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I attribute this to a relavent backlink development campaign I did 2 weeks ago. Previously, my backlinks were dominantly unrelated.
Like staleness, ancient 301s, and a plethora (like results 1-10 sometimes) of dupe content/domains?
Might be me but my Y! referral percentages haven't budged for years; they didn't drop after the switch, which is praiseworthy, but they're still a distant 2nd.
My G traffic is holding steady.
PR and number of pages indexed has stayed exactly the same.
What I've been able to figure out so far is that my sites still show up for exact phrase matches (i.e. "widgets located in this place") still show up at #1 to #4, but without the quotes I show up on page 5 or 6.
Based on my pages, it seems that Google is putting some sort of penalty on pages with the exact search phrase on the page. Pages with all the keywords, but not together seem to show up near the top. Exact phrases are later.
Bek.
Based on my pages, it seems that Google is putting some sort of penalty on pages with the exact search phrase on the page. Pages with all the keywords, but not together seem to show up near the top. Exact phrases are later.
I noticed early this month G used a spam filter on one of my pages because a target keyphrase was repeated twice in close proximity in the first paragraph. Adsense displayed public service ads on the page for weeks. I edited it to use more natural language and related terms, and it was picked up within a day. Yours might be another part of the filter.
My other smaller sites traffic seems to be halved since the 23rd.
Going bananas today.
My secret? Haven't SEO'd the site. Haven't touched the site format (urls) since June or so. I expect will only get better with time the more I leave things alone.
:)
Ben
There have been times over the last year when I've thought G's behaviour was akin to shooting themselves in the foot, but lately it seems that they've taken aim directly at their head. Of course, their aim is not so good as it used to be, so they might still miss. ;-)
Traffic down over 50% on 2 sites.
:(
I think it's fair that the average homepage creators (sometimes with better content) get a chance as well to get more visitors.
- a number of large sites with relatively unoptimized internal pages took a hit on August 4th. Many lost up to 80% of their Google referrals.
- some of these sites then recovered completely around August 25, and smaller sites suffered.
- then on September 22, the dial was turned back away from large sites, and additional filters / penalties were applied to other sites that may or may not be related.
Our take, as a large, fairly unoptimized site that took a hit on August 4 and recovered on August 25, is that this most recent tweak was a toned down version of the tweak that occcurred on August 4.
On August 4, we saw fairly significant erosion in the serps across hundreds of thousands or relatively uncompetitive key words. For example, key words that we had placed #3 for, we placed #10 for after August 4.
This latest tweak is the same type of across the board erosion in the Serps, but the more typical slide is #3 to #5.
I don't think that there's any why to know if this is simply a 'randomization' effort by G to keep folks off balance, or if this indicates some more permanent shift of how sites are ranked.
Perhaps in an effort to curb the spam of affiliate marketers, Google is willing to throw out a few babies with the bath water.
I'm still hoping that this is a glitch as they re-organize their index - it would really stink for me if I can never get a top 5 listing for any topic on my main site.
