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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
3) Yes, I have atleast one site with DMOZ links, including several deeplinks, that seems to be suffering. DMOZ links haven't been of much help to my other sites that seem to be in extended sandbox/limbo mode but that is another thread.
Does anyone have a site they can compare to with this time last year? One that is stable and changes very little in the SERPS to compare to?
I do, and Google referrals have increased both in real numbers and as a percentage of total referrals. If Google is losing market share, the evidence has yet to show up in my referrer data.
for a travel site, the yahoo is now showing two top links from catholic education site and a NGO that works in health.
How could they be better for travel tips, and i have seen absurd results for many search keywords realted to my travel site.
[webmasterworld.com...]
if google is dropping in market share, you should also see a broad dropoff in adwords traffic at the very same time. this is, in fact, happening to at least one person.
i am far from concluding that google has dropped like a rock, since that seems to be far less likely than an algo change diverting traffic to other sites, but this is an interesting post.
[edited by: DaveAtIFG at 9:26 pm (utc) on Aug. 8, 2004]
[edit reason] Linked URL. We can link to ourselves anytime! :-) [/edit]
Does anyone have a site they can compare to with this time last year? One that is stable and changes very little in the SERPS to compare to?
My site has been online since 2000--about 40 pages. It has made steady progress in last 4 years and does not drop during summer.
Last Dec I started updating several of my pages every week and my visitors doubled and increased weekly. I have had over 90% visitors from Google for several months now and they have been increasing weekly.
However my visitors did drop this last week by 10% and I can't tell what might be the cause because major keywords seem to be still ok and same referrals are still showing up.
So, in my case it's not an August slump.
A quick check over a stable keyword has shown rankings from across various datacenters
8 to 30 (original was 2)
8 on 66.102.9.99 out of 1,370,000
30 on 216.239.39.99 out of 1,320,000
On a less competitive phrase (main phrase for site 2)
1 on 66.102.9.99 out of 34,300
1 on 216.239.39.99 out of 33,800
Also noticing that a number of datacenters are offline. Results on 216.239.39.99 seem fresher ....
<added: bah .. results are changing on the individual datacenters also ..>
I personally do not think so.
Has anyone gone through their keywords and checked your rankings?
Google has dropped all our sites instantly within 2 days time from all major keywords.
We do "everything" like their legal document states from the way they link etc. which hurts knowing that some sites beat our rankings in Google and they do "not" go by the rules.
Like yesterday, I went shopping for some stuff and found a coupon site listed high called flamingoworld.com, went into the page for the store I wanted and they spammed "coupons" about 50 times on one little coupon page and only had 3 offers.
I don't understand what Google is doing, but if they keep doing this to those who list in their search engine, that will be thousands of users that they are also shoving into other search engines.
We held our top spots for years in the search engines always keeping on top of the latest linking methods etc. I just don't understand what they are doing now.
We are a two many run network and this is what pays our bills, or what did pay our bills. We live in the middle of nowhere and the only job here is pizza delivery, not something we are looking forward to going back too. Just hope they fix things right away.
Us too. The devaluing of internal links theory is consistent with what we're seeing. Individual pages within our 200K page site are not well optimized. Historically, we have ranked well by efficiently distributing our PR throughout the site, allowing us to do very well on pages focusing on non-competitive key words.
As an added data point, after a mod rewrite several months ago, we did not 301 our dynamic urls to the new static urls. Meaning that all of our backlinks from other sites that pointed to internal pages, now point to the 'old' urls. These old URLs were filtered out of G (rightfully) as duplicate content.
Up until this week, this loss of backlinks to individual pages hadn't been a problem for us, as those backlinks were still being applied to the domain, which was in turn distributing that credit throughout the site.
If this theory holds water and the changes stick, it would seem like a nice development for the SEO community, and an unfortunate development for large, established sites who had been able to focus on building content (and not running link development campaigns).
1. An "authority site" is now a site that is focused on a specific area, so a site JUST about mp3 players is an authority on mp3 players and might also rank well for google sandbox terms related to mp3 players:
cd player, mp3 music, cheap hifi etc
2. There seems to be a further increased value to well established brands that will naturally have a lot of inbound links, they are usually about a specific area and so are now an authority site, getting even better ranking then before because:
3. Inbound anchor text has even more weighting while internal anchor text (possibly completely diluted?) doesn't seem to have any... This fits in neatly with the new concept of what an authority site is because these niche sites will naturally have inbound links with appropriate anchor text.
More speculative:
I wonder though if Google are keeping a closer eye on how people get their inbound links, they hate webmasters creating value for their sites, so it could be hard to get out of this mess...
