On

216.239.53.*
216.239.59.*
66.102.7.* are the serps where our 2 sites that lost top positions on Aug 17 are restored they've been there for about a week; shame those results are not spreading

The message from Google is fairly obvious; don't get too comfortable with your organic placement, familiarize yourself with AdWords and be on the ready to boost your daily budget when your organic placement gets jerked around.

That might just be the strategy. If you want traffic, pay for it! And then Google can pay all the spam sites with Google Ads a LOT of money for their page views and click fraud. Maybe Google own them all?
I know what I am going to do now! I'll stop doing whatever Google tells me to do so they will "allow" me to be in their results. They should be f*ing glad to have my site in there and high up too instead of all the crap they show now, so I am just going to ignore Googles TOS and all other crap they say I need to do with my site!
I am going to work with all other search engines and when I am done doing that Google have to beg me to get my site in their stupid crappy index! Google is talking about "bad neighnorhood? S**T, we are all in a bad neighbohood being in Googles index!

Another thing with all these updates is that old cached pages has come back. For some reason when they do their updates/downgrades/s**w-ups they put all these old pages back and I am not sure about the strategy for doing that. There's got to be a reason since the pages have to have been crawled and cached long after March this year.
Here's a guess. They crawl a page and find that there are keywords matching a query on that page so they index it under that keyword/phrase "tag". Then they change their algo and for some reason the page gets deindexed under the former "tag" and the page goes into supplemental hell until the algo thinks it is a good match again for something else. That might explain why there suddenly are old cached pages showing up. maybe...

SOOOOOOOOOOOOOO..

is this the final big change at the end of the summer as was told by googleguy? 99% of the comments made here are negative. Many have stopped to even post anymore since it's been since April-June that this mess has been getting worse and worse..

Perhaps it's the right strategy at this point in google to buy up hundreds of domains and created mass spam pages.. these folks have been doing amazing all summer long.

Lost over 50% of Google traffic. First time ever for a 3 year old site. Rankings now back to what they were approximately 2.5 years ago.

Since I was quick to chime in during previous data refreshes that dealt me a bit of pain, I should equally be as quick to note that I am now seeing what appears to be a full recovery.

I will most certainly not be comfortable, given the liklihood of the site getting smacked around on the next data refresh (in like 5 weeks or will they hold off till the end of the shopping season?)

Anyhow, I didn't do anything drastic when we were feeling the pain during previous updates, but here's what I [u]did[/u] do, that might help some of you.

1. Check for supplementals. Understand why they might exist...not unique enough? scrapers? Re-read everything G1smd said 2-3 times.
2. Continued with the existing link acquisition strategy.
3. Most recently...cleaned up my outgoing links. There were pages that I hadn't touched in over a year, whose outgoing links weren't the best -- a few became bad neighborhoods and too many 404s.
4. Try to be patient and understand that there won't be a quick fix.

I really hope that all of you that lost your site will be able to fix anything that needs fixing, and climb to where your site deserves to be. For those of you that came back, about time huh?

Cygnus

[edited by: JoeSinkwitz at 2:11 pm (utc) on Sep. 18, 2006]

We have seen no change at all, just the constant flux.

More and more Datacenters have now the Serps until last week again:

216.239.37.*
216.239.53.*
216.239.59.*
66.102.11.*
66.102.9.*
64.233.185.*
72.14.203.*
72.14.207.*
64.233.163.*
64.233.169.*
64.233.171.*

Perhaps it's the right strategy at this point in google to buy up hundreds of domains and created mass spam pages.. these folks have been doing amazing all summer long.

I have really to think about my business strategy.

I was since January 2005 underway to different fairs and interesting projects to make big detailed reportages about them.

This 100% original content sites are filtered away since June 27th and lost 85% Google traffic.

Maybe it was a bad idea to invest so much effort in creating original content, I think the spamers have the better business model.

Arni. where do you check that?

My site is recovering. [:)]

Recovered for some keywords, hopefully it will be fully recovered sooner than later.

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

Nor any here either, as far a quick eyeball over the stats and some key search phrases show me.

However, I have three (very small) new sites I've just put up in the past few months, and each is only showing the home page as being indexed, and that's kind of frustrating. I was hoping that this next update/data push would bring a few more pages up, but it hasn't happened yet.

