Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Looking up what I used to rank for approx 20,00 medium to long phrases then all top listing just disappeared BUT results can now only be described as awful - in fact on one query results 11-20 contained sites from Poland, Germany, Czech, .info and not a single .com or .co.uk - when will Google admit that they really screwed up big time this time?
As my site is a .com hosted on uk servers then it seems that I have now moved to the index for Mars. Time to move to the dark side methinks rather than stay in the Google lottery.
[edited by: tedster at 7:08 pm (utc) on June 6, 2008]
[edit reason] moved from [webmasterworld.com...] [/edit]
What I'm seeing is not a drop ranking of our pages. Instead, I see that a swath of our pages that no longer appear in Google's index. And we haven't made any significant changes to the site in quite a while.
Is anyone else seeing pages actually dropped from Google's index? Any suggestions?
[edited by: tedster at 5:40 pm (utc) on June 6, 2008]
[edit reason] no personal domains please [/edit]
Those with higher traffic sites (say top 10,000 alexa for your country) then please have a dig in your logs to see if we can link the drop to a specific time.
Of course this could be part of the Google masterplan to fill the results with loads of tiddlers to suffocate the bigger fish into buying air from Google!
1. Are you referring to product pages also available in similar guises on many other sites or are we referring to unique informational pages?
2. What has happened to your competitors?
My sites consist of local infomational pages (state, city). All of them got hit.
[edited by: SEOPTI at 8:04 pm (utc) on June 6, 2008]
Well this is a new one for me but I see the results and hope they improve from what I am seeing.
I guess its time to make sure all our sites concentrate on great user experience and contain videos and properly used alt tags
- there are some URLs which for the most part contain links only
- it hits big sites
- sites are hosted in Europe but target US market
- no outbound links
- high PR
[edited by: SEOPTI at 10:09 pm (utc) on June 6, 2008]
in other words - awesome content and usability
Six years old.
4000 pages of content, about 10 links going out with more than 500 coming in, many from other good sites.
White hat SEO.
Only thing that is perhaps unusual - it's editorial info but many pages have photos and about 50 words of text.
Perhaps the solution is to take the 400,000 pages of content - yes they are product pages and turn them into 2,000 x 200 page websites, crosslink them all and buy lots of cheap backlinks as this seems to be the sort of site that Google now favours.
The silence from Google is deafening on this one - we all know they have had UK geo problems and my guess is that they have attempted a fix that is wreaking havoc in some areas.
As an aside, I noticed that Google spider stopped spidering some of my other sites early on Wednesday like it was on holiday or something but today the crawl rate on the PR6 site seems to be running at 3x its normal rate - it is like Google lost a whole block of indexed pages and is now trying to get them all back ASAP. The loss of 100,000 pages would clearly hit ranking if internal support pages were lost and the unusual spider activity is certainly something that I have not experienced before - the one thing a large site has in its favour is the remarkable predictability of activity so when that predictability disappears then one notices the impact pretty quickly.
Time to chill for a couple of days, touch nothing and see what happens.
[edited by: confuscius at 11:03 pm (utc) on June 6, 2008]
It is an affiliate site, with lots of content. Lots of internal linking from subordinate pages to main page. No repetitive (or redundant links). Some, but not many, outbound links.
I'm hoping that this is just another Google screw-up !
Good solid site, 10 years old, NO recip links despite lots of requests,
White Hat (in fact no Hat as we just don't do anything at all just write our site)
Only one country was hit. Our oldest and largest site (4 years). Go figure.
1,000,000 pages still indexed for the lost country site though. No obvious penalties.
I can search for some of our unique titles and find a high result other are gone. That being said we are a long tail site so we have 1000s of keywords constantly changing so not beholden to a few keywords.
We do very very little linking out without a NOFOLLOW.
Emailed back and forth with Google, they said they couldn't see anything wrong. (shut off our AdWords account so I could get someone to talk to me)
No link exchanges or link campaigns. We're web standardistas. Absolutely no black hat strategies. We try to escape out any UGC trickery. Some users could have slipped something by us and we're still checking but its unlikely.
We have a footer that links to each country site. Had it for a long time. It's not an SEO trick, it's a legit navigation so our users can jump countries. Could be that?
Firstly, the number of search results being reported on some popular UK products seems to have fallen dramatically - my guess would be 80-90% reduction.
Secondly, and I find this one amazing, I am starting to see sites where the total number of NON SUPPLEMENTAL pages being reported in the serps is significantly more than the total number of pages INCLUDING supplemental pages - the numbers are nonsense.
Thirdly, for say a five word search then the cache reports say two of the words on the page and say three of the words in links pointing to the page BUT the words linking to the page seem highly unlikely. Could this be the effect of all of these external search type query parameters being hosted on remote sites? If this is the case then it seems that the spammers may well have found a way of unduly affecting the Google algo.
