Nor did I say you were, in fact I had no clue you were even reading the thread......my statements are meant as generalizations unless I reply to a quote and even then its not a direct thing per say. however there is an old saying that goes: A guilty mind needs no accuser... Peace
My guess is that it's the lesser of 2 evils. They made a mistake, because they are testing some new stuff out, and rather then roll back alot of data-centers and spend lots of time doing so, they're going to allow the penalty to live out its short-term penalty and just move on. It's cost effectiveness. Big sites that were effected complained, and they pulled the penalty manually, but those of us on the bottom of the food chain are merely the result of Google following business models for the less costly option rather then meeting everyones wants and needs. This is only my guess... feel free to tell me I'm full of crap, because I probably am.
That seems rather unnecessary. What exactly is it supposed to imply about northstar and his/her site(s)?
You read WAY too much into what I stated. I applaud Google's desire to provide the most relevant results and to weed out spammers. At the same time they need to better balance this against the harm caused by penalizing legitimate sites that are not spamming. Look at my environmental chemistry website and tell me honestly that I am spamming the serps, attempting to use black hat SEO or in any other way deceive search engines or users. I have been building my site for going on eleven years and on my current domain for around seven years. My site has always done well in all the search engines and is very well received by its target audiences with lots of inbound links from very high caliber sites (e.g. .GOV, .MIL, etc.). I don't play the Google dance routine and normally ignore Google updates. Rather than fretting over every little rise and fall in search results, I focus on the big picture of producing lots of really good content. A page or two tumble in the SERPs for specific key phrases could be considered a natural fluctuation. Yet on July 27th my site virtually disappeared from Google's SERPs literally overnight and even now my highest PR pages are still buried ten pages deep in the SERPs. Even for search phrases that I've been rarely below #11 for since around '96 my pages disappeared. My site's fall in Google's SERPs isn't a "natural" fluctuation; it has to be the result of a site wide penalty that is intended to eliminate spammers from their search results. In other words my site became collateral damage in Google's war on spam. Yes Google needs to fight SERP spam; however, they also need to make sure that they aren't penalizing legitimate sites as the results of being unfairly hit by a site wide penalty can be economically devastating. In my case between my fall in the SERPs on July 27th and now I estimate that I have lost over $5,000 in ad revenues between AdSense, affiliate ads and direct advertisers. I don't know about you, but the loss of $5,000 really hurts me economically. At the very least Google needs to be more receptive to and faster to respond to reinclusion requests when a legitimate site gets hit by a site wide penalty that is designed to weed out spam. Google needs to stop treating all websites as the enemy and instead do a better job of working with legitimate sites that truly provide value to users.
Hi Ken, This is very well written and exactly what happened to us. Our sites are, www.calcruising.com and www.calcruisingauctions.com We have lost over $8k in revenue since July 27. I was able to get a reply from Google and they stated that are site is not penalized. I know this is not true because although our site is indexed the SERP results have become irrelevant. I don't know if we are going to ever recover. This is sad because we have been online over 6 years and this is by far the worst event yet. Did you actually send a reinclusion request and did you get a response. I hope this ends soon. Thanks, Mike
I did send in a reinclusion request around July 30th, but I have not gotten a response from Google. Part of my recovery strategy is to create mountains of new content and to ensure there is no potential for duplicate content penalties within my site. To do this I've employed all kinds of 301 redirects to crop off superfluous query strings and other URL concatenation issues. I can only hope that I can recover in Google's SERPs very soon, because my cash reserves are dwindling very quickly. Also the end of September through middle of November is traditionally my highest revenue period of the year so every day I am down in the SERPs right now hurts many times worse than at any other time of the year. I am getting very desperate to see a recovery.
Mistrel No idea but the poster jumped in about their sites not being spammy and I had no idea they were reading the thread... I draw from my past and as an investigator the line held true a great deal....
Ken I would never say your site is spammy... But lets look at it from a bots persepective... Your head tags are poorly constructed... Then there is this bit <META NAME="KEYWORDS" CONTENT="asbestos, asbestosis, mesothelioma, Pseudoscience, Environmental chemistry, Hazardous Materials, hazmat, hazmat placards, federal regulations, hazmat regulations, environmental news, periodic table of elements, chemical database, 2004 ERG, Chernobyl, NIMBY, teacher resources, free teacher resources, educational resources, teaching resources, teacher lesson plans, science lesson plans, science articles, science experiments, environmental issues, environmental science, environmental education, environmental articles, recycling, ecology, science articles"><META NAME="language" content="en-US"><META NAME="revisit-after" content="15 days"><META NAME="MSSmartTagsPreventParsing" content="TRUE"><link rel="meta" href="/labels.rdf" type="application/rdf+xml" title="ICRA labels"><link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="/feed.xml" ><link rel="shortcut icon" href="/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon"><style type="text/css" media="all"> @import url("/css/Main.css"); #BotTrap {width:1px;height:1px;display:none} A. The first three underlined keyword terms probably earned you a filter. B. You're telling the bots to only visit every 15 days....it may have started paying attention better. C. Whats a bot trap for?? Do you think a bot could be programmed to look for that then leave the site?? Further down I found this <div Class="Hide"><a href="/badbots/gohere.html" title="DO NOT FOLLOW THIS LINK! It is a bot trap. Body {visibility: visible}</style> Dont know what its about but you may have shot yourself in the foot with this instruction. Now do I know this is the problem??? No Have I seen it on any of 1,000+ other websites...NO What if the good bots follow it by mistake? Next your use of relative links to pages within your site probably give issues to the new mediabot... that wasnt an issue to googlebot I do see your point in how this is hurting you financially and why I have said time after time to clients and non clients alike Do not pin your business to a search engines doings.... "what Google giveth...Google taketh away" As for Googles taking their time to respond to these issue...one needs to remember the organic serps are an expense to Google...the only real purpose is to carry Googles paid advertisements and as such webmasters concerns are typically dealt with as you noted in a group algorithim change and not usually fixed by hand tinkering.
