Jagger 2 Update Info
It looks like Jagger2 is starting to be visible. GoogleGuy posted over on WebmasterWorld with what SEOs should expect:
McMohan, good eyes in spotting some changes at 66.102.9.104. I expect Jagger2 to start at 66.102.9.x. It will probably stay at 1-2 data centers for the next several days rather than spreading quickly. But that data center shows the direction that things will be moving in (bear in mind that things are fluxing, and Jagger3 will cause flux as well).
Matt Cutts posted how to send feedback on Jagger1 at http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/update-jagger-contacting-google/
If you’re looking at 66.102.9.x and have new feedback on what you see there (whether it be spam or just indexing related), please use the same mechanism as before, except use the keyword Jagger2. I believe that our webspam team has taken a first pass through the Jagger1 feedback and acted on a majority of the spam reports. The quality team may wait until Jagger3 is visible somewhere before delving into the non-spam index feedback.
If things stay on the same schedule (which I can’t promise, but I’ll keep you posted if I learn more), Jagger3 might be visible at one data center next week. Folks should have several weeks to give us feedback on Jagger3 as it gradually becomes more visible at more data centers.
Not much more I can add to that. Even on 66.102.9.104, it will still take a day or so for the changes to be fully visible at that data center. Just to re-emphasize, if you send new feedback on a data center such as 66.102.9.104, be sure to use the keyword jagger2 in spam reports or index feedback so that we can tell this is newer feedback. Jagger1, Jagger2, and Jagger3 are mostly independent changes, but they’re occurring closely enough in time (plus they interact to some degree) that it’s clearer just to act as if they were one update for feedback purposes.
nino Said,
October 26, 2005 @ 2:28 am
I agree with :
“If things stay on the same schedule (which I can’t promise, but I’ll keep you posted if I learn more), Jagger3 might be visible at one data center next week. Folks should have several weeks to give us feedback on Jagger3 as it gradually becomes more visible at more data centers. ”
Nino
normasp Said,
October 26, 2005 @ 2:56 am
I’ve sent a reinclusion request next week because my web was disappeared from Google after Jagger1.
I can see it now at 66.102.9.104.and 66.102.9.x
I don’t now if Google pay attention to me..
tomylorsch Said,
October 26, 2005 @ 3:22 am
I know it is off-topic, but what about his matt?
http://battellemedia.com/archives/001964.php
Claudiu Said,
October 26, 2005 @ 3:52 am
Matt,
Can you tell me which is the difference beween Jagger1, Jagger2 and Jagger3?
Claudiu
Arvin Said,
October 26, 2005 @ 3:56 am
Jagger 2 - Why is it that old sites that have not been updated in years are ranking well? Why is it that I rank lower than websites that link to me for my domain name as a keyword? Even though my content are much better.
I have been watching Bourbon, Gilligan and Jagger but still no luck. I don’t use any hidden text nor any other blackhat techniques.
Frustrated webmaster from Thailand.
HWHT Said,
October 26, 2005 @ 4:00 am
Since Jagger 1 Update Our traffic dramatically reduced. Hope it will backed up with this update.
Aaron Pratt Said,
October 26, 2005 @ 4:34 am
Hold me, i’m scared!
Pinyo Said,
October 26, 2005 @ 4:55 am
Good news: Update is not over, so there is still hope.
Bad news: Worse beating is still to come?
Traffic has not been the same since this last round of update.
Steve Said,
October 26, 2005 @ 5:05 am
I have noticed a few obvious sub domains on very large sites like a financial sub domain on a leading UK newspaper promoting a single company in the finance sector. Would G consider this to be SPAM?
Marcin Frackiewicz Said,
October 26, 2005 @ 5:19 am
Please do Jagger #3 and stop any other changes
I think that Google dance without any rules
and that is Jagger 
Glenn Said,
October 26, 2005 @ 5:25 am
I have a technical feasibility question. With Google’s vast resources, couldn’t these changes occur (maybe it did?) on development sites that no real world person has access to and perhaps have your own test team of 1000+ offshore searchers + you could invite SEO/webmasters interested to visit a dev.google.com or something?
It just seems to me in the 4th quarter where many people rely on holiday sales your killing them.
I should note - I do not sell anything seasonal, so it isn’t affecting me as bad as many.
Thanks - Glenn
Gareth Said,
October 26, 2005 @ 5:34 am
Hi Glenn,
You said : “It just seems to me in the 4th quarter where many people rely on holiday sales your killing them”
I guess the whole point of any update is to improve the quality of the search results. If an external site is relevant, then it should still appear high in the search results. remember, google isnt in business to make money for the sites that appear in search results, but to give users the best quality/most relevant search results. If webmasters can provide relevant sites, then they will appear higher in the results, and hence will still be able to make money. Hopefully this (and other updates) will remove the kind of spam that doesnt do anything for users, but just makes money for the site owners.
faglork Said,
October 26, 2005 @ 5:43 am
Great.
http://66.102.9.104/search?hl=de&q=wlan+tagungshotel
is worse than ever.
Look at #1 - the worst case of SPAM I have seen in a long time:
http://www.zugbruecke.de/Hotel_Urlaub_Wellness_Tischtennis_Tagungen/Tagungshotel.html
If the Google SPAM detection algo does not even catch THIS …
I really hope Jagger2 is just temporary.
faglork
Greg G Said,
October 26, 2005 @ 6:00 am
does anyone get http://www. blogpatrol .com for # 7 for “limos for sale”?
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&rls=GGGL%2CGGGL%3A2005-09%2CGGGL%3Aen&q=limos+for+sale&btnG=Search
it’s almost like that flaming pile of garbage, i mean site was created for the purpose of placing adsense … nah, couldn’t be
Greg G Said,
October 26, 2005 @ 6:03 am
Matt … just wondering, howe about an atricle on how to deal with sites with blatantly rip off your content … how do you fight this? and does google know which site is the real deal, and which is a rip-off?
Thomson Said,
October 26, 2005 @ 6:21 am
Matt, Any idea when this update will end and can see all the equal results in all data centers.
Until Then we have to keep our fingers crossed.
Thanks
Eduardo Maio Said,
October 26, 2005 @ 6:46 am
And how about the first 4 results here?
http://66.102.9.104/search?q=carros+artilhados
Spam? Of course! The text in those pages doesn’t even make sense, and it’s in english for a portuguese keyword.
I’m seeing lots of those websites.
nervousj Said,
October 26, 2005 @ 6:47 am
That hotel link from faglork ranking at number one would almost be funny, if my whitehat zero-spam site hadnt been kicked off the face of the index by jagger1. Will try not to panic til after jagger3 though. I still have faith in google….for now at least.
Nike Said,
October 26, 2005 @ 7:07 am
Finally Matt with our network of hundreds of pages , our SEO tactics ,and exploiting your algo’s ,we can now control everything in Greece ,hotels ,flights,real estate,travel guides and travel agents.Thank you Google you made us rich without any adwords or adsense because we are such site.
Steven Hargrove Said,
October 26, 2005 @ 7:32 am
when is the ETA of these updates settling for a bit? I understand that these “jagger” updates are more for spam-fighting, but is it more of a continual thing or just an update?
Ben Anderson Said,
October 26, 2005 @ 7:33 am
I must thank google for the speed with which reports with the “jagger1″, were taken on board.. I reported lots of spam, and all of them were removed from the index.. Thanks 2 google :)..
Not sure what has changed here in jagger2 - I seem to have fallen even further.. hopefully in time it’ll return to good rankings for me :)..
Do we report the spam with the same method, but use “jagger2″ if the report is made using the new DC??
Now I just need to work out what has happened to my own rankings, and how to get back above the rest of the spammers who are still left!..
Hristo Said,
October 26, 2005 @ 7:41 am
Is the update on 66.102.9.104 final?
In one of the industries I compete, it seems the update favors DMOZ listings too much. And a DMOZ listing with keywords in anchor text, seems to be too hard to outrank.
Hope it is temporary.
Daniel Said,
October 26, 2005 @ 7:57 am
Matt — what changes exactly are being made in jagger2? After jagger1, quite frankly I was confused as to the specifics of jagger2 and jagger3. Obviously jagger1 had an update in PR rankings and backlinks, but is jagger2 specifically for serps? Maybe I am missing something here about what each update entails, if not it would be nice to hear some feedback.
Also, as you undoubtedly know, people are talking about Google Base, the new feature in Google that was ‘leaked’. Do you have any comments on this? It would be great to hear some more thoughts from you.
jwbond Said,
October 26, 2005 @ 8:06 am
From my observations it seems that you might be making use of TrustRank. Does the jagger update make more use of it?
