Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
That's the Ghost Dataset.
I don't see it as a bad thing those home pages went "missing". I see it as a good thing.
Hi Whitenight
Would you be kind enough to explain your rationale for this please.
Cheers
[edited by: tedster at 9:28 pm (utc) on Nov. 5, 2008]
We roared back when Matt said the problem was fixed (we glitched Oct 31st for a short part of the day, and then fully returned on Nov 1st, 4am or so in the early morning)
The trust dial is completely at work here, I can't even rank for my site name with the 8 sitelinks I've had for many, authortative years...
I don't know if this is G going through yet another one of its tweaks but gumtree is now taking 7 of the top 20 places on one of the terms I monitor and other terms are looking just as bad, overall the serps are looking poor anyone else seeing the same
[edited by: tedster at 4:37 pm (utc) on Nov. 9, 2008]
October 31st was the Halloween special Google gave us; I wonder if there is any correlation to this?
[edited by: KevinSource at 9:19 pm (utc) on Nov. 10, 2008]
[64.233.179.184...]
[64.233.187.84...]
Anybody else have noticed the same?
May be this TBPR update would be announced during PubCon. Lets wait and see ;-)
allinurl = site is not #1, no sitelinks, etc...
Pagerank = intact, no visible change
site:mydomain.com= all pages present; even more are indexed
googlebot= moderate crawling; nothing different than before I believe
Adwords Pay-Per-click= tremendously positive developments on October 31st and on (likely coincidental); increased QS, rankings for the same bid price... I know organic search and ppc are apples and oranges, but you have to wonder how far this glitch extends... a penalty (at the minimum) one would think your cpc prices, quality scores to be negatively affected, not the opposite..
Where long standing #1 rankings have dropped to page 5-7, I am seeing an "indented" effect where the homepage and subpage are displaying in an indented listing type format.
Super respected authority sites (we are talking industry leaders, some as old as 1996, playing by the white hat book) can't even rank for their brand name, nor do their long standing sitelinks appear.
Moreover, it doesn't matter whether your site is ecommerce or affiliate based; I've personally observed sites in either niche suffering.
Interesting enough, the query www.mydomain.com does rank these missing authority sites #1 with their sitelinks- which is positive I guess?
Google Webmaster Guidelines Stipulate:
"Verify that your site ranks for your domain name
Do a Google search for www.[yourdomain].com. If your site doesn't appear in the results, or if it ranks poorly in the results, this is a sign that your site may be penalized for violations of the webmaster guidelines."
I'm just not convinced this is penalty related, just too many sites having identical issues (with an already known google confirmed problem). If October 31st was indeed an anomaly (per Matt Cutts) and quick fix Nov. 1st...then Nov 6th-7th where we saw a re-appearance of this "glitch" returning----I guess we'll hold out hope (lol) Nov. 13th and 14th will produce some kind of positive update to these remaining authority sites.
It's a bit hard to keep the faith...out of 8 billion websites, google has somehow lost a long standing, respected site? I agree something has flagged these authority sites (webmaster being guilty or I guess it's not completely impossible; right now they can't rid themselves of all this .edu spam that has invaded since Oct 31st.
Anyone care to share thoughts, common themes?
Page count has dropped 70% now over a 2 month period but overall traffic has increased.
Pages that are nestled deep inside with little link juice outranking authority sites while our most prominent and heavilly linked pages have been drilled.
This is the first time in 9 years we have seen this type of page count drop so I would say something big is going on over at the plex.
Only this site is being effected, other low pr5ish sites arent seeing anything like this going on.
Their clearly "IS" something going on and I'd hoped like the last blip it would have been sorted over the weekend but no!
Hopefully G will not string us along too long before sorting this!
One site thats ranked 2nd for a highly competitive term is pure spam, the page has 30 links back to the index using the same main keyword for the site and nothing else - not even the design theme of site just a blank page with 30 links !
Is this what we really expect from the worlds number 1!
[edited by: D4vid at 9:58 am (utc) on Nov. 11, 2008]
For those who are fortunate enough to go and speak with Matt regarding this ongoing issue, please report back here to us less fortunate ones! ;)
For the record, I'm still mostly good, but there are some weird results around. And I'm getting Yo-Yos where I wasnt before.
for those who are looking for this new issues as i had my site 50% of traffic lost since last Sep 2008 i discovered that my site was 302 hijack"ed" by a https that was global over our ip so another site from other niche at the same server was crawled by google that "stole" our Page Rank on most of our KeyWords. This was not intentional, was a consequence of this missconfigured SSL HTTPS
first i watched my index being vanished from SERPs, than other autoritive pages of our site was not ranking for the keywords they used to
our regional SERPs are very poor and our google.com search even worst, i tried get more backlinks, exchange link programs, change page titles in order to increase my rank but nothing have changed
15 days after sending a Reconsideration Request my site got lot's better but a single week was what it takes to go down on SERPs again!