I only just noticed today that my original artwork website had dropped from page 3 for my favorite keyword phrase to page 27, since last time I checked only about 3 days ago.

Lately I've been working really hard on my attached Amazon store (and have been starting to do increasingly well with it), so thought maybe I'd overdone the keyword density or something. I see other, much more knowledgeable webmasters are having similar problems though. Anyway, what a sinking sensation! I guess I'm not necessarily being penalized for anything I've done, though.

Connie

gehrlekrona

Do like your approach to the Google monopoly. Perhaps we should all deny Google access to our sites as suggested in this thread.

Anyway, we tell our visitors, that our content is invisible for Google users and that we recommend Yahoo search at this time.

We own prime content for many keywords, had top listings for years and these current updates do nothing but damage with zero traffic from Google.

Did you know, that in Germany the Google marketshare is at 90%.

this can be depresing...especially when Google screws you for months. If you have 50 sites and no updating is needed, one might not mind a few falling off periodically, but in my case I really have only one good site, and I update it daily, google or no google traffic. It's hard to find the drive to keep doing this. To make matters worse, with Google it's either on top or might as well not be in the index at all.

If everybody would deny Google access to their site then it would work but there's got to be a lot of people not affected, for some reason, by all these so called updates (I prefer to call tme down-grades) thay wouldn't want Google banned from their sites.
Maybe we can try to steer the visitors away from Google by adding something to our sites. A nice banner where we promote MSN or Yahoo or any other search engine but Google
I wish that they would stop treating our sites as garbage and collateral damage with all these down grades. To me it seems that maybe we are too close to spammers in what we do so our sites triggers some kind of spam filter but it's kind of strange that sites that steal your content, put some google ads on it gets indexed after a couple of weeks and gets ahead of your site. Maybe we should take a closer look at all these sites and see what they have done. It seems like Google really like what they are doing as far as optimising their sites since no sandbox or any other penalty is brought down on them.
I have read threads that people that got hit in June are coming back big time now. What does that tell us? Did Google get back to what was minus removing some of the spam sites that was there back then? What about the new ones that shows up now when you do a search? Is this the way Google is going to fix their index every month?
It's REALLY strange that I now once again see cached pages from March this year, pages that are supplemental once again. Why do they suddenly use old cached pages again? Why do they even USE cached pages? Another "funny" thing is that sometimes it says that they have a cached page and when they try to retrieve it Google tells you it's not found...... hmmmmm.... gets weirder for every day.
I guess one thing we need to do is to think: "What would I do if there were no search engines?"

in Germany the Google marketshare is at 90%.

For those who are wondering, night707 informs us that the source for that data is the German IT News site, Heise Online. [heise.de...]

that freaky line of dates June, July, August simply points at some certain malfunctioning inside the Google corporation where certain executives feel entitled to decide about www traffic. Spammers and outdated junk is receiving exactly that traffic that quality publishers need in order to produce their publications.

From my point Google is going the same way as ancient products like lycos, altavista etc. who ended up with delivering the same junky results such as Google since these ridiculous updates that have turned a good engine into a useless monopoly run by folks who prefer to convert something good into a mess. Perhaps the founders have forgotten about their roots.

Our sites have been fairly stable, except for one (which is our biggest earner.) This site has been in and out of Google the last few months, and is back in as of a couple of days ago.

Obviously I am happy about this, but I must also say, that the results are MUCH better in the sectors that I check. Previously, in the top ten, there were four spammy redirect pages; now there are zero. Count me as one person extremely happy with this latest change.

My site has dropped yet another page in the last hour, under my main keyword phrase, to page 28. Talk about depressing. I've put an AWFUL lot of work into my Amazon store lately, and was just starting to see some good results. Maybe I shouldn't have put so many of my eggs into one basket, but my options have just been very limited lately.

Thank you for allowing me to vent. I know I'm not the only one in this position. I can't help wondering though if there's something that I was getting away with before that is now "verboten." I've started reducing the keyword repetition in my store navigation links, for example. Possibly my meta descriptions are also too long, though that didn't seem to matter before. Or maybe none of this has anything to do with anything.