John Tourloukis Said,
October 26, 2005 @ 8:39 am
I’m starting to see my site pop up top 100 for some serps. I hope this is the beginning of my sandbox release. I am still seeing several pages with hidden text, should I fill out spam report on these? I’ve submitted them in the past to no avail. I’m glad to not see the scraper sites anymore.
John Skurka Said,
October 26, 2005 @ 8:46 am
Matt:
I had noticed some very different results on the 64.* datacenters early yesterday morning. Would this have been the beginning of Jagger2, or something else?
Ben Anderson Said,
October 26, 2005 @ 8:48 am
@ John..
I have had some success in reporting spam by using Matt’s suggestion of using the Keyword “jagger1″ in the report.
I think (though not sure) that you should now report spam with the KW “jagger2″ to get through to the google guys..
One thing I have noticed with jagger2 is that many of the non-authority sites high in the rankings have lots of one way BL’s.. but mostly from blog spamming, or automated back-link creation tools..
Is there any way to report this.. it’s not “on-page” spam, but I’d still say it was spam of a sort..
Ben Anderson Said,
October 26, 2005 @ 8:50 am
oops.. my reply was directed to the other john (John Tourloukis).. seems to have been another John posting in between LOL :)..
Jimmy Said,
October 26, 2005 @ 8:50 am
It does look like the report spam sites are working, I reported one that just had hundreds of pages for each city across the us with no real information just keyword stuffint where they were #1. It seems google has fixed this. BRAVO Matt.
Jason Lewis Said,
October 26, 2005 @ 8:52 am
Just wanted to let you know you have a great blog and I am coming to rely on it. Thanks for the service, we now you don’t have to do this and it is appreciated. Our sites have fallen a bit, but, I think in the long run these updates will be for the best.
Beauty articles Said,
October 26, 2005 @ 9:14 am
when is the ETA of these updates settling for a bit? I understand that these “jagger” updates are more for spam-fighting, but is it more of a continual thing or just an update?
lots0 Said,
October 26, 2005 @ 9:16 am
Hey Matt,
Getting rid of what you guys call SPAM is all fine and dandy, but when are you googlites going to start working on “Relevance”?
Raffi Said,
October 26, 2005 @ 10:29 am
I agree with the previous posted. Google’s relevance has been clearly diminished. Here is live example: I searched for La Canada real estate and about 90% of the first 100 results are about Canada real estate. Well, La Canada is an upscale neighborhood near Glendale CALIFORNIA. Google missed the results just by a tiny bit: http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&as_qdr=all&q=la+canada+real+estate&btnG=Search
Matt Said,
October 26, 2005 @ 10:31 am
John T, I would report hidden text sites still in the index with jagger2 as the keyword. John S, I doubt jagger2 was visible early yesterday morning. About the earliest it was visible was 10pm last night or so (pacific time).
Daniel, Google Base is not my area, so I couldn’t add much useful insight there. Ben, glad that the spam you reported is gone. Definitely switch over to using jagger2 to report new stuff now.
Steven and Thomson, I hope that Jagger3 will be visible next week, but people will have several weeks to give us feedback on Jagger3. I expect Jagger3 to be the eventual new index, but it will take some time to switch everything over, so people will have plenty of opportunity to report issues or spam to us.
Nino, please don’t drop referate-type sigs in your comments. There’s a rel=nofollow on all these links, so it doesn’t help; it just looks annoying. I edited the comment, but you’re on notice.
Glenn, it’s tough because I don’t want to rain (snow?) on anyone’s holiday season. But when a change is ready, we can’t delay launches for ~3 months. In this instance, Jagger1 was the sort of thing that we could launch at all data centers quickly, but Jagger2 and Jagger3 require switching over each data center individually.
timona Said,
October 26, 2005 @ 11:07 am
faglork, great find. I find it a pitty when webmasters resort to that sort of spam the actual site of the hotel you mentioned is very nice, and has a lot of pottential. This looks like a typical example of someone getting dupped by some SEO guru and his devios techniques. Just my 2 cent.
jwbond Said,
October 26, 2005 @ 11:13 am
I am noticing a competitor of mine that is constantly stealing my content is doing better than I for anything he targets.
I can only attribute his success to one of two things:
his site being older, my site is out of the sandbox but still does not seem to get rewarded the same for internal links.
or
TrustRank has been implemented and due to too many incoming links too fast, my internal links have little value.
it is frustrating that a thief can outrank the honest joe. am i anywhere on the right track with my guesses matt?
Michal Wlodarski Said,
October 26, 2005 @ 11:23 am
hI Matt,
hotel/travel SERPs are still bad.
Google still shows large hotel booking engines for small destination queries, like Val Thorens hotels, Courchevel, Kitzbuhel, etc.
These are small destination with 1-3 deals per area offered by the giants.
You completely ignore niche sites offering 5-10 times more deals in these destinations only because the niche sites are not global players.
I am seeing some 30 sites everywhere - each of them with auto-generated destination pages: same text with destination name only changed.
Those, who not believe, see:
http://66.102.9.104/search?hl=en&q=kitzbuhel+hotels
http://66.102.9.104/search?hl=en&lr=&q=courchevel+hotels
http://66.102.9.104/search?q=chamonix+hotels&hl=en&lr=
http://66.102.9.104/search?q=zermatt+hotels&hl=en&lr=
hope that helps.
cheers,
michal
Johny S Said,
October 26, 2005 @ 11:33 am
Matt,
I was wondering if I can get your help. My main index page has duplicate content issues, such as:
http://www.domain.com
http://www.domain.com/index.php
are both mirror index pages that exist in Google’s database. I was wondering if there is a good way to remove /index.php from Google’s index? I’m afraid that this is resulting in ranking problems for me due to duplicate penalty. If you could please advise on this situation, would greatly appreciate it! Thanks
Ben Anderson Said,
October 26, 2005 @ 12:59 pm
I have also notices this too. Other sites stealing my content, working it into redirections, and then beating me in the SERPS for my own KW’s..
It’s annoying that they ourrank you for your KW’s using content stolen from your site
Surely there must be a way to combat this? .. Maybe google should stop all redirections??.. Not even sure if it’s possible.
It’s frustrating when your outranked by a spammer redirecting to something else
jon Said,
October 26, 2005 @ 1:04 pm
When is Google going to offer a (paid) service where webmasters can receive prompt personal attention from a Google staff member? Our website was banned from the Google index July 28, 2005. We have submitted 3 polite reinclusion requests, per your guidelines, and have received no response other than the automated reply. As far as anyone here can tell we are in total compliance with Google rules, and if we aren’t we are 100% willing to make changes. Losing the traffic from Google is hurting terribly - forcing layoffs. Our business is clean and good and so is our site. We need help in the form of answers and are willing to pay if need be.
Jumpin' Jack Said,
October 26, 2005 @ 1:30 pm
Hi Matt,
Looks like you’ve been doing a great job so far. You still need some improvement in detecting dupe spamsites made up exclusively of Overture spsonsored listings and doorways using JavaScript redirects and/or CSS-hidden stuff, though. I’ve dropped in a few dozen spam reports with ‘Jagger2′. Plenty of useful examples in there, hope you check them out.
Thank you, and keep up the great work and communication!
JJ
VJ Said,
October 26, 2005 @ 1:41 pm
It seems like everyone is overreacting a bit. There are always huge fluctuations during Google updates, but usually after the changes are implemented things ‘normalize’. I have a tiny quote site which does ok on Google but disappeared completely from the SERPs during Bourbon. After the updates were done it slowly floated back to its previous spot.
I’m sure it is much more frustrating and urgent for webmasters who make their living from their site, but making changes to a site during an update is the last thing anyone should be doing.
Ankit Said,
October 26, 2005 @ 2:00 pm
Agree with Michal above!
Travel/Hotel results are full of large sites with auto generated content and no authentic information as compared to small regional websites.
Nigel Said,
October 26, 2005 @ 3:09 pm
Matt, take a look at Alexa’s movers and shakers
http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/movers_shakers?lang=en
#2 Mattcutts.com, traffic rank 1675, rising 190%
Must be your book reviews
Steven Hargrove Said,
October 26, 2005 @ 3:23 pm
Matt,
I appreciate your ability to stay on top of your blog comments and replying to them, thanks for answering our questions.
If i report a site with jagger2 keyword right now, what is your estimate as to when google will take a look at it?
Matt Said,
October 26, 2005 @ 4:11 pm
Search Engines Web, folks here read the forums, but people there don’t give any specifics. It’s pretty hard to debug “my site is very relevant for red widgets, but I don’t show up there any more.”