It is flawed logic like this that convicts a lot of innocent people and Google seems to be using this "guilty" until proven innocent attitude a lot lately. Normally there seems to be a rhyme and reason for when a site falls in Google's SERPs, but this time there are just way too many reports of good sites being "penalized" and/or disappearing from SERPs for no apparent reason. It is time to stop looking for on site causes of the problems sites are facing in Google's SERPs and start demanding some transparency from Google on this issue. Something is very wrong within the Googleplex and a lot of innocent sites are being very severely hurt by Google's problems. Spammers be damned, Google needs to be a little more transparent about what is going on and be more receptive to acknowledging that something isn't working correctly in their algorithms. After all spammers will always find a way to beat Google if they are transparent or not, all their current activity is doing is hurting legitimate websites and producing garbage SERP results for users.
Hi Ken What is this about as well?? http://www.aboutus.org/EnvironmentalChemistry.com Are most of those all your domains you linked to inside the related domains?? If they are and all are interlinked on your server than more than likely this is another cause of issues for you as why would an Environmental Site link to CreditAdvisors.org??? In Googles eyes this may not be a good thing. Peace
Nobody convicted anyone...I simply stated a line that holds true a good deal of the time...I was an investigator...not a judge. I agree Google has issues and some sites are being hurt but not you or anyone else can explain why sites I know of dont move for their terms.....why you yourself stated you held rankings for years... So what changed?? Your site?? Google??? Googles bots??? I think the answer lies in Googles new bot having issues with websites... Perhaps take the three keyword terms out and waiting to see what happens with that will have an effect/ Do you ever use a text browser to see what the robots see ?? Peace
Now As for www.calcruising.com and www.calcruisingauctions.com You are the sites Google is looking to rid from its ranks ...not include.. you offer no information of any originality.. and your sites would be likely classified as "MFA" Made For Adsense Full of links .... No content... Hate to be straight forward as many do not like it... But your sites dont deserve to be mentioned in the same thread as Kens..
13,000 registered members with over 5,000 classic car auctions run over 6 years. Our auto insurance directory has detailed descriptions of over 700 paying insurance agents. Our muscle and classic car directory has detailed descriptions of over 1,100 classic cars. Average unique visitors of 9,500 a day prior to July 27 with a combined google adsense and commission junction income of over $500 a day. How do you earn your living? It can't be from critizing the people who actually accomplish something online.
Oddly enough the page you are referring to is back to normal for its most important key phrase searches, the pages that are still gone from the searches they are relevant to do not contain the key words in question. But you are correct that is a legacy key word selection from when the article on the subject in question was the latest article. Those key words needed to be cleaned up for the front page. The frequency of visiting should have no bearing on SERPs from the standpoint that the pages really don't change from day to day that much. No page really needs to be visited more often than once every 15 days to maintain an accurate copy of said page. The idea with this tag is to save SEs and me bandwidth and server resources. The last thing I need is every search engine trying to index every page every day. No if you look in the robots.txt file the "bad bots go here" page in question is banned from being crawled. I monitor who and what follows those links very carefully. Google does not get caught by those traps. I have used the bot trap for a couple of years now. Its purpose is to detect site scrapers and other site caching programs that do not obey the robots.txt file. This is necessary to reduce bandwidth costs due to spam bots/site scrappers trying to cache my entire site for nefarious purposes. What happens is any IP address that requests the banned page in question is automatically logged and monitored. If they continue to request pages too quickly or request too many pages they are banned from my site. Like I said, this has never caused Google a problem. Google indexes pages on my site on a daily basis. One badly configured bot can grind my server to a halt and consume almost a gig of bandwidth by following all pages on my site (including robots.txt denied paths). I had to put the bad bot traps in place to reduce bandwidth costs and increase reliability of my site for real users. Like I said, I have been using it for over two years (almost three now) and have monitored it very carefully. In the first couple of months of operation there were a couple of false hits, but exceptions where made for those bots and there have been no issues since. No problems for either Mediabot or Googlebot, both are able to follow all links correctly and neither Sitemaps nor AdSense report indexing issues. In addition server logs reveal no problems. Easier said than done with content sites; I've tried like the dickens to limit my exposure to Google by encouraging organic link development (hence every page suggests readers link to it), providing RSS feeds and actively promoting my site via non-SE means e.g. blogs etc. The problem is that in the past two years Google has gobbled up more and more of the search market. Two or three years ago, Google accounted for only 40% of my total traffic. Before July 27th they had begun to account for more than 80% of all traffic. People are spending less and less time using directories, following link references from other sites and using non-Google search engines. Instead, more and more people have gotten into the habit of relying on Google exclusively for everything from their news to finding information. The quality of Google's search results should be a top priority from a business standpoint. The only reason Google is able to sell so much advertising space is because people have become to trust and rely on Google to provide quality and relevant search results. If Google's search results continue to fall in quality and more and more spam works its way in, then users will switch to other search engines. Google's popularity was built on the backs of web publishers like me promoting their search engine to our users. If Google continues to fail honest hard working web publishers like myself, they will find that their competitors will start to be more heavily promoted thus reducing how much their search engine is used. If Google is to maintain their market position and thus continue their current levels of advertising revenue they must address legitimate concerns of users and web publishers. Yes search is an expense, but it is also the product that drives Google's ability to generate revenues; to forget this would be fatal.
