Webmasters in Disarray with the ‘July 2008 Google SERP Changes!
Webmasters at the Webmaster World are stunned and experiencing quite dramatic ranking changes in the Google SERPS (Search Engine Result Pages). According to the threads, these ranking fluctuations have been occurring because of the July 2008 Google SERP Changes.
For example, a highly targeted website with appreciable performance has suddenly lost all traffic. The Webmasters also report that for the month of July this year, the short tail searches are starting to surface but long tail results have vanished into thin air.
Here are some interesting excerpts from Webmaster World:
“Has anyone recovered from June 4th catastrophe?”
“No recovery so far.“
“one particular site of ours which was badly hurt has started to see a few shorter tail terms begin to slowly come back up, long tails are still nowhere.
its basically a one-page information-heavy (kind of cookie cutter looking site)”
“The only chance I see is to take a deep look at sites in your niche which have not been affected by June 4 desaster and to make a new site based on these facts.
Chaning current sites makes no sense at all since in most cases you need to change the url/file structure.”
“our target term, very niche, is four words, we’ve always dominated for it. contains the word “home”
now it’s buried - out of sight.
but if I drop “home” bingo, back on the front page.
Wild “
“My positions have completely dropped this week for a site that has enjoyed good ranking for years.
It happened over the weekend.
On sunday, i jumped to position 4 for my major phrase, then when i check on sunday, it had completely dissapeared.
Even when searching for my sites name (and we’re the only site called this, plus i have all the domains, .co.uk, .com, .net).
Now when i look, the first listing of my actual domain is on page 6, all the previous entries are pages about my site.
I’m really hoping this is a glitch, its only been gone for 2 days.
I’m going on holiday tomorrow, i hope that when i come back 18 months work hasn’t been wasted.
I’m using exactly the same, safe link building techniques as i use on my other sites, all which have kept their positions.
Has anyone else suffered any similar problems where their ranking came back after a few days?”
“No change here and if anything its worse now than it was a few weeks back. More and more keyterms that we used to have in the bag are droping 3-6 pages from being at nos. 1 pror to start of June. So I have decided to do something about it as I can’t wait another month.
Complete site overhaul and upgrading from static site to Drupal. Hope to complete by end of July. Will keep 90% of content add some fresh pages, blog, etc, new navigation but keeping same URL structire, will also move site to a different dedicated server. Small and tightly controlled “hello, over here†link campaign.
This has hit us hard and I wish I could have done the overhaul when we had more time at the end of the year but G habecome impatient and so we must obey
Will post back if that ‘redeems’ us!“
November 4th, 2008 at 8:17 pm
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