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About 4 weeks or so ago, I had one of my PR7 sites experience the mysterious "dropped pages" syndrome that has been discussed here, goign from over 100k indexed pages to less than 3000.
Further, reported backlinks went from 1200+ to 10 (!)
A little background:
-Site is non-commercial with NO ourgoing affiliate links visible (any of the few sponsor links sprinkled thoughout the site use cgi-based redirects)
-Although we have exchanged some links with other sites in our genre, they are ALL on topic, with no more than 15 outgoing links on any one page (and NO bad neighborhoods)
-The site in question is updated everyday with ne non-commercial, on-topic content (mostly articles).
-The site does very well in Yahoo, ask, etc.
I've never done anything dodgy with the site, nor do I employ automated link exchanges, etc.
Having said all that...and despite STILL having a PR7, freshbot no longer visits, and googlebot visits in general have dropped to a handful per day for the last 3 weeks. In fact, the Yahoo/Slurp and Ask Jeeves/Teoma crawlers have grabbed 1000% more pages than google in the last 30 days...
So i guess my question is...what's up with the googlebot?
It may be that alot of your reciprocal linkers are no longer linking clearly to you.
Another reason you're hits are down could be Google's current tendancy not to deep crawl sites. Does your PageRank spread evenly over your site (PR6, PR5's and so on) or is it just your main page that is high?
It should be noted that any actual "sites of interest" I linked to were direct links. Only redirect were used for the few affiliate/advertising links (mostly for tracking purposes).
Further, the site has a good deal of pages that are deep-lnked from other sites (articles, etc.), and still has over 700 PR5+ sites linking to it (not to mention 2 Pr 8's, and dozens of Pr6's etc.). After checking over 60% in the last 3 weeks or so (I've kept track of incoming links), all are still linking directly.
I'm leaning towards this being a (hopefully) temporary glitch, but I'm not holding my breath on that one. Luckily, we receive enough traffic from Yahoo/MSN and sites linking to us that all is not lost in terms of traffic...but a 50% drop is a splash of cold water, that's for sure.
Ah well...to be honest, I've given up on trying to pander to google's whims, and I'll stick to the tried and true: Clean Html and good, basic design. I think it's time I stopped letting google dictate deisng decisions, and focus on what got us here in the first place.
Having said that...if google fails to realize that it's "experiments" in algo changes belong in the lab, and not released in the wild until it's ready for prime time, then perhaps their days are truly numbered...
Yahoo's results are looking pretty good ;-)
My HTML checks out with the W3c validator, and my links seem OK with the link checker. Scooter seems to still be spidering the site the same as ever.
I'm looking into possible causes, since another site I watch closely still has the normal ratio of visits to page views from Gbot.
Maybe a little less focus should have be given to that lengthy moon office garbage april fools and a little more time kicking gbot in the butt to get his ass in gear.
Do you see a difference between the pages that you did not loose in comparison to the ones you lost?
We have hundreds of good links in, some of them from authority sites that have home pages of PR9 and PR10 (Though the links are from PR5 & PR6 pages). We have a fair amount of content (about 1000 pages) but all the major revisions we've made to content over the last few weeks is just not getting picked up. There has been no change in IP, robots.txt, and no (my educated guess) bad neighbourhood penalty, no duplicate content/title/description/first para/text (apart from the gif Nav Bar) and no loss of PR. In fact several of our pages went up to PR6 in the last update. The changes I refer to above were updating of content and didn't involve major changes to structure/linking/design.
Google please come back.
From the pages that you lost how many of them have similar content in form of
- same title
- same description
- same first paragraph
- other content that is the same as on other pages?
Do you see a difference between the pages that you did not loose in comparison to the ones you lost?
In a word...none. Every single page is unique in both first paragrpah, description, title, meta tags...and so on. Other than utilizing the smae basic template (for both esae of use and graphical attractiveness), there is not a single thing about these pages that could be considered duplicate content.
As for the current # of pages...it continues to drop, and has fallen below 2000 as of this writing (despite our maintaining a PR7!?!)
Ah well...I've gorwn so tired of the rolloercoaster that it's just not worth worrying over anymore. I've been doing this since 1996, and the same thing hold true now that held true then. Develop a good resource, and the traffic follows. While google may not be able to get it's collective head out of it's rear, Yahoo/MSN/ASK are now sending us about 70% of the traffic levels we enjoyed with google ranking our site as it is desered to be ranked. Since it is (for all practical purposes) a non-profit, google is becoming a non-issue.
Kind of nice, really. A few short months ago, it may have been a catastrophe with the googlopoly on search, but with all the "new" players picking up the slack it's alot easier to sleep at night.
same thing happend to me....every day G drop more and more sites, from 200.000 to 100.000, to 60.000
Seriously!? How many sites have you got. Maybe that's a reason - too many sites - possibly automated creation of pages?
since 3 years it wasnt a problem.
2.)
then, i have a mirror @ www02.example.com- google knows it and crawl it like the www-domain in past. same PR (6)
3.) i have more than one page designs, every design is another subdirectory like this:
www.example.com/design1/ is the same as:
www02.example.com/design1/
4.)
my domain have 2 aliases:
www.ex-ample.com and www.exmple.com
i dont know how many sites i have...there are all dynamic...every day my site become 50 - 100 new members, and so 50-100 new sites.
it is a page like millions of others.
