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The panic is settling down, the whine of worry is receding to a steady hum in the back of my head, and several recovery plans are forming...
I lost my index page entirely, due to lazy keyword stuffing. My fault! Unfortunately, mine is a very small business: no listing = no food (let alone xmas).
I was planning on overhauling the website anyway, and I've given myself until 1/1/04 before I accept an opening with another business and abandon my own. The question now is: overhaul the index page and resubmit to Google immediately, overhaul the entire website and resubmit the whole thing in a few weeks, overhaul the website (starting with the index page of course) and wait for Googlebot. Time is most definitely a factor.
...are any of these plans likely to restore my index page to the directory before I have to throw in the towel in January?
There are also longer range options of starting over with a new website and closing the old.
Mahalo Nui Loa! (Thank you very much!)
There could be filters one some group (very big group) of keywords. I'm targeting phrase with 3 or 4 keywords. When I drop 1 kw, site ranks pretty well in many combinations. However, if I add that one which I also need, I'm gone.
Can anybody confirm that theory?
Same here. The new Google directory from DMOZ seems to come and go. I see both throughout the day, depending on my luck.
What's really weird this eveing is that my competitors who were top in the SERPs right after the Florida Update (FU - somehow that's seems quite fittimg right now)are now gone too. And, all of them had the keywords in the title (as typed in a search). I don't mean to cause any more conjecture, but this is the first time since the Friday update that I've seen a significant change under my search terms. And now, even more sites are gonners...including my own.
If you business depends on such a short time scale loss then you don't deserve to be in business
I make a large percentage of my yearly income in the holiday shopping months - does this mean I don't deserve to be in business?
FU - somehow that's seems quite fitting right now
Very funny...
Hey everyone, remember the dom/esm business? They used ancient data so they would have a more stable database to tweak with, (so GG said), things were a disaster for certain serps, index pages disappeared... then the rolling update started and things came back together.
All this "Is the update over?" stuff... it doesn't work that way anymore. With Florida, Google cranked the algo knob, on old data, and this is just temporary madness. We'll be rolling again soon.
No one jump out of any windows yet... things will look a lot better in the next week or three, just like after dom/esm.
These tangential results are commonplace with the emergence of this new index. Obviously, a negative side effect of their recent filters, not their intention.
But on www2 and some of the other DCs the same seach gives the same results but with 4 additions which are labelled "supplemental results". They disappear if I click "repeat the search with the omitted results included" and I just get my pages and the www inbound links.
Can anyone throw any light on this?
Whoops! Since I posted in Message #500 that we had dropped from #1 to #7, I see that now we are back at #1 for our second most important keyword. Man! This is crazy! Very hard to figure.
Someone please pass the Dramamine....
GuinnessGuy
I have been in the top 3 (usually 1) for 2 different KW1 KW2 search phrases for the past year, now I'm nowhere to be found since Friday. No spamming, no tricks, good old WebmasterWorld 101. One of my link partners is showing up on page 10 yet I'm nowhere.
However, for product specific KW1 KW2 KW3 searches I'm still number 1.
Now you're confused too. I'm going to have another drink :)
Example:
We do a search for "buy" and the product name and see the first eight results as the same company, same websites, all .biz domains and they all rank one right after another. I've seen this on smaller scales, but not like this.
What's worse is there is no difference in the product/website information, they only insert "filler" keywords to hike up their rankings.
If anyone would like me to stickymail them, please let me know. I can send you a couple of examples.
This index is, in our opinion, the worst and most unspecific for true, relevant searches we've measured in a while.
Thanks, TrueMarketing
Agreed. The value of following the threads now is to see if there is a plan for next time. Wouldn't it be nice to be #2 and rather than dropping out of sight and climbing back to #2 in 7 - 30 days, to next time just drop to #25 and get back to #2 in 3 - 5 days.
That's what I'm doing. Like panning for gold, just hoping for that one piece of information that will tell me how to avoid the drop next time around. So far, I haven't found it but I'm still looking.
We're in the third trimester but the contractions haven't started yet.
