Matt Cutts Gives Insight To Bigdaddy

The weird thing is my referrals from Google do NOT seem to be down. So my forum drops from several thousand pages indexed to 2 pages (basically the home page only) but keeps its Google rankings for all main search terms and increases its PR, AND maintains its traffic.

I really would love to understand how all those things can coexist... it makes no sense whatsoever to me.

 

Minstrel, have you tried searching for some of the terms that you are ranking for that should only go to a sub-page to see where you come up? Basically, are people still getting to your site from terms that are based on text in your de-indexed pages?

I'm asking because I've seen several people report this in other forums and I also have noticed that this week my main page replaced a subpage on the spot it had been holding (so I'm wondering if that's happening on yours as well).

 

Footer ads and coop ads are removed, reinclusion request has been sent.

Lets see what G have to say about it.

 

Does anyone know if the hyphenated domain name problem applies only to the domain name, or is it affecting hyphenated file names in the URL as well?

The site: command might have been tweaked so it no longer returns all the real results, just like the backlinks lookup command was awhile back. Although if it was, I don't see the motivation for it, except maybe some kind of bandwidth-saving attempt.

 

Actually, I just checked and that does seem to be what's happening. Google searches bring up the old pages (nonexistant for several months) - you click on that link and it takes you to the site custom error page - that error page contains a link to the forum home page - I guess people are following that link.

So the good news, people are still finding me. The bad news is that have to go through pages that don't exist to get to pages that do.

 

I don't mean to be cynical, but Google is out to make money, who do you think they're going to cozy up to? The billion$ business, or the owner of a hot dog stand?

I also think it's worth noting that the receipe for sucess hasn't really changed but it's just got harder as the big boys have come in and chucked a portion of their marketing budget at SEO.

 

Please keep us posted!

Also forums.DP.com is showing 1.1M pages indexed ... surely there are links (many links) in sigs and posts that link to bad neighbors, wouldn't logic according to Cutts say that DP would get pages dropped?

I smell smoke screen courtesy of cutts, I'm with Minstrel - SOMETHING IS BROKEN

We should start an internet drive to have webmasters and site owners to put a nocrawl in the robot.txt for google ... see how quickly they loose their share ....

 

So all this is telling me that the pages are in fact indexed and returning results, but they won’t show up on a “site:” search. That sounds like an attempt to devalue things like the co-op without really harming the serps for the sites running it.

My co-op question is this: If the weight goes down by 99% on every single site in the co-op, then isn’t each “point” of weight just worth 99% more? In other words, of we end up with 10 for every 10,000 then long-term, 10 points will get you as many links as 10K used to. Right?

 

If you're worrying about your Coop weight, you're worrying about the wrong thing. What good is Coop weight going to do you in all this mess?

 

A couple of great points there.

Sayles I think some sites like DP are old enough and trusted enough to survive anything.

We could rent it to people who don't read Matts blog.

 

I'll post the same as what I have posted 30mins back in Matt's blog...

Hi Matt, Hi JohnScott. Hi everybody.
I’m the webmaster, the person who did this.. http://www.mattcutts.com/images/poor-quality-links.png
Matt, first, thanks for not mentioning the url, my name or email - its really, really stupid step i took to bring back my clients site indexed in google again.

In short:
the website is about 6 months old, with around 30 uniques a day. I was building “natural” links for 2-3 months, few pr5,6 sites, but mostly 1-2-3.

Right now it has 520 pages indexed, Matt, you can check them
And again 30 uniques a day

2 moths back - the website had (almost)each page indexed - around 1000.
There were NO LINKS IN THE BOTTOM. Not a single link ! Only internal links.

And the pages went down to one. Three in the best days. For a month.
My clients were not satisfied - they asked me to fix this. So what I did ?
Pyramid Linkings - 3 urls in the index. 5 DP co-ops. Reciprocials from directories - the clients were not going to pay me for this, so i just spend exactly one hour to set pyramidlinkings, coops, stupid directory listings.

JohnScott, I AM REALLY REALLY SORRY for this link (v7 contest)! It IS RECIPROCIAL LINK FROM A DIRECTORY! I absolutely did not looked at the anchor text. SORRY AGAIN

When I bring back the “new website”, with this links in the bottom, I got nothing. Google started bringing back my webpages.. with around 10 to 30 per day. One day I saw they were back to 100 or something, then I sent the mail to Matt Cutts. The other day the index was good - 400 or something, from this day, Matt pointed the date, I was getting +10 pages a day. With this links from the image. An hour back I removed every single outgoing link, I left only the internals.

