Matt Cutts Makes Comment about the 27th

Google is doing a great job itself to killing adsense revenue with their latest update. Went from $xxx to under $xx a day in just a week....

 

YPN is still not international, once it is, Google is going to notice. In the meantime though, they can trample on us however they want, they're the best that's available to most of us in most circumstances.

 

I thought I would come out of closet and let everyone know we got hammered very hard after June 27th, 2006. We lost about 40% of traffic which will most likely result in a lost monthly revenues of about $20,000. The site that was affected underwent a major redesign effort about 2 years ago and has been on cruise control since. We don't really employ any real SEO efforts other than provide good content for the users.

One of our main keyword phases that ranked in the top 5 consistently in Google's results is now buried at 51. The odd thing about this new position is that it is for one of my secondary pages. Originally it was the home page that was getting the top five results. In fact the home page is no where to found in the listing for that particular keyword phrase. The question is why? The home page has not really been changed over the 1.5 years. It is like the home page is getting penalized for some reason.

Another observation that was made was that the site:yoursite.com operator use to list over 65,000 pages, but now we have only 5,000 pages. I am not really sure how many pages we have as much of the content is database driven. In addition I see lots and lots of results are tagged as supplemental. I don't know if previously they were supplementals because I never really researched in the problem.

Another observation is that the link:www.yoursite.com only shows 11 listings. But I know for a fact there are 1000s and 1000s of people that have linked to us one way or another. Most of the links are linking to www.yoursite.com and it is like the majority of those links are not shown because of some kind of penalty.

Here are the characteristics about our site:

PR5

About 7 years old

Lots of contents driven by database

We use CJ for our affiliate program.

We have some duplicate content as the spiders is indexing both the database pages with the url variables & and mod_rewrite pages somehow.

No Adsense

We are going to give Google 1 month to sort this out. If it isn't sorted out then we will attempt to figure out why Google is out of favor with us. Its a shame that a search engine can inflict so much financial harm without having a real relationship with its stakeholders. If only Google could be so kind to tell us what we did to deserve this kind of punishment then we would be proactive and take care of the problem.

 

I was going to suggest you contact them since with your throughput, I assumed you were a premium publisher. Good luck, your issue sounds absolutely disastrous

 

If you want toknow how many pages are really listed, then imbed some unique data in each page. I use the postcode (zip code) plus another word on each page. I can tell with a simple search how many pages are in the index.

As I said in another thread, Google are on a spam hunt, and they are buckling under the weight of strain from the masses.

Babies with the bathwater does not come into it. Google are currently throwing out the entire bathroom suite!

 

You know OWG, I'm starting to think you're right. I tend to believe very little that I read on forums, sometimes speculation pans out of course, but in this case I think Big Daddy was an anti-spam update. And I agree google is willing to harm good sites in order to remove the bad. "Collateral damage" and all that sort of thing... Cuz for the life of me I can't figure out what else BD is supposed to accomplish???

I know some competitors that have simply been ripped to shreds by this update. They've lost first page rankings, like 142857 in his post above, and are losing some serious cash, and they have no idea what to do. Neither do I. Neither does anyone!

 

The issue wibr, is that the index is still chock full of massive amounts of spam.

 

Yeah, I'm no spam hunter like some of the folks here (kind of impressive how much they find really) but yeah it seems the spam remains unscathed.

So has ANYTHING positive come out of this big daddy update?

 

Nothing that I can think of. Even if it was meant to remove spam, it's no more difficult to spam the index now than before. I'm assuming spam fingerprinting may have improved (some argue that they even use site fingerprinting at all), possibly taking out a bunch of legit sites in the process. I don't know, who knows if countless things have changed or not on Google's end for the better? All I know is there're a lot of unhappy webmasters and SEOs, and I'm finding it harder to find the results I want in the searches without actually sifting through things.

 

I'm not sure that will be effective with the current google mess going on.

I have a unique business name, been using it with my website for ten years now. Lots of incoming links.

Google used to list it as number one if I searched for my business name in quotes. Of course, I should be number one for my unique business name (yahoo and msn have me as number one as well).

