Well I have extracted myself from the coop network by refunding the advertiser who was paying me to put the code on my site for the balance of days left on his current payment. I have now completely removed coop links from all of my sites. If I quickly return to the serps it will be a pretty good sign (but not definitive) that Google is penalizing sites that host the coop code.
I wonder the same thing. It seems as if they feel they can just sweep it under the carpet and it will just go away. It's not going away...
I don't use the coop and my site was slammed. So the coop may contribute, but it's not the sole reason for the punishing serps.
As far as they are concerned only a bunch of black hat SEOs over at DigitalPoint are complaining about this so it is a non-issue that they can ignore. The funny thing is, I'm not seeing as much rumbling about this issue outside of DigitalPoint. It is almost like a repeat of Digg banning all DP members from Digg. Could we have all been labeled as suspicious black hats because of a few bad apples? To say that the delisting of my site has devastated me is the understatement of the century. I have been working very hard developing my site for almost eleven years now and actually turned it into a full time job. The strongest SEO tactics I ever used were "content is king so more content is better", W3C specifications and accessibility guidelines are golden so validate, validate, validate. If one looks at my site, it is very obvious that user considerations came first in the design and layout of my site. I even put the user ahead of profits by avoiding the most obnoxious forms of advertising even though I would have earned more money from it. I've been linked to by department webpages in Universities I could never hope to attend, government agencies I could never get a job at and my site is a primary reference source for hundreds of pages/articles at wikipedia.org under many of the different languages. I've spent tens of thousands of hours researching developing and maintaining content on my site over the years. Quite simply I feel like Google is treating me like a common spammer and is forcing me to prove my innocence without the benefit of knowing what the charges are.
Maybe there are more threads about this here at DP than the three or four I'm tracking, but I see lots more grumbling about this over at WMW than here. Related posts at WMW follow (even if the topic title doesn't quite suggest it). There are probably some threads I've missed. June 27 - we fully recovered from traffic drop June 27 - changes June 27 - changes Part 2 June 27 - changes Part 3 Datacenter Watch: 2006-06-28 27 June screwup - theory 27 June screwup - theory 27 June screwup - theory part 2 Datacenter Watch: 2006-07-04 Datacenter Watch: 2006-07-21 New Data Refresh - 27 July 2006 Big drop in Google ranking Yet another 27 June theory Datacenter Watch: 2006-07-26 August 2nd Data Refresh? Lots of people hit on June 27, many who recovered on July 27. Some didn't recover on July 27. Some sites which survived June 27 were hit on July 27. I really doubt this is targeting co-op specifically since the vast majority of sites impacted were not members of co-op. I'm beginning to wonder if the reason many (but likely not all) of us have been hit by the June 27 and July 27 data refreshes were either people doing black hat things with 301/302 redirects, or people who might have had incorrectly configured 301/302 redirects, or people doing "clean" things with redirects but have tripped some sort of redirection spam filter. There are so many sites that were impacted by these two data refreshes I don't believe it was for any one single reason. However most everyone I've talked to who was impacted (here, on WMW, and offline) have some sort of 301 or 302 redirect in place. And several of us have discovered that some of these redirects were not 100% properly configured. We know that "redirection hijacking" has been an issue Google has been trying to tackle for the past several months. I had a 301 redirect setup from the non www version of my sites to the www.example.com version of my site. Unfortunately, I had another rewrite rule that wasn't playing nice with that redirect and as a result my homepage (example.com) was being redirected properly to www.example.com, however my inner pages (example.com/foo.html) were being redirected to the homepage (www.example.com). I can see how during a crawl this would look very suspicious. All sorts of internal pages (in the example.com site) being redirected to www.example.com while internal pages on www.example.com were appearing fine. Another thing many of us who were hit see is that the "site:www.example.com" operator doesn't list our homepage first.... or at all. In my case this would make sense if Google thought I was doing something suspicious with lots of 301 redirects to that single page. I corrected the redirect and now a couple of days later I'm starting to see some of the Google data centers now show my homepage first again for the site:www.example.com query. Ken, I also see your homepage is now properly being returned first in the "site:" query for your site on about six data centers. I haven't picked up in the SERPs yet (who knows, it might take another data refresh to straighten it out... which would make sense since it took a dive during the data refresh) however I'm at least hopeful this might help. The irony of this all..... I had contacted the Google sitemaps team about what I thought was a problem/bug with the Sitemaps interface. Google took a look and told me about the 301 redirect problem because the 301 redirect was causing the weird data I saw in Sitemaps. Hooray to Google for finding and letting me know about that problem. Now if they would only tell me what they don't like about my site. Again, redirection errors might not be the reason why all sites took a drop June 27 and July 27... and my site might not come back after the next data refresh. But I can at least hope this is what caused my fall as I've fixed the problem.
