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]
Their ignorance is still awful. A multi billion dollar company is not able to communicate a few minutes with the people who provide all the content.
Where would they be without our content? What the heck, what's wrong with these people? Do they also treat their shareholders the same way?
Whoever likes ignorant people, I don't.
[edited by: SEOPTI at 8:16 pm (utc) on June 15, 2008]
An algorithm that looks at the freshness of topics may be inclined to view old pages as 'stale' and reduce ranking scores for those pages.
This might also explain the resurgence of Universal Search media popping in and out of position 4 and even position 1 for topics, since news would be considered the freshet form of media imho.
1. Since we've been talking about losses on short competitive queries, was the affected url your domain root? Or have some high performing internal urls also been hit hard?2. For those whose competitors who did not fall, can you spot any key differences between your site and the ones that stayed?
ROOT URL
and mostly what we an see as a "cookie cutter" "landing page looking site", text heavy 3 pages including the buy page
starting to crawl back up for five word terms and some four word terms
but was #1` for two word very niche terms
1. Since we've been talking about losses on short competitive queries, was the affected url your domain root? Or have some high performing internal urls also been hit hard?
2. For those whose competitors who did not fall, can you spot any key differences between your site and the ones that stayed?
Traffic to the home page was negligible for my website. The internal pages are all those affected. A few of my competitors are also hit. But the grand-daddy of all ( the biggest site in my niche and exact type) still unaffected. It's now around alexa 5000 range with over a million pages indexed.
Running the same forum script and similar content. The main differences i spotted a) Non SEOed standard vBulletin urls. b) Default vBulletin template.
Is over optimization matters?
The website I’m talking about is a kind of tech community (10 years old domain) with mainly user generated content, with a lot of active members daily. We run similar websites on one and the same server using the same CMS. I do not agree that we have a SEO issue here, nor a server/software performance issue.
Exactly the same scenario. Same kind of website, same niche. Is your urls keyword rich or 301ed?
I'm wondering if these "old" and established sites with millions of outdated pages are falling victim to this:From the Official Google Blog:
Recently, we improved our algorithms to process new information faster, and the result is quite tangible -- you should now see fresher suggestions for queries on current topics of interest.
I strongly believe this is a relevant factor here. Means it's not a penalty and probably no recovery from it.
Anyone here affected that does NOT have Google Analytics on their sites ?
I don't have it. I pulled it out in last December when i got hit by a -950.
So what's the solution? Do they expect us to rewrite pages for the sake of being fresh! Do we write additional pages about the same topic? Do we write content just for the sake of it? Surly that's not what the end user wants. If a page has been indexed and well ranked for 5+ years why if the end user finds it useful would that be a problem? I agree if our site was a news site or a site that required constant updating then such an algo should apply but I don't think it should apply across the board for the sake of freshness. Water with the baby comes to mind.
If Google does not want us old school, white hat, established sites to go off and mess around with a perfectly good site then why not simply state that older sites should consider xyz. At least then we have an informed choice with the end user in mind.
This reminds me of the issue of speed cameras. If the purpose of them is to slow traffic then why do they hide them?
Where would they be without our content? What the heck, what's wrong with these people? Do they also treat their shareholders the same way?
The question is where would they be without "your" content. And I'm sure they'd be fine without it. There are only a handful of sites that are actually "needed" by search engines. The most commonly searched for terms will always have relevant results unless everyone agreed to block Googlebot from their servers ... And that's not going to happen! The smaller terms are no longer a big concern for Google as savvy users will now simply adjust their search themselves rather than curse the results.
If 50% of the webmaster community added noindex to their pages the Google end user would probably not notice a difference, especially with there now generally being an equal number of PPC and natural results on any given results page. If 50% of the webmaster community added nofollow to their pages or hid outbounds in javascript or redirects then Google could have an actual problem, your site's only worth to Google is the outbound links ... (not that I'm suggesting anything) ... ;)
Do they expect us to rewrite pages for the sake of being fresh!
Very doubtful, my information is both authoratative and evergreen and my two core sites, both 14+ years, have seen nothing discernible other than some longer tail searches.
I have been affected on a couple of small brochure sites, both 10 years old and I really can't work out why other than to assume now that it has been a bad data push since these two sites are either #1 or not to be seen at all.
I'm sure Google's playing hide and seek with some of us!
I have been affected on a couple of small brochure sites
I've just been checking my logs and these two sites were first affected immediately after the maintenance weekend of April 12/13th. Since then they've bounced up and down like a yo-yo with +/-50% of the traffic!
BUT if I change to strict filtering the the number of supposed results on .com ( as seen from within .co.uk) goes down by 10% but the supposed results on .co.uk goes down by 90%! That is nonsense.
So, if the whole UK had had strict filtering turned on then 90% of my pages in the UK would no longer be visible on .co.uk but 90% would be visible on the .com option with google.co.uk - that is just a plain crazy set of figures.
I am wondering if a load of images have been tagged as adult for some reason and this had then led to my pages being classified as adult and then no longer visible, etc, etc. BTW 90% of my images are NOT adult but they all have alt tags and if the alt tags were being used to identify an adult image then clearly pages with no alt tags would benefit!
It could be that values where is the link, top (my principal menu), left (all menu), center (content), right (blogroll!), bottom (exchange)
In the last week GWT is reporting a 20% drop in backlinks to our oldest site which is in the hundreds of thousands for backlinks so this is a large amount they have cut out. To me this is a good indication of new filters being applied.
Our longtail has changed by a large percentage to completely new phrases never before seen.
Our spidering has increased dramatically.
Our traffic is unchanged.
[edited by: SEOPTI at 3:27 pm (utc) on June 16, 2008]
I agree that most older pages do lose rankings but do improve if you update / re-write the content.
My affected site has no affiliate content at all, has been around for years, has adsense and display ads and is a directory site. My unaffected site has also been around for years and has lots of affiliate content. The main difference is the affected site is a .co.uk domain, totally UK centric content and aimed at the UK but hosted in the US, the unaffected site is totally international in content, is a .net site and is hosted in the UK.
Not too sure what to make of this, so far I have sat tight to see what happens but am beginning to think I need to do something!
My guess after reading here, they might be trying to filter UK related results. We can rule this out if someone got very few UK results in the past, and was also hit.
Even some of the older pages on my site are working well and appearing on top yet but most of the new pages that used to come on top are gone and nowhere to be found.
My site is hosted in Canada and the content is US centric I used to get 500 unique visits per day and this has come down to 50 from Google Search with this said I am sure it has nothing to do with US or UK hosted sites .
By going through all the posts we could not come to any logic behind the drop in traffic and for sure this could not be a Algo tweak if it is an Algo tweak there would have been a good trail of similar affected sites.
Only one thing is common amongst all the affected sites that is the date 4th June and nothing else to draw a conclusion except for the date and time of the event.
I feel GOOG has lost trail of rankings of the affected sites and need to re index before every thing comes back to normal this should take about one to three months.
If any one else has a different opinion then mine please post back I would be very thank full to you
First one similar to this one happened almost a year ago. On June 29th 2007 the traffic from Google dropped for 50%. By July, 1st 2007 the loss increased to 80%. It had last for 2 months and then it started slightly to improve on September 1st, 2007. Everything get back to normal on October 1st, 2007. Then on March 2nd, 2008 we experienced similar drop with 4/5 of traffic got lost over night. However, 10 days later (on March 12th ), we turned back to normal. Everything was pretty normal until the June 4th following with June 5th we just lost 80% of our Google traffic.
