It's been weeks now after June 27th (Black Tuesday) and I do not see any changes at all when I do my site command to my sites. Everything is still f***d up so it seems that this is what I have to live with, most pages gone supplemental and visitors dropped to almost nothing. In my sitemaps I can see that google is trying to crawl a subfolder that hasn't been there for almost a year now but suddenly shows up with errors since they can't find it DOH!!! Yesterday I had to reinstall to try to get rid of all hundreds or errors... their paths to my pages are still totally screwed up even after submitting sitemaps and all that, so my theory about them using old cached/archived pages to spider sites seems to be right...
I'm seeing EXACTLY the same thing. And worse, it seems to be unchanged over the last few days. So I guess this is how it's gonna be???... I'm sick of google. Especially sick of building sites and pages just for them. What happened to their line about "build pages for users, not for the engines"? Well I don't have to do specific SEO for MSN and Yahoo. I just build pages, write articles, get links, and guess what? They spider my pages and index'em! What a novel idea!
Hell, I still haven't recovered from pre-Jagger(9/22) or Jagger(10/17), or a recent Big-Daddy-related hit on another site... It's forced me to create new sites, new marketing methods, new revenue streams, etc. If I suddenly recover from those, $$$ will be very good, I'm sure... Until then, I'm coping. You will too... -- Derek
None of the afore mentioned updates had a significant impact on my site best I was able to tell. I'm a firm believer that the more people try to micro manage the SEO of their sites from one "update" to the next the greater each of the updates impact on one's placement in the SERPs. If you don't like Google dancing, stop dancing to Google's lead.
among other things, is that why doesn't MSN, Yahoo and other search engines bots have any problems spidering my site and give the users the exact page with the right keywords in it? It seems like Google never forgets and if they have a link that is wrong then they keep spidering it until the end of the world. Another thing is that when you have submitted a sitemap once and then delete it in Sitemaps because you don't want to use sitemaps anymore and you forget to delete it from your server, then Google will download it anyway long after you told them NOT to use any sitemaps! I thought that we could build web sites about anything and get spidered and if we didn't do anything wrong we could be in their index competing with other web sites about a place in the sun but that is not how it works anymore with Google (GURGLE!). Why don't we just buy a ready made web site from Google where they control everything? All we need to do is to add our name to it and we'd be done! Hell, we could even buy keywords from Google and pay extra for top spots..... Page rank? who cares about PR? All that matters is that you get traffic and page rank doesn't give me any visitors? Backlinks? Why would Google care about backlinks? isn't it the content that matters? Google comes up with all this shit and then one day they realize "Nah... we shouldn't have done it this way..." then they change everything from under us and we have to do all this work over and over and over
To KLB and MikeSwede - good points. I'm tired of dancing too. From this point forward google gets the same treatment MSN and Yahoo get... ignored. I'm just gonna keep building sites and pages and writing my articles and reviews. Let google do whatever it wants. Screw'em. I've already wasted enough time on them in the last few weeks.
Yeah Google has really lost their mind this year and they better get their head out of their ^ss or they too will fall (all great empires do eventually) I was able to pull all my sites out of the toilet by removing ALL the Google sitemaps and closing my sitemap account.
I'm seeing some minor action from Google again, but nowhere near what it was before the 27th. In my case I had done a 301 redirect from non-www to www about six weeks before the big crash. Digging around the SiteMaps blog today I noticed a comment from someone at Google that suggested that while a redirect was the right thing to do, it could take "a while" for Google to sort it out afterwards. Makes me wonder if others seeing this problem had done redirects in the couple of months leading up to this? I've been using the Google URL Removal tool, and I believe its helping me out a bit – my main site is a WordPress blog, and since there are category pages there really is a lot of duplicate content, even if it's just bits and pieces. I used the Removal tool to remove the category pages from the index, and then blocked Google from ever getting back into them, via robots.txt and also meta tags. Besides the massive drop in traffic, the number one symptom I saw after the 27th was that all of my pages in SiteMaps were showing up as having the same Snippet, and so you had to use the "Show Other Results" or whatever that's called, just to get them to list. Being a blog my pages never hade Meta Descriptions, or Meta Keywrds tags, but I've fixed that now and Google very quickly picked them up, and now I can see almost all fo my pages in SiteMaps again. Whether this will ultimately help in the SERPS I don't know, but my SiteMaps listings sure look nicer! I also removed the few pages that Google had listed as supplemental, because it was just five pages, and that's a drop in the bucket really. I didn't like to see their nasty faces staring back at me from the site: results! hehe Another thing I had recently changed before the 27th was a move to Private WhoIS through my hosting company... I'm starting to think this may have been a bad idea, but I hated getting calls at home about my website. Uggh. I'm thinking that one benefit of blocking Google from a lot of pages on my site (ones I really don't need to show up in the index anyways) is that hopefully my PageRank will be a bit more conslidated towards the pages that really matter! Nice!
The best thing to do with Google to get rid of this problem would be to do a 301 Redirect from the folder/page it is trying to go on to the newer pages or possibly the home page of your site. But I must admit, Google is not the best indexer out there anymore. MSN and Yahoo are pacing ahead of it. IT