something was wrong and i needed to discover what i never had known this 302 hijack or Deceptive Redirect
but after i guy here at this thread pointed this possibility i did a search at google.com
"keyword" my_site_url
and it didnīt show the expected results
i did it again "keyword" mypage_particularname_html
then i realize instead of me, another site with the exactly page of mine
then
site:suspicious_site.com was showing my PAGES!
as i said in the beginning of this post it was un-intentional that this happened due to the HTTPS thing.
we placed a robots.txt disallowing all robots to craw the https, 404 not found pages to all requests coming from other sites to the ssl, and using the Removal Tool at webmaster tools removed more than 200 pages
a couple of days has passed since then nothing changes
"my keyword" suspicious_site.com shows the correct results
"my keyword" my_own_site_url doenīt show the correct results
i will wait more days and if it not fix itself alone i am going to send a spam report or something as another reconsideration request
we considered to 301 back from the suspicious site the requests to our correct and valid and own pages
but i was concerned to pass the lame rank from then back to us so i choose placing the robots and 404 header
diging it hard i even found a real Cloaking Deceptive link that is a bot of a particular domain
that has many pages in many languages, using this bot it clones pagenames and titles and mix some random content to create another pages of "autorithy" then it serves to googlebot this page headers and to us it strongly redirect to another thing that seems to be spam links Farm
but as they are not redirecting to our content and just mixing parts of many contents and copying our page names i think this is not a issue to me
i like to state that my site is 100% build with original content i never copy a single line and never had a single Black Hat over my sites it is 100% html and this issues are hard to be correct troubleshooted
thanks, hope someone else can find a clue on their issues
Claudio
I like your site, one week later, no I don't like your site, two weeks later again I like your site, but, no one week later I don't like your site ....
This is childish behavior of an algorithm, what a nonsense! Maybe their machines are going wild and those Goog "creative minds" don't control them any more?
Again they try miserably to force publishers into Adwords to squeeze out a few more billions.
[edited by: SEOPTI at 5:03 pm (utc) on Nov. 11, 2008]
The 'quotes' are the typical language used to explain away the completely coincidental requirement to spend on AdWords to keep trafic up.
Tin hat time. Would it not benefit Google to push up info sites (which have adsense on them) at the expense of ecom sites (which pay for adwords)?
On a less bitter note, I'm not really seeing the info-at-expense-of-ecom consistently on SERPS. Just different sites bouncing around in broadly the same proportions. Anyone actually seeing consistent data, rather than just the view from their site(s).
Conversely, any AdSensers seeing higher impressions due to improved organic rankings?
Oh, it will be a 'relevancy' thing. Users are getting more relevant result. Those webmaster/SEO who are losing people will be 'in the minority' due to a 'bug' that they will be 'working on'. But the 'vast majority of users' will be happy.
Heck, I just checked and right now I'm #4 for 'widgets'. #1 is a site of all paid links, #2 is wikipedia, #3 is some rinkydink site with 76 backlinks, none of which are terribly authoritative or relevant. That's what's beating my main site with thousands of backlinks, mostly high quality and relevant. :). I'm not going to waste time figuring out how to tweak my site to make it palatable to whatever's happening.
The fact is, IMO I should be #1. And was for the last year or two. But I'm not. And I (and you) don't have anyone to petition to to 'correct' the issue.
If we're living off of the vagaries of an algo developed by a third party black box, it's wise to be a bit more diverse. What people should be learning from this is not how to fix this immediate problem, but how to guard against this type of problem on an ongoing basis. And that solution is pretty simple:
- develop more and better backlinks
- diversify your sites. One site is not enough. I have three, and have others I can light up if needed.
- attack the long tail
I'm either doing or working on all three of those. I'm in the middle of a site redesign that will allow me to publish another 50 articles. I've got three sites ranking, one is my blog. And since my main site is getting yoyo'ed on my main term (though I'm still getting traffic) my second and third sites are starting to gain steam and pick up the slack. When I'm done my design to my main site, publish the extra articles and calculators and drive new links to them, I expect to have a noticeable *increase* in traffic - yoyo effect notwithstanding. *that's* how to come out of this - more and sustainable traffic. not 'how do I fix what Google did wrong?'.
I'm also recommending to the Directors that we launch... well, lets not go there. It's not clever, but its quick, should be relatively easy.
And I'm still going for the 'build it and they will come' mentality. Good content, seeking good links from industry magazines. In fact, we've got some really great ones the last few months.
But, and here's the thing.
I claim my inalienable right to moan about things I can't control.
So added to my favourite topics of the weather, reality TV, and the price of beer, I now proudly add Google.
And like the football, I'm sure I could do a better job if I was in charge, rather than those overpaid people who's only qualification is to be the most talented people in a competitive feild. So there!
This weekend would be exciting, IMHO.
This says to me that the site is on the edge of a filter, and it is harmed when that filters knob it is tweaked to far in one direction. Now I believe this filter to be for 301 redirects (filtering out the authority passed on by 301s).
Does anyone else who has been experiencing this same yo-yo effect rely on 301s a bit too much and agree with me?
I feel obliged to point out that the 301s I have in place are legitimate - domain/company name change (just in case Google is watching lol)
