Yesterday, Friday, September 16, I lost about 40% of my traffic. Today, it's looking awful again. I came here to see if it was just me and I see it's not.

I am number one still for my main keyword, but I've gone down to like #18 and #26, etc. for many of my other keywords. I've changed nothing significant, so I am hoping this is temporary.

Does anyone know if this is hopefully temporary? Everything was normal since Friday, everything fell to crap on Saturday.

I have not had anything this bad happen since the Florida update where I was nowhere to be seen for a month or so.

If anyone figures out what "rules" have changed, please let us know.

Do you think we should just sit this out and not change anything to see if this is a temporary mess?

Chard and Northstar: I feel the same as you. Enough of stressing about free Google traffic.

It's hard to find motivation to build new high quality sites. Before it used to be the sandbox. Now it's these monthly data refreshes. I can't add new content without thinking of all these stupid "too my new pages too quickly" or near duplicate filters that could drop my site from the serps next month.

Sites come and go and sadly this means I have to keep uploading new grey hat pages as fast as possible just to maintain my income level.

With Google you never know! To me it seems like they have a monthly temporary mess, or shoudl I say, contant temporary mess? The only thing you can be sure of is that you can't trust Google anymore. It doesn't matter what you do. SEO? Not worth the name anymore and is totally useless. What Google wants today, they penalize you for tomorrow. If you don't get any hits from other search engines, then you need to change your site. In my mind, google search are crap and if I get hits from Google in the future it's just going to be a bonus hit.
To me Google is dead, long live Live.com

i worked hard getting links from partner sites and now all
my work is useless,

What rules are now in Google?
Should i continue to build link campain or nothing will help now?

WolfLover,

At this point it looks like Friday Sept. 15th was the most recent installment of the monthly "data pushes" which previously occured April 26th, June 27th, July 28, & August 17th. Judging from the posts here it doesn't seem like as many people were hit by this data push as in the previous months. My site has never been effected by any of these pushes until now.

I've read where some have bounced back within days, and some have bounced back on subsequent pushes. My assumption is that those who bounced back in days were fixed manually, and the ones who came back in subsequent pushes were fixed algorithmically.

There are also those who have never come back.

The burning question is then what kind of data would get our sites hosed like this, how do we fix it, and how do we get our sites to be included with the ones which are fixed in a matter of days?

The burning question is then what kind of data would get our sites hosed like this, how do we fix it, and how do we get our sites to be included with the ones which are fixed in a matter of days?

dataguy, how do those that get fixed manually get it done? Is this done by the webmaster or by contacting Google?

Does anyone know how to go about getting your site back where it was manually rather than waiting and hoping the next data push will put you back where you were?

This is really awful, so many of us make our living this way and everything can quickly fall to crap even when you've done nothing wrong or against any TOS.

The June 27th update did not affect my site, however it was buried pages deep for all search terms with the July 27th update. For the Aug 17th update I expierenced a recovery of a very small number of search phrases. As of yesterday (Sept 15th) I have seen a complete recovery in Google SERPs with my traffic back to normal pre-July 27th levels.

The more a follow threads on this issue the more I tend to think it is some kind of massive rolling date update that results in sites totally disappearing from SERPs for a couple of months while some kind of data related to the site is purged and refreshed.

... the more I tend to think it is some kind of massive rolling date update that results in sites totally disappearing from SERPs for a couple of months while some kind of data related to the site is purged and refreshed.

Exactly, people need to realize ultimately this is a good thing. (in a sadistic way)

Unlike with past updates, instead of having some "unknown" penalty being applied to your site and lasting 6-12-24 months, there is a much greater chance that whatever "penalty" you have tripped will only last 1-2-3 months
(Regardless of whether the penalty is deserved or logical)

This is the "new" modified Google dance. Sooner one gets used to it, the less the stress levels.

dataguy - I haven't been affected either until now. I did fine through big daddy and all these other "data pushes". I'd love to know what it is that I've done 'wrong'.

I'm still first for my site name and a site: search seems fine so I don't think its any type of penalty, at least not in a somewhat older sense of a penalty.

