Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Has anyone recovered from June 4th catastrophe?
[edited by: tedster at 5:43 am (utc) on July 1, 2008]
When things get churned up, does that balance change?
At first I thought this may be a test, but as time goes on I'm starting to wonder if this isn't a more permenant change? Still not seeing this in wide circulation on SERPs though.
...it would be good to figure out if Google is testing your url for it's performance, or testing two different versions of the algorithm.
It's hard to say whether they're watching particular urls so much as watching large numbers of pages as they react to algo changes, evaluating each set of changes, and then noting the combinations that give greatest user satisfaction.
On some searches I'm watching, eg, I'm getting the impression that they're turning the dupe filters higher and lower, while at the same time they're cycling everything except the top one or two pages up and down within various ranges in response to other factors they're evaluating. This on top of the fabled 200 factors, some of which might be stable at any one time.
[edited by: Northstar at 12:36 pm (utc) on July 13, 2008]
For testing I used 10 computers at 4 different locations. At home location, where 2 of the 10 computers were used, only one computer cannot see rankings.
1. Competitor site A ranked first page for all major terms, but ranks nowhere only when searched from one of the 2 computers at home testing. All other locations other offices fine. (noticed around June and still in affect)
2. Our site B ranked first page for all major terms, but ranks nowhere only when searched from same computer location. (noticed in July, but traffic is down slightly since June but holding). Site is 'discretionary' spending dependent so we're blaming the economy.
3. Client site C ranked first page for all major terms. Client has never(in over a year) been able to see his site ranked from his IP location but all other testing locations fine.
4. Other sites we develop can be viewed from all locations even the one 'home' computer mentioned. At least now.
What I find odd is the inability to view specific rankings of specific sites at any one computer time and time again. (at least based on the current testing environment). The above mentioned sites are all ranked well, strong PR's, alexa ratings under 500k and are 5-6 years old.
Interesting: Google Site links are available for all sites, except missing when viewed from that one computer.
My one computer can't be the sole viewer of the rankings loss, how many others are out there that cannot see what all my other locations see.
I realize this is a very specific observation and we're dealing with 1000's of DC's but it's real.
Has anyone ran a test like this? Any insight into what could be wrong or is this a rogue wave about to pummel these sites? Just a tweaking of their algo? Maybe Google is penalizing me for running to many queries from my computer. (kidding)
I used Google's Keyword Tool a few days ago, and noticed that in Firefox it defaulted to English, United States but in Mozilla Seamonkey it defaults to English, United Kingdom.
In Mozilla Seamonkey I had edited the language preferences to be:
[en-gb]
[en]
[en-us]
but in Firefox they had been left at default (assume [en-us] only).
So, browsers do return hidden information to Google, stuff that you might not realise is signalling something about your location, stuff that you might not know about.
Whether it has any effect on SERPs, I have no idea, but I suspect that in some case it might do.
For the third or fourth time in a couple of months we've had to re-verify our nine webmaster-listed sites. No problem - google verified them immediately. The sites range from a few pages to several thousand.
The odd point was: the reason they were all un-verified was that the sites all returned as the "error" when last tested:
"We've detected that your site's home page returns a status of 200 (Success) in the header."
Which I always understood was a GOOD status!
I have to say this doesn't appear to have affected any of the sites' positions significantly but the un-verify probably only happened about 5 days ago during a site scan, so maybe not had time to percolate yet.
For the record: all sites except one have a google sitemap.
A well-established site not included in the webmaster list (and with no sitemap) changed position for ONE set of keywords during the past five hours or so, down from 41 to 44. The actual position isn't too surprising. Other more relevant keywords currently put the site near the top. No detectable positional difference between two computers at the same IP (linux and windows).
We will keep a better eye on the positions than we have done.
This has actually been going on with me for a number of months - sites keep coming up un-verfied and I just click to re-verify them with no problem. I hadn't gotten the 200 (Success) thing until recently however. I'm using meta tags to verify at the moment, think I'm going to try switching to the other method.
Congratulations sahm, my rankings are still no where. Do you have any dupe meta title/desc errors ?
WMT says that I have 73 pages (out of 1,000's) that have duplicate descriptions. I do need to follow up and fix those.
It also says I have about 2,000 duplicate title tags, which are almost all in my message forums, not the main content of my site.
My returned rankings have held through the weekend, I'm keeping my fingers crossed.
dstiles: Same IP location, 2 different computers. Consistently different results.
I did conduct a datacenter check again earlier, this time I checked 30 of them, none of them showed the results I see at my one 'rogue' computer.
How long did the traffic go for?
38 days...
So, browsers do return hidden information to Google, stuff that you might not realise is signalling something about your location, stuff that you might not know about.
I don't suppose any of this is due to google screwing up site verification? Or is that just a side effect?
[edited by: Dave_Hybrid at 11:54 am (utc) on July 14, 2008]
What about the non WMT Homepage owners? Are they not affected by this penalty?
Is google only looking on WMT Homepages? Does google think WMT Users are Seo´s or business-realted pages? This would be easy for google to guess who is a proffesional WM?
Are you using WMT ? I do ! An lost >50% on two domains!
helpnow We also have a full recovery today from June 4 - we are better than before. We made many changes... I can document them if anyone cares. Our 40 days and 40 nights in the wilderness are over.
We'd also be interested in looking at the changes you made. If you'd be so kind, please let us know. We lost most of our google traffic gradually over the course of last month.
Many thanks,
ianama
I've also been monitoring my server logs recently for GoogleBot entries and over the past couple of weeks Googlebot is just reading my sitemapindex and the child sitemaps. Very few of my actual web pages are being crawled.
Could this be related to my sites dropping from the index?
< continued here [webmasterworld.com...] >
[edited by: tedster at 8:04 am (utc) on July 15, 2008]