Nigel, that’s pretty wild. Alexa is really popular with webmasters, so that may be a little skewed, but I’m really happy that people are finding me and (hopefully) getting some good info. I noticed that the temporary home of WMW was another big mover.
Steven, if you do a jagger2 keyword spam report today, someone might read it today. Probably the earliest round-time reaction where you might see spam going away would be late Friday, I’m guessing?
Ulco Said,
October 26, 2005 @ 6:19 pm
Matt,
Why don’t you switch to rel=”nofollow” instead of rel=’external nofollow’ for the author link? As you may have noticed Yahoo can’t handle these space seperated list of link types.
I bet this would reduce some of the comment author-link spam (like mine
)
Jorge Said,
October 26, 2005 @ 6:40 pm
Hi Matt,
(Good to know that you remember me! ;)). The sites I submitted that were spamming with hidden keywords (with “noscript” or CSS) are still in the top positions. I’ve submitted “jagger2″ reports.
One interesting thing to notice: one of the spammers is a big SEO company (yikes!). It seems that ever since your already-famous blog entry on hidden text they are not hiding text with CSS anymore: They simply display it in tiny iframes at the bottom of their page!
On a positive note, I sent a “not satisfied” report about some relatively obscure medical term that was missing what’s probably the key site in the field, and it’s now showing up in jagger2!
P.S: the security code expired while I was typing my post, just so you know…
Greg Said,
October 26, 2005 @ 6:47 pm
Confused about the meaning of Jagger I googled it. The 1st result was mickjagger.com of the Rolling Stones of course. The Stones had a famous song title “I can’t get no satisfaction”, which from what I have been reading over the last week, is a common theme of many website owners and webmasters. Seeing the obvious connection with this famous song and current search engine events, I took the next step and googled “famous songs”, up came as the 1st result a site that had a logo/picture titled “the romantic jukebox”. Confused I kept with the music theme knowing music soothes beasts and such and googled “jukebox”. The 1st result was a site with a screen shot of the group greenday. Now I knew I was on to something, greenday surely was a synonym for “money day”. I mean search engine results are big business afterall. My pulse was racing as I googled “money day”. I nearly passed out when I saw the 1st result. Computer Money day. Computer+Money had to = google or at least provide another link to the answer I sought. Reading this link I discovered that the 1st computer money day was held in March 1996. I decided to take a bold step, I googled “March 1996 google”… Half way down the results page was the answer. The result was an article titled…”The birth of google”. There it was. Smarter men and women than I have pondered, debated, guess and re-guessed to the real meaning and intent of Jagger and I found it by using a variation of that Kevin Bacon game and google itself.
Jagger means birth, new birth, changes.
Pondering this revelation it suddenly dawned on me….I need to leave the search engine stuff to the professionals.
Oz Said,
October 26, 2005 @ 6:50 pm
Hi Matt,
I noticed one of my sites (the homepage of which was ranking at a position in the top 5 for a “semi’ competitive keyword before Jagger came to town) which got hammered in Jagger has now “semi” recovered to a position in the 50s for this same keyword (at the DC:66.102.9.104), HOWEVER the interesting thing is it isn’t the homepage that is ranking in this position, it is a subpage. The homepage is MUCH stronger (on page, and off page optimization) for the particular keyword but can’t be found anywhere the SERPs (yes it is indexed and cached), would this indicate that the update on the DC I am looking at may not be completed?
Kind of worrying with Christmas coming up, have no idea how many products to stock
At least I guess the site is still ranking at the very top of MSN, and Y! (touch wood) but want my nice ranking back in G 
Thanks or the blog BTW! Top notch.
Daniel Said,
October 26, 2005 @ 6:58 pm
Matt –
I have the same problem as Jorge at times — the security code does indeed expire. Just wanted to help confirm this problem, which I’m sure will be fixed =)
Greg Said,
October 26, 2005 @ 7:31 pm
Matt,
If so many webmasters careers weren’t upside down thanks to jagger i’m not so sure you’d be a mover and a shaker
on offense … it’s good reading and all …
Steve Said,
October 26, 2005 @ 8:23 pm
Hi matt on my first post http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-mistakes-unwise-comments/#comments (steve bennett) I placed into the URL section 2 URL’s not knowing that your site would link to them. For some reason www - “indigoguide.comwww.guide4living - .com” actually goes through to my site http://www.guide4living.com - As I mentioned previously i cannot understand why G will not index this site - thing is, its indexed this page which - still will not index the normal site??
Please would you remove this link www - “indigoguide.comwww.guide4living - .com” - its going to hit me for DUP penality if the REAL site ever gets indexed one day. and replace it with just http://www.guide4living.com.
Thanks
steve
Matt Said,
October 26, 2005 @ 8:32 pm
Jorge, I’ve got your CD.
I’ll look into the security code timeout.
Daniel Said,
October 26, 2005 @ 8:36 pm
Matt –
I have noticed pagerank fluxuations and backlink fluxuations once again — I thought that was over with? I am curious still as to what things should be expected in jagger2. I’ve seen websites with high PR drop to 0 — yours included, dropping to 2. Please elaborate if you can on what is being done, I’m sure we would all greatly appreciate it.
John Tourloukis Said,
October 26, 2005 @ 9:00 pm
I’m seeing alot of Googlebots, does this have anything to do with Jagger? Seeing almost triple the amout of Google bot.
Keith Wellman Said,
October 26, 2005 @ 9:17 pm
Good luck with the reinclusion process. I had a website listed at google that I focused on for over 3 years getting a good page rank and bam…its gone. Never used any black hat techniques…just good ol fashion viral marketing and link exchanging. Been nearly 2 years and even after changing the name with the register it is still not listed
Keith
http://www.viralfx.com
John Tourloukis Said,
October 26, 2005 @ 9:42 pm
Jorge made a comment about spamming using the no script tag. Is the no script tag ok if it coresponds to your java navigation? is there a better way?
Star Said,
October 26, 2005 @ 11:12 pm
Hey great site. Just wondering if you would be interested in more traffic to your site. Your site is doing great on alexa. Email me so we can talk. Thanks.
Harith Said,
October 26, 2005 @ 11:24 pm
Good morning Matt
You wrote:
“Steven, if you do a jagger2 keyword spam report today, someone might read it today. Probably the earliest round-time reaction where you might see spam going away would be late Friday, I’m guessing?”
GREAT. But it seems that some webmasters think that they should wait untill Jagger3 is over in reporting spams.
Can I say; “I wouldn´t be surprise if” GoogleGuy or you post that the folks can report spam already now
Matt Said,
October 27, 2005 @ 12:29 am
Hi Star! I’ve got all the traffic I want right now; thanks though.
Harith, please let people know to report spam early and often. It’s ranking issues (e.g. canonicalization) that they might want to hold off on until Jagger3 is out..
John Tourloukis, I’d be very careful if you’re thinking about stuffing things into the noscript tag. It doesn’t do much good in ranking, and if someone turns off JavaScript and sees a bunch of different text that wasn’t visible before, that can look bad.
Matt Said,
October 27, 2005 @ 12:30 am
Daniel, I haven’t heard of that happening, but I think there was a slight update of PageRank and backlinks. If some values look different, I wouldn’t worry about it much (at all?). We have the values that we actually use internally and those are in good shape.
Harith Said,
October 27, 2005 @ 12:40 am
Hi Matt
“Harith, please let people know to report spam early and often. It’s ranking issues (e.g. canonicalization) that they might want to hold off on until Jagger3 is out..”
Thanks. Consider it done!
‘Night
Josh Said,
October 27, 2005 @ 1:02 am
Hi Matt,
One of my sites looks like it has dropped completely out of google - no pages indexed, no links index anymore, but I have no idea why this would of happened. I have read that sites are being emailed when they get dropped? I haven’t recieved any emails yet. Do you know if there’s a chance it could just be temporary or can you advise me how I can determine what went wrong to get the site dropped like that? I’m sure there are lots of pages being reported as spam, but is there a report to request reasoning behind being dropped?
Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Pascal Said,
October 27, 2005 @ 1:26 am
Hi Matt,
I am not a SEO specialist - just a normal business owner lerning by loking through online forums.
Got hit by the recent update after being for over 6 years on position #1-3 under the search term noni juice. As suggested here, I keep reporting sites which shouldn’t be in the listings but nothing seems to change. For example, there is now a one page website in the listings with only 3 lines of text. In addition, after this second stage of the update I got even pushed back further.
I now feel I am getting penalised after reporting other sites to Google.
Thanks for your feedback.
