (all of them).I'm thinking about leaving the web business once and for all ... I'm in the business for more than 10 years but with this Google monopoly there is no chance than to rely on these ignorant and arrogant people who don't respect our content.
