He's just stating the obvious, Sem - you haven't exactly dazzled anyone with your insights in this thread previously, have you?
Lets remember to just ignore off topic posts in this thread. It really is the best way. Now on the subject of this thread. Yesterday I expierenced what appears to be a complete recovery in the SERPs as my traffic levels were back to normal for a Saturday. Today my traffic also appears to be at normal levels for the middle of the day on a Sunday. Lets hope this is a sign that the problems are being fixed.
Wibr Are you by any chance posting these articles around the net and also on your own pages? If so, Google may think you are copying articles and marking your pages supplemental. It's best to do one or the other but not both.
Wow, congrats! I had one keyword recover to pre June 27th serps, and a couple jumped up a few hundered places but are still very (uselessly) low ranked. The rest of mine are still in no where land. At least something is bubbling though, I still have hope.
Not here to dazzle but I will say this has been a very productive thread for me.....made a new friend from the UK and another fellow SEO has written me for some help and I bought a new site for some fun I am having with my muscle car penchant... Question is what have you contributed other than to snipe me and offer the occassional "I think google is screwed up completely" dribble??? You deem this food for thought? Have you tried to offer others methods to find additional ways to drive traffic and increase revenues?? Go back to sleep....
Well No recovery at all not one bit of traffic from google in the last month , completely confused how ever other relatively new site is flying hmmm confusion both use same seo also , hmmm 2moros another day. also this thread has been enlightening also for me, learnt more things off cool people.
As of yesterday it's like 27th June all over again for me, my traffic and SERPs came back on the 27th of July to what they were pre June 27th, but now I'm in the black hole all over again. Got me stumped what they are doing there over at Google, I went through and checked my site after June 27th and found nothing worthy of a penalty, hence I didn't change anything, I'm tempted to go through it again and look for anything but it would probably be a waste of time.
I just un-overoptimized a site that's been having problems thanks to the advice of someone on this forum. I'll let you all know if it recovers. BTW, the reason Matt Cutts is so vague is probably because of Google Policy--he can't say too much or the spammers would figure out how to circumvent what Google is trying to do--remove spam. So, I agree, we have to read between the lines. How much to un-over-optimize is the question.
Matt Cutts is vague because he appears to be detached from the majority of his readers. Matt is unaware that there is a problem as far as I can tell, or he/Google thinks the changes are beneficial to the algorithm which in any case is incorrect. As far as Google's answer to spam, I think they're discovering or will discover that algorithmically that's impossible. If they want to pretend Google is some secret sauce of mathematical equations that don't require human oversight then they are seriously deluded. Every time Google thinks they've created a math equation to remove spam, they end up hurting legit sites. Unless they provide a universal template for legit sites to which we all follow, they will never be able to advance Google to the point it's intelligent enough to remove it on it's own. It's impossible. Bottom line I think is Google got way to big, way to fast, and their misinformation and constant updates is their way of trying to please greedy stock holders that demand results. In the end, you can only re-write the same amount of code, so many times. The sooner Google realizes this, and Matt Cutts admits there is a problem, is the point all of us can count on consistency rather then intermittentcy.
Very well said. I hope someone from Google actually reads this post. Maybe we should spread this one around to other forums including the Google Webmasters forum.
Sadly the point to build a business that does not rely solely on search engine traffic is missed... later in this decade there will be some around still who will remember the wisdom of such a thought. Peace Out Rehashed
@ascensions Your last post was very good. I think it does reflect some of the problems we see with the way Google is doing things.
I don't know if Cutts is aware of how vacuous some of his posts since Big Daddy have been or not. Generally, I suspect he is aware of the problems but is disinclined for various reasons to admit it. Then again, every now and then I start to believe that he truly believes some of the twaddle he has been posting. That's a lot more scary.
You know I was thinking about what Cutts said about being effected by the 27th being a over-optimization penalty. I'm wondering if it's triggered by a 301 of the www version to the non www version. It's ironically been timed around sitemaps integration of "choosing your preferred format." I know mine is 301 to the non www version. I looked at your site KLB for environmentalchemistry.com and it's showing a redirect as well. I wonder if anyone has been effected that doesn't have a 301 on the www/domain? Just a shot in the dark but it would be an obvious tell-tale sign of seo and over optimization. It would be stupid for them to penalize it, but it is an odd coincidence that the events were closely timed and Cutt's did make that remark.
@ascensions, There could be something to the thought that redirects are part of the problem. While my site redicted from www to sans-www using 301 redirects, I did have some mistakes in my .htaccess file that caused what I thought were 301 redirects to be 302 redirects. I have seen a lot of comments over the past year (including on Matt Cutts website) about Google trying to resolve 302 redirect issues this year. I do not, however, think this was the sole factor in our problems. In fact I think a lot of our problems have nothing to do with SEO, but rather some sort of massive data refresh that is being done in stages.
That's my sense as well. There may be a number of minor things that contribute to the problem but there are just too many sites affected that don't meet the criteria for ANY of the suggestions I've seen for the Google boondoggle. I don't think it's the sites, in the majority of cases. I think it's Google.
Exactly. Here is the first paragraph of what todays entry reads One truism you learn quickly at Google is “you are not a typical user.†If you’re reading this blog, the truism probably applies to you too: you’re much more likely to be a power-user, an SEO, a librarian, or someone else who is familiar with the site: operator or the info: operator. But it’s important to remember that many Google users aren’t like that. . HUH? WTF is the "operator or the info: operator"? He intentionaly makes his posts sound arcane and he reports the most trivial stories. His blog is about SEO; not Live.com, Acer, or queezebox. Even more annoying are the 50 or so lemmings that reply to EACH and EVERY one of his entries as if something groundbreaking was posted.
That would fit in with the fact that I have a site that recovered it's pre-june 27th last week. Another site, seo'd in the same style (completely different site and topic though), is still in the pits. If they were 'punishing' these sites for some reason, or made an algo change that affected my seo efforts, it would affect both sites equally.