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We have seen changes come and go and have never really heavilly optimized our sites for seo, some garden variety stuff but have always focused on content and our users and site usability. Thus the success of our major sites which push 2 million or so visitors a month.
We have noticed over the last 4 months a gradual erosion of pages housed of our sites by google which seems to be only on our largest properties. These large sites have tens of thousands of pages with all manual all unique content made over 5 years by me and my staff.
Google has never really housed all of it but it used to house a fair amount until a few months ago and it has been a downhill slope since then, thousands of pages disappearing a month slowly but surely eroding down to about 30% housed of each large site.
On the other hand the new Yahoo has 90% of each site already and is outstripping gbots insane amount of hits per week almost.
Yes our traffic is dropping on these properties from Google but we are strong enough now to not be totally reliant upon them but I was still wondering if anyone else who has large pr7 established 10k backlinks plus site has been noticing the same erosion over the last few months.
On a side note nothing at all has changed with our site in the last 18 months beyond its pr increasing and backlinks increasing which would be positive aspects, no server changes, no template changes, no seo changes, little to no seo to begin with, no content duplication, noone stealing our content, no changes at all just the usual growth for the last 5 years.
Let me know if you are seeing the same erosion or if there is something else at play here that we may be doing wrong.
Thanks a bunch
Dman
This likely has nothing to do with your situation, but then again it might. I've been looking hard at something this week and I'm curious about a couple of things.
As your pages indexed have been decreasing in number, do they just "go" or do they first lose all or part of their description and/or page titles? Some sites have been slipping out of the index with first losing both those and then finally losing rankings.
Is it all at once that they fall out or is there a gradual change, as some others have seen and reported?
Also, I understand that all your pages have unique content, bu what percentage of the pages would you say is identical to others across the site, or sections of the site?
Welcome to the unpredictable world of google I guess.
It seemed as our sites were soaring in the ranks, once they got noticed they got yanked.
Im sorry to hear you are likely going through the same situation. Don't put all your eggs into one basket!
It is for sure a gradual phasing out of content and seems to be for our 3 largest properties settling at 30% crawled.
A interesting note we made yesterday is across our largest sites and across 3 other large sites owned by competitors in the pr7 area all 6 came back to roughly 30% crawled.
I almost wonder if they have instituted a percentage of site allowed after a certain amount has been crawled. I do not believe they have capacity issues, ie they are giving away 1gig of email storage, possibly processing capacity issues though.
The percentage of the same content used in the same site would be less then 3%-5%. And we have found instances of that being crawled out twice so we are sort of ruling this out as well as problems with the page sizes, seo, nav, url length, html standards.
I am getting the distinct feeling they will only crawl around 30%-40% of these extra large 20-60k+ page sites.
Whether this is to fight html spammers or to free up processing power for more sites to add to there index I dont know but it is a shame to see such high quality properties including our competitors be virtually whittled down to 30% of there size while amazon/dmoz html spam and crawling html title/keyword generatored html spam is running totally rampant.
I sure hope they work this problem out as Yahoo is now housing 2-3 times as much of our old established sites then bigG is along with our competitors. I like Google, they have been good to us as we have followed the "rules". But lately that doesnt seem to matter much.
Dman
