GDPR Update In Progress

[Enigma121]

It would appear that a Google Directory update is underway (affected us this morning). We previously weren't listed, despite being in DMOZ. We now are in there and a pagerank has appeared.

This is of course good news for us, but there are always winners and loosers when a shakeup occurs.

Anyone else noticed changes today (Wednesday, Sept 7th)?

[sharp]

hmmmmm, as I mentioned elsewhere here yesterday....one of our sites had 140 pages listed in Google last week, and has all but disappeared now.

I'm hoping the update isn't over and thingswill restore themselves quite quickly.

Can't understand why this one site has suffered as our SEO practices are identical for all our sites, and the others haven't had any notceable alteration at all recently.

Also weird is that for the site in question, where all our pages have disappeard from the search results....our page rank has remained constant...maybe I'm missing something, but why consider a site worthy of a page rank if you don't have that site in the index?


Ho hum, will keep my fingers crossed that it all pans out OK in the end over the next couple of days.


Annette

[peterjhale]

yes, your site is in trouble Annette

Have you done anything "dodgy" recently

I say this because it looks as though you are almost banned

Have you bought any links or was your site down for a long period of time ?

[Enigma121]

If it's any use to discover what might be going wrong, we have recently launched a backlink campaign (manually, not bought in links) and implemented a google sitemap for the entire site.

[sharp]

Hi Peter & Enigma121,

first off Peter - why do you say I'm almost banned? Because my pages have been delisted or because you have some resource that you've looked at in relation to my site?

I've never bought a link in my life...that site has in the last two months had a google sitemap added and I've done some small tweaks to the page titles and so on but absolutely categorically nothing that could ever be thought of as underhand....it just isn't me.

The site doesn't currently have any backlinks to it to my knowledge as we've never sought any. But that didn't impede the site getting the 140 pages indexed just a week or so ago when I previously checked.


And my other sites that are all desiigned in the same format and using the exact same of everything are still absolutely fine in Google.

Just plain weird....trouble is, I don't think there's a great deal you can do about it is there?


Annette

[peterjhale]

here are the links to your site:

http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=lin...&cop=&ei=UTF-8

I say "banned" because google has none of your pages and no title for your home page.

It must just be because you have a limited amount of links

Go and get some !

[Ian J]

I'm not sure how valuable the Google Directory is. Most of my site visitors come from Google but I can't recall any coming from anything other than directly from the search engine despite having been listed in the directory for years.

I have a suspicion that like the DMOZ listing, the higher up the directory structure you are, the more effect it will have.

[Ian J]

Google updates - like hurricanes - all have names and it is the Gilligan update that is in process at the moment.

It would seem that Google are finally tackling one of my pet hates, scraper sites and pseudo directories that are just copies of DMOZ with no added value of their own and they are starting to try and weed them out.

Hopefully they will also get around to comparison sites like Kelkoo as they jam up the search pages for certain categories of goods. Just try looking for a domestic appliance and these sites monoplise the search results.

[sharp]

Well, following on from this thread from yesterday where I found that one of our sites had been all but removed from Google....when I check this morning, I see that everything has gone back to rosy and we have 194 pages from that site inexed by Google. Of our other sites, one has gone up to 362 pages indexed, another has gone up to 207 pages indexed and the final one (which has had no site optimisation done on it yet because it only launched last week and we like to bed in for a while before doing any search engine stuff) is exactly as we expected and not yet listed.

So..all in all I am quite pleased that whatever we're doing does seem to be working...

I do agree with Ian a bit though regarding Google...I wonder just how much traffic we get from organic search results rather than paid for results....but I don't want to take any chances....I'm a bit of a conspirtacy theorist as far as Google is concerned and think perhaps there's a link between SEO for Google, having an Adwords account, doing Froogle feeds and so on....and that the more you 'buy into' the Google thing, and the more you play their game, the more likely you are to be rewarded in Google heaven! Any thoughts on that? I know there's a whole industry out there professing to be experts on what makes Google work for you, but at the end of the day, it's all a big secret and for me, one theory is as good as the next!


Annette

[Ian J]

Originally Posted by sharp

I'm a bit of a conspirtacy theorist as far as Google is concerned and think perhaps there's a link between SEO for Google, having an Adwords account, doing Froogle feeds and so on

My main site ranks either in first or second place for the single word search term and I therefore have no need to use Adwords.

I did try Adwords for a few months on another site that wasn't ranked at all by Google in the top 100 for the same search term and although I did get some leads from it I still never got a decent page position at all.