Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
its not the trademarked ghost dataset that went missing, and it wasn't a rebuild like the halloween update.
No, but the overall technique has a familiar feel to it. More than one dataset may be involved this time - and perhaps many more. Interesting that three weeks ago we were hearing reports of googlebot spidering like crazy, and in recent days, reports of googlebot not even showing up for some sites.
[edited by: tedster at 5:09 am (utc) on July 15, 2009]
my site is back in again for the 2nd time. it was in for ONE DAY in early july, now its been in since 25th july.
the first 2 days I had loads of traffic from several pages, then from the 27th its been minimal traffic only from homepage keywords really.
[edited by: tedster at 8:09 am (utc) on July 29, 2009]
one keyword in particular went from page 1 to page 20 and no changes were made to the page that was listed.
noticed that the visitors to the site yesterday were alot higher than usual, without creating a spike in page views, so was thinking the site had many pages spidered and they are being re-indexed
Traffic has not decreased, but overall get loads of fluctuations on the SERPs for a wide range of keywords... Some times rank as high as no1 and sometimes after the first 30-50 results.
Wonder how long this will last.
This makes no sense to me... More & more I am hearing that reciprocal links no longer matter, and you need relevant one-way links (perhaps from blogs, articles, press releases, directories, etc). However, all my sites that have gone through QUALITY off-page SEO have lost their rankings and my 2 sites that have gone through old-school reciprocal linking campaigns are now better than ever.... This makes no sense. Any feedback? Has anyone seen similar things happening on their sites?
Also, I am also seeing really bad SERP's still. Extremely irrelevant results. Tons of un-optimized sites are polluting the first few pages still. Hopefully the Yahoo/Bing merger will steal some market share from Google, because Google (once again) is really hurting my business.
On topic reciprocals are fine and always have been- as long as you have a diverse profile.
blogs, articles, press releases, directories, etc
In fact, your report is an interesting datapoint, indicating easy-aquisition 1-way links are being devalued, presumably in favour of traded RELEVANT links, at least in your niche.
I have to say that doesn't quite match with what I'm seeing, but I will bare it in mind.
ADDED-
Google doesnt want to return "Optimised" sites. It wants to return good content- regardless of optimisation. Google thinks of white-hat SEO as little more than structured markup, presenting the content in a digestable format. However, it wants to be able to rank pages that have no SEO and hurt pages that are overtly manipulative. While the SERPs are not perfect, and are still churning, I see much less fluff, spam, MFA and plain irrelevant pages than there were a week or so ago.
They are treating capitalization as 2 different urls any one else noticing this problem. Its only happened since the latest update.
i.e
www.widgetsite.com/BIG-Widgets/
www.widgetsite.com/big-widget/
Is now being treated as 2 different URLs im sure before this latest update G was clever enough to see that they were the same URL and not intended duplicates.
Anybody else spotted this..?
While the SERPs are not perfect, and are still churning, I see much less fluff, spam, MFA and plain irrelevant pages than there were a week or so ago.
I'm seeing quite the opposite. On one specific term, a geocitie site with nothing but links and adsense has captured the #1 spot and held it. I find it very hard to believe that a site with nothing but links and adsense is more relevant than the 3 or 4 sites that were spot on and loaded with content which have now been sent to page 5 an beyond.
Google doesn't know what they are doing and have over cooked their prize sauce this time to the point that it has broken what wasn't broken.
They picked a bad time to be doing this since Bing returns better results at least for the things I'm searching for.
I've had clients ask me why they can't find stuff on Google and I just tell them to use Bing.
Google doesn't know what they are doing and have over cooked their prize sauce this time to the point that it has broken what wasn't broken.They picked a bad time to be doing this since Bing returns better results at least for the things I'm searching for.
I've had clients ask me why they can't find stuff on Google and I just tell them to use Bing.
I totally agree. Based on my experience right now, Bing & Yahoo are far more superior than Google, as Google is returning garbage.
URL's are case sensitive, if a website displays the same content for different URL's Google will pick it up, then they might slam you with some sort of penalty or attempt to try to figure out which url is the true one for the content.
If a website is having issues like that, they can be fixed and it will take a while for Google to sort out the mess.
maybe google didnt like what they saw first time round and changed it slightly.
they should add a final paragraph to their webmaster guidelines:
"do all the above correctly and we'll still mess you around for 6 weeks"
What kind of terms are returning garbage? I mean, the terms I watch (including the terms that have nothing to do with my site) are mostly context-independant:
"Widget"
"[Variant1][Variant2][Variant3]Widget"(where any or all variants may be there or dropped, and each has 1-4 alternative discrete options as the variant)
[widget model number]
[widget series name]
"Widget" stands for maybe 10 distinct products, so all those permutations would run over the ten product offerings. (for example, but not correct, widget could be mobile phone, laptop, mp3 player, satnav, console)
So, lots of subjects, but all specific THINGS. We're ecom, obviously.
Are you watching terms with Geographic information, for eg. Or temporal information? Or news-related stuff? Things that have built-in variance?
Are you info, service or ecom?
What I can see looks to be testing of various filters on the current indexes, or an attempt to fix that was released into a 'god' or 'cleared' export. Only time will tell, but definitely there are alot of websites in uber flux.
My site seems to have taken a huge hit, today. Part of a long-term pattern of decline, but still annoying.
What I would like to know, ultimately, is what Google is either favouring or penalising, with these fluctuations. As I'm sure many others would, too :)
Is 'Google Everflux' now a fact, I wonder?
Note: I don't buy links. I just do article and directory submissions and my own, non-keyworded, by-hand blog comments. I'm in a very competitive sector, up against people with _very_ deep pockets, so I'm not surprised at getting clobbered.
[TigerTom briefly fantasises about what it would be like to buy 100,000 backlinks over the course of a year.]
Bing and Yahoo do not show this effect for the search and only show one listing for the site.
The Google SERPS are a mess.
It's exactly the kind of link building that Google does not want to be effective, and I wouldn't be surprised if this update made the link wheel scheme a lot less successful. My advice would be to avoid this kind of thing -- you must be willing to throw away the domains you use at any time. It's not an activity that builds long-term success.
[edited by: tedster at 2:52 am (utc) on Aug. 1, 2009]
A healthy website has a diversity of backlink types (they certainly don't need to be from a home page), and that especially includes freely given "editorial votes" for your site's content. More and more, the old schemes are fading in their power.
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