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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.
Agree.
I believe that Google may simply implements into practice its open statement that Google considers as spam all that is optimized for search engines *only* and had no benefits for human visitors.
Vadim
How do you figure out if G! thinks you have duplicate content?
I'm not sure if there's any way to tell for sure, but if you do a site:www.mysite.com command, any result that shows just a url, without a description, has been crawled but not indexed. My understanding is that this COULD be due to duplicate content.
IMHO, Google is removing most sites which use any type of Amazon script. I see examples of this on several sites I watch.
Yes, one of my sites is an Amazon scripted site which has suffered the Google purge. The thing to keep in mind is that while Google may not like such a site, the other search engines do.
Since I have spent NO time or effort on this site since March 2004, I feel ANY revenue it generates is a bonus..
My September 2004 stats show you can generate some traffic from this type of site from the other search engines..
Links from an Internet Search Engine 23 different refering
search engines Pages Percent Hits Percent
Ask Jeeves 13455 78.4 % 13455 78.4 %
Ask Jeeves UK 1283 7.4 % 1283 7.4 %
Yahoo 905 5.2 % 905 5.2 %
Teoma 373 2.1 % 373 2.1 %
Excite 292 1.7 % 292 1.7 %
MetaCrawler (Metamoteur) 214 1.2 % 214 1.2 %
Mamma 174 1 % 174 1 %
MSN 137 0.7 % 137 0.7 %
WebCrawler
Robots- 9 different robots* Hits Bandwidth Last visit
Jeeves 499819 6.87 GB 26 Sep 2004 - 21:32
Inktomi Slurp 952 15.84 MB 26 Sep 2004 - 21:21
Googlebot (Google) 403 6.96 MB 26 Sep 2004 - 20:06
Alexa (IA Archiver) 236 4.25 MB 26 Sep 2004 - 03:36
Unknown robot (identified by 'spider') 69 1.53 MB 26 Sep 2004 - 14:00
I can see some sites filtered that don't use amazon product feed, but do use large datafeeds.
So, I'm off to move the amazon datafeed and all other datafeeds to another domain, then block them out on my site with my robots.txt file.
Perhaps I'm jumping the gun here, and it is still a glitch - anyone else have suggestions how they'd handle this?
I think you fellows are off base with the whole affiliate approach. Better yet, I hope you are. I've been looking at the top rank pages and what I'm finding are the most relevant sites have the most relevant backlinks, as well as the greater amount of backlinks. At least the several I checked. Those top sites also contain relevant links to several affiliates, including Amazon.
No doubt Google is tweaking a few things.. maybe the Gaang enjoys watching webmasters tweak, too. I left town last Thursday thinking I might come back to a disaster - after reading a few pieces of <another> earlier thread. Indeed, just the opposite. Don't believe that I'm all happy about it either... I won't get to sleep in until sometime next week.
Btw, hello everybody as this is my first post here, have been lurking here for years so I though it was about time to make a post. Anyway, I better not turn this topic into my own welcome post so back to topic.
The extra traffic is not comming from my top key words but from thousands of new and kind of weird keywords like this one " barrel racing video game "
Yup, mine are big aff sites!
My aff site is doing ok but my site with original content is just disappeared from google. The traffic of this site drop from 4000 to 50 and my adsense earnings are also down, down to earth.
But I can see different results on google for same keywords for last 4-5 days.
Is still google is tweaking with algo or its google dance.
I also observed one thing keywords in URI is doing well.
What's your observation?
KK
Lots of good, clean information sites have affiliate links, since they aren't in the biz of actually running a shop, but still want a chance to make $.
I can see problems if you are mostly using content pasted from the site of your affiliate though, with links to their site where the spider can find the duplicate.
How can we define affiliate site?
Personally, I define one as a site that is sinply generated using a merchants datafeed, with the only difference between one page and the next being the H1 title/meta tags, etc.
I've seen too many of these types of sites to count, but I've also seen a large number in the last few days get tanked. It's about time.
by affiliate site, I am not referring to a site that only has a banner for affiliate programs on it.
If you have ever seen sites that use Amazon's product feed, combined with mod-rewrite. Using the script, you can create search engine friendly pages for all of Amazon's items - essentially creating thousands of pages that are dynamically generated from Amazon's content.
