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I emailed Google and they say I do not have a penalty.
It is very clear and obvious that many of the sites listed are nowhere near as relevant to the search. PR0 and no backlinks etc.
I am relatively new and the sites are largely non commercial by the way.
Do I sit tight or should I try and do something?
Regards
Rod
It had recovered quite well from the Florida and Austin set back, when we had Brandy a few weeks ago - but on the 12th it went back to Florida type rankings again.
I'm not changing anything yet ......
My three sites have all gone the same way
It seems like huge amounts of work have been in vain unless anything changes>
What they didn't tell you ..cos they can't ..but they can give out great big eye walloping hints ( look who is in the top ten now for any search on any subject ) is ..
Buy *mazon stock ..
Build your own directory site ..
Put adwords on it ..
Do it now if you want to stay alive ..!
Forget it.
Secondly, Google is doing some strange things, and has been doing for months - so don't automatically assume there is a problem with your site - there may be a problem with Google (personally I'm sure there is, but there will always be disagreement: some people actually like these directory listings - in the same way that some people stand on street corners and lunge at dogs :)
Thirdly, the safest bet is to make only additive changes to your site. I've made quite a few changes to my site, but I haven't *removed* anything. If you start removing stuff, and the daft algo corrects itself, you could find yourself overtaken by 'optimised' sites.
This is the strategy I've applied, and it seems to be working o.k. I have also seen some funny stuff in the past few days though - a whiff of Floraustindisaster back in the serps? Some glancing relevancy stuff is certainly floating back up to the top again.
This is not about new sites dropping after 2 weeks of SERPs #1-3 or thousands of non-human/spam pages killed.
I'm veering towards it being one of 3 things:
X - A simplistic page structure throughout the site which is quite formulaic. ie computer generated & not "manual"
Y - Linking patterns
Z - Very deep extension of Florida
Questions:
1 - Have sites built slowly & manually been hit? - ie not database-driven or computer-generated
2 - Have your badly hit sites many genuine independent links to them?
3 - Are your hit sites predominantly linked to from other sites you control?
Some of our pages are still doing extremely well for some terms where there are relatively few searches.
This leads me to speculate that it might be a further extension to Florida which is now hitting a huge amount of very minor KWs which previously escaped damage.
If Florida/Austin/Brandy took out the major KWs, then the application of LSI to very small KWs could account for last Friday's disaster.
Suggest "Coors" as a name as I really need some.....
J
Many of the larger sites I know about that died did NOT have very many inbound links.
Has anyone with more than 10 links from (10) different sites been affected?
1 - Have sites built slowly & manually been hit? - ie not database-driven or computer-generated
This is a really interesting one. My commerce site has a large number of handwritten info pages, including a handwritten index page. But the actual shopping pages are computer generated, with a lot of necessary repetition of templates etc.
The intention was always to produce an info site, with a shop 'attached' - this was the original intention long before Floraustin, because I has long admired a site built along similar lines.
The manually written pages still perform great (first page on generic searches.) But it is notable that the 'shopping' pages do pretty badly. *Except* for the ones I hand edit before upload.
Food for thought - brings us back to Sssid's particular interest in dupe (or what might appear to the bot to be 'semi-dupe') pages.
Seems the new algo likes to see variety - hence the suspect results. G seems to intend to serve up a pot-pourri of related sites, but all with different content. Hence the glancing relevancy of many.
It might work in future, but the semantic intelligence is lacking at the moment. Rolled out too soon I think -should have given it another year or so.
Did you changes the pages much or just a word or 2?
Most of the sites that have overtaken me haven't ranked well since the Florida update. All makes for an interesting puzzle. This seemed very much like an update to me.
Are the number of results returned for the KWs you're still #1 much less than those for which you've dropped?
Do the pages appear the same in structure as the dropped pages?
>>>*Except* for the ones I hand edit before upload.
Did you changes the pages much or just a word or 2?
Funnily enough, just the titles for certain important pages.
It's another mystery surrounding the algo. Titles are *extremely* important, but then, of course, at the same time, they're not ;)
(I hate to pollute this thread with noise, but we ask customers over the telephone how they heard about us. It's usually Google, but they make some interesting comments like: "great site - took me ages to find you though on page 4", and "there's some funny stuff on page 1" Only anecdotal of course - therefore holds no water, I rest my case m'lud etc.etc. :)
As I personally wouldn't buy a used car from someone just on their unsubstantiated word that it was or was not a lemon....
