Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Xmas Day 2005 is looking positively huge compared to what I am seeing today, Xmas Eve, and the past two days have been a couple of my lowest on record ever.
I guess Santa G ain't bringing me any pressies tonight nor in the New Year?
How are your metrics looking?
Goodness, how many m^2 of marble does it take to differentiate your business from a scraper! B^>
Rgds
Damon
Goodness, how many m^2 of marble does it take to differentiate your business from a scraper!
Hahaha...anyway, the interesting thing is that me, nor my competitors are being replaced by MFAs or scrapers.
90+% are now Alibaba-type directory sites of one genre or another.
I've come to a rationalisation about this tonight (UK time) therefore consider this about any keyword and the way the algo may be working right now in my sector for which there are thousands of producers world wide and tens of thousands more wholesalers and retailers.
Site 1 has all the information about the keyword and apart from great SEO includes images, technical information etc etc, the usual accepted authority site.
Site 2 has hundreds, if not thousands, of independent 1-10 page sites all using the same keyword, similar keyword images however not much more information other than contact etc etc...
Now if you were to select which sites you were to present as results would you choose:
a) The authority site
b) The site with loads of seemingly similar pages with loads of different offers
I can see what's happened, can Google?
Joe Surfer will soon click away with his mouse if they don't rectify it unless, of course, you actually want to trawl through all those similar results!
Traffic is fine. No problems with Google SERPs. EPC for December is down somewhat compared to the same period last year, though. Could the dollar's fall be partly responsible? I'm thinking it may be a factor for sites that have a lot of international advertisers and traffic.
The only metric which is a bit out of sync is ECPM. ECPM seems to have softened a bit towards the end of this month - and is significantly lower than last year when ECPM was unexpectedly strong. Earnings are, however, stronger this year because lower EPC has been more than counterbalanced by increased traffic.
I have not experienced any Google SERP problems - at least not yet.
Good to hear your metrics have been holding up. Undoubtedly Xmas occuring after a weekend has had an enormous influence on traffic levels for businesses that do not focus on Xmas business and I bet even they have done nothing either
Keep an eye open for any sudden reduction in traffic however since it's been four days now from the very weird 20th "update", you are probably clear of any damage.
Whatever it is they're doing I'm glad they're doing it at my quietest time of year!
Maybe this is due to year end holiday.
During times like these it is apparent that Google control a disgusting share of worldwide search and this scares me now more than ever.
To make matters worse no PIP has been posted yet either for November Adsense earnings.
I can honestly say that current events have darkened Xmas celebrations. No over reaction... a fact.
I haven't seen any radical changes in serps for my site, but I can offer this advice:
I was dropped during the Bourbon update and I screamed at Google loudly and often that my site was unduly penalized and that it should return #1 for certain keyphrases. The title for one page in particular was an exact match for the search term and highly relevant and an authority in the field - it was completely dropped out. After numerous complaints, many emails, and some pretty serious accusations of incompetence, my site was returned to the top of the search engines for most relevant searches and has stayed there. My traffic came back, as did my adsense income.
So, in a nutshell, my advice is to contact Google and insist that they straighten out their mess. It makes no sense that a site ranked in the top 5, say, should completely fall out. Make your case and don't give up. If a highy relevant page was near the top and now it's gone, specifically point it out to them. My experience proved the old adage about the squeaky wheel getting the oil.
Good luck and be firm. They make money off your site, as it is, so it's in their interest to get it right.
the old adage about the squeaky wheel getting the oil.
yep, but keep in mind that if the wheel squeeks toooooo damn much, it might just get thrown out!
Traffic is fine. No problems with Google SERPs. EPC for December is down somewhat compared to the same period last year, though. Could the dollar's fall be partly responsible? I'm thinking it may be a factor for sites that have a lot of international advertisers and traffic.
I have similar tourist sites to efv, and my results are similar for December.
Out of interest anyone in same niche as efc having problems with this "shuffle" on Google?
About half my sites got dinged last month, so maybe the just started crawling back enough to offset the holiday.
Doesn't matter either way in the grand scheme of things. I've taken the last 2 weeks of the year off anyway, so I never got paid this time of year. Everything I get from AdSense is a bonus.
p/g
At the start of December I thought it was due to seasonal factors, but upon comparing last year's December figures to this year's figures, I now see that the drop has been much worst during this December.
One of my 10 yr old authority core sites has been decimated by whatever is still occurring, down at least 66% in direct comparison to my others sites, whereas another core site hasn't seen a single movement.
In my sector a lot of Alibaba directory style sites have appeared and some old, useless pages from heavens knows where have been dragged up.
Considering it is a holiday period the search forum has seen an unusual amount of activity over the past 3-4 days, there were several threads running and they've now been merged and the latest Part 2 thread can be seen here:
[webmasterworld.com...]