KenB - did you make any changes that you think may helped your site come back time?

Have other people done something that they think helped them to recover from one of these "data pushes"?

KenB - did you make any changes that you think may helped your site come back time?

I don't know if anything I did had any impact on my recovery; however, one of the big things I did was fixed a whole mess of what I thought were 301 redirects but were actually 302 redirects. I also made sure that database driven sections of my site returned 404 errors when no results were returned from the database. These were techical errors that have existed for around three years plus.

Another thing I did was to add a sitemap for my site, which may have helped expediate the elimination of any duplicate pages caused by the lack of appropriate 404 errors and the 302 redirects, which should have been 301 redirects.

I don't know if anything I did had any impact on my recovery; however, one of the big things I did was fixed a whole mess of what I thought were 301 redirects but were actually 302 redirects. I also made sure that database driven sections of my site returned 404 errors when no results were returned from the database. These were techical errors that have existed for around three years plus.
Another thing I did was to add a sitemap for my site, which may have helped expediate the elimination of any duplicate pages caused by the lack of appropriate 404 errors and the 302 redirects, which should have been 301 redirects.

I am very surprised and depressed by this thread, because I expected the Google updated for next week and I have no changes at all my affected domains.

After June 27, an improved script for the contact formulars returning error 404 for pages no longer existing was one of the first actions.

Later, I created also a site map.

A few pages, maxbe 1% of the content had been used on 2 different domains. I have now 301 redirects to the one and only remaining version.

Seems so far nothing helped.

With Googles frequent changes to whatever they think they need to do, it is like walking around in a maze on a dark night witn no moon or stars. There is nothing to guide you and if you think you have found one way to get out, then they are there to switch the maze around, or put up another invisible wall.
It seems like they have been reading SEO-101 and taken everything there is to know about SEO, created an algo that contradicts everything known to mankind.
If it wasn't for a little tiny bit of hope getting hits back from google, I would just disallow their spiders from my site. Then they can deal with all spam sites and not have any real sites in their index. It'll be spamgoole.com instead and people would go anywhere else to find what they are looking for.

Two of my sites disappeared on Sept 15th. So what should we do now? I haven't yet made a reinclusion request.

I find it interesting that my hobby site used to have the title "red widget reviews" but I changed that in July to just the site name. Now I find I am ranking #4 for the phrase rather than #10 to #20. I wonder if anti-SEO is playing a part. Perhaps I will change all of my page titles to something irrelevant.

Although I dont think this data refresh - or whatever its called these days - is complete based on looking at some datacenters differences, but it looks like the best way to rank for any money phrase in Google right now is to get yourself an homepage dot aol account(preferably in germany) and place as many spam pages as you can on it - guaranteed top 10 rankings

Ahh - now that I see some more refreshing it looks like Expired domains are working again as well - amazing if someone really forgot to put that filter back in

From the volume of posts here it does not appear that the changes are as far reaching as some previous updates.

Not really, I just can't be a..ed really to follow all the G changes anymore.

If there is nothing you can do about Google results, it's better now to concentrate on tier 2 traffic generators and let Google update itsself out of the market.

Google = Search and that is really bad! I even heard Bill Gates using "googling" in an interview on TV :(
It is also too bad that people don't really get mad when they see all the bad results google show these days. I saw that people have went to the trouble to go to page 85 to find my site! So what was on the other 84 pages? Spam?
Like someone said, all we now need to do is to put up spam sites, with a lot of stolen content, no backlinks to anybody and link the crap out of it to our spam sites with subdomains. That'll do it! Google will gladly index them and if we do it "right" we'll take the first spot :(

A few weeks ago I posted my "plan B" in the thread entitled 'Is It Realistic To Base A Business Around Free SERPs?' ( [webmasterworld.com...] ). I'm now deciding at what point it will be necessary to implement plan B. I'm fortunate since about half of my business is mostly Google independent. I think it's important to not play the role as victim, and though I may have to cut back hours for a few employees, my business will survive.