I still can't help thinking there's something I should have done better, since many of my competitors' sites are still exactly where they always were.

keyword repetition in my store navigation links

I think you may be on to something there. I've seen some reasons to believe that at least some of the recent Google ranking changes fall into this area.

I would not worry about long meta descriptions, as long as they are unique and specific to the page. Suggest you take that one on later, especially if you see awkward truncations or refusal to use your descriptions in snippets.

>> It's REALLY strange that I now once again see cached pages from March this year, pages that are supplemental once again. Why do they suddenly use old cached pages again? Why do they even USE cached pages? <<

It's all in [webmasterworld.com...] and the threads it links to.

Thank you for the feedback, Tedster.

Another thing I was wondering about is the repetition of similar or identical descriptions for many of my store items. Could that be considered duplicate content/keyword spamming?

And what about document titles where you have several numbered pages of similar items? Such as pink widgets page 1, pink widgets page 2, etc.? I try to categorize items as much as I can, but sometimes that's the best I can do.

With meta descriptions for store pages with similar items (say books in a certain category), I've always tried to vary them by listing a few of the actual titles on that page.

I'm not really a webmaster, I'm a right-brained artist type, and a lot of the terminology that gets used in places like this is over my head, but I keep learning as much as I can.

lost my flagship last month ,back in better position 9/15 for my main keyword =#5 out of 40 mil results ,but looks like a long way to go yet ,some questions about that monthly data push
1:is Big Daddy ready?
2:(does anyone knows when finally Google will update the PR in Google directory)
3:a final BL/PR update?
4:following by a big tsounami update on those boring SERPS
(PS)
OK the "good guys" have made there millions the last 1,5 year, come on Google let a few of us normal guys to make a few bucks:)

Big Daddy was a "done deal" more than 4 months ago... I forget exactly when though.

If you have 50 sites and no updating is needed, one might not mind a few falling off periodically, but in my case I really have only one good site, and I update it daily, google or no google traffic. It's hard to find the drive to keep doing this.

It is possible to have a number of sites and keep them all updated. You don't have to update every page every week. And it does help to smooth things out income wise. When some pages or even whole sites drop in rankings with algo changes, if you have a variety of sites with different styles and topics, then usually at least some other sites will go up, so things even out.

I think you may be on to something there. I've seen some reasons to believe that at least some of the recent Google ranking changes fall into this area.

Hello Tedster, I'd love to hear some elaboration on this. Would you be suggestion varying the internal navigation link text on the popular pages of website?

[edited by: CainIV at 6:26 am (utc) on Sep. 19, 2006]

I'm not talking about anchor text repetition across many pages, but rather repetition across many links on the same page -- within the template, in other words.

No, I would NOT sugggest altering the text used in the same navigational link on different pages. For one thing, that can confuse a visitor. They expect and need consistancy from page to page.

For another thing, Google recognizes the page template and to a degree can "see" the navigation as contrasted to the body copy. The repeating parts of the template have a distinctive footprint, in other words. If you start varying that anchor text from page to page, it just "might" look like you're trying to play a game with Google.

You can work in anchor text variations if you link within the copy, but I would not play with the menu areas. Of course, you may be braver than I, or may have a domain where you can afford to experiment. Might be interesting!

So, if your site is about widgets, then I think having the actual text "widgets" in too many of your navigation links could cause a problem. In fact that is one issue I think I've seen on various unrelated sites that recently dropped in their rankings. This was a common factor across several -- especially in footer links. To degree this practice ws lways problematic, but now the dil seems to have been turned up a bit.

One other area that may be in play (again, this is just a conjecture made from recent suggestive observations) is Google taking a harder look at domains with lots of 301 redirects within the domain -- especially where the content of the target url is nothing like the content of the original url. In other words, using a 301 where a 404 or 410 is really the truth of the situation, in an attempt to leverage backlink influence. Not proven, just suspected and under investigation. Something sure seems to be different about internal 301 handling lately.

tedster wrote: "I would not worry about long meta descriptions, as long as they are unique and specific to the page. Suggest you take that one on later, especially if you see awkward truncations or refusal to use your descriptions in snippets..."

What if you run a unique content site on a CMS with fixed descriptions across the site? Am I doomed?