Jonny Said,
October 27, 2005 @ 1:45 am
Matt,
I am still awaiting an email from Google with regards to duplicate content issues with upper/lower/sentence URI case issues. A search on Google reveals three instances of the same page with different capitalization in your index (e.g. Widget.asp / widget.asp / WIDGET.asp). I suspect this will trigger the duplicate content filter?
Can you tell me if any of the Jagger updates will correct this? We have taken care to ensure that all URL’s on-site are now lowercase.
Cheers Matt
Stephen Said,
October 27, 2005 @ 1:55 am
Oooh - New Security code
Matt
With reference to domains not being mentioned on webmaster forums (I prefer the term webmaster to seo) - intresting in the Search Engine Watch update thread there are a few domains mentioned.
They all have one thing in common - indexing of the non-www to a greater or lesser degree.
However, I know that this might be dealth with in stage 3.
I obv. hope canonical urls are fixed - but to rely on webmasters putting in a 301 from non-www will not work - it may reach a handful of webmasters but it does not solve the problem.
So here is hoping that the 301 fix is no longer required after Jagger3 for Canonical url problems to be solved ( although my 301 has not solved it yet anyway
)
Cheers
Stephen
Marc Said,
October 27, 2005 @ 1:57 am
Well I am quite impressed with this update and it has treated me very well.
I just following basic SEO rules and do purely “white hat” techniques and try to create good content.
It seems to be doing well so far.
Lancer Said,
October 27, 2005 @ 4:14 am
Matt,
You have endless, saint-like patience; it’s incredible. How do you do it? You must spend all day, every day typing furiously at the keyboard reading people’s moans and groans, trying to respond. And always so polite? I would have told us to buzz off a long time ago or else flung away my cordless keyboard in despair.
I think you are more than one person - you must be a call centre!
As for Jagger updates - I’m not worried or confused. It’ll all settle in the long run. People, calm down! If you’re in for the long run and aren’t completely obsessed with money then it’ll work out…
jwbond Said,
October 27, 2005 @ 6:15 am
Matt: “Search Engines Web, folks here read the forums, but people there don’t give any specifics. It’s pretty hard to debug “my site is very relevant for red widgets, but I don’t show up there any more.””
What specifics are you looking for? I have a list of results that went from very relevant to partially relevant unhelpful garbage.
Alex Said,
October 27, 2005 @ 6:17 am
Hi all, this is my first post ever in a forum.
My point of view regarding jagger is:
web site that have been using always the same anchor text have been penalized. Noting else than this.
So I will not wait untill this will be over, i’m already asking webmasters to change my anchor.
Thanks for reading my post and good bye
Flower Said,
October 27, 2005 @ 6:58 am
Hi Matt,
My site got pagerank during Jagger1. My homepage has a pagerank 0, while all other pages have pagerank from 4-6.
I was hping Jagger 2 will clear this problem, but not in my case.
I saw Pagerank on MSN is back.
Should I report thios, and when yes where?
Sorry if this was already discussed.
Thanks Flower.
Aaron Pratt Said,
October 27, 2005 @ 7:02 am
“We have the values that we actually use internally and those are in good shape”.
Ah ooooh! Booyah!
Aaron Pratt Said,
October 27, 2005 @ 7:15 am
Matt said: “Steven and Thomson, I hope that Jagger3 will be visible next week, but people will have several weeks to give us feedback on Jagger3″.
Quick question about spam fighting, from what you said there Matt you imply (or I read into it incorrectly) that the best time to report spam is during updates? Is this also true for reinclusion and other things?
The reason one would ask: I have yet to ask for reinclusion and report spam because I believe you guys are taking care of it and my sites will prevail, but is this a bad choice? Should folks ask for reinclusion of all the pages that dropped off when they got their dreaded PR, or just be patient and hold on to the belief that “age” is a factor and someday they will have their chance to shine?
So the question is: Is it a good idea to communicate with google during updates?
Thanks
John Tourloukis Said,
October 27, 2005 @ 8:02 am
Matt,
Thanks for responding, but if the no script coresponds to navagation will it be considered spam? Should I use short anchor text? Does Google look at this on a case by case basis? Is there a right way to use the no script or should I not use java navagation? When you look at the cached text version of my page the no script links are at the top of the page where the java menus are. Will Googlebot follow java links?
Thanks in advance,
John
Dave(UK) Said,
October 27, 2005 @ 8:09 am
Hey Matt
With all the great minds, money and datacentres and money google has been earning in adwords since this update, why doesnt Google update its indexs in a non live environment - maybe update the index offline and then switch the update over in one go, merging with any final index updates.
I totally agree that some spammy sites need to be removed, but surely out of all the sites indexed this is still a minority rather than the majority. So far jagger has knocked a lot of sites course, sent webmaster mental, sent customers to other sites, caused a mass of speculation and hysteria and given me a headache…
Why do you not have two sets of bots, ones looking for spam, ones updating the index, merge them and then update all the live centres in one go.. Maybe call it the big bang update..surely this would save a bit of fuss and some of the goggle engineers could check the results from live data, rather than it being based on a select result set?
anyway, fancy swapping links id fit nicely into your travel section for ‘holiday rental property’ .(joke)..
Dave (UK)
Brett Said,
October 27, 2005 @ 8:59 am
Hi Matt,
The first “Jagger” round seemed to go after pages that had JavaScript redirects and the result was those domains got completely kicked out of the G index. If pages have a good reason for having a redirect in them is it safe to use the Meta Refresh HTML tag or will G see this as a problem as well?
rite Said,
October 27, 2005 @ 9:43 am
Hi there,
well, my impression of Jagger2 is a rather ambivalent one. It seems to have released some recently built sites of mine, targeting only German keywords, from the sandbox. One of these was made all new on a fresh domain half a year ago, another one has now had about four month since relaunch after a complete redesign. Jagger2 placed these, one more, one less, on top of the crowd for the desired KWs.
But another one with PR 4, accepted by DMOZ, overcrowded by content, which held a rank 2 for its main keyword for almost a year, was kicked back to the bottom of page 2, instead, all the crap is back on top again, including this one:
http://www.webseeds.de/Seiten/de/bereich.php?SNr=62&WNr=16
Now, just have a close look and surf it once with JavaScript enabled, once disabled. For the search term “taxi göttingen” (a little German town, where you may still need a cab), this guy has nothing to offer at all: He offers SE optimization. Huh. I handed the address in for the complaint department, labeled “Jagger2″, and if he stays on the first or even second page, I stop building websites and start playing lotto.
Z Said,
October 27, 2005 @ 10:01 am
To Whom It May Concern,
Here is my minority report, Matt. What’s happening to our no-evil, brilliant and relevant Google? I am totally sick, tired and exhausted watching my site being trashed by Jaggernauts, feeling like an ant crashed by elephants. I am starting to have obsessive thoughts about googlebots crawling all over, looking at my eyes for a sign of guilt. I have to explain to my clients and myself why my good old legitimate site doesn’t rank well, in fact doesn’t come up on any decent searches at all. I have waisted over 100 hours of my life, took it from my family, myself and my business, only to find out that my online business has most probably been “sandboxed”, “DDID” and otherwise assaulted. We have dropped from all imaginable searches, from page one to page one million five. WHY? Because in 6 years we have used Web Position Gold a couple of times and traded a few links with others? Or is it the fault of some dirty linking that “evil competitor” has placed? Or may be it happened because our site has been indexed by Google 3 times as http, https and http with no www? Come-on engineers! All my pages are sitting in ONE directory - there are no 3 versions of them! I am on shared ISS web hosting, I can’t have htaccess or server-side redirect access. This is TYPICAL SITUATION! Why should I and a million of other people be penalized for a technology glitch? Do I now have to take another 3 days off and move to Apache or dedicated server? This is absolutely ridiculous and has nothing to do with the common sense and good. AND? Did we get better GOOGLE results? Pretty much ALL of my competitors are gone as well. ALL I can see is the victorious march of 800-pound gorillas that remained untouched. I think this is a poorly thought through update.
“Oh dear, these are just a thoughts, about just a search engine, let it go!” NO, Google IS a very important part of Internet reality, and it’s flexing its muscle without considering the extent of its power. Just think about the colossal lost of productivity you just caused! No virus would be able to compete!
OK. This is my feedback. I complain! You can ignore it or you can learn from it. Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE Google, I want it to stay young, build GoogleEarth and play in sand boxes, but PLEASE don’t throw sand in my eyes so casually for no apparent reason, respect a small business person that pays for your AdWords, and consider, that with great power, comes responsibility.
Good luck to all,
Ant Z, crashed.