My hands are shacking.
I wont be able to sleep…

Matt, I did not wrote everything above in the right direction - I dont think myself this is the reason for NOT being indexed in google.
The situation is not the way you describet. The reason is something else, i know my website, i know what i did with this. I can proove that this links are not affecting my dropping and upping pages…
I will not post anything else here if Matt dont want to.

JohnScott, you are great person, sorry again for mentioning your contest with this bad topic

/sorry for my broken english - Im from Eastern European Contry /

 

I wondered about that at one time too. I don't believe that's the case.

 

I am sure John Scott will not be too upset.

Matt was saying that because you had linked to some poor quality sites you were being penalized. Its nothing to do with your incoming links as far as I am aware.

 

I am not talking about incoming links.
I'm talking that I put these links on my website AFTER my pages went down to almost zero level.

 

The sites I did lose a lot of pages on were using either DP or LV...not all of my DP or LV sites lost pages, but those that did were members of the networks.

If that trait holds true in the next few weeks then the networks could likely begin to base their importance metrics off of Yahoo (or maybe MSN), shifting webmaster focus even more away from Google.

Another thing: I've seen it mentioned and I believe it -- the inbound link quality equating to banned domains had either be a scare tactic or it will result in a ton of chaos at big G, for all the obvious reasons.

In closing, I think a lot of the post was pseudo-factual, but was just as much the tail wagging the dog. Before Google moves to discounting useless links they need to more accurately determined which domains should truly be trusted, and they aren't very good at that.

Cygnus

 

Can I just say that the LV Co-op thing is a red herring, so please don't get sidetracked by it. My Rugby forum is 1005 straight, never been involved in any linking schemes, never gone out and bought links, never traded links ALL the links are 100% natural (Apart from my forum sig links). There is ABSOLUTELY no reason why the site should have pages removed from the index. It has some decent links including authority links like .gov and the bbc etc. Yet it went from 30,000 to 700 .

Please don't think it is because of the co-op or LV, while links from these schemes might fit the FINGERPRINT of what causes sites to be treated this way, it is NOT involvement in these schemes that is doing the damage, as is proven by my forum!

 

I just noticed something in my stats (AWSTATS):

There are a large number of 302 temporary redirects showing up.

The problem is that I have no 302 redirects on my site. None. Zero. I do have some 301 permanent redirects.

What is that about?

 

Has anyone noticed a LOT of link:www.domain searches showing up in logs? I certainly have, and initially wondered if Google were running some sort of automated link check this way? seems very off though I am going to have to roll my sleeves up and look at thousands of lines of text in a text file. Thank God for F3

 

I can second that. I have never used LV. I discontinued Coop last fall, back in November I think (?). That isn't what's happening on my forum.

 

Here is what I am garnering from several Matt Cutts blog posts:

Google can mix up your content with another's site, and it may be a spammy site that causes further de-indexing of your site due to that content. Y/M/A seem to be intelligent enough to know that this is a problem... At least Google is aware and are working on it.

Don't hold your breath, this is reminicent of the 302 hijacking bug, and it took 2+ years (It may be longer, I have seen a few blackhat posts that indicate it may have been around in 2002, though the posts are a bit cryptic as to what they were doing.)

Okay, Nintendo and I have confirmed the fix. Someone asked if that affected hyphens in the filenames, and I cannot see how it would not. But what else did they forget? Question marks? Equal signs? Plus signs? More than one hyphen? Hey, who is running a forum around here and getting de-indexed? Makes you wonder if they even know the alphabet... Perhaps Bill Clinton's old staff got access and stole some keys again...

So, only if Googlebot proper hits your page is it added to the index. But anything else Google generated will put your page on the proxy cache servers. What does this mean? Perhaps this is a clue:

Anyone who has dealt with a cache of any kind understands that it is first in, first out. So every load of adsense, news feeds, blogsearch, etc. feeds into the cache. In the meantime, Googlebot is the only one to add sites to the index, but those adsense etc. pages will cause the cache to become full, and the pages are dumped before the Google can get to adding them. Googlebot says, "I indexed that this morning, no reason to get it again" and it ends up last on the list, and dumped. The flag for Googlebot to add the page gets reset, and the page gets dropped from the index or shows an old serp cache, because it has not been crawled by it for awhile. Maybe this is at least part of what Eric Schmidt means when he says "Those machines are full"?

Conclusion: Google set up a new system to save money without testing, without enough space, with a known bug in some versions of apache, cannot write code to properly parse hyphens in domains, and is screwing alot of people over.

Gee, folks. Sounds like this publicly traded company has forgotten it's bread and butter - the webmasters.