Google Algorithms Gone Bonkers! Traffic Loss by Almost 90%!
Webmasters at Webmaster World, have been running a thread, almost 5 pages long about a serous concern, that has all these Webmasters on the edge. According to the reports, there seems to be a sudden and a dramatic traffic drop from Google. This drop in traffic is estimated to be 90% of all Google directed traffic. Google also seems to be dropping hundreds or maybe thousands of pages from these Webmasters’ websites.
Due to sheer volume of posts in the Webmaster World thread, I’m displaying a couple of selected and relevant posts, just to give you an idea about the severity of the situation:
“I can now join the catastrophic loss club! UK site, PR6, rock solid rankings, 400k pages indexed, fast loading - 90% loss of traffic since 2 days ago. Last time the site went AWOL was early February for a couple of days.
Looking up what I used to rank for approx 20,00 medium to long phrases then all top listing just disappeared BUT results can now only be described as awful - in fact on one query results 11-20 contained sites from Poland, Germany, Czech, .info and not a single .com or .co.uk - when will Google admit that they really screwed up big time this time?
As my site is a .com hosted on uk servers then it seems that I have now moved to the index for Mars. Time to move to the dark side methinks rather than stay in the Google lottery.”
“one of our sites was hit hard. it was a “landing page” looking site, without css.
most were not hurt,
one with really great css, (the page looks like old style internet informational pages without css), it has PROPER use of H1, h2 and h3 with videos on most pages and lots of properly tagged images (like for the blind person who HEARS the screen) and it was not hurt and has climbed!
G said they were going to start paying a whole lot more attention so sites with great user experience including video and properly tagged images.
I guess its time to make sure all our sites concentrate on great user experience and contain videos and properly used alt tags”
“I have a few mini-sites and one of these has seen its traffic go up 20 fold and it simply does not deserve to rank for what it is ranking for - no SEO effort whatsoever - a blog with about 20 pages of content!
Perhaps the solution is to take the 400,000 pages of content - yes they are product pages and turn them into 2,000 x 200 page websites, crosslink them all and buy lots of cheap backlinks as this seems to be the sort of site that Google now favours.
The silence from Google is deafening on this one - we all know they have had UK geo problems and my guess is that they have attempted a fix that is wreaking havoc in some areas.
As an aside, I noticed that Google spider stopped spidering some of my other sites early on Wednesday like it was on holiday or something but today the crawl rate on the PR6 site seems to be running at 3x its normal rate - it is like Google lost a whole block of indexed pages and is now trying to get them all back ASAP. The loss of 100,000 pages would clearly hit ranking if internal support pages were lost and the unusual spider activity is certainly something that I have not experienced before - the one thing a large site has in its favour is the remarkable predictability of activity so when that predictability disappears then one notices the impact pretty quickly.”
“Lost 90% of Google Organic last week on one of our country TLD sites. Daily 30K organic traffic dropped to 3K, so Google is STILL sending some traffic. We have a network of sites all hosted in the US. All other sites are fine. One application runs the whole network. Network of TLD sites in each country of a major continent.
Only one country was hit. Our oldest and largest site (4 years). Go figure.
1,000,000 pages still indexed for the lost country site though. No obvious penalties.
I can search for some of our unique titles and find a high result other are gone. That being said we are a long tail site so we have 1000s of keywords constantly changing so not beholden to a few keywords.
We do very very little linking out without a NOFOLLOW.
Emailed back and forth with Google, they said they couldn’t see anything wrong. (shut off our AdWords account so I could get someone to talk to me)
No link exchanges or link campaigns. We’re web standardistas. Absolutely no black hat strategies. We try to escape out any UGC trickery. Some users could have slipped something by us and we’re still checking but its unlikely.”
“A few more interesting observations.
Firstly, the number of search results being reported on some popular UK products seems to have fallen dramatically - my guess would be 80-90% reduction.
Secondly, and I find this one amazing, I am starting to see sites where the total number of NON SUPPLEMENTAL pages being reported in the serps is significantly more than the total number of pages INCLUDING supplemental pages - the numbers are nonsense.
Thirdly, for say a five word search then the cache reports say two of the words on the page and say three of the words in links pointing to the page BUT the words linking to the page seem highly unlikely. Could this be the effect of all of these external search type query parameters being hosted on remote sites? If this is the case then it seems that the spammers may well have found a way of unduly affecting the Google algo.”
“There is at least one site that records Google searches and what pages ranked in the top 20 for specific search terms - but it has about a three week lag in its data.
What I intend to do is take a copy of the 20,000 or so search phrases that I used to rank for before 4 June and in a few weeks time take a copy of what I now rank for after 4 June and compare the two lists to see what was affected and, perhaps, more importantly what was NOT affected to see if I can see any pattern.
At least I would be able to confirm independently the timing of the loss and that some sort of wholesale site penalty filter has hit me. The speed of the loss indicates some sort of site penalty rather than a gradual change from a page algo change, but I may be wrong!
If my site returns then this particular exercise will still be possible and worth doing, in my view.”
“Hmm i’m also in to the club. It all started in the morning(GMT) of last fourth. My website is a PR4 .com, mainly vbulletin forum, tech related,usa hosted one. Daily google referels dropped from 15-20k to 1-2k. Competitors all going strong.
Over 200k Pages are still indexed. Google is still referring a few visitors. No drop in PR.
A few changes i made recently:
- 1. Changed the forums’ skin.
- 2. Enabled RSS feed. (I disabled it in last December after a similar penalty. )
- 3. Posted comments in a few blogs with anchor text as my domain. Mainly do-follow blogs.
In the forum all the outbound links are hidden for guests, including crawlers.”
