June 27th revisited

well no recovery for me looks like ppc is the only way , why is it only a small percentage of us?

Is there anything we can do?

 

Just be glad you aren't one of the people who was hit on June 27 but still haven't recovered yet. I'm on day 37 of this mess.

 

me 2 or there abouts and no end in sight, well looks like time to ditch that site, unless anyone has any ideas?

 

I think what we need to do is gather a collection of REALLY good content sites that were severely punished by these updates and use them as poster children for Google's update gone bad. The only way we can fight against this is if we can move this discussion beyond these forums and make the wider Internet community aware of what has happened. The only way we will get any sympathy is if we can show examples of really high quality content sites that are being unfairly punished. We need to be able to prove that Google's search algo is broken and that Google's heavy handed efforts to eliminate spam is not removing the spam yet is hurting legitimate sites that are very valuable to the end user. I've blogged about what happened to my site, but this is not enough. We need do find a more effective way to draw attention to this issue.

 

Murphy's Law is my enemy, so I must say.... whatever Google did back around June 27th, was good for me!

Last year, August 2005 was my best month. I was doing awesome. Then something changed and it was down hill... in fact... I took the slide down from 1.5 million pages indexed in google... all the way down to a lunch change amount of 14,000. Needless to say... the Adsense income dropped like buckets of rain.

Except for last month, I have been holding steady since Feb/March range. I finally hit bottom, or at least I had hoped. While a regular visitor of this forum in the hay-day... the loss of revenue from Adsense caused me to just lose interest and just move on and focus on the site and let adsense be adsense and be thankful for anything coming my way.

Then, about a month ago... my pages jumped of up around 500,000 almost overnight. The revenue jumped as well. I more than doubled June's income in July. While this doesn't get me anywhere near where I was last year... but yesterday... more traffic was coming than in July... so something changed again, but again, in my favor.

So... looks like Murphy skipped me this time, but Im sure he will be back.

 

Great idea KLB any ideas how to increase our exposure?

 

Heres something that might be of interest, if you've seen it already sorry

www dot mattcutts dot com/blog/ - take a look at session 8.

 

You really have tor read between the lines with Matt answers of course, but I think he does give some information where he alludes to the fact that the 6-27/7-27 events are an existing algorithim that may have something to do with heavily optimized pages. He also mentions something about spending too much time in the SEO forums and to work on content...yada yada.

So is there a common thread that could be found between these sites? Did they all use a specific optimization technique that has been discussed in forums? Is it something that a regular writer of a site wouldn't know about so they are filtering for some reason? Does it have anything to do with the coding? Can anyone think of a change implemented site wide based on something you read on a forum?

It's things like all the "NO FOLLOW" discussion that always scare me. If theres a big rush on the forums of people going and changing all of their links to NO FOLLOW, then google can easily change their mind and not tell anyone. Instead of treating the link as a non-vote for the other site, perhaps they also treat it as 'we know this site has a bunch of bad links that they've confirmed by using NO FOLLOW so were going to punish it'. So along comes the change 3 months after I've changed my site, and I'm sitting here wondering what I did. I'm not saying thats the cause at all, but just used as an example of something I've seen discussed on forums and a lot of people saying they were going to do it.

 

algorithm changes

 

The thing is, I rarely make changes to my mode of operation because of SEO forums. I try to follow the same best practices I have followed for years now. I write clean well structured code and produce quality original content. I even avoid cheeky types of SEO.

I will say that it is kind of scary how three weeks after I joined these forums my site had the worst SERP crash it has ever had. That could really screw with a paranoid individual's mind.

In my case the only thing questionable on my site from DP is the coop links that I have been hosting for almost a year now. A third party paid me to put the code on my site about a year ago and I was under the impression he was reselling the links to others I had no idea about DP coop at the time. I've shifted the links to rel=nofollow and will probably remove them at the end of the contract term in two weeks, to be safe from Google's standpoint.

I've always looked at the "rel=nofollow" with suspicion. I really don't trust Google one bit on this count, it is like flagging a site for investigation. Normally I do 301 redirects if a provide outbound links instead of using rel=nofollow.

Really I think Google has become so obsessed with beating down SEO that they have become totally blind to the really big forms of search engine spam like the sub-domain spam issue.

 

I also got hit on 27, but now Google has come back to normal and still better

 

Because my cached pages that are supplemental are from around August last year.... hmmmm ... coincidence or not?

 

my site got hit on the 27th.... july 27. i lost virtually all the listings i had for my site in google. i was getting traffic from about 10,000 keyword phrases. a few are coming back, but are far lower in rank, then they vanish again. my traffic and revenue have crashed since then. anyone else see changes on that date?

 

Did you pages go supplemental? If they did, when are the pages from? What date/month?
BTW, on your NapaValleyWedding guide you have a link to a site where it says Text Link Advertising. I am not sure but being involved with these guys MIGHT be a problem!
I used LinkMetro a while back but stopped because you never know if it's going to hit you in the butt....

 

Hi,

I am new to this Forum but have been an SEO for about 8 years now.
I am really surprised there aren't more folks out there like Yaffer and KLB.
Our one bread and butter site got "Whip-sawed" by Google exactly on July 27th. We lost 80% of traffic/revenue!!!
We thought maybe we got penalized, but it sounds like even the very "white- white hat" websites got nailed!
The only thing we are doing now is trying to test other sites and see if they rank better than the one that got "Whip-sawed."
One last thing that we are trying to do is use the Ranks.nl Prominance Tool on our old "Inner Sub Sites" and make them more Prominant.

JFYI... Items of interest:
1. GoogleBot is coming more often than ever to our "whip-sawed" site starting on July 27th.
2. Google is now indexing our "whip-sawed" site faster than ever starting on July 27th.
3. There are a very small few of our 3,500 "inner sub-sites" that are actually in the Top 5. Which is kind of weird if our site was penalized. Maybe only 50 sites that are like this.
4. I now only see one competitor of mine that remained ranking well

Hope the above helps. Feel free to hit me up with questions or whatever

JayDogs

 

And I also disagree. If we look at what happened when someone found the billion spam pages.... Google doesn't know WTF they are doing and when they try to fix one thing, they screw up so badly that it hurts a lot of good sites. I think we should just leave Google to themselves so they can go down with a big bang.
One thing I haven't seen before is that people actually go to page 30,40 and 50 to find my site nowadays, so that tells me a few things.

1. People don't find what they are looking for on the first 20 pages in Google anymore so they have to scroll through page after page
2. My site has dropped that much in the listings

 

I hate to say this, but maybe we should all quit using Google products until they get this thing fixed.

 

i've thought about it, but ypn doesn't have enough ads or the type of ad that converts. the lion share of my clicks are on link ads.

 

yaffer & JayDogs:

i seem to have the exact same thing you are experiencing on one of my websites. about 80% of my traffic and revenue is gone. i ranked top 5 for most of my terms, and now not one of them rank top 1-29. most of them rank 30-35, its like i have a filter or penalty which only allows my site to rank 30-1000.

even when i search for the name of my website. with spaces in between i rank # 30 and 31. im not sure if you guys have the same issue, but this didnt happen until july 27th. the only questionable thing i can think of is coop links being on my website. i just put them on about a month ago. any ideas on why this is happening to my website? thanks all.

 

the only thing i've changed on my main site lately is adding sitewide links from a link directory, but i doubt that's the problem. do you guys buy links for your sites?