The 301 vs. 302 issue is an interesting theory. I do make heavy use of redirects to get lost users to the right place and I discovered due to they way I was doing them, lots of my redirects were 302 redirects instead of 301 redirects like I thought. I had gotten this issue fixed over the past week and all of my redirects should now be 301 redirects. Its amazing how many people are having problems with these updates, I just wish we could get Google to listen and that they would fix this issue much faster as it is really costing a lot of people a lot of money.
Many sites (my site included) dropped on June 21, NOT June 27. There was no mention the June 21 hit anywehere on WMW or anywhere else other than the DP co-op forum: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=98931
Indeed. Any suggestions how to make a bit more serious complain and shout about some progress with the "bugg"
I don't know that the "bugg" is the answer, they are too stuck on themselves. The noise is going crazy over at webmasterworld on this issue and GoogleGuy and Matt Cutts are regulars over there. What we really need is a "real" tech reporter for one of the major online tech rags to pick up this issue. Then we would start to see some action.
I have a feeling it's some sort of penalty thats been applied, and while they know it may have effected sites that didn't deserve it, they're not going to do a re-index. I'm guessing it will probably correct itself in another month. The bad part is that, thats a long time to wait for some of us.
And this violates their motto of "do no evil". They are seriously harming a lot of innocent websites and not correcting the error in an expedient manner. For me personally this will cost me a couple grand in lost advertising revenues.
Oh I agree... I really think someone shoud have made a correction over the weekend. I'm not in the thousands, but certainly in the hundreds. I don't blame Google for goofing up, we've come to expect that as webmasters with Google. What really bothered me is when Matt Cutt's eluded to the reason we may be having problems is due to our poor authoring. Thats evil, or Matt is so misinformed he probably shouldn't have addressed it. If Google is really serious about communicating with webmasters, it should have listened on July 28th when the effects started to become apparent. Maybe they have, and their updating is slow, but we've put alot of faith in Google, maybe a little trust that we know whats going on with our own sites, might be a kind gesture in return?
Absolutly! They need to honestly look at some of the sites that got banned from an open mind. They have labled us SEO spammers and are forcing us to prove we are innocent and making us beg and making us wait. All the while spammers and black hats continue to make money. I could accept a hiccup for a few days but weeks, a month, maybe longer. That is just plain wrong. Google as do all of the major search engines have an obligation to be accountable for their actions and to really take a look at how their actions are impacting on honest hard working web publishers who try very hard to produce a high quality product. No lies, no passing the blame, no diverting attention from the real issue. They need to own up to what happened, be transparent about it and fix the matter in days not weeks.
Or June 28 for many of us.... There are still tons of people who have been in this hole since the end of June, through all of July, and now into August.
I posted my feeling's on Matt Cutts blog here. It seems like others are agreeing with me, rather then just praising cutts. I'm thinking maybe if the rest of us who are having a problem post here, we can get someones attention. Give it a shot if you have a chance.
I post comments sometimes in MC's blog, but have never got any type of answer. Since it is MC's blog he just picks up on things he might have answer to or just simple requests. It's the same with his "vidyos"... just crap I don't expect MC to do anything about the problems. Like I said a while back, we are here to stay. Google like the result because if they didn't it would have changed a long time ago! We're stuck in this hole and there is no way of getting out! Maybe we should all redirect our sites to Google since they have stolen everything we had anyway
This would be a good idea if the income were at ZERO for everybody, but i do not think that this is the case. So it would be like driving yourself to death by doing this.. i'd prefer a 100%width banner on top of all sites. with a google campaign. I doubt google would care, but it would be something to speak about..