I suppose that is considerably better than refreshing data used by an "non-existing" algorithm. /tom/
hehe! Matt should get a job in politics. He missed his calling. He's not just a spin doctor, he's a freakin surgeon.
THe 27th.. yes I lost 90% of my traffic from Google since then (3000 visitors/day). Also lost 80% of my adsense income. I have thousands of pages like that, but they aren't doorway pages, they are pages with the actual information for each title. As they eliminate the dynamically generated trash, they also eliminate real sites that use databases to be more efficient. How can that help their search results?
Is there a huge pattern that could be identified in which almost everything is the same except a few keywords that change for the page title, etc? More and more, I believe that if there is little value to the dynamic content, except to getting indexed by the search engine, the engine can figure this out.
I operate to seperate link list sites. One is three years old and uses static pages. This page wasn't effected at all by the june 27th change. Our other larger site is over seven years old and uses dynamic pages. This older site dropped 70% on june 27th. So does that mean this mess is caused my google changing the way it indexes dynamic content? Or am I on the wrong track.
I'm seeing the EXACT thing! My static sites have remained fully indexed while my dynamic sites are taking a shit kicking!
How would Google display search results if it didn't have databases? Would Google ban itself for being dynamic? How do you display data, user added info, etc (the web is not just articles) without dynamic pages? Lets say you want to have a resource listing every language school in every country of the world. Would you write a bunch of pages by hand for each country, inserting each school into each file by hand or would you make a database and have the file bring up the data for each country? Then why would you call the name of the page anything different than 'Language schools in [Country name]' , isn't that what the individual page is about? So if you have hundreds of pages that say ''Language schools in..' then you are a spammer?
A bit of solid communication is needed when things like this happen instead of the usual "lets just make up some new terminology & hope they forget about it" which is becoming tiring....
Does anyone remember any other time that a Google update adversely affected this many sites at one time? My site is over 7 years old and I have never took a hit like this before. I had Google drop 10% - 20% off and on but never 75% over night. This is a nightmare I hope they fix soon.
Matt sounds like my wife... "new shoes?" nah I had these like forever" yeah sure it existed they started testing and tuning it several months ago. These results show the results I posted about like 3 months ago. saying nothing is better than a good lie.... But anyway, who cares if it is called an update or not. My pageviews did not drop with 5k out of 30 in the past few months. I can only hope for them their stock won't do the same.
It was kind of a downward spiral since a couple of months but, like other sites, the 27th (BLACK TUESDAY) it all went went to hell. There might be some truth about dynamic pages since my site is all generated from a database and we should be able to do that and NOT get penalized for that from a stupid SE with their even more stupid algos. Tons of my pages went supplemental and when I look at the cache date almost all of them are from August last year! Somehow it seems that Google is using that old cache to bot the pages since the paths they have are all screwed up. They have nested paths that I don't even have and there are thousands of pages thy say they can't find in my sitemap stats (yes, I DID submit a sitemap to see if that would help) which is hasn't yet! I can see google crawl my site like crazy right now and I am trying to help them find my pages so they could go from supplemental and become real pages again. One thing that I think is really interesting and that is that Yahoo and MSN and other SE's don't have a problem finding the right pages. No problems with paths there! And what is even more interesting is that the other SE's are more accurate when it comes to displaying a page that is close to what people are searching for, not like Google at all! As long as anything shows up in Googles SERP's I think they don't really care. It's only when there is an outcry that they might do something about it but if there are spamsites with a content that goes with an ad, why would Google care? Matt Cutt? He's nothing but a second hand programmer and all the PhD's they have over at Google must have gotten out of school and work there as interns. I have worked a lot with DB's and an algo is nothing but queries... It seems like MSN and Yahoo can handle it, so why can't Google?
While there is a lot to be said for people with advanced degrees, it isn't true that being smart and able to work through complicated concepts allows one to design algorithms that will handle real world issues. Microsoft was also famous for creating crappy buggy code and they worked very hard to get bright people right out of school as well. What both companies need to do is get bright people about five years after they've had the crap kicked out of them by real world situations instead of being sheltered in some PhD heavy debating club where they are shielded from the real world for years at a time. As with everything, a balance is required...
I think I overslept on the 27th and missed it, not quite sure what happened and can't find a definitive post to clue me in. However, as to massive shakeups, yes, there have been a few. Two I can think of off the top of my head are the Florida Update and Jagger. Massive massive changes that upset many people. Of course, I'm quite sure that many people were made happy as well, but they didn't bitch as loudly as those who were hurt. I know your site is 7 years old, and therefore went through both of those updates, maybe weathered them well, maybe you missed seeing them. I'm sure there were plenty of people unaffected by this change. That doesn't make this one bigger. Different updates affect different sites... umm... differently. -Michael
No, mvandermar. That's just more Google spin. Big Daddy was flawed from the outset. It didn't fix what it was supposed to fix and it created problems far greater than those it targeted. Google has admitted to some of the problems but has tried to smokescreen most of them with rhetoric and bafflegab. They continue to apply patches hoping to fix the mess they've created but it only seems to create new problems with every patch. Yes, with other updates and algorithm changes, people were unhappy at seeing their sites drop out of the top 10 or top 500 or whatever. This is different. Big Daddy is indexing and showing caches for pages which haven't existed for over a year while failing to index new pages created in the past 4-6 months. That's not anything like Florida or Jagger. That is just a monumental fuckup.
I've been saying for sometime that "BD" should still be in developement. They went live long before they should have. This is what "Beta" is for. Also, let's not forget, they are a "baby" when it comes to being a public company and simply coming out and saying... "It's broke" is simply not an option. There's been a long line of of problems, one after another. It appears to me that they keep putting a "bandaid" on something that needs "stitches". One of the things I fail to understand, and you can apply this to Jagger as well, why the need to roll this across all DC's? One would think they'd be able to use say half of them, prevent them from going live while the do all the fine tuning. Ego? But then again, I'm not an engineer. Speaking of which, being engineer makes you educated not smart. Dave
I can't really use any quantitative sorts of analyses, though it's kind of impossible anyway. But this new "update" subjectively looks like them going back to original BD. A lot of pages are going supplemental. Certain sites of mine have gone back to more or less exactly where they were _just after_ BD. I fail to see why some of my pages are supplemental -- actually I do know, I just disagree with Google. They're pages with prices and a short description for repairs of items that are comprised of mostly non-competitive keywords. To Google, that may look like doorway pages, but they're legitimate pages IMO. The client actually sells the service. I'll probably be forced to add content, even though it serves no real purpose and helps the consumer in no way, nuke the old pages, and create them at a new set of URLs. Personally, I don't care. But I don't like the fact that I need to act like a spammer to get legitimate pages indexed. Good going Google, you're getting lots of false positives these days. Yet I still see lots of crap MFA sites.