Tip #1: Anytime you're visiting a hotel, library, or any other publically accessed computer with Google set as the default, change it to another SE. Tip #2: Feeling greedy? Instead of changing it another SE as outlined in Tip #1, change it to your homepage! Dave
Google is slowly falling into the same methodology with its algo as Microsoft did with its Windows products......put a beta together....get some "controlled" feedback and throw it out to the public then patch as bugs and flaws are found....it's like getting snagged in the gravitational pull of a black hole....once your caught up in it...good luck getting out. Gone are the days of delivering something with quality. Now, its all about the $$$$ and keeping the stock market and investors happy. Since they have gone public; Google has put their mitts into everything and it appears they have lost focus on what got them here. It's odd how you never hear of MSN or Yahoo having similiar algo problems. Google has created a whole new form of industry, businesses driven solely on search engine results. I would hate to be the owner of a company whose only revenue is based on where they rise and fall in the rankings.
I know it sounds kind of lame, but I'm glad to see that I'm not the only one who lost a ton of traffic on the 27th – it at least suggests that I'm not completely and utterly insane My main site is a WordPress blog, and it of course makes use of a Database, but has static URLs. In my case I happened to get a number of organic incoming links, and hence a deep, deep crawl from Google just days before my traffic took a nosedive, so I was just totally confused and bewildered. Sadly, I had just reached a peak level of traffic from Google, and things were really looking good, so it's a big dissapointment to disappear into the ether. Now about the only thing that will bring up one of my pages is a Unique-Text-Block type of search. I noticed a number of my site's post feeds had been indexed and were showing up supplemental, so I've been slowly removing them vie URL Removal (which, by the way, isn't nearly as scary as it sounds.) I've noticed that as I've removed supplementals from the index I seem to be getting a bit more traffic, but certainly not anything even close to where I was at before the 27th. Black Tuesday Indeed!
If you have adsense on your homepage and you use tip #2, make sure you didn't sign in to your account on that computer.
Here's what I see: 1. Yahoo provides webmaster feedback from SE engineers if you ask a question. 2. MSN is ready to launch Alive. 3. MSN offers phone support for their ad network and does direct mail advertising with US Mail. Even wants feedback from a question I asked. 4. Google has ambiguous blogs and FAQs for support which includes Matt Cutt's Blog. I cannot believe that Matt Cutts spends time to do those graphics in his blog. He shouldn't anyway, should be working on fixing things at G instead. (I'm not talking about pictures of his cat ) 5. Google launches Google Checkout but doesn't have phone support. Come on, we're talking about MONEY here and there is no-one to talk to when it can't be found? The fees are good, but in my opinion, there needs to be a voice on the end of the phone before I'd join them. Yawn.
Yeah, but tedious (one url at a time if you don't want to do the whole domain), and you wouldn't want to do the wrong url by accident. Also, only temporary, I think maybe 6 months per removed url. Pretty sure that's how it works. -Michael
It doesn't have to be that bad, and as long as you update your robots.txt file or Meta Tags you should be able to stop Google from picking them back up after the 6-months time period is up. You just have to be careful of what you're doing... what I've done is use the Robot.txt analyzer in SiteMaps to double check before I request removal. So far it has worked quite well If you block a bunch of Supplemental Results with the Robots.txt file then you don't have to enter them one by one. YOU DO HAVE TO BE CAREFUL THOUGH! – you could nuke your site
It's up, might be something between your connection and his site. Maybe he was updating, who knows. -Michael FutureQuote ©2006 Michael VanDeMar All Rights Reserved.
I also remember when ICQ was king and then MSN messenger stole the market - nowadays it's very rare to see someone using ICQ, I don't even know if it still exists What annoys me the most about Google is its lack of stability, plus all the fud and lies that the guy from google spreads, blaming webmasters for their broken SE
I did a little experiment: I removed my 301 redirect for a moment. Guess what: I checked my old URL home page, the one with supplemental results and it showed PR5, exactly the same as my new URL. I thought that if I set a 301, the PR should be transfered to the new URL and the original URL should stay with no PR. Am I right? If the answer is yes, then definitively Google has a problem with 301 redirects.
Not so much wrong as not fully understanding what it is, I think. If Google has a page indexed that is a 301, it will show the PR of the resulting page if you query it, as long as it knows about the 301. If you still have a page supplemental in the cache, and you 301 that page to a new one, Google will transfer the credit for the old page to the new one, once it finds the redirect. The problem is, with supplemental pages, who knows when Google will find it again. Try this... 301 the old page to the new. Then find someone who has a decent PR page, say 6 or 7, that gets spidered daily by Google, and ask them if they'll drop a link to your supp page for a day or two, just to get it respidered. Once Google tries to respider the supp page, and sees that it it 301'd, it should straighten out the issue in a few days. If you do this please let us know how it works out. -Michael
Maybe you are right, Mvandemar, and this is because Google 'remembers' the old URL had PR5 the last time it was spireded and cached. I 301 the old URL again. I will try what you suggest, changing the link to the forum in my home page (PR6) from the new URL to the old one. I will report in a couple of days.
The other thing to remember is that PR is stored separately from page data. The PR is not going to show zero until an update occurs after the 301 is found. Dave