If you're in the clear, fine, if you believe your figures are way down then you'd better catch up on what seems to have happened.
Oh, and of course, Google say very little has happened, just normal index updates!
Joe Surfer will soon click away with his mouse if they don't rectify it unless, of course, you actually want to trawl through all those similar results!
What I heard from Joe Surfer is that "Internet is very scrappy lately". Not Google, but Internet.
I'm getting clobbered the same way. Somewhere between oct and november, my traffic dropped to a third of what it was. December's average per $$ day is below what it was in 2004 even though I've added more sites and content.
I'm noticing that for some of my day to day searches (unrelated to the topic of my sites0 , the serps are ok but for others they completely useless and filled with MFAs and scrapers.
I think that the MFAs are trying to game the system so much that google can't keep up on the serps end. Google's attempts to rectify things seem to be causing scattered collateral damage to honest sites.
Some people like EFV and others seem to be OK. There is something that google doesn't like about my sites now probably as a result of an algo change. Previously they were doing well and traffic was constantly improving.
As long as Google allows the blatant MFAs and scrapers to profit from adsense, then the MFAers and scrapers will continue to find ways to game google's serps. Google will try to stem the flow by applying algo changes that cause collateral damage. Until google addresses the cause of all this - namely that their tolerance of the MFAers and scrapers is the underlying problem, then things will spiral downhill.
I don't think that the answer for google is to keep trying to work on this as a serp issue. They have to be a little more selective in who they allow into adsense. My guess is that the bonuses for the adsense people are based on the wrong metrics. They are probably going to get their 2006 bonus based on overall adsense/adwords dollars. That's easy to measure. What is harder to measure is the longer term effect on the serps, honest publishers and adsense/adwords in general.
cg
I don't think that the answer for google is to keep trying to work on this as a serp issue. They have to be a little more selective in who they allow into adsense.
Pandora's Box was opened in June, 2003, so it's a bit late to put the lid on. Plus, tougher entrance standards won't necessarily accomplish anything: What's to keep Samantha Scraper or Monty MFA from cobbling together a small but useful site, getting approval, and then adding a pile of made-for-AdSense pages? It seems to me that the real solution is to be less selective about who gets dumped from the AdSense program.
Example: Google could have a rule forbidding click arbitrage, and any publisher who was identified as a click arbitrageur could be dumped from the network with no ifs, ands, or buts. (Mind you, that sounds simpler than it would be in real life, because click arbitrageurs can buy traffic from any number of sources, not just from AdWords/AdSense.)
Collateral damage is another weakness of the punishment approach. Let's say that Google bans scraper sites. How does Google differentiate between a scraper and a site that's making legitimate use of, say, DMOZ data?
Google's philosophy seems to be that it's less risky (and less controversial) to starve out MFAs, scrapers, etc. than it is to ban them altogether. (It's obviously easier--and more "scalable"--to let algorithmic improvements rescue a site that's been smart-priced or pushed down in the SERPs than it is to reverse "your account is closed" decisions or manual search bans.)
I appreciate it's not easy but at the same time I do not comprehend what has happened to one of my core sites on 20th December, for instance the following has happened to just one of my many pages:
1. keyword1keyword2keyword3 - nowhere to be found in the SERPs
2. keyword3keyword1keyword2 - #1
The problem that Google is now creating is that my trade advertisers don't know which sites to target because in example 1 AdWords is not available, plus I'll bet that site's wondering why they're suddenly getting so many hits for an extremely poor page!
Since my trade advertisers already appear in the general SERPs Ads it's not exactly driving Google any further traffic OTHER THAN possibly taking 100% of the revenue rather than myself earning the publisher's cut or Google trying to ramp up the CPC.
I sincerely hope that they sort out this mess soon since I can tell you this, I for one have started using other search engines because my sector is a darned joke.
perhaps whatever happened to cause the drop, it's over.
Nope, my other sites are performing as expected in comparison to each other, granted the traffic has been well down however this specific site has been hit by an "algo" or "bad data push" update.
To put it into context Core Site 1 and Core Site 2 have tracked each other for page impressions almost identically for 7 years and since 20th December Core Site 2 is 66% down on Core Site 1.
I'd say that's pretty significant.
FWIW, if I were getting the regular amount of daily visitors my earnings would be excellent, no loss in EPC nor eCPM for that matter, just that Core Site 2 has been hammered for an unknown reason.
And, of course, according to Matt Cutts on behalf of Google:
I know for a fact that there haven’t been any major algorithm updates to our scoring in the last few days, and I believe the only data refreshes have been normal (index updates).
Yeah, it's completely "normal" for my site to lose 66% of it's traffic!
I also notice the inclusion of "believe"...:-)
Should we change that to "insofar as I have been informed"?