Lets just ( as someone said recently ) call it a "Thingy" .....which "semantically" can be taken to mean for indexation purposes "update".....
Except for the thought...
Heretical here... (depending on who is on snipping duty ) .....
I do accept that we use "widgets" instead of *******?
But It does strike me as ridiculous that we can't say update ( when it obviously is or was )...
Unless "gg" says it was ...?
( I want that kind of sycophancy ..I go to "google groups" over at the plex.... )
Otherwise this becomes less a "forum" site ..and more a
"google approved faq and theories" discussion ..?
I say we take Sweet_ali's cue and call this the "NeverWas" update.
;)
The less reliance Google has on anchor text, keyword density, and other spamable weights, the harder it will be for spammers out their to trick the algo. I would suspect that this is what Google is pushing for in my opinion.
GG said he was not aware of a "major" update. He may not be getting informed of minor ones as they happen.
Expect a roller coaster ride this year!
The results are so bad at the moment that there are two possible options.
Either:
In the interim, build more content and get more links.
Using current SERPS to analyse the algo is probably a waste of time IMO
My site was hit on or about the 12th and does indeed rank #1 for some KW's, but it's obvious there is little or no competition at all for these. The few visitors I receive are mostly search terms 5-6 keywords in length.
The site has been indexed for about 100 days, has plenty of manual content, although it does have some database-driven pages, including forum software. It has links pointed to it from a variety of websites, however few of these show in the link:website search as usual.
A site that used to be #1 where i was #2 has now dropped completely off the SERPs but still has a decent PR. They had a lot of domains about different types of widgets heavily interlinked, so I guess this is now been liked less.
Doesn't look like optimized sites are been penalized just not rated as highly, plenty are been missed though which is very annoying!
I checked all the sites above mine, and there are plenty of them, and I concur with you 4eyes. They're bad unless you like directory type sites with hundreds of items to search through to find the keyword you were searching for.
I have an old spammy site that got hit pretty bad. Trouble is, my newer, try-to-be-good quality site took a bad beating too.
I'm trying to be objective about this ... I know that just ranting serves no one.
Who has even one .js or javascript on sites that are in the toilet?
Are any of those .js or javascripts redirects of any kind even in valid use?
-s-
no-.js site is in the toilet
my sites without any .js files are all pretty much okay, but these are also non-commercial sites.
My flagship travel site (100's of pages of original content and by far the largest travel guide to this city, with ~20 inbound links from PR4-6 sites. . . not from my own sites) has lost 50% of its traffic every update starting with Brandy. It was launched right after Florida and did very well until Brandy. On March 12, I lost another 50-70% from Google, which makes me think that the Florida effect is being expanded with each update.
This site is currently PR6 and ranks #3 in both Yahoo and MSN for searches on its one-word cityname, which is a reasonably competitive travel destination. I don't use any redirects, but simply KWs in Title, H1, a few times on the page, and anchor text. I tried the semantics approach around 6 weeks ago to no avail.
My eternal gratitude (and all the tequila you can drink) goes out to the person who cracks this uber-filter and shares the secret with us.
I'm having more success getting into google than I am starting a new thread on WW! ;)
Hmmmm. Agreed. But to be fair there is a lot of whingeing on WW (that's WW's excuse anyway for deleting posts.)
But now this! - stand by - here goes:
It looks like a large number of SEO tricks are no longer working and that is what is causing the drops.
No, no, no - who wrote this?
The over-SEO concept was propaganda put out months ago: it is nonsense, well-documented on these boards, and put to bed months ago. So who are you to raise the issue again?
There are no tricks on *my* site.
How's your PR 11 site doing 'new member?' Identify yourself.
I admit to maybe using a keyword here and there when something else would do. By no means often enough to consider it keyword stuffing. Also putting keywords in Alt Tags when something else would also describe the picture. The algo for over use of keywords could have been dropped right down so inoccent sites are getting dropped.
Something has drastically changed and it appears to be effecting sites that are optimised even though they are following the rules. Maybe this is particular to the keywords I look at but definitely appears to be the case. It isn't right to call this a penalty but traditional SEO just isn't as effective as it used to be.
Ofcourse this could all be wrong and Google really does have a bit of a problem.
