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I am talking about traffic of nearly 7 k from google everyday and hence its a sizable decrease.
Looking for early answers on how we could check the things
[edited by: div01 at 12:47 pm (utc) on Aug. 13, 2004]
mfishy, I like your example. This is the type of website that I would totally agree to be of real great value with genuine contents. It was registered since 1999 with a lot of contents from a lot of members "AND it is a bit just over 100k pages."
xcomm, i'm not sure where i pointed out that i have a 200,000+ page spammy site. i don't have one that is that large or in the least spammy. perhaps someone hijacked my account in writing that (?!?!) or maybe you were mistaken about who said it or misunderstood what i tried to convey.
i agree that webmasterworld is indeed a site that is google-worthy. and it doesn't need a professional staff of hundreds.
A very critical review of your site with respect to G's webmaster guidelines may be prudent and revealing. Are you cross linking "excessively" (or even a little)? Are you buying or selling PR? Do you have anything "hidden" on your site (links, text, redirects)? Are you linking to a "bad neighborhood" or two? Are you in a "link exchange" program that has become popular enough to be "on the radar?" Didja ever spam a blog or two?
Please don't reply with "My site is spotless! Google made a big mistake!" until you've carefully reviewed. It might be wise to ask a friend to do a site review for you to insure objectivity...
Personal opinion: The Google algo is very heavily dependent on links as we all know. Google has changed which backlinks they display twice that I recall, the last change is very recent. I suspect this is a "defensive" measure to protect their algo. If so, "questionable" linking practices should be given extra attention.
Also, not to say that I am perfect, I have gone through my site to see if I was spammy in any way with my wording, and I even rewrote some things that I thought may have unintensionally been spammy in that my keyword density was quite high. But I don't have hidden links, or lists of keywords, and I don't ovcersubmit to the search engines. I follow rules and protocols to a tee because years ago I did get warned about spamming from dmoz. Many years ago, when it happened I was able to speak with them and correct my issues and not be tagged for spam, and ever since I have used their reccommedations to me to ensure I am not spamming the SE.
Thanks for the update.
It was very kind of you both to elucidate my queries.
Cheers.
Copper
ownerrim,
you seem to be incredulous that any site could have 100,000 pages. i have one such site. i won't tell you what mine is but let me describe for you hundreds of such sites: newspapers.
I'm not ownerrim, but I'll defend his right to be skeptical. The member who made the comment about 100,000 pages referred to "my site," which isn't a phrase that's likely to be used by a newspaper employee. Of course, it's possible that he (or she) was Rupert Mudoch writing under an alias. :-)
Future generations will then thank Google for cleaning up the mess it has created.
$1 per page? I would be starving :)
I am in India, and have a site that is run just because it is useful for people. I make a meagre profit, and the site has 1,00,000 pages.
By your calculations, forget continuing making that profit, I would be worse than Enron by now.
Or perhaps you would like the Net to be populated only by the ones with laaaaarge pockets... no NGO do-gooder types?
BOOHOOOO
I'm pretty sure it did. G is in a neverending battle with spammers.
The fact that spammy sites still exist high in the SERP's doesn't mean that the update did not include measures to knock out more spammers. In the most of the categories we operate in, the sites that got hit this time around were typically among the spammiest of the bunch.
That does not mean that the innocent sites were immune; they never are. Since Florida, unfortunately, G has been hitting a lot of innocents in their efforts to kill the spammers. Acceptable casualties.
Annual fee of just $1 per page to be indexed will take care of 99% of the web.
Won't happen. Why? Because the only sites that would pay the fee (and, in many cases, would even know about the fee) would be commercial sites that have a strong financial interest in being listed.
To use an example, if you wanted to look up "observatories," you wouldn't see any research observatories in the SERPs--you'd see nothing but pages selling home observatories and telescopes.
Annual fee of just $1 per page to be indexed will take care of 99% of the web.Won't happen. Why? Because the only sites that would pay the fee (and, in many cases, would even know about the fee) would be commercial sites
Even if this idea was only used by commercial sites, that would be a vast improvement. I would think a separation between commercial and non-commercial would be beneficial for all involved. Commercial and non-commercial are separate universes after all.
I disagree...my site got hit hard.
;)
I think we need to put a meta tag into our pages to help Google identify the difference.
Ok.. I promise .. last post in this thread.
I would think a separation between commercial and non-commercial would be beneficial for all involved. Commercial and non-commercial are separate universes after all.