With this latest google update, they have me listed at 60 something. Above me are pr 0 scraped copies of my site, sites that briefly mention my name, and even a pop-up page that's on my own site - a page which has no pr and and is listed as supplemental.

My pr 6 homepage is listed *below* a pop-up page on my site with no pr, no links other than one pop-up link (not using my business name as anchor text), that's in the supplemental index. What is that about??!!

Anyway, I don't think google has enough on the ball to even tell you how many pages have any particular unique text on them. I do use that technique myself, but the number of results returned varies often.

Come on google, get things straightened out, please!

 

Hah! I have directory entries that're linking to my site outranking my site itself... for a unique business name AND domain too!

They need to get their shit together, this is getting beyond ridiculous.

 

That's actually not new, it pre-dates big daddy. I've had sites that mention my site name outrank me for over a year.

-Michael

 

Issues like that had happened previously, but never on such a large scale. Something's upped the sensitivity of whatever it is that causes it.

 

I don't know about what is going on at Google and I can't say I am being affected by these problems, but I can say that I think Google is getting above it's station. What Google forgets is that it's the Webmasters and Developers that create the sites for Google to have a search engine and stocks and shares at all. It's webmaster complying with their guidelines that allow them to have the benefits of people "Googling" instead of "Searching".

If communities like ours move as one to voice our dissaproval, eventually, they will have no choice but to listen.

For all the marketing spends and campaigns by Google, Yahoo and MSN, there are only one group of people who can force a change of search habits by the general public, and that is us.

We are not there yet, but much more of this shit by Google and I can foresee Yahoo becoming the webmasters choice. That will also move the public over to Yahoo, in time, and Google will be screwed.

As I said, we are not there yet, but I have already found myself talking about Yahoo to friends. With all this in mind, I'll be paying a great deal more attention to my Yahoo serps and what is going on over there. Unless Google sorts itself out and gives us a little respect - I think it will go the same way as many of the dot com companies that peaked - went on the markets - then collapsed.

You heard it here first

 

I would like to hear by mass media about what it is happening to google, maybe on this way something will change sooner

 

When traffic starts dropping, and searchers start moving, and stock values starts to drop, THEN and ONLY then will Google listen to anyone. Until such time as that happens, they will continue to do what they are doing (trying to take over the world).

 

I have to agree with Old Welsh Guy rather than Not-so-old Welsh Guy here: Webmasters aren't going to make a difference.

Joe A. Searcher is the one who can make a difference. MSN Search is going to continue to be the default search on most new computers and on MSN Messenger, which is what the vast majority of younger people use. They're not webmasters yet, mst of them, but they are very computer literate and they are not going to change to Google without a reason. MSN Search continues to get better even as Google is going down the tubes. That's not a good trend for Google, no matter what spin they try to put on it.

Those who do not learn the lessons of history are condemned to repeat it.

 

Knock knock:

Who's there?

AltaVista

Altavista who?

EXACTLY

When longhornvistawindows2007 comes out with the built in MSN search, then Google are going to have a fight on their hands.

When Google came along there were a handfull of search engines and AV was king. Google was light years ahead, and as such via Word of mouth, stole the market.

THINGS HAVE CHANGED. People are using MSN, and they are not going to quit applications simply to search Google, when they can search MSN from where they are and find what they want. google has a year or so until they really have to fight.

 

Good Points

Just to add... I watched as my MSN traffic climbed a bit over this past xmas holiday season, and surpassed my Yahoo traffic and now has almost doubled it. Similar SERP's.

Why? New computers from Santa Claus with MSN set as the default would be a pretty good guess.

Dave

 

Why don't we all make a little bit of advertising for other Search Engines on our sites? We can just put a link with the anchor text "A better Search Engine, Live.com" and put a link to a SERP in MSN/live.com.
Have a note on our sites saying "If you came from Google, why not try MSN next time. Better results, faster search, less spam sites!"

That'll teach them maybe!

I know that when one site disappears from the search then there are other to take it's pplace, but if a site makes $5000 a month on adsense, which isn't very uncommon and this site disappear, how much does Google loose every year? $250,000? More? If 100 sites disappear that makes that much? How much do they loose? $25,000,000?