Is google reading affiliate links? I noticed one ecommerce company's backlinks including a page that ONLY had an affiliate link to it - [scripts.affiliatenetwork...] etc
I wonder if thats why some of the ecommerce sites appear to have moved up the rankings?
Look forward to people telling me I'm barking mad, the need for some answers is more important so go ahead!
Fingers crossed it will right itself.
I believe that the majority of traffic loss reflects changes to position. This seems to be a "check your referrer logs" for keywords mandate. If position drops, obviously traffic will follow.
However, there's a high degree of inconcistency. I'm not seeing wide adjustments. Such inconsistency could be indicative of very sector/category specific tweaking of the algo. Or human audits.
If your site has dropped in your main keywords, or most competitive keywords, how likely would it be to stand up to a very detailed manual inspection? If you were required to rank your site against all others in selected keywords, where would it rank, based on its true comparative relevancy (rather than parental fondness)?
As more of an "outsider" than the site owners, I can look a bit more objectively, and say that the content of half dozen of the sites I've created professionally is not as good as other sites located under the same keywords. I don't control content, only presentation. None of those sites have been affected by a drop in postion or a loss in traffic.
But then -- I looked individually at the top 25 sites in each category (125 sites in all) where my clients site's had dropped out of top positions, and noticed something "odd" -- none -- absolutely NONE -- of the sites now on the first page (top 10) were using AdSense. Only a handful used any sort of advertising whatsoever. Somehow that strikes me as quite ... unusual.
Does anybody else see this in their own sectors?
(New) Authority = Scarcity of Affiliate and/or Sponsored Text Advertising?
[edited by: lars at 7:25 pm (utc) on Aug. 8, 2004]
Nah .. I've seen Amazon links and google adwords show up in some pretty respectable places. :)
(New) Authority = Scarcity of Affiliate and/or Sponsored Text Advertising?
Yes I've noticed this and I can't understand the reasoning. A great many information / review sites relay on advertising to function. Such as PC hardware reviews sites.
Advertising is the only way Google and Yahoo function, shame they penalise others for doing the same. Be nice to hear GG comments on this thread.
Not in the Travel and Tourism industry... if anything it's gotten worse. There seems to be even more boiler-plate sites with throw-away domains ... most displaying adsense ads - hmmm....
(New) Authority = Scarcity of Affiliate and/or Sponsored Text Advertising?
I've got affiliate links and AdSense ads on most of my 4,000 or so editorial pages, and they haven't hurt me at all.
Anyway, it wouldn't make sense for Google to take a negative view of affiliate links and text advertising, because ads and/or affiliate links support most information sites on the Web--and Google's stated corporate mission is to organize the Web's information and make it universally accessible.
I am currently gone off of the landscape over the past 3 days. I had been in the top three for my specific searches. I cannot see how I can be wedged now on page 10 in the results next to completely unrelated items.
also some results are real messy and bizarre - maybe this isn't over yet?
[edited by: DaveAtIFG at 9:31 pm (utc) on Aug. 8, 2004]
[edit reason] Linked URL [/edit]
I did however find that a high ranking page had the keyphrase in the middle of the title tag and nowhere else - except in meta keywords - which was stuffed to capacity. Also they had inbounds from FFA's etc.
So it seems to me that I need to start keyword stuffing and getting more FFA links to get a decent ranking.
no adsense or affiliate links at all for the top results
Maybe you should think about it this way:
The Adsense program is the perfect way to meassure the success of the SERPs. If Google tuned sites with not the best content are in the top, they got many visitors from google BUT Adsense sees them leave as fast as they were come from there. This could very much improve the algo. :-)
Any ad or other commercial motivation seems too far fetched for me.
And if there is one thing I can't believe in at all: manipulation or monopolization of SERPs by G, especially right in the middle of a VERY troubled IPO.
I'm sure most of us would not have guessed Google would have done what they did to be in the middle this VERY troubled IPO ... wouldn't surprise me in the least. Adsense = profits, both for the publisher and Google. Profits are very important to Wall Street - perhaps it's just 'another ' coincidence.
Anybody else seeing this trend on sites that have dropped?
If a majority of sites that rise in the SERPs (as a result of this change) do not carry adsense ads - how does that improve googles revenue?
It is NOT about not carrying Adsense - it is about if carrying Adsense to perform good!
It is NOT about not carrying Adsense - it is about if carrying Adsense to perform good!
I dont really understand the point you are making here - what do you mean by "perform good"? Are you talking about conversion from a click?
The most important change at Google seems to have downgraded very big sites at 100000+. This seems what about this tread is.
The title would say that is was a page for everything on coke can and so would the keywords, description etc.
The page was all about coke cans and not about odd items.
but they still dropped.