Steven Hargrove Said,
October 27, 2005 @ 11:55 am
Thanks for your replies again matt..
this is a site i reported about 3 days ago with the jagger2 keyword: www*29*20we*bdes*ign*com (remove *’s),
do a “select all” on the page and look at the tiny tiny hidden same color as bg text on their right panel of thie rhome page, as well as some of their sub-pages
is this the sort of thing google bans sites for? its upsetting because they dont need to do that, but they do basically to cheat, sigh oh well
Charles Perkins Said,
October 27, 2005 @ 1:47 pm
I am not SEO expert but have paid some interest since setting up out site 12 months or so ago. The latest google update has reduced our search engine results from google by 3 quarters. We have a large contents drive site with around 4-500 pages of quality articles etc on an obscure subject of dance music and raves in the UK, not a subject that is greatly target by spammers etc. Why we have been catapulted backwards is beyond me. We are still at the top for our main site word (Fantazia) but other than that seem to have disappeared mainly, even though we were at the top and are page were much more relevant than most of the other sites ahead of us. We have a PR3 which is comparable or better than most sites……….
I hope the update changes and is not near the end…… tried looking at the google site at the top and it didnt seem any better than the one I need to if this is the out come it is very disappointing……….
Sebastian Said,
October 27, 2005 @ 2:13 pm
Can you please roll out a new Jagger weekly? It’s like in the old days, when the Google traffic doubled with every dance. Thank you
Mike Said,
October 27, 2005 @ 3:48 pm
Matt, you gotta love this for an update.
Typing in the single most competitive search phrase for travel, specific to a region yields this site right up at third: http://www*gmbds*com/villas*htm, replace * with .
Have you ever seen so much spam on one page, see the hidden text at the bottom.
Secondly, this one in at number 9
http://www*cyprus-online*com/ -lets get serious. This guys owns all the sites that interlink to this one giving him good SERP. The content is chronic, it’s a joke.
Thirdly
This one comes in at position 4
http://www*cyprus-holidays-hotels*com/
Content is fair, but does google really think this is what people search the net for?
Excuse me if i broke all etiquette on this posting, but this update at google is a big mistake. Searching for entire strings of paragraphs on webpages (even competitor sites) brings up some untidy directory or site that is spamming. 3 very flawed results in the top 10 of a broad search….tut!
I don’t rate google at this stage.
Joe Said,
October 27, 2005 @ 4:04 pm
If these data centers 66.102.9.xx are how the index will look then my fishing site which was one of the 5 biggest saltwater sites on the web is history.
After jagger1, my site went from Google being 55% of my daily traffic to 12%. Obviously I must have a penalty but I use no tricky things like hidden links, text, or cloaked stuff. Maybe my Printer Friendly pages and also my charter Capt’s posting reports on the main site and then posting in my forum got me a duplicate penalty or something.
Now looking at jagger2 at the data centers specified my site has totally disappeared for all intents and purposes. It is like my site is brand new or something again. My main keywords for charters and fishing report type keywords have evaporated completely. I feel like I have let down all the Captains, 100’s of them that counted on me to get them some exposure and phone calls.
So I have tried a re-inclusion request by using the steps Matt talked about on this blog. I cleaned up even the most trivial items that were questionable. I Blocked or removed anything that even resembled duplicate material or spam and dis-connected from questionable links.
Then again maybe my site just doesn’t take to this new update - I don’t know because I am not an expert but my heart tells me there is a penalty so I did the clean up and re-inclusion request. If there isn’t a penalty I at least know my site is clean and I won’t have to wonder about these types of things anymore.
Am I discouraged? You bet. But the worst part is telling my Captains that their exposure is gone.
If these first 2 updates are a preview to jagger3 then my fishing report and charter listing site is in real trouble. But the light at the end of the tunnel is if my site is under a penalty for something stupid I did or missed it can be corrected.
I will also add that if I am not under a penalty then the new Google update totally missed my site and a valuable fishing resource. I am not a spam site and I still provide very usable and unique fishing information for many thousands of anglers - at least I did that is.
I will try to stay positive - Google is “The Leader” when it comes to search, Right?, and if they are as good as everyone says then they will pick my site back up because it is a top resource for it’s sector. I hope.
Thanks, J
Aaron Cooper Said,
October 27, 2005 @ 4:16 pm
“”"Hey great site. Just wondering if you would be interested in more traffic to your site. Your site is doing great on alexa. Email me so we can talk. Thanks.”"”
That is one of the funniest things I have read in quite some time.
Matt,
This is sort of like the blog you posted about the site that had “insert hidden text here”. It could not have been more blatant.
This person is offering to get Matt Cutts more traffic to his site.
I don’t care who you are. That’s funny!
Steve Said,
October 27, 2005 @ 4:20 pm
We have seen competetors who have used our titles or similar order of metatags push us off pages all together. Our SEO says that we can do nothing except pay to change our phraseology.
Is it not about time Google stopped other sites from using identical titles and phraseology on a first come first served basis. This would stop DCMA issues and unscrupulous web masters and their clients.
Tony Said,
October 27, 2005 @ 4:43 pm
I think I must be the only person happy with Jagger2 my site went from number 177 to number 2 on that data center for my key phrases, hopefully Jagger3 will keep me there.
Chris Robbins Said,
October 27, 2005 @ 5:00 pm
Matt, I am looking through your blog to see if you have discussed this…and I do not see anything. Can you comment on how to encourage Gbot to revisit old/expired urls that are now 404 or 410 so that they can be removed from the index and have no future impact on content (dup content) issues?
Thanks
Chris
TearingHairOut Said,
October 27, 2005 @ 6:34 pm
Matt,
This has been mentioned before somewhere, but can you provide any info on why inner pages with hardly any BL’s are the first page from a site that appears in the rankings for a keyword, and the homepage is nowhere to be seen, even though the homepage is targetted for the KW in question, and has far more BL’s?
john jurgensen Said,
October 27, 2005 @ 6:54 pm
Mr Cutts, what is Google doing to stop site’s from duplicating another’s content. I know one of the filters was turned up, and my site got caught my the filter, although my site had the original content but was penalized by Google as not being the originator. A simple back-cache check needs to be done. Lot’s of good site’s were lost to this filter.
Alan Said,
October 27, 2005 @ 8:19 pm
Matt,
Why is plagiarized content out ranking the original in this update. Are you even aware of this?
Stolen content with the originator company name on the site is out ranking the originals? This just doesn’t make sense. I thought Google archived dates of content, why would it replace the originals with obvious clones?????
I could use your help on this one, if you can manage a moment. I’ve seen it on a couple of sites.
Aaron Pratt Said,
October 27, 2005 @ 10:28 pm
How would one report 100’s of people spamming with wordpress blogging software? And how will google not confuse who is legit and who is not?
I have a website I am doing on water gardening, it’s an edited wordpress blog, if you want to take a quick look, here I am: http://www.water2garden.org
Now here are 100’s of spammers, scrapers, splogers trying to appear that they are doing as I do: http://technorati.com/tag/water+garden (Click any link on that page and tell me what you see?) There sentences do not even have periods in them, they don’t even write like humans (articlebot?).
Should I be concerned that I will get mixed up in this pile of spam and not see results for my new site? The result above is just for one technorati tag, can you imagine how many there are out there??? BUT I see that many of these are removed already from the SERPS for “water garden”, thank you, just please do not remove me!
LB Said,
October 27, 2005 @ 11:58 pm
Me three!!
LB Said,
October 27, 2005 @ 11:59 pm
As in what TearingHairOut and Oz mentioned.
jared Said,
October 28, 2005 @ 12:13 am
Matt, thanks for taking your time to help us frustrated webmasters and SEO specialist.
My client after spending 1000 of hours rebuilding his site is and taking off all black hat stuff that a previous SEO company did jumped up considerably in Google for his main words and other keywords. WE were building a nice steady increase every month and raising to the top of major terms in our industry Miami Rea Estate.
I concentrated my efforts on the low hanging fruit theory and got #1 listings for almost every building in South Florida. This has all disappeared from Jager1 and getting worse in Jagger2. Is there any penalties which I can figure out that you can see with the site. We proudce and spent a lot time and research into out buiness and seemed to be always rewarded with but now we have people copying our content and submitting it rss feeds and press release distribution sites and just changing our URL to theirs. I am now seeing their articles that were stolen with the same exact text, or maybe just the titles change and a word here and there out of 1000 words. Can this be hurting the site? Is there anything we can do or just wait till the end of the update and hope for the best or evaluate and then rebuild.
We have a staff of people who service are leads and I am just afraid that the business my faultier if all or hard work is getting penalized or something that I can’t figure out or wont be figured out until the end of the update. Like the rest of us we depend on traffic to feed or families and employees families.
Any comments would greatly be appreciate!
