I have a completely genuine site, a sort of business directory. The site has been ranking better and better in Google since I've been doing completely legitimate relevant SEO. Suddenly on saturday all my rankings have gone down, Ive gone to about 10% of the Google traffic I had before. Is it possible this is because of the new changes with Google Bombing? Is it possible Google has messed up the algorithm and is punishing my site? Has anyone else had this problem? Pete
Yes, it is possible they included sites that are not the victim of a Googlebomb in this latest change. I'd even say that it is probable, though I have no real proof. One example at Matt Cutts blog of a search for sites that are victims of collateral damage was 'click here' for Adobe Acrobat. It is showing now. That told me this filter is not just targeting specific phrases... nor is it set in stone. Is there one keyword phrase that you are targeting that has gone away completely or taken a big dive in the serps? Could you post or PM the details? I sure would like to look around a bit...
There have been quite a few reports of legit sites being dropped for a short time and then coming back after a week or so. Give it some time...
It's odd. My large keyword phrases have dropped a couple of pages in the SERPS, and the long tail ones have completely disappeared... I really hope that Google will change back whatever got changed. Sites similar to mine have not been affected
I've been doing completely legitimate relevant SEO. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ nobody tell what is legitimate ,but in my experience, quick BL increase do hurt you google SERP.
DSM65 - same here, I'm down to 950 to long tail results but my main phrases are up considerably, very odd. We do white hat on a site with 14, 000 pages - little bit of reciprocal linking to quality sites only. We do have alot of content that gets scraped to bitsand the html isn't the cleanest in the world but we've not changed anything to warrant a drop - very odd. I;ve heard lots of reports on wmw that people who dropped initially are recovering so I've got my fingers crossedd!
Why do everybody connect googlebombing filter with bad rankings of their sites? Do you believe that googlebombing filter was the only change made during the last update? Things look like when "sandbox" appeared - everybody shouted "my site is sandboxed" without understanding actual meaning of this term.
After just having read Google's own comments on their blog about Googlebombs, it begs a question: Since the change was made to the algortihm itself, and it detects multiple links with the same anchor text, how does this affect the link building strategies that are commonplace in the world of seo? I mean one of my sites has some inbound links that all have the same anchor text. I know this since I bought these links myself. Now does the new algorithm give less weight to these links simply because they all have the same anchor text? How specific do you think this algorithm change is? Could it be that they have set a numerical limit on the number of inbound links with the same anchor text and that beyond this you will be penalised? I'm just wondering should i continue to build links specifically for one or two phrases that I want to target?
There are various things going on in this thread. So let's get things straight (or try to) 1) Google announced recently that google bombs are not likely to work any more. They fixed that. This is a certainty. They also say this isn't going to effect normal searches. Whether that is actually true is another issue. This change is MEANT to not effect normal searches. 2) Google changes its algorithms on a regular basis to fight spam and keep giving us the best, most relevant search results. One thing they do is they update PR on a daily basis now (though on the toolbar that doesn't show). So if your competitors got more, or more relevant backlinks this month - that would explain what you are seeing.
While we're not likely to get a lot of very specific information on algorithm changes, I don't think they're looking at a "same anchor text" issue. It's more likely to be a comparison of anchor text with on page content - does the anchor text match the page content? If not, it's likely to be affected by this algorithm change. FWIW, Cutts has said that these reported site fluctuations are not a result of the Googlebomb algorithm change. That post leads to a comment where he looks at 5 sites as examples that had asked about being affected by the Googlebomb algorithm and points out how and why they dropped.
Indeed - and the main reason they dropped is that all of them had issues concerning: not good (or absent) content. Meaning: empty pages, non working links that sort of thing.
I would agree that the Googlebomb algorithm did not affect those 5 sites. I am not certain it did not affect anyone, however. I do think there are other changes going on from looking at the last few updates, and it is confusing things for anyone looking to diagnose problems with a site or it's serps. For example, I found this very interesting, and no one seems to be talking about it: If the Googlebomb algo changes are causing what is happening, it will be hard to pin down.
A lot of people have talked about that, under the heading 'supplemental results'. But that does not have anything to do with google-bombs, does it?
No, I'm pointing it out as an example that there's alot going on... and it's hard to pin any one problem to any one change right now.
Oh, right. That's certainly a good point. With PR changing all over the place and people's position in the serps dancing regularly, I see what you mean.