3:Google Updates and SERP Changes - June 2010

[mhansen]

< continued from [webmasterworld.com...]

I think this is appropriate to this thread as to the condition of G being broke of sorts;

Of sorts?

I have built a site for +3 years around a small segment of specific products and up until June 2nd, did very well with answering every question around those products via my website.

Since June 2nd, I have dropped 80% or more of the google referred traffic to this rather small site (-300 pages) and now when I look at the serp pages, I see top result pages with... literally, 8-10 ad blocks per page!

The page that is filling my #1 void (for a specific branded search) has:

- A Popunder to a screensaver cpa
- Google custom search box
- 3 Adsense link units
- 3 separate adsense blocks
- 2 Chitika ad blocks
- Kontera Infolinks on 8 separate words on the page

The page itself is 327 words... with 4 comments (Wordpress) from readers, and very little reference to the phrase I used to be found for.

The serp's are very broken right now. Or are they?

I think its all just Matt Cutts way of getting people to report spam! LOL

[edited by: tedster at 7:00 pm (utc) on Jun 24, 2010]

[toonarmy]

same problem here for us today, only about 5 hits off the google bot

[indias next no1]

my backlinks was 28 last week, then it down to 4, then to 3 now today it is 1 , whether it will affect page rank also ?

[cien]

Gbot hasn't visited my site at all today. First time in years I'm seeing this. My site:site.com reports 300,000 pages today from 6K for the last 4 months. Traffic remains very low since the beginning of March. Something is up.

[Kbug44]

We have had an interesting downturn in traffic from Wednesday, May 26 to Tuesday, June 15th. It's very apparent on where we would have our highs and lows bumping from 120-150 from Google and during that time period we never got above 100 visits.

On Wednesday June 16, we suddenly jumped up. I need to explore the long tail possibility more but initially it seems like we are just getting more traffic from our main keywords. They have not changed in the past month, we just seemed to receive less traffic from them.

[pontifex]

I would not pay too much attention to the amount of backlinks shown by Google... Just build more links is my advice. At least I have no other explanation for the recovery of my visits in the last few days.

[BillyS]

The link: command seems "broken" on Google right now.

[Karma]

My experience so far...

3rd May = Mayday update (significant traffic loss)
18th May = Slight increase in traffic
18th May until today = Slight decrease in traffic each week

:/

P.S - I've been gaining links and creating content the whole time, nothing seems to stop the decline.

[Dave_Hybrid]

Exactly, 120 pages crawled today out of a normal 100K per day for the last week, 30-50k per day average over the month, they are processing something :P

[Dave_Hybrid]

Supprise supprise i get my sitelinks back today, it's rolling, hopefully a traffic bump when it's all pushed out.

[scottsonline]

Yesterday with the timing of the bot withdrawal we had a pretty decent surge in Google referrals. For the first time in about 50 days traffic from Google was up but here is the shocking part to me: For the first time in about as long Bing was done, Yahoo about flat.

When I looked back at the last month and a half it's pretty clear to me that the increase in Bing and Yahoo was directly related to people searching on Google, not finding what they wanted, and searching elsewhere. Will keep an eye on it today to see if the trend continues.

[Andylew]

Something definately seems to be on the move.

An interesting quirk I came across today;

A site:domain search returns a different number of pages to what site:domain domain returns (on the affected site not on others). Not just by a small amount but 1700 times the number of pages. Roughly worked through the site: search corresponds to the traffic we currently get and the site:domain domain relates to every page change they have ever crawled on the site.

This put along side other peoples reports that pages that havent been around for years have been apearing in backlinks and non functioning domains apearing in the serps indicates to me that they have all the data they should ie they havent lost anything but since caffine something has gone wrong with their ability to handle that data and at the moment they are working on a fall back algo/dataset and only pushing queries to the 'proper' algo/dataset when the query is so bizare that the fallback algo doesnt have the ability/data to handle it as it isnt a common/cached search query.

[scottsonline]

Andy, I can tell you some of the queries I mentioned here and some others I did not? They've had mega changes in the last 36 hours. So the example I gave here that was a total disaster now has relevant results but again filters still seem to be missing as all the top results are mirrors for the same organization. But, it's far better than what was happening.

Google may never admit this but they've obviously either decided to pull back some of the changes or are rolling out new ones. Either way what stuck in my side about this was the idea that this was a set of data they were happy with and that it passed a committee. IMO, the committee didn't do enough real searching and in the future for such a massive change Google should enlist thousands of volunteers/contractors that sign NDA's or whatever because this time they blew it terribly.

For our particular site yesterday to see the trend totally reverse in one day in terms of searchers not only using google more but the demolishing of the yahoo/bing upward swing tells me in a lot of the B2B trade search consumers may still have been using Google first, but were going elsewhere when they didnt find what they wanted. Starting yesterday when they were able to find relevant terms on the first page the traffic from yahoo and bing slowed.

[bastilar]

Hi I've had a site that was finally de-ranked on june26th. I thought I was immune to mayday up until that date.

I've been hammering the web and this site looking for information trying to figure out when I would or may get my rankings back.

My site still has it's pagerank and isn't deindexed, it's just not ranking.

My question is has anyone seen any restoration of their original rankings yet? If so, how long were they in the "void" of the serps?

If they haven't seen a restoration, how long have your sites been de-ranked? I want to know exact days or dates.

We can figure out what is really going on if we put our heads together and work with facts. I've myself concluded that 20-35 days is what you need to get most of your rankings back provided nobody reports your sites and you don't do anything "dumb" but that is loose info based on this thread and elsewhere.

I also am aware that sites that target "thin affiliate sites" or 1-5 page sites are adversely affected but I have seen blogs and a site similar to my own that has the same or just 1 page ranking on google just fine.