No there were no changes of any count that would have mattered to Google. Just the routine addition of new articles. Any on site changes should have only caused minor turbulance in search results, not a complete overnight disappearance. Yes it has to be within the algos, how site penalties are applied or a significant data coruption. This is the only thing that would have caused an overnight disappearance of so many very different sites. I'm not seeing this, Google has been indexing changes I'm making and my addition of new pages just fine. Really it is old well established and high PR pages that are having the most problems. It seems that Google has fallen back on old out of date caches of pages rather than the most recently indexed versions of pages. Like I pointed out in my previous message those terms were only used on the appropriate three or four pages (out of 18,000) and the page you pointed out has recovered for its most important search term, while my most important/popular/highest PR page that never contained those terms is still buried ten pages deep in search results. Yes, my site is actually optimized for Lynx. To see for yourself, turn off stylesheets, JavaScript and images. I was very concerned about accessiblity and have done my best to make sure my site not only validates to W3C HTML 4.01 Strict & CSS2 specifications (with no errors) but that it also follows W3C's WCAG as much as possible. The entire site including critical forms can be navigated using the keyboard. You aren't going to find many sites that have paid as much attention to these details as I have.
Frankly, Sem, your credibility is slipping badly in this thread. To start with, that's an auction site - what the hell did you expect it to look like? I'd hardly call it MFA... Additionally, your comments about Ken's meta tags betray a lack of understanding about how little attention is paid to those tags.
Google is a lose cannon at this point with all the new updates and changes being made since jan 2006. the rules have changed and they continue to change. the rules change so fast it is hard to assign a valid set of rules. For webmasters who make all or most of thier income online though search engine based traffic your fate lies in the stability googles algorithims. All it takes is a simple nanosecond alteration and you can go fomr page one to page 10 and there is aften nothing you can do about it. Traffic subsequently plummets in a split second (and stays that way faaaar longer than a split seocnd! ) and so does revenue (ditto). if you email google about it nothing will happen in 99.9% of cases cause it isnt thier job to assign 'special attention' to non google related sites. Google has algos that rank sites and these algos are controleld by smart well paid people who can really care less how your site ranks.
Ken Thank you for your replies I will read them over and learn from them as well. Minstrel I dont worry about credibility...head tags are poorly constructed as I said...I did not mention how bots view them since I am not a robot nor am I someone who writes the algorithims for a living.... And while they may pay little importance...you miss the big picture of SEO..there is no one thing that will get you listed and staying listed and that is doing all the little things correctly Like making a chili or a fine dessert all the ingrediants need to be meted out in the right proportions and even in the correct order at times.. And the other part of the credibility issue.....the guy who owns the bank down the street has no problems with the credibility of my bank account... and in the grand scheme of things... that is all that matters to me or the family I have to house and provide for... That is all well and good but nowhere on your site does any of this information appear so to an outsider looking in your site looks like what I said... I doubt googlebot knows or cares what your membership or pedigree you may think you have.... BMW and many more notable corporations have faced Googles not liking their site.....you everyone else here and myself included are not above it all..... And yes I make quite a bit of money critizing peoples websites thank you very much...... Oh and I make over $1000.00 per month from Google Adsense & just hit my first $500.00 for the month with Yahoo Publisher Network and I am a one man company without 115 paying so & sos And I also have clients listed on the front pages of all three major search engines for over 3 years solid.... but I am losing credibility..... lol Out
As I said I do make a nice living criticizing others websites Ohh and my income is not tied to any one search engine.... so if Google were to dump on my sites.... oh wait I dont have many of mine listed in the search engines .... "What Google giveth...Google taketh away.... Peace and good luck to you in the future....
KLB and calcruzn Instead of me picking on your sites and getting worked up about Google.... let me go about this another way A. What is your monthly budget for paid advertising?? B. What percentage is that to sales? C. What percentage is that to profits? Thank you Peace