Thanks and keep up the good work
Jared
Piet Said,
October 28, 2005 @ 4:32 am
Hi Matt,
for which time you awaiting the spread out of the Jagger2 results to the other Datacenters? Or will the next step to Jagger3 happen first…?
Aaron Pratt Said,
October 28, 2005 @ 5:20 am
I have put on my super hero mask today, I am now “Superlamer - spam fighting cop”
But seriously, want to see and example of greed?
http://garden-pond-kits.gardenpondsguide.com/
Pisses me off, nice use of a wordpress blog eh? Before this update many of these people where owning the search for MANY things. You go Google, even though I do not see much success in the results, they are very relevant.
Those who haven’t read Aaron Wall’s - Matt Cutts interview, it was very good and will surely make you feel better.
http://www.seobook.com/archives/001263.shtml
Thanks,
-Aaron
Mike Said,
October 28, 2005 @ 8:48 am
Hi Mat,
Thanks for your blog.
You are proving a great PR tool and communication channel for G these days.
The spam report tool needs a good update as there are several ways to spam apart from the options mentioned there.
Automatic created pages that generate millions of backlinks is just one of them. Hidden text seems peanuts compared to some of that stuff.
Keep up blogging!
Sorry me again! Said,
October 28, 2005 @ 11:19 am
These posts are getting extremely large, can you increase the page width Matt? I just found that a question I asked you had already answered, sorry.
Overture: For those who think Overture is for spammers you are correct, but I believe it is a great way to focus on exactly what people are looking for in the search engines. Isn’t this what successful websites do?
ViralFX: Even the name of you domain screams excessive marketing yes? (I could be totally out of line here, please correct me)
Hidden Text: Too hard for me to figure it out BUT if it is spam isn’t there a way for the Googlebot to detect it? Should this even be an issue outside of Google, is this a weakness that gamers can still exploit?
Anyone?
Thanks,
-Aaron Pratt
Peter Said,
October 28, 2005 @ 11:27 am
Just to confirm that site I reported couple of days ago as spam because of doorway pages has been removed completely from Google search!
Well done Google!
Steve Said,
October 28, 2005 @ 3:01 pm
As I can see i am not the only individual with issues relating to stolen text titles or tags.
I feel that if we all write to Google on the same basis and spread the word via other boards Google will sit up listen and at leat build a quasi system for Web based sites which are Commerce led to stop phraseolgy for title and unique text being stolen. The only issue will be wether a robot command would have to exist to confirm that the site is commerce related.
Surely this is the way forward.
Steve. (Centralchauffeur.com)
Fionn Said,
October 28, 2005 @ 4:23 pm
Its time to acknowledge the truth Google is not about Serge and Larry but Matt Cutts. I saw an article the other day where you were described as the Bill Gates of Google. They did not imply you had his money of course just his fame! Now the question is this should we stop calling you Matt and cut to the chase and change to St. Matthew or should we just start the “Matt Cutts for president campaign”
Steve Said,
October 28, 2005 @ 4:46 pm
Fionn, Grow up! This is not a board for flaming or ignorance.Why do you feel uncomfortable with someones sucess? These comments are not germaine to the discussion here.
Fionn Said,
October 28, 2005 @ 6:04 pm
Steve I was completely kidding. I know Matt and think he is a great guy. I really did see an article which said he was the Bill Gates of Google.
Danny Said,
October 28, 2005 @ 6:42 pm
It is indeed most frustrating to see how your trafic has been reduced to about 20% of what it used to be, while a competitor gets rewarded with top rankings based on your very own (or slightly modified) content.
Even if this is just a temporary situation, it just ain’t right. These thiefs should never been indexed in the first place.
Alan and Steve, i’m with you.
Have to keep this short… i got another couple of cloaked pages to report, some huge network with auto generated pages stuffed with one-way links in their webring and then i’m hopefully back in business.
Alan A Said,
October 28, 2005 @ 9:08 pm
I have a couple of question not just for Matt but for anyone that can answer it.
Question 1
My company focuses on web design but this last year we have been getting a lot of requests for search engine optimizing, this is mostly because most of our sites appear in the top ten for there desired keywords (we don’t do anything special we just follow the guild lines on the Google webmasters link).
Since we are trying to follow the rules we decided that it would be a good idea to have control the links on each site so as to not link to any site that is misbehaving so some of our site have a link exchange page which will link to sites we control. So my first question is if all these sites have a link page with the same links and text will that effect there position with all the new changes?
Question 2
For the same reason as above we allso host some of these sites by having there domain name linked to a sub domain rather than on a stand alone server of vertual server mostly because while we are building the site we have a preview link on our clients page which links to there work in progress and 9 times out of ten the site will start appearing in the top ten before it is finished so at which point we will just have there domian name point to the sub domain in order to keep their listing position. Another reason why we do this is because some of our clients have been burned bad by some less than legitimte seo comapnays and the site has just been dumped from the searches. So my question is because these sites are appearing in a sub domain should I change them from a sub domain to a /folder name so they will not lose position or will this not effect them?
If you want to see this in action search google for bay Area Plastic surgery and the first result is one of our sites then just check out the links page, link to our site is at the bottom if anyone wants to contact me directly to answer my questions.
Thank you in advance for any of your help in answering these questions
Alan A Said,
October 28, 2005 @ 9:12 pm
sorry for posting this message twice but I osted to the wrong thread first time
seolid Said,
October 28, 2005 @ 9:47 pm
Alex Said,
“web site that have been using always the same anchor text have been penalized.”
Nice find.
George Said,
October 29, 2005 @ 4:58 am
Frankly, I can’t find words other than “mass hysteria” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_hysteria) to describe all those moans and groans here and there and fanatical 100+ pages threads at WMW. Guess it’s time for some good psychoanalytic to write a “How I quit worrying and learned to ignore my site position in Google” manual. Something “based on true story” like mine: G booted my site off completely on Sep 22; I panicked too at first, spent a week reading TONS of forums and comments and “SEO gurus” opinions, sent reinclusion request and even got that “second personal reply” from help@google.com, thank you… but, after calculating my October sales figures, I feel much better now. Despite 75% drop in traffic, drop in revenue is only about 15%, - I see some webmasters has reported the same phenomena. So I have given up on trying to figure out what’s wrong with my site for Google *algorobots* and now I’m moving on with providing valuable online service which *human* users are extremely happy with. After all, if I remember those G commandments correctly, “build sites for users, not for search engines”, right Matt? Sadly, the only losing party here are few thousands Google users a day looking for our quite a unique service.
PS: pressing “the back button in your web browser” as this “security code” script suggests, doesn’t fix the “invalid security code” error, at least in Firefox. Hint: 1.) Press back button 2.) To be on safe side, copy the text you just entered and paste it in your text editor 3) refresh the page to get new (supposedly “correct”) security code 4) paste the text back into the form if necessary 5) hit “Submit comment” button. Cool, eh?
rite Said,
October 29, 2005 @ 5:46 am
Hi there,
a comment on Google’s present activities on spam reports: Few days ago, in a former comment I mentioned a [German] website using JavaScript redirects to present different pages to SEs than to visitors; I had spam-reported that website one day before that comment. As a matter of fact, it took just two days and that website vanished from the SERPs. Wow, good job! Thus I assume that in obvious cases the response time is very short.
Much earlier (and later again labeled “Jagger2″) I spam-reported another website where no action at all is taken, and I don’t understand why. It’s a German search term again, “steuerberater” (tax adviser in English), which yields 2.5 million results, as it is a really important profession, who would doubt that
. So, to have adequate results, one may add the name of a city or region to limit the results to a relevant number.
But whatever German city name I add, I always find one website on the first SERP like this:
http://www.steuerberater.aoz-duesseldorf.de/steuerberater/steuerberater-berlin.html
You may replace the city in the file name at the end by whatever you choose: Hamburg, Frankfurt, Koeln, Bremen, Kiel, Luebeck, Duesseldorf, Stuttgart, Kassel, and I successfully tried a dozen far smaller cities, too.
This site always pops up on the first or second SERP. But not only for “steuerberater”, it also works for “werbeagentur” (advertising agency in English, another hard-fought term, of course), for “zahnarzt” (dentist) or “augenarzt” (oculist) and for a variety of other branches. Look here:
http://www.google.de/search?hl=de&lr=&q=+site:www.augenarzt.aoz-duesseldorf.de+augenarzt+frankfurt
Same text on every page. Same system for all spammed branches: The set up a subdomain by profession and add a directory and file adequately named by the spammed term. It must be thousands of pages in that domain aoz-duesseldorf.de. Each of that pages is stuffed with hundreds of links carrying each and any relevant anchor you may imagine for virtually anything. Uh, I should add this: They do of course not offer any of the advertised services, they only say (pick your term …) “tax adviser|advertising agency|dentist|oculist … network under construction, soon coming!”, with the pages last mod half a year or a year ago. I have never seen anything that obviously spammy, I reported it several times: They get by by with it, I know it for years already …
Why-oh-why does Google not recognize that to be regular large-scale spam through all of Germany for multiple professions?