I've often thought that Google search would be vastly more efficient if users could use radio buttons or separate search boxes for:
"I want information on:"
"I want to buy or book:"
The results wouldn't have to be from separate indexes; Google could simply skew the SERPs toward information or commercial pages. For example:
"I want information on: [Widgetco WC-1 digital camera]" would tend to display Widgetco's own pages and third-party review pages at the top of the SERP.
"I want to buy or book: [Widgetco WC-1 digital camera]" would tend to display dealer and affiliate product pages at the top of the SERP.
The problem, of course, is that some commercial sites would try to second-guess the algorithm and crank out two pages for each product or property, one a commercial page and the other an ersatz "information" page. Still, Google could be extremely aggressive in filtering out questionable pages in information searches, since those same pages would still be available in a commercial search.
I'm not ownerrim, but I'll defend his right to be skeptical. The member who made the comment about 100,000 pages referred to "my site," which isn't a phrase that's likely to be used by a newspaper employee. Of course, it's possible that he (or she) was Rupert Mudoch writing under an alias. :-)
No, I am not I have over 100k unique items in my inventory database, and no, it is not Amazon XML feed.
>$1 per page? I would be starving :)
Okay, make it one rupee per page for India. ;)
>I am in India, and have a site that is run just because it is useful for people. I make a meagre profit, and the site has 1,00,000 pages.
A few thousand free page allowance for all sites, perhaps depending upon PR, will be fine. Any special case like non-profits can be handled separately.
No excuses like this - I have 1 million unique products and I need 1 million unique(right!) pages to be indexed because that will be good for my visitors (Yeah, right.) Even Wal-Mart does not store one product only on a shelf. Sites can keep their million pages but let Google index only a few thousands, rest can be found easily by the visitors once they arrive at the site.
Google traffic on five of my sites dropped dramatically on the same day (August 5). Two of my sites were almost totally dependant on Google and traffic is now 20% of what it was. Other sites have a better balance with MSN-Yahoo-Google, so the loss of Google traffic has impacted overall site traffic maybe 30% istead of 80%. But it is still dramatic.
All of these sites used directory-like pages with same content aimed at specific keywords.
So Google has penalized one or both of two things:
A) Internal duplicate content(pages within the site that have same content, but different keywords in the title)
B) Directory-type structure - main directory pages pointed to 50 sub-pages where, apart from the keywords in the title, each page has the same content and the same set of external links.
Google penalty must be aimed at A or B or both, because I have other sites without any of these directory-type pages, and Google traffic is up in August.
Comments?
So Google has penalized one or both of two things:A) Internal duplicate content(pages within the site that have same content, but different keywords in the title)
B) Directory-type structure - main directory pages pointed to 50 sub-pages where, apart from the keywords in the title, each page has the same content and the same set of external links.
Looks like Google got something right!
All of these sites used directory-like pages with same content aimed at specific keywords.
Sounds like a text book definition of doorway-spamming to me. If your site wouldn't stand the scrutiny of a human review (and from the sounds of it, it wouldn't), then it's a case of the Algo working like it should.
From everything I've read, the only conclusion I can draw is that a whole bunch of different changes were made, some to penalize spam-like sites and then some other tweaks of the knob that has the effect of devaluing large sites, whether intentional or not.
Some large site manager reported seeing a rebound a couple of days ago. I have not. All I have seen is Googlebot going nuts - more than 120,000 pages views this week in my logs.
Search for some major brand name stores, such as best buy, sears, JC penny, Circuit City and more and you will see exactly what I mean. I am now seeing them show up at the top of some of the best words in my industry that they don't even have one single instance of on their entire website! They are ranking well for terms that have nothing to do with their (limited ammount) of content.
This is two great examples of directory style affiliate spam that is dominating hundreds of popular searches and in some cases outranking the main company with two short, generic paragraphs of text.
I usually do not post specifics and I mention no url's but these are just a few of the very popular brand names these sites rank great for. Surely Google did not intend for this.
Isn't your home page generally supposed to be that way? A home page with liknks to all of your other pages on the site, and a little bit of information on some if not all of what is on the other pages you are linking to? I mean it doesn't mean that I repeat anything from the home page to the other pages, but let's say I have my home page "a" and then content pages "b-z" There is a little sentence or blerb in general about "b-z" on the home page, so people know where to look for what? Plus I have news about recent things say "b" that will also show up in the actual "b" page.
I thought this was giving accurate user friendly content... am I wrong? Is this filterable spamming?
you are right. and these spammy directories do not have any page rank and are still ranking near the top. there's no question that some folks are gaming the system and winning the gold on google (i'm watching the olympics opening ceremony right now so pardon that).
