Matt Cutts Gives Insight To Bigdaddy

They did have a couple of those things going with a site of mine, but they fixed it about 2 months ago.

 

Yep. Just tore through new and old logs this morning and sure enough, I've got more 404's than I've ever seen. Hmmm.... I really hope google is gonna fix this soon. I can do all kinds of patch work to get through this, but I feel like I'm just wasting time putting bandaids on my site in order to work around a problem that google created.

I also checked on something you mentioned earlier about Yahoo. Same here. It's slurping like crazy. I'm getting more visits from yahoo on all three of my sites than I've ever gotten. That's nice to see and should help some with my loss of google traffic.

Ya know, I'm very happy to give google what they want in regards to site development. I have no problems abiding by their guidelines. It's just business after all. But in this case I simply don't know what they want or what I can do to resolve this?

 

I'm not convinced it's anything anybody but Google can resolve, wibr.

I'm still getting most of my SE traffic from Google but the rate Yahoo and MSN are spidering tells me that they may start to gain some real ground if Google doesn't clean up its act soon.

 

The problem is that even if Yahoo and MSN spider like their lives depended on it and their algo's give perfect results with no spam it will take them years to take substantial market share from google.

75% of people in the UK think google is the internet - how can you change that?

 

Multiple stabbings until they smarten up is the usually recommended DigitalPoint method.

 

lol!

Ya know the more I research this "thing" the more I realize how screwed up it is. Also I really don't know how long it's been happening to my sites. My traffic always fluctuates and I don't worry about traffic ups and downs. But for the last two weeks it's been sinking like a stone. So I took a long hard look.

After researching this forum and a few others, plus analyzing my logs and chatting with some competitors (who are also friends) over the last few days, I realize this has nothing to do with webmasters.

There is no rhyme or reason to any of this. .ASP, PHP, blogs, forums, html, shtml, .pl and every type of page known to mankind has been deindexed, or not. Sites from diverse markets such as: real estate, personal sites, adult sites, florists, etc... all hit, or not hit. I simply can't find an underlying theme.

Maybe google really is broken?

The one issue that really convinces me of this is the reindexing/listing of old pages in the google SERPS. That is entirely the fault of google. I mean if a webmaster deletes a page from their site and removes the links to it then we should expect it, in time, to be removed from google's index. If they can't get that right then they have a serious issue. I should not, nor should anyone else, be expected to send google a personal note everytime I delete a page.

Until google fixes that I don't see how they can lay blame at anyone else's feet. All of this sits squarely on google's shoulders.

Anyway, sorry about the rant. It wasn't aimed at anyone (well yeah, google). Just stating my opinion.

 

If anything this will make me feel better about seeing indexed/cached content from years ago. I wouldn't have spent all that money on writers if I knew they were going to stop indexing it.

I'll cut you FOOL!

 

Yeah, I'm feeling your pain. I didn't pay for my content, but I did write it. Every keystroke of it. Hundreds of pages.

Well I'm still researching this fiasco. Here's the deal as of this very minute.

I have 3 sites (we'll call'em A, B, and C). A and B have been absolutely hammered by this latest google debacle. But C, the newest one, is unscathed. After the last few hours of reviewing logs and traffic I see that C is performing better than ever and has a traffic increase of approximately 70% over last month.

The first 2 (A and B) have had the majority of their pages deindexed. Site A, the largest and oldest, is showing very old pages in the index. Some as old as 6 months. Site B is not showing older pages in the index. All of its pages have been deindexed with the exception of the index page.

Then there's site C. It's only 5 months old so it's the newest by far. It's built exactly the same as sites A and B, but with its own subject matter and a different template and CSS for a different look and feel. Site C is being indexed like crazy. And it gets the fewest googlebot visits of the 3.

I have reviewed every single variable for these 3 sites. EVERYTHING. And there's only one difference. Sites A and B have xml google sitemaps. Site C has an XML google sitemap too, but I never submitted it. When I log into my google sitemaps account site C does NOT show. I forgot to include it when I built the thing.

Well there is one other difference too, site C is less than 6 months old.

And yet site C is kicking butt in google. Could my sitemaps have been the problem? They were updated weekly. I don't know if that's it or not, but I'm gonna find out...

 

Lol, we must bring this to the attention of Bill Gates.

 

66% of stats are made up. I doubt many people think google is the internet. Maybe their first place to look for things on it, though.

 

I get a lot more traffic from being 12th on google than I do for being 1st on MSN.

 

It's actually worse than that. In my case, the old WERE gone from the index and the newer pages were included. Since Big Daddy, the new ones have disappeared and the old ones have come back again.

This is old data - from last summer.

 

I think what Maldives was saying was that 75% is the share of search in the UK that Google enjoys. In the Uk there is no other search engine in the eyes of the web user, it is all google. (well 3/4 or 75% to be correct).

He wasn't suggesting that we brits are all so dumb that we can't tell the difference between the web and google, it was a figure of speach, as in 'television is his life' or 'I would kill for a nice cold beer' etc, it was simply forcing the issue of importance of Google to UK users. If you are not in Google in the Uk you are NOT in the game.

 

Thanks OWG for backing me up

 

In Scotland and Ireland, "I would kill for a beer" isn't a figure of speech - they mean it.

 

Classic, It is also true in Wales. The saying goes, take my money, sleep with my wife, but touch my beer and your a deadman