I've never been in this position before so I don't know that I have the best advice. I'm certain that my site doesn't have duplicate content / 302 / 404 issues, I solved those issues years ago and have only ever seen one supplemental listing from any of my sites. My best advice is to hang out in the places frequented by Google employees and try to make contact, places like Matt Cutts blog, Google's Webmaster Help forum, and here at WW. Even go to PubCon and SES if it is in any way possible. If you can influence someone to give your site a manual review maybe you can get some good information or possibly expedite the process a bit.

No changes here, either in traffic or in the top rankings of the keywords that I watch. (At least, not so far.)

One of my sites' index page is either around #35 or #2 or #3 for a major keyword phrase (32 million results), it jumps back and forth. We rank at or near the top for slightly less important kw phrases no matter what happens to the index. What's odd about the jumping around is that most of the other results in that SERP set are stable but mine is in and out. I try to not focus on where we are in the results but steadily and slowly acquire more inbound links, and steadily add more pages, too. Unless major crap happens with G's algo, the trend will be higher and higher.

Still at least two main indexes... the apparently being replaced that had tons of freehost spam, and the newer on with much less freehost spam but different data-refresh/lost/screwed-up sites.

Literally today (Sunday) was the best Sunday (heck best traffic day all round) since around May. I wonder how much of this is seasonal fluctuation and if maybe I'm not doing better in some phrases than I was before July 27th.

Given how volatile this past few months have been I'm not ready to pop any Champaign corks to celebrate quite yet. I am, however, hopeful that this is a sign of things to come for my website in regards to Googles SERPs

--edit reason: typos/missing words--

[edited by: KenB at 3:36 am (utc) on Sep. 18, 2006]

My largest site was hit pretty hard initially by the Sept update and went about 99% supplemental. It appears to be having a bit of a traffic recovery today but not much.

I must admit that it's a mystery to me, since this site is user generated unique content.

Over the past year I've pretty much written Google off as a reliable source of traffic.

There are pleanty of other ways to get traffic out there. I get 60%+ of the traffic on the effected site from repeat visitors that have bookmarked it. About 30% comes from the "other" search engines and PPC ads.

Freq---

Our content rich site was cut off from Google traffic on June 27, came back on July 28 and went down to zero on August 17. No improvements on Sep 15 are now forcing us to simply give up on aiming to be a quality publisher and our sites will no longer receive daily updates and new content.

For many keywords we provide the by far largest picture and video selections that Googler users do not find anymore whilst outdated and irrelevant pages receive all the traffic.

From the search term analysis we realize, that many users are searching for our different content channels and even our domain at Google and we truly feel sorry to disappoint our visitors.

Now Google owns the traffic monopoly on which publishers are depending and good content is obviouly no longer a guarantee for receiving visitors.

We hope, that one day someone will crush that Google monopoly to make the Internet as good as it was until their engeneers had started to demolish publishers with their algo updates.

No changes here, either in traffic or in the top rankings of the keywords that I watch.

Truly amazing!

Looks like I spoke too soon, again... the putrid results with all the freehost spam, even worse than before, seems to now be the dominant result batch. Pathetic.

"I would just disallow their spiders from my site. Then they can deal with all spam sites and not have any real sites in their index."

Nice idea! Since a while Google does not seem to care for tight search results and quality publishers who get cut off from traffic. Just hope, that someone steps up and will make a better thing than allmighty Google.

"The more a follow threads on this issue the more I tend to think it is some kind of massive rolling date update that results in sites totally disappearing from SERPs for a couple of months while some kind of data related to the site is purged and refreshed."

I must admit I tend to agree with this statement. Only what algorithm takes a couple of months to complete, except possibley the good ole google hand check.

FWIW I had orginally popped by to comment on thread that was reporting google showing the linux 1969 cache date for suplementals. (the thread seems to have disappeared!)

On

216.239.53.*
216.239.59.*
66.102.7.*
66.102.9.*
66.102.11.*
72.14.207.*
72.14.203.*

are the SERPS, which where active until last week.