Blamejane Said,
October 29, 2005 @ 6:46 am
Should I stop my adsense campaign?
The only difference that I can see, between my site and the top 10 for my keyword is that we had an active Adsense campaign running when Jagger hit.
It just doesn’t make sense that our site dropped of the face of the planet; while my competitor’s outdated stale sites remain untouched.
So would stopping the ad campaign bring us back to the top? Has anyone tried this?
Alan A Said,
October 29, 2005 @ 3:19 pm
I agree with George, I have been looking at a lot of posts here and it all seems to be how badly it has effected their site and since most of the sites their talking about our SEO sites shouldn’t you all be worrying about your clients sites and not your own?
Our site lists quite high for the keywords we target yet I cant remember the last time somebody told us they found our site on Google, Yahoo or whatever pretty much all our clients come form ether referrals our people who have found their competitors site and asked us as the designers to do the same for them.
I also noticed a lot of people whining about their main source of income is from business they get from search engines and how their going to have to cut back on employees because business is getting hit, personally I think any company that puts their future and the future of their employees into the hands of a free service that can change its techniques at anytime thus leaving you and your employees out in the cold is really irresponsible. Is it just me or does anyone else see that Google is a company that’s has a product like everyone else (adwords) and weather your site appears in the top ten is at the bottom of a very long list of priorities I would hope their share holders would be their number one priority.
Ps I hope at least some of these SEO companies I’m seeing here having taking a least some time away from checking where their site is listed to maybe check to see how it is effecting your clients, our are you just going to wait and then charge them more to get them back up?
Carol Said,
October 29, 2005 @ 7:50 pm
Canonical url problems.
What is this? I keep seeing this term and hve no idea wht it means.
Yes, I am a non computer person working with FrontPage2002 on my own web site and have a ton to learn.
I am so frustrated by Jagger as I had worked and worked following the rules and got my site high, now it is way down in the dumps and sales are off 99.9% and I have no idea why my site has taken the plunge.
:-((((((
Steve Said,
October 30, 2005 @ 12:33 am
Matt - I originally posted this WMW - was not published.
I am sure there a lot of us like me that do SEM & SEO professionally. Thing is – not like being a doctor or a lawyer we have no recognition. Just like doctors and lawyers there profession could easily be destroyed by BAD EGGS – e.g. doctors using there license to supply illegal drugs to the public. Because it’s a profession that is recognized they cannot get away with it.
G has been asking and is open to ideas on how to improve its SERPS. The fundamental problem is it relies on either off-page or on-page factors to rank the pages. Black Hat SEO’s also have exactly the same ability as White Hat SEO’s to extract what is favored by G’s algorithm over a period of time – in fact the black hat SEO’s probably have an advantage in that they have more capital available to meet G’s attempts like 10 year registrations to game it opposed to white hat sites. G’s answer to this has been to use methods like DATE to clean out the SPAM – not an ideal situation because its taken everything out of the SERPS and prevent fresh content to become available in their SERPS.
Some sort of G qualification or verification is necessary in my opinion. Some sort of license needs to be created where a verification code can be placed on sites who have – written, paid for and passed an exam? – or submits IP addresses, domains etc under a QUALIFIED license (EG like the “audited” Netcraft impression” EG - http://audited.netcraft.com/audited . Just like doctors who practice illegally SEO’s would be at risk of loosing their license. To a degree G is encouraging us to do this via SPAM reports. To a certain extent this has been attempted by dmoz – G has fortunately not used dmoz completely as I am sure they must recognize how corrupt that directory really is. The first place I would look for black hat spammers would be the editors at dmoz who don’t list good sites.
The question I am suggesting is ideas to help meet G’s goal of listing only quality sites. Maybe it’s not a registration process. Here is the problem – what is the solution??
What methods for on-page and off-page algorithms are necessary to prevent webmasters from gaming Google’s algorithm? Remembering that whatever we suggest – look at it again from a black hat perspective – IE “OK so that’s what they are doing – OK so now how can I fiddle it and make my site appear to look like they are conforming?
Joe Said,
October 30, 2005 @ 10:54 am
Hello Matt,
I hope some constructive criticism is OK. I don’t really know where else to post this anyway. On a forum where nobody cares?
64.233.183.104 if this data center is a preview of things to come then the new Google index just doesn’t like my site anymore or my entire sector.
66.102.9.xx I noticed these results reverted back to jagger1 and I would have to say good. The charter, fishing, and outdoors recreation sector was in a word “ruined” and this new ‘preview’ on 64.233.183.104 is a small improvement over 66.102.9.xx but it still has a long long way to go.
I will let the results do my talking and give you one example as to how “OFF” the entire fishing sector is on datacenter 64.233.183.104 .
Keyword - ( Fishing Cape Hatteras ) will show you exactly 2 sites about fishing in Cape Hatteras and there is even a Canadian website in the top 10 that has absolutely nothing to do with this search. WHAT? There are 4 Real Estate sites that I am sure say buy this house and enjoy the Fishing in Cape Hatteras but that is not what folks searching for Fishing in Cape Hatteras are looking for, not the 95% majority.
Results for ‘Fishing Cape Hatteras’
4 Realty Sites taking up 5 results
1 Arts and Crafts site
1 Canadian Site - WOW
1 Sea Shore State Park Site
and Oh yea there happens to be 2 sites about Fishing in Cape Hatteras.
I was once listed here and I had tons of charters, tips, and information about fishing in Cape Hatteras and when someone typed in that search they actually got what they were looking for even if they didn’t notice my site, there actually were Cape Hatteras Fishing sites and info.
For heavens sake, one site is calling their “shopping cart” a “fishing net” and they are ranking top 5 for Fishing Cape Hatteras.
Real Estate Sites should not be in Fishing Search IMO.
I really hope this is some constructive criticism and don’t hate me for saying this but search same keyword on MSN and compare the results - Hands down MSN has more relevent search results for the term Fishing Cape Hatteras and none of the sites are what one would call Spam.
That was just one example as this is happening across the entire fishing and charter boat sector.
If there is such a thing as a ‘Keyword Spam Filter’ then I would have to conclude that the setting that triggers a site being considered as one that has “Keyword Spam” is turned up WAY WAY too high for this sector.
This is just one example but it’s all over the fishing sector.The results tell the tale and Google results PRE-jagger1,2,3 were much more relevent for the sector IMHO. Can we go back to old results now, to the pre jagger results, pretty please??
Thank You for providing a place to post our concerns, questions, praises and criticisms too.
Joe
Dave Said,
October 30, 2005 @ 9:54 pm
Hi Matt
I was thinking after finding one of my site page while searching Google for something totally unrelated to my site. Having said this, the phrase was on the page. Most/some searchers know we can use negative keywords to help stop irrelevant pages in the SERPs. IMHO it would also be a good idea if Webmasters could add negative keywords to the HTML code somewhere so the page will never show if that word is used.
The 2 combined (searchers & Webmasters negative keyword) should result in Google being even more relevant to its users.
whadayathink?
Jim Sterling Said,
October 31, 2005 @ 2:16 am
Hello Matt,
Less than 2 years ago my company hired SEO Inc. to optimize our site so it could get indexed properly. From doing research lately, I realize that they have lost favor in the listings with Google. We stopped using their services about a year ago, but my concern is that we have now dropped so heavily in the rankings for google recently, that I am not sure if it has anything to do with their services. They let us know upon hiring them that they were completely reputable and only do things that are allowable by Google, Yahoo, MSN and all the other major search companies. My biggest concern is that if they have caused a problem with our site, how would I ever be able to find out what it is to make the changes. Could you take a look at our site and see if there is any issues you can find?
Thanks,
Jim
Spamhuntress Said,
October 31, 2005 @ 4:27 am
SEW:
Nice try.
Like most big companies, department aren’t talking to each other. The banning will probably (well, hopefully) continue until we hear different. I for one will keep reporting.
And Matt:
Can you PLEASE get someone to remove prstorm already? Can you get someone in Adwords to take your call?
johan Said,
October 31, 2005 @ 4:38 am
Hi there Matt,
Just a quick thought regarding pageRank, something which I think could be improved on - I hope this is the right place to enter this, if not apologies, just nix it
-G- explains pageRank as “the importance of this page”, which is potentially quite a useful gauge for folk browsing the web to assess the relevancy etc of pages. But, since pageRank is based partially on backlinks, ie an absolute measure, it means that important & creditable sites about obscure topics will never get a high pageRank, which seems kind of iffy.
