All my sites have suffered deindexing of many pages. On one of them that included the index page disappearing for a few days then returning. So although it is unusual, even under the current widespread deindexings, I'm not sure it definitely means a site is 'banned'. I would wait a while before panicking.
I tell ya what... the only site I have seen drop of the chart in it's SERP rankings is the site with DP coop ads on it... This definitely raises my eyebrow now that you mention it... Is anyone else saying huge drops in SERPs for sites running coop network ads, yet seeing their other sites remain stable?
My site's ranked PR5 and not even anywhere near the search results as of yesterday. Don't know what's going on but I've disabled the co-op for now hoping it'll come back. It's never been this bad!
Ok, here's my theory: I am in a high competition industry where a lot of the ones I'm up against have been link building for quite some time and have quite a few high powered links. I made up for this by getting a lot of links from a wide variety of sources. I did this through manual link exchanges and some LV links. In the past 2 weeks there seems to have been 2 rounds of upheaval in Google. The first one was a fairly high wave of pages being deindexed, and the second one was an even higher wave due to the recent huge spam attack. I believe that the pages being dumped are likely the ones with the lower link-weight on them (lower PR, lower number of inbounds to those actual pages, etc). I know that with LV many of the previously cached pages are no longer there, and I assume that the coop probably got hit the same. I used a unique tag line as my site description. 4 weeks ago there were 800+ sites coming up when I searched that sentence in quotes, each one of those results a page with my link on it. Today there were like 99. I don't think that it's a penalty per se so much as it is the fact that the pages where our links are on are no longer cached, and therefore we no longer get credit for them. Can anyone else test this? Check like 20-30 pages where you know your link is, and then see how many are actually cached. Don't check just the ones you know are higher PR, or that one unasked-for .edu or .gov link you got that you're so proud of, but a random sampling. It would be interesting to see some percentages. -Michael
My site which was penalized has thousands of quality inbound links, mostly to internal pages. It also had co-op links both outgoing and incoming. My pages are not de-indexed. I simply fell in the SERPS from 1-5 to 40-50 on several hundred keywords. Losing weight from incoming co-op links would barely have hurt me. They were providing very very little of my overall inbound link mojo. I am leaning towards the theory that the outbound co-op links are what killed this site.
The upheaval you describe has been occurring for the last six weeks at least beginning with what appeared to be a major algorithm change. Yesterday it seemed to settle-down and the new results have spread to nearly all 500+ known datacenters. As for the de-indexing, it seems that this is mostly a problem for large sites, and why not? Can most sites seriously claim to have 10,000+ relevant pages? Most large sites are filled with duplicate content, spider targeted gateways, and lot of unremarkable pages that no one will ever read. (Note that I said most, not all) The de-indexing of pages that show co-op ads and other mass link exchange programs may cause some to lament, but for others it is a victory. Linking schemes are a clearly stated violation of terms and detract from the quality of the Internet. I have tried the co-op and as much as I appreciate Digital Point for this forum and its tools, I found the co-op ads to be highly irrelevant and, when visible, to degrade the authority my sites convey to their visitors. Also, when I ran link checks I would often be embarrassed when I saw what sites were indexed as linking to mine. The co-op is a dated SEO scheme whose time passed long ago. I think that as Google continues to fight the battle to discern relevant from the irrelevant, and as Google continues to evolve, we will continue to read "road-kill reports" here on this and other forums. It's inevitable. Google and the other search companies are crafting mathematical algorithms that must capture dialogue, translate it into computationally useful bits, then translate those results back into useful dialogue. It's a lot like putting English into a translation program, converting it into Japanese, then translating the Japanese back into English. Chances are the original and the end result will have similarities, will be identifiable, but will also be strikingly different and contain some stunning errors. It is easy to be hard on Google, especially since they often approach things with a "ready, fire, aim" methodology. However, every time one of my sites moves up a spot because a junk site disappeared off the radar I think to myself hooray for that.
A couple of my sites dropped 3-5 pages for many terms, it happened yesterday.. Both sites had some solid rankings near the top of the first page consistently for years. Both of the sites are running co-op ads but no inbound links from the co-op ads. Eric
Love your datacenter tool!!!! Any plans to make that long list of centers easier to navigate? Scolling up and down, and then trying to find the submit button gets a little tough after a couple clicks.
Love your datacenter tool!!!! Any plans to make that long list of centers easier to navigate? Scolling up and down, and then trying to find the submit button gets a little tough after a couple clicks.
I'm not being hard on Google, but is is hard to know that a site that you have been running for two years that is essentially blood sweat and tears is all of a sudden being out ranked by some rubbish portal site whilst you are virtually de-ranked on every single one of your formally rock solid terms (not de-indexed) while these "junk sites" move in. Hell I don't even rank on the first page for my site name anymore even with the second highest PR in the industry. Well anyway as this thread goes on it would appear apparent that Google may be targeting these automated link exchanges, and whilst the whole coop network idea may have it's days numbered I'm not convinced that Google is attempting to employ an attack on it at this stage, and that this may just be a reshuffle. I'm willing to wait around for a couple of weeks to see how things pan out before dropping the coop ads. Maybe a new thread should be started about the issue of coop and it's recent effects on site's rankings.
I guess I feel a little better now. I started rotating in YPN on a couple of my sites and traffic has dropped off severely since then. I hope it's just an update and things will go back to normal but just in case I took the YPN ads off. The ctr was terrible for me anyways. -the mole
I'm seeing many, many, smaller sites affected dramatically by this. It's not a phenemenom afflicting just the larger sites. As far as links go, most of the pages I've seen being affected are the automated/scripted ones. I've had a look at several 75k-85k pages with nothing but OBL's from exchanges, nicely organized and on topic, that are done by hand that remained indexed and recently cached. Google hasn't destroyed the ranking value that reciprocal links provide. I actually don't think they're able to handle it algorithmically so they de-index the links instead. No link, no value. Rather, they're forcing webmasters to take a closer look at what sites they exchange links with. Not a bad thing in my opinion. Dave
Why has this thread been moved to website reviews? It was an important, relevent and popular thread under search-engines/google. I've been following it (though had not posted in it) because my site was affected too. The thread is about many sites getting dropped in rankings two days ago. No site reviews requested or expected. Just a general discussion/agreement that something was going on... and what that something might be. IMHO, it belongs and is relevent to it's previous location. That's where I and others have been looking for it.
One of my sites that has dp ads on it dropped. Another site I have does not have dp ads, and it dropped too. I don't think this serp drop is related to having dp ads on the site.
I dunno I'm becoming increasingly suspesious of the DP coop and it's role in these SERP dropouts, it would be interesting to hear from people that are still running DP coop and not seeing any effects as yet.
My serps dropped even more yesterday, and then more again today (except for one or two keyphrases that came up one position since yesterday). Anyone else that experienced the big drop last week still continueing to drop?
Yes - this matches what I am seeing exactly. Unique Visitors: 20 June - 21,181 21 June - 15,752 22 June - 4,275 23 June - 3,726 24 June - 2,472 25 June - 2,096 The attached JPEG charts the motions of 156 keywords throughout the process.