just wondering, of those sites that got wiped out by google, how old was the site(s)? when where they registered? before anyones accuses me of a witchhunt ... i'm just trying to collect some data here.
Exactly 5 months. Was got out of sandbox in 3.5 months. btw, there are some folks with old sites also hit by this 'update'. ( or whatever you call it )
i wish i added these options ... "my site was old and so was the content" "my site was old with fresh content added regularly"
My newer sites ared doing better than older sites, 1998 my main one that got hit, I updated to a degree as I always have, add content and don't use anything that could be considered duplicate content like news feeds for updating purposes. Google crawls the site non stop and continues to do so but has hit me pretty frickin hard. Today if stats keeps going the way they are I'll be lucky to get 30% of my normal daily traffic, thank god for book markers, yahoo and msn.
What about how many years is your domain name registered for? Just harkening back to the algo patent(?) that came out earlier this year.... Has anyone seen or heard of that actually being a factor?
Poll like this is useless. You cannot deduce anything from the results. What you need is the ratio of hammered/not hammered sites of given age. V.
Oh I will not. For me, it is not that interesting. All my sites are new anyway. But if you want to get useful results make the options like this: a) started 2004 - hammered b) started 2004 - not hammered c) started 2003 - hammered d) started 2003 - not hammered etc. There is another issue. Each participant would need to vote several times - once for each of their sites. But that is probably not technically possible here. Instead they they may RANDOMLY pick one of their sites. The remaining problem is getting enough votes...
I think every potential theory on whatever is going on has been thorougly destroyed at this point... I am sure it is a combination of factors, so people need to stop looking for a single thing that is the culprit. Heck Google won't even admit they are doing anything.
I agree. ----- BTW It would be interesting to gather some statistical data about various aspects of google. If enough (>1000) webmasters participated, the results could be worth it. (reverse-engineer-google.com is still free!!! )
Date registered is meaningless. Google will not use registration date on it's own for anything as it has absolutely no bearing on the age of the site. 'every potential theory thoroughly destroyed' ? I've yet to see anyone even attempt to destroy Caryl's theory yet. http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showpost.php?p=376374&postcount=12
That's not what I meant -- I meant how many years is your domain name registered for? i.e. going into the future (and including the past)...
in my core segment, fairly competitive real estate, me and quite a few of my competitors got hammered; only one survived and he has the oldest site.
i think this is a good poll. but one thing that might also have been useful is... since when were your (hammered) sites been ranking within the top 10? in my case, the answer is: 2005
That's exactly what I was wondering. I'm currently doing an experiment to see if this might be the reason.
When was I ranking in the top 10 for my phrases? If that's the case 99 or early 2000 I would have to guess.
Well a site can't be older then its first registration date, so google might not use that date for anything but we can use to to see what oldest a site is. I have found a number of sites that are pretty young like less then less then 3 years that rank for stuff, but on a whole there doesn't seem to be many of them. The increasing the power of older links would make old site rise, mabye older sites tend not to be as optimized as much, like 2 years ago it wasn't as common knowledge that anchor text is important, maybe older sites tend no to have as repetitive anchor text.
too bad you can't edit th epoll once it's up ... but that would also make the previous votes inaccurate. next time i'll poll before i poll