Who knows LOL. It's time to work on branding I think. I need to find a way to get people to come to my site looking for something, instead of going to google typing in a phrase and perhaps clicking on my site. Gotta work on that one. If google has any pattern, its that when they "update" something major (like Florida), crap floats to the top for a while, then disappears again. I wish yahoo (Im a yahoo store) kept logs for more than 6 months, I'm curious to see how long I was down after the florida update (what? nov 2003, I think?) - 4-5 days I think.
with 80%+ of traffic coming from search and msn up to 14% Its still google or out really. I would suggest many many sites, not linked together, built differently, hosted differently and registered in different names. If i have 1-10 I wont mind losing one of them
Diversification is definitely the key to long-term sanity in this business. I have well over a dozen sites. Unfortunately, only a couple of them are real money makers. I am definitely focusing on raising that number from two to at least three or four.
Yeah, I thought it wasnt that big a deal and I would get round to it until this one took a dent.. I started 4-5 new this month, so I am a bit late.
Will - Have your sites totally come back as of yet? I showed slight (and I mean slight) improvement this morning, but its hard to tell because of the 1000 query limit (those NA's will take a while to go away I think). I've noticed that directories (business.com, dmoz, google dir) have a lot of higher listings these days. I am wondering if internal links are mattering less these days and external links are where it is at. Words that I have lots of external links pointing at seem to have faired better than words that do not have a lot of external links at. Also, its almost as if the links are not "inherited" any longer. I'm not sure how to word it better.. If you have site A link to your page B. The link also used to secondarily help your page C (which was linked from page B). This doesn't seem to be the case so much anymore. I'm trying to make the site that dropped, more reflective of the site that did not in hopes of resurrecting it. I've removed a JS and I'm altering page titles slightly to get rid of the second occurence of the keyword (even though I liked how that looked).
I'll throw another possibility out there. What about on-page and off-page density of 'related' terms. I only track a few kw groups so I don't have a lot of data. But, it seems that the sites that have improved are those that have lots of content rich pages supporting their targeted kws, making especially good use of synonyms and related words. If true, a single page in a competitive topic would tend to fall in relation to competing pages/sites.
I dont think thats it either. I have seen sites with no unique content in the top 10. (search google for "wind chimes", look at #9 - its not even a site!). Here is a good one though. Search google for "see no evil hear no evil speak no evil" #1 is an article that I wrote and links to my site. I am #180 for that search now. I used to be #2, this article page was #4 or 5 (and even disappeared totally) for a while. I havent investigated lots of them like this yet, but I think its a starting point. Earlier, I emailed google a reinclusion request (per googleguys instructions on WMW) with a request to see what the deal is. Hopefully, it'll do something.
OMG... you're right! Unbelievable. My first guess was that content must have been switched recently. But, the cached version is the same. What's strange is that for my two kw groups, SERPs hardly changed at all. And I've seen a few other posts from people who have said the same. But, your examples are good ones. Yes it is a place to start. /*tom*/
I think I'm in dupe content hell for sure now. I was checking out sites where I posted articles (my first ones, almost a year ago). I believe I am being kicked out, in favor of those sites, and its hurting all my other SERP's as well. I'm having all those rewritten this weekend and next week in hopes of getting it remedied. For my KWs...the sites that have crept up to the top defy google logic. All links are to the home page; all link exchanges have the same anchor text (I know most of my competitors, so I know how they work). Its absolutely miserable.
My site dropped on the same day as Will's, and is now TOTALLY back! On the left side of the image is the traffic just before Bourbon.. then towards the left, the next drop was from the Yahoo situation ealier this week.... just before it sky rocketed yesterday and today.
Spoke too soon.... Looks like the data centers.. some of them are reverting back to pre-Thursday results Will, you seeing the same thing?
Ack! I can confim that the following data centers have rolled back to earlier results: 64.233.189.104 216.239.53.99 216.239.57.99 66.102.7.99 216.239.63.104 216.239.53.104 66.102.7.104 216.239.57.104 216.239.57.98 216.239.57.105 66.102.7.105 216.239.57.147 66.102.7.147
well, as far as Im concerned yes. On Mcdar I see my new and old serps showing. However, from google.com - I see the new (bad results) and my visitor numbers back this up. Hence, main results.
There is no such thing as the "main" Google. When you type www.google.com into your browser window, www.google.com redirects you, behind the scenes, to www.google.akadns.net. It is at this latter location that you are then routed to the Datacenter/IP Address that is both close to you in proximity (area of the Country) and experiencing lower traffic at that time. If you are skeptical, you can "ping" right from your own computer (if you are using Windows and are able to open a DOS prompt) . * Open your MS-DOS prompt window (Go to Start > Programs > Accessories > MS-DOS Prompt. * Simply type in at the prompt C:\WINDOWS>ping www.google.com the hit ENTER on your keyboard. * To repeat - simply hit the UP arrow on your keyboard then hit enter again. * You can actually use either my little "Ping Utility" or your own DOS Prompt to find the IP Address of any site on the internet. So you see IF the Datacenters are different in any way, you could get different results based on which Datacenter you are actually searching each time you search on Google. Even back to back searches of the same exact Keyword could give results from two different Datacenters. Caryl