I can give you an actual example, but to keep this generic, say we have a book called “A Tale of Two Widgets” by a publisher “We Luv Widgets Inc”. Now, the homepage of “A Tale of Two Widgets” on the “We Luv Widgets Inc” site gets a pagerank of 6, because there are only so many people linking to them. The highest pageRank for any -G- search regarding “A Tale of Two Widgets” is pageRank 6, ie the upper ceiling because of the absolute # of backlinks in the calculation. However, compare this with the homepage of some SEO utility, which has a pageRank 10, because they have a lot of backlinks etc.
What I think is iffy here is that for the subject matter “A Tale of Two Widgets”, that publisher’s page should really have a pageRank of 10, because it is the most authoratative site on the subject :). ie, ideally pageRank would be a relative % of backlinks that matter to the subject, not based on absolute #s of class C backlinks.
I hope this makes some sense, but that’s my observation on the whole thing that I just wanted to shoot past you.
Regards,
JJILN
- ps thanks for the new sitemaps.xml feature, very useful.
Andrew Said,
October 31, 2005 @ 6:16 am
Spot the hidden text! - here is a clue its within the first 5 sites
http://66.102.9.104/search?hl=en&lr=&q=go+fishing
Ive reported this for the last 3 years, and again last week - its still there!!
Bob Albright Said,
October 31, 2005 @ 8:40 am
Matt:
my URL doesn’t even come up when I do a search for my comany name?
I am ranking from 60-90 for my top 3 KW.
What kind of trouble is this URL in with google?
Fabio Said,
October 31, 2005 @ 10:18 am
One drops one goes in…ok…makes sense…but does really make sense to drop from #1 position to not listed in first 1000??? What does that mean? That Google was completely wrong before this update, for months? Because this is how it looks like…make a search for http://66.102.9.104/search?hl=en&q=turnkey+websites&btnG=Google+Search and tell me if how many listings selling turnkey websites you find, in the top 1000: 27!!! All the rest are directories listing listings about turnkey websites, spamming articles bridging to our sites, press releases (!!!) and real websites selling turnkey websites like ours and those of our competitors are not even in the first 1000, while it was at number 1 until one week ago for months and months. There are approx 100 turnkey websites sellers on the Net (i mean witha proper site, with content, not spamming, not cheating…serious businesses) and 83 of them do not show even in the first 1000 results. What is Google going to do about this? Because if adwords is the only resource for legitimate, honest, small businesses to get visibility on google, it means that google has become a paid search engine. Nothing wrong with that, but it should be told clearly.
istar Said,
November 1, 2005 @ 4:45 am
Matt is true that Google has a terminal cancer?
Johne Said,
November 1, 2005 @ 6:49 am
In the last half of October, a number of my pages that had never done well in the searches started pulling enormous traffic. The pattern seems to be that my longer pages which are very dense on keywords did well.
Pages that previously did well including some that had no true SEO structure, low keyword density, and were somewhat short, seem to be doing slightly worse.
Any thoughts?
Johne Said,
November 1, 2005 @ 7:16 am
I just read the comment about letting websites put in “negative keywords” for natural search.
I use negative keywords on PPC and would be willing to use the same for natural search if only google would ask.
I’m an education site and the word “reading” is a striking example. Reading has three contexts: astrology, literacy, and a city of Pennsylvania (and maybe another in the UK). Basically, about 60% of the searches with reading are for astrology, about 25% relate to literacy, and the rest to geography. Since we don’t really want each others traffic, someone should create a negative meta.
djmick200 Said,
November 1, 2005 @ 9:47 am
Matt
Was whatever changes that took place on Sept 22nd the start of this update or was that dealing with something completely different?
I too took a huge nose dive that day (16k a day).
Now a couple of my pages still show up for their chosen kw but most don’t and all the pages follow and use the same structure.
I am very confused !!! Could you shed even a glimour of light on this please?
Cheers Mick
laura Said,
November 1, 2005 @ 10:50 am
Carol - Canonical URLS are basically using one primary URL for one page, look up canonical URL in Google and there’s a bunch of info there.
So regarding this comment: “It’s ranking issues (e.g. canonicalization) that they might want to hold off on until Jagger3 is out.”
Uh-oh… We are in the beginning stages of fixing our zillions (literally) of canonical URL problems, with the biggest problems to be addressed this or next week… Should I be putting a halt on this til whenever Jagger 3 is done?
Shaddow Said,
November 1, 2005 @ 12:47 pm
Hi all,
I work in 2 completely different sectors, and both have been hit hard. One of my sites which has been online for many years with great ranking has also been effected. This is the first time this has happened with any of the google updates.
However, as mentioned by many, I am going to sit and ride this through before making any analysis of the situation…
I think if serps remain as they are across all the sectors, Google would slowly disappear and loose out to Y and MSN.
This is why people should not panic, there are some smart heads running the show at big G, and relevant serps will return, and if they don’t, traffic will shift somewhere else…
William Said,
November 1, 2005 @ 5:32 pm
We have a site, Explore Kew Gardens, which was very poorly ranked for several years. Then, after Jagger1, it zoomed up to #4 or so. That lasted about 3 weeks, and now it’s back around 1,000+. Weird, huh?
David S. Said,
November 1, 2005 @ 10:39 pm
Matt,
Fabio’s post above is pretty valid for me as well (google has become a paid search engine).
For the last couple of weeks if I need to do a business search I won’t waste my time weeding through your organic results. It is straight to Adwords. That is great for short term profits but not if you plan to continue being the leading search engine company.
It would really be interesting to be a fly on the wall in with the Google engineers who are responsible for this latest update. Are they impressed with themselves or are they standing around and scratching their heads.
Google stockholders are thrilled but behind the scenes by making major changes that negatively affect thousand of webmasters right before the busy Christmas season Google is taking over the “#1 Bad Guy in IT” spot from Microsoft. I hope that Sergey Brin and Larry Page don’t find themselves having eggs thrown at them while they are walking in public.
In the end hopefully that this will be similar to the Florida update when things began to settle down after a couple of months.
Mike Said,
November 2, 2005 @ 7:14 am
Matt,
Could you please post some deatils about todays serps? It would be nice to know if jagger 2 flux is occuring or if this is jagger 3 rolling out.
I firmly beleive that the entire jagger update did not go as planned. I can not beleive that Jagger was designed to flip everyday searchers to only big directories, sites with little to no relevance or news articles.
This has to be some kind of temporary search “filler” to hold the masses of “searchers” back, until you straighten this out.
Marvin Miller Said,
November 2, 2005 @ 11:12 am
The Jagger updates have killed my website entirely. Google drive traffic has dropped it to a level it hasn’t seen for years.
Googlewashing has stolen all my top key phrases. Between the Jagger update and the Googlewashing my site’s been finished off.
I found over 200 pages of other sites taking my content by Googlewashing. They’ve been reported but nothing seems to happen. This has been going on for three months.
My site exisits strictly to help people (askmarvin.ca/forums) and develops 95% original content. The work I do to help others resulted in a nice and steady growth curve. Google did the updates, the Googlewashers worked their magic and now I’m paying for it.
My site and my efforts have been penalized and Google is paying sites for googlewashing MY content with adsense dollars. I’ve reported them and nothing happens.
Please see this message for details - http://groups.google.com/group/google.public.support.general/browse_frm/thread/ad867820ff9c8d67/9c92fc1ae5420604?lnk=st&q=why+is+google+killing&rnum=1#9c92fc1ae5420604
spamcop Said,
November 2, 2005 @ 2:06 pm
Hi Matt looking for spam have a look at this scamartist
http://216.239.59.104/search?q=cache:myWvTbbF3N0J:www.landenweb.com/Holiday/Crete_Holiday.cfm+crete+accommodation&hl=en&lr=&strip=1
and this one
http://216.239.59.104/search?q=cache:http://www.e-travels.gr/&hl=en&lr=&rls=GGLG,GGLG:2005-41,GGLG:en&strip=1
Dave Said,
November 2, 2005 @ 3:43 pm
I wish updates could be discussed in a mature logical way. Unfortunately anyone stating the SERP’s look fine, or better simply gets howled down.
Michael Said,
November 2, 2005 @ 5:55 pm
Looks like Jagger3 has hit http://66.102.9.104/ now, from what I can see…correct? What I see as significantly different from Jagger2 is that keyword-laden pages do much better than before. Specifically, I’m seeing so