Stefan, Thank you for the temporary breath of sanity. I'm under the same impression.
Of course, I might be entirely wrong.... :-)
Really, man, everyone should try to dredge up the threads from esmeralda and read through those. It was a disaster for the first while, then things improved. No one should make any drastic changes yet... sit tight and watch it for another week until the bot gets active again and the rolling update resumes.
Look no further. Here are some gold tidbits
Gold Piece #1. Relevent incoming links from pages Pageranked four or higher with keywords in their anchor text.
Gold Piece #2. Keyword density of around 4%.
Gold Piece #3. Keywords in title, description, anchor text and <H1> tags. Lots of text with as little HTML, Flash and Java code as possible.
Doing this assures position stability. All five of my network of sites barely move during these updates on any of my important search words.
Google, expect the unexpected.
I will be glad when things get back to normal
LisaB
interesting theory Guiness, but i don't think it holds up with google doing it deliberately to get in more spam reports.
i personally have no complaint as a SEO as all my clients sites have improved, however i would do if i was average searcher.
i have seen competitors that should rightfully, be right there with us still, drop way back and in some cases out.. and sub pages from sites that i feel shouldnt be there generally come up into the top 10/20.
but its all part of the dance, its highly unlikely if i go away for a week and come back results will still be like this.
its coming up the weekend in Australia and i will certainly be going for a few beers and watching the wallabies beat england in the rugby world cup, not stressing over googles update.
;)
Im not the least bit worried. :)
Give it time folks.
Alex
>interesting theory Guiness, but i don't think it holds up with google doing it deliberately to get in more spam reports.
Yes, well I did say it was a 'cute' theory. No doubt it is just a nice side effect for the hand editors at the plex.
But seriously, what is the purpose behind doing this live with the real online SERPs. Couldn't this have been done behind the scenes and introduced once it was stable? If it was technically possible then why didn't they do it that way. Perhaps they are looking for feedback of some sort(like here in WW), and not necessarily spam reports.
GuinessGuy
This time too.
But for all the craziness, the underlying direction of the past updates seemed to have as a goal greater relevance - more focus on understanding pages; more focus on Local Rank, etc...
The patterns are different this time. This update isn't about adding better sites, it's about purging e-commerce and affiliate sites. I said once before that there are many awful spammy affiliate sites, but also many very good sites that derive some income from affiliate stuff.
Those who say it's a zero sum game; I'd agree. If G continues in this direction, it won't change the macro trends in online e-commerce...up, up, up. What's happening here is just what happened in the bricks & mortar world: Goodbye boutiques and specialty sellers; Hello GAP.
Is this really where the Web is going? Perhaps inevitable. Not really what I was hoping for though.
(Note: BTW, in non-commerce, non-competitive areas, I agree that there is far less upheaval, and that is to be expected. Those sites, I believe, are not at the heart of this latest algo experimentation.)
One bad thing I just saw, now in place of some spam crap that was removed, is a linksmanager page (something like link page 257!) of an unrelated site that just happens to link to an on topic site. This is not a huge issue since the site is ranked in the 90s, but still, a linksmanager page should be PR0 and not be ranked at all, but for it to be in the top 100 of a 200,000 word search is not good.
The root of this algo change is extremely good, IMO. Quality sites and information appear to be benefitting a lot. But also truly goofball non-relevant junk seems to appear in groups. This is all the more reason to send feedback to Google. At least in my area a huge amount of redirect sites were removed, and hopefully the Googletechies learned something about why that junk made it in in the first place.
Frankly, if the concept of localrank was applied to this group of results, I'd guess we would have by far the best results ever.
(I'm not seeing any "lost" sites at all in the areas I'm intimately familiar with, so that phenomenon is a mystery to me.)
I think that's the main problem i'm seeing with the results, lots of news sites that mention the keywords only once. When i'm looking for Widgets I want a page about widgets not an article that makes a passing reference to widgets halfway down the page.
If this update is over then google is going to lose surfers, but i'm getting the impression from most people that it probably isn't over.