Very interesting times. I am now going to chill!
By the way Adesense is our biggest earner with a few affiliates.
I'm going to forget about it for a while and just continue to get excited by the new iphone on Monday.
What are they trying to accomplish with this step, hurt innocent sites so they get more Adwords money?
[edited by: SEOPTI at 12:27 am (utc) on June 7, 2008]
Are the websites that experienced a massive drop hosted in the US or Europe?
Have you noticed a significant change in the number of supplemental pages listed in Google.com for your website?
I have noticed a significant change this week in the numbers of supplemental pages for one of our websites. Most of our traffic came from the top 5 listed pages anyway, so we did not experience the same level of traffic drop.
[edited by: CainIV at 4:20 am (utc) on June 7, 2008]
Are the websites that experienced a massive drop hosted in the US or Europe?
One site i watch is hosted in US with UK TLD
.... I still continue to think there has been a major algorithmn adjustment to Google which is applying to some sites . See [webmasterworld.com...]
Initially, I thought there were some problems with the geo filtering being screwed up with regards to the UK, but I'm not sure about this statement in isolation. Maybe it's a bug and maybe it's not.
Since it's hard to pinpoint we really need a lot of information to decipher the problem or adjustment that G has put in place . If it is only UK related sites, then my hunch is that this could be rolled out in other regions with more aggressive filtering.
Some things I'd like to know or qualify , especially from the long established members here or folks with long established sites, are things like this :
- is this purely selective
- is it only high PR sites and if so what level of PR
- is it only UK related sites and does that mean the TLD and/or hosting [ chief suspect is geo filtering issues ]
- do these sites have an inbalance of linking techniques e.g. lot's of navigation IBL's , footer IBL's ,
- do these sites publish frequent content
My observation so far is that it has been
- highly selective in a competitve niche to a minority of sites
[ total stability around the site i watch ]
- effected by a combination of factor
[ not sure what right now ie one factor in isolation isn't enough to send a site down, more one event combined with another is. This is because I'm observiing others using the same techniques which are unaffected ]
-effected by introduction of high PR link/s , leading to
- recent upward PR increases [ not visible on toolbar ]which have caused a re assessment of the site's "trust" rank.
- it only effects UK TLD's [ need more info on this ]
- a further discounting of low value pages bringing the overall PR down
- thin affiliate sites or sites with aggregated content been only effected [ not 100% on this - just some sites I'm watching ]
- linking stagnation or momentum altered
- lack of fresh , original content
Actually, my feeling is that it's nothing new , it's just more aggressive in it's selection of sites
In the case of one site I'm observing, for any phrase or content [ exact match and broad match ] the whole site has been tanked to between -40 to -60 on phrases that should rank. Not one single exception. When it initially disappeared from Google it was completely off the index for 3 days.
This might correspond to recent discussion by Googler John Mu about the - 60 penalty which appears to have been acknowledged , which would seem to be based on a recent change at G. Some folks have reported improvements coming back quickly with a site clean up.
But there's not enough reports to be sure.
My concern is that the recovery could be indefinite and have effected the trust rank of effected sites - and of course communicating with G through WMT leaves webmasters are exposed to hand checks which could expose other inadvertent nasties and one way communication.
[edited by: Whitey at 5:00 am (utc) on June 7, 2008]
- is a large, authority niche site
- main page PR 5 - PR has not increased or decreased in years
- is hosted in the U.S.
- has many incoming and outgoing links
- contains original and reprinted articles; no product pages
- is updated several times a week with new content
- is linked to from many of the smaller sites ranking above mine
My competitors seem not to be affected as far as I can tell. The top 10 sites for my main search term are same as usual except mine is missing.
There is no rhyme or reason to the positions of my pages that are still ranking in the index. Each term is ranked at a different position - my main term is currently ranked at #15.
is hosted in the U.S.
Is it a UK TLD , .com or other ?
Have there been reports of these issues prior to June 4 -5 ? Our observation relates to events starting 24 May. Alterations were 8 days prior.
[edited by: Whitey at 5:10 am (utc) on June 7, 2008]
I have a few questions for those have experienced this drop.Are the websites that experienced a massive drop hosted in the US or Europe?
Have you noticed a significant change in the number of supplemental pages listed in Google.com for your website?
Hosted in US but our theme is non US
Sorry, we don't follow supplemental results at all as we just see our traffic in our logs, don't really take much notice of keyword eitehr.
To be honest we just write our site and don't bother about anything elese.
Site is 10 years old, 100's of pages, all original articles and photos .
Google adsense on most pages.
Traffic is pityful right now.
our ONE site that disappeared is in the us