On my site, I use the script to target specific items relevant to my visitors, but the other items were getting indexed by Google and did get substantial traffic.
I also used datafeeds of information from other merchants to create search engine friendly pages to promote there products.
My main site, that has the Amazon product feed, plus a few other datafeeds, got hit the hardest. I am getting around 20% of the traffic I used to get, and it appears even for very specific searches, I'm not in the top 5 listings.
For my wife's site, that has a few sections generated by large datafeeds - her traffic is down, but not as much as my main site. She doesn't use the Amazon product feed at all on her site.
I also have a few small niche sites with no datafeeds, and those are still ranking the same.
I did some searches for specific amazon products, and it does look like several of the sites using amazon product feed are getting the same results as my main site - searching for their main site name does not show them in the top 5 results. However, when I do some other general searches, some sites using amazon product feed do show up in the results, and seem to rank without any penalty.
So, my conclusion is that this could be coincidence at this point, but it could also be a filter. For me, I've made the decision to block off all my datafeed generated pages, including the Amazon product feed generated pages using my robots.txt file. This is going to basically get rid of a lot of the 20% of the traffic I have left, but I'm hoping it'll get the main content parts of my site back into Google where they used to be. Overall, I've always felt that the datafeed generated pages would eventually get weeded out by Google - I assumed they would do it on a page by page basis, and not a site-wide penalty basis.
I'm really curious if anyone who got hit on Sept 23rd does NOT use amazon product feed or other large datafeeds on their site. Cutting them out of my site is painful - and I realize it could be a huge mistake if the drop my site is seeing is a glitch - as I won't have any holiday traffic to my datafeed pages now, either way.
1 old page cache in serps from 1st week in september
2 reduced visits by traditional gbot since 5th september
I suspect there are 2 types of new filter
(1) An on page filter gbot still visits
(2) A site wide filter normal gbot does not visit
with differing penalties applied therefore affecting serps in slightly different ways
steve
if you do a site:www.mysite.com command, any result that shows just a url, without a description, has been crawled but not indexed. My understanding is that this COULD be due to duplicate content.
I tried this on sites with true duplicate content, the source site listed all pages, the duplicate sites are exactly as you say, I think you're right.
Rick, we don't use any affiliate feeds, and took a mild hit on September 23 (about a 10% drop in G referrals).
I was on page 1 for lots of search phrases, I'm now appearing on page 7 kinda thing. All my pages appear to be in the index, and I'm being crawled still (more than usual). It's a 4 year old site with some solid incoming links.
On Aug 5, some key terms went from 6 & 7 positions to 3, 4 and 5.
I've seen some people reference activity on Aug 23 and Sept 6 as well.
It would seem to me that Google is doing bi-monthly updates. Now the real question is are they updating PR or tweaking their algo?
Perhaps both, maybe their twekaing algo's on the 22 - 24th of every month and changing PR's on the 5 - 7th.
I'm willing to take bets that their is another wave of volatility around the 6th of OCT.
Nope , Traffic went toilet in some of my 3 big sites , they are not amazon aff and also there is no way an algo can decide mine is an aff site since its not an datafeed site , no mention of merchant in the site and also no direct linking to the merchant site .
As some one posted here i beleive they turned the knob away from title tag and exact phrases on the body!
One peculiarity is that a few of our products have managed to stay in the results on Google, though their rank has dropped considerably. The odd part is, they are displayed simply like this:
widgets.com/widget_product_name.html
Similar pages
IE, our remaining results in Google are now missing the page titles and descriptions, and only showing a simple address and similar pages link. I have noticed other companies with results appearing this way as well.
Is this a related issue, or something that we are doing wrong on our end?
GBot has hit our site with vigor in the past 2-3 days so hopefully this will be resolved soon. Anyone agree with the earlier post that a likely time for a shuffle in results pages would be Oct 6?
Hope to see you all in VEGAS!
For other affected affilate sites, what do you think there is on your site that may have made it suffer from the algo tweaks?
In particular:
This sites used to rank for this obscure keywords with the power of title tag ,body text and internal anchor links and now they altered something in the algo mix many of these sites are not ranking anymore!
My site is small (500 static pages) and almost all affiliate links. Links are not hidden or redirected.
wellzy
Been looking at my stats - I would be lying if I said I knew why Aug went down and why the past few weeks are up . . .