I also went out and got 1000's of links within a couple of weeks, mostly nofollow. So I want to know how many links, if any, your sites that were deranked got.

I realize this is my first post but I don't normally post. Mayday changed that so now here I am =). Thanks everyone.

[Andylew]

^drop me a message Id love to see your examples.

Ive just tried site:domain domain again and I now get the lower number - this query must now be being served from the fall back dataset having been a previously unknown phrase it has now been cached so can be recovered from the live dataset. However there is another non generic term that ive tried which returns the larger number of pages. I will see in a couple of hours if this drops aswell.

[seocolin]

Hi Bastilar

I also do not normally post but just in case it helps here's what's been going on for one of my sites.

- site ranked in top 10 of G for almost 8 years for many terms and one particularly popular generic term.
- 15th April dissapeared from rankings (still indexed, pr etc)
- 19th June came back again
- 28th June (to-date) nowhere to be found
- two competitors with similar content still ranking
- have not carried out any link building for a year or so

[Yippee2]

@Andylew
The site:domain domian, what is the purpose of that search? I have never done that before and when I do, I see a 4500% increase in pages returned over the normal site:domain. as I start to drill through the pages i see that about all 4500% are suplemental.

Can you or anyone expand on the significance of the domain domain or point me and /or others wondering this in the right direction for the knowledge?

Thanks in advance

[Victor1]

The sites I work on for Clients that fell at the beginning of June have had no substantial changes.

We have rewritten (averaging about 4-6 hours per page) what was already high quality original material in diffent fields on 15 sites that used to be in top 3 results, based on the upper level root word siloing technique. The sites have been re-indexed and not moved up any in G.

They are all small original sites with the keyword in the url. The re-working of the content has put all the sites firmly in #1 in Yahoo and traffic has gone way up from yahoo in the last few days as yahoo has re-indexed but it is still small compared to what G used to bring. So no changes from the June 4 update. (note - These sites did not take a hit on Mayday but all on june 4). So i know quality of material has nothing to do with the indexing of these small sites.

I feel it is unfair for the small quality sites I have been working on, with some professionls in their respective fields with up to 20 years experice to be lumped in with the thin adsense/affiliate sites, that use the keyword as the URL, with little good content. Often the content ideas are taken from my clients for online articles and other sites.

Perhaps it is my fault as the web master to have directed the small clients that wanted micro sites to the SEO in url technique... but it seemed like solid seo until recently and all were happy. I hope the small sites that are based around a longer tail keyword that add value to the web that have been heavily penalized for being small will be able to return in the rankings.

[tedster]

The [site:domain domain] search asks for all pages on the domain that have the domain name in text, somewhere on the page. It's hard to say what the current numbers mean. It looks like it might give more complete results - without filtering out the URLs that are not included in the main results.

[bastilar]

@andylew You know we shouldn't be sharing our sites =) It's safest that way for all of us, especially with everyone reporting others (I lost one money site and a link farm a few days ago and I know it was a manual penalty and reporting).

@seocolin Dang that makes no sense then. Does your site have an inbound pagerank4 link or above to your home domain? If so, how many? I know that sites that have enough pr4 links to homepage don't have much fluctuations on rankings.

@victor1 you are right. Mine are 4-5 page self-product sales pages like you see on clickbank except i sell my own products. If it makes you feel easy I see 1 page products who sell their own ebooks still ranking on google for "hot niches"

I guess the takeaway from all of this is to try not to mess things up doing something drastic. I think we're all going to get our rankings back eventually provided our links are there but this latest overhaul on google is doing a great job scaring us.

It still makes me feel very unhappy that seocolin lost ranking for 2months and 4 days and lost ranking again 2 weeks later.

[seocolin]

@bastilar - nope, no pr3 or above links. Thanks for the observation, I will have to start looking for some high pr links ;)

[bastilar]

Thanks seocolin, that was really important info. So we know basically the real filter is any site that doesn't have pr4+ to homepage is kicked to the curb and dealt with at the algo's leisure.

I'm not sure if pr3's will work but we will see.

[rocco]

Google Webmaster tools is showing crazy amounts of backlinks. I have one site showing over 2million when I used to have 50k showing.

Another one is showing over 1million backlinks that used to show 30k. This site was hurt heavily by Mayday and the vast amount of backlinks is coming from scrappers (of course I have not checked them all..) which ones got hurt even more (according Alexa these sites must have had 250k-500k visits a day and are fallen to nearly zero). I am not sure if this affiliates my site to these scrappers.

[AG4Life]

One keyword that I have had for at least 8 years at 4th dropped to 11th around the middle of March, it's now just come back, having seen it randomly appearing in the last 2 or 3 days. My overall traffic (long tails mainly) are still down though.

[ohno]

Our GA data has gone all green now for over a week-constant increases. Merchant Centre is also showing massive increase in clicks, is normality returning? Yesterday was very good sales wise as was the day before, Monday was dead but that was hardly surprising given World Cup Sunday!

[Andylew]

Re site:domain domain it isnt just that more pages are returned it is that it returns several multiples of the number of pages the site has, hence the conclusion it reports every page ever crawled with the same page counting more than once for every change it has been through. Or the conclusion for the past few months - google is broke :D

[john1975]

@andylew,

maybe you have pages with and without www indexed. I don't think google was ever broken. It just didn't return the results you wanted. same message applies to @ohno

[ohno]

Sorry but after 8 years of pretty stable sales etc it was pretty obvious something went(still is?) wrong. Junk results all over page one normal? I don't think so, & that isn't just from checking own sites/keywords it's from personal searches over the last few weeks.

< continued here: [webmasterworld.com...] >

[edited by: tedster at 5:21 pm (utc) on Jul 1, 2010]