June 27th Screw Up Fixed

What changes you have done during the month or it was fixed at the GG side.

 

Yeah they're probably not going to fix it until the next major update, why? coz they don't give a shite about the little people.

 

My site has been on line for ten years and even through a domain name change I never saw a drop like I experienced on July 27th. I'm now starting to see really old page titles showing up in search results (e.g. couple years old). Something has gone very wrong with this last update.

I think my site http://EnvironmentalChemistry.com is a poster child for a really good site that is being punished unfairly. It contains mountains of original or unique articles written by highly educated and qualified professionals. Its data sources (periodic table of elements, regulatory information, chemical database, etc.) are tied together in a way nobody else is doing such that one can continue to drill down into a subject starting in any direction to really begin to understand a specific chemical or element. My periodic table is not only one of the oldest periodic tables on the Internet, it is also one of the most detailed (I'm adding even more information today).

My site is highly user centric and designed to allow users to get to what they want to know as fast as possible. My site is as far from a junk MFA/spammer site as one can get, especially given that it was started before banner advertising had even really gotten off the ground and AdSense wouldn't come into being for another 6-7 years. If people want to hold up an example of a site that has been severely punished by this last update but is actually the hallmark of what Google says it wants, my site http://EnvironmentalChemistry.com is that site. It contains no black hat or even grey hat SEO, is designed to validate to W3C specifications has exceptionally clean code and is linked to by thousands of webpages including .GOV, .MIL .EDU websites (official department pages) and highly respected scientific organizations. This isn't a cookie cutter affiliate site, it is a very high quality site that provides information found no where else on the web.

What happened to my site on July 27th was a very unfair tragedy, it is costing me dearly and is seriously jeopardizing my ability to fund the writing of new articles that the users of my site find so valuable.

 

This is one of the best testimonials I've heard regarding the problems with this latest so called "update" from google. This proves that google really doesn't give a damn about quality websites. They just want the $$$. If they cna hammer a site like yours then none of us are safe.

You know, maybe if you slapped a bunch of keyword stuffed MFA pages on your site you'd get your rankings back?

Seriously, how sad would that be?

 

Oh they are also losing money off of this as I was making some pretty good money with AdSense and now my revenues have fallen to 1/6 what they were before the crash.

 

Everyone always says "don't depend on google" but if you have an ad driven/traffic driven site... no matter what is, like any other business it depends on exposure. On the net, search engines are the main means of exposure.

Sure you can buy ads, and direct traffic at your site, but I dare someone to do disallow all crawlers in their robots.txt for a new business site. Everyone is dependent on the SEs, and no matter how much you diversify, a traffic drop will hurt.

Not you specifically, but around here, whenever someone complains about a google drop they get the tired line "don't depend on google"... well google gets the users, and they feed the results. And that is where the majority of most people's traffic comes from. Unless you're as big as DP and have a hella active forum or something. If you're selling widgets, or have an informational site about widgets, then you depend on google to return results to people who want to buy widgets. There's just not that many alternatives to that.

 

Nddb, you are very right, ideally we wouldn't depend on Google, and I always tried to do well in many different search engines, but when Google controls 77% - 80% of the search market, what can one do? Nothing. Google is really growing into a monopoly position and what they do has a devistating impact on our businesses no matter how hard we try to diversify.

 

I checked your site and it looks good and can not undetstand why it got penalized at all.
I did a site: command and see no supplemental pages and no cached pages. Dod you have no-cache on?
Something I see now and haven't before (I think!) is this:
In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 18 already displayed.
If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.


Not sure how they define the similarity because to me they all look different. This is the same with my site and don't get it

 

Thanks for the vote of confidence. This is my point it does not make sense why Google would penalize the entire site. Sure I could understand Google ignoring some of the pages of my site deep in the bowels of my chemical database, but the entire site shouldn't have been penalized.

I've never found a supplemental page on my site either. Yes I have no-cached turned on, but this has been on for years. All search engines and all web browsers get the exact same files. What you see is what Google sees.

I haven't seen this before.

The best I can think of is my chemical database where some chemicals have lots of identical disclaimers and supporting documentation and sometimes very basic information for a specific chemical. These are pages I would expect Google to ignore, but when taken as a whole, this section is a very useful resource for my users. This database is based on years of data collection I did in line with my real job at the time. I made this database available on line for free at a time when all other similar chemical databases required very expensive annual subscriptions. I've been looking for sources I could use to flush out my chemical database and provide more information about individual chemicals.

 

Ken, I really don't know any more than anyone else, but here is what I've seen/observed. There seem to be two distinct big Google problems right now. The first is sites going almost completely "supplemental" without good reason. I've seen lots of sites go supplemental recently that should be there, but lots of good quality sites that seem to have wound up there as well. Since this hasn't happened to any of my sites (yet) I don't have much more to add there.

The second problem seems to be that the homepage no longer appears at the top of the SERPs for a site:www.example.com query. Sites which exhibit this behavior have taken a huge hit in the SERPs where they used to rank well. Some were hit with this on June 27 and "came back" on July 27. Others (but not many) didn't come back on July 27. Still yet others survived June 27 but were hit with this issue on July 27.

I've seen lots of theories thrown out about what might have been in common with these sites. So far most of the theories have been proven false. 301 redirecting from a www.example.com to example.com or vise versa seems to be common with many of the sites.... but I couldn't imagine that is what is really causing the problem.

So far all of the sites I've seen plagued by the "dark 27" days are white hat and don't have anything obvious they should be penalized for.

Unfortunately Ken, the only thing I can think of to do in the mean time is to head down to the Old Port and kick back a few at Gritty's while we wait for Google to sort this mess out.

 

Pretty much where I am now, something with 301's, that seems like the connection. http://64.233.171.104/ shows correct PR on a non-www check, (301 to www type site) and it seems to me this would be the correct thing for Google to do. Other d/c's don't. I can't remember checking such things before everything went haywire, however.

I wonder if they are playing with the 301, perhaps 302, redirect handling... seems like if they cannot resolve the two - www and non www - you would end up with a duplicate content penalty, end up with supplemental pages, and take a dive in the rankings.

 

Whatever they are playing with, given their market share and how big of an impact they can have on small companies even with short term bumps, they have a social obligation to be much more careful. Stable SERPs are as important if not more important than their desire to remove spam. If Google didn't control 80% of the market, but instead only controled maybe 30% of the market it wouldn't matter so much, but given their marketshare, it is impossible to run a website especially a content site and not to be almost completely dependent upon Google's SERPs. A bump like this even if it is fixed in a month will still cost a publisher nearly all of their income for a month and for a small publisher that can be very damaging.

 

That DC (64.233.167.104) and 72.14.207.104 seem to be the only locations that are displaying the site:www.example.com results properly on the site I have that was impacted.

 

From what I see my sites are not yet restored. I tried checking some other tools but it's all bad news. I used to be solid #5 for a term not really competitive but I was definitely on that product, very active forum for that term.

Eric

 

I just blogged about this issue at: http://environmentalchemistry.blogspot.com/2006/07/googles-june-27thjuly-27th-update.html

 

72.14.207.104 is the one I have marked as really bad right now, in fact this thread revolves around the results from it. Whatever it is, it is now on 64.233.167.104, too. Do you think it is correct, tflight?

 

Last night 64.233.167.104 was showing some of the best results for my site since June 27. Now it is back displaying garbage.

 

Well Im back, but not anywhere near as strong as I was. Placed 5th-7th over the past 2 days...

 

Ken,

Do you have any other domains parked on this one or any others being "forwarded" to it?

Dave

 

I do own some unrelated parked domains.

I also own some typo domains directly around my environmentalchemistry.com domain that forward to the correct place. I own these domains to reduce typosquaters around my own domains. I all redirects from typo domains are via 301 and I do not advertise those domains anywhere.