I have just done some basic research and no websites with Adsense on them came up in the first 3 pages of the SERPS (for the queries previsouly used to get to my site). Is this just coincidence or is Google trying to clean up the Internet??? Of course, that is assuming that any website with Adsense doesn’t have a product to sell or orginal content – which isn’t always true.

I am starting to wonder if this goes deeper…

I had been running at between 5000-6000 page impressions a day for around 5 years before I added Adsense. Within a month of adding Adsense I dropped in the SERPS and consequently page impressions went down to between 2000-3000 a day. Then in mid-June I added Google Analytics and a week after I was dropped from the top 100 results in the SERPS and page impressions are currently around 600-700 a day. Quite a drop!!

Is this coincidence or is it related to the recent changes?

My site isn’t a lame MFA site (I started it in 1995) and I’d rather spend my time producing content than playing SEO games, but something totally ran amuck with this update. I have noticed that Google’s reported number of pages indexed for my site is many times more pages than exists on my site and I’ve been trying to figure out how to make sure Google only indexes the pages it should (I uploaded a site map with all valid URLs today). It is just really upsetting to wake up and discover that traffic to the site I have been working very hard on for over ten years suddenly dries up while finding millions upon millions of sub-domain spam pages being indexed for domains that aren’t even ten days old.

I’d love to know what happened that suddenly removed my site from the favored status it has held since the days Netscape 3.0 & 4.0 ruled the Internet.

(oh and yes I’m refering to the site my name links to)

To demonstrate the ludicrous nature of the change:

A rival site to mine – who a customer emailed me to point out they have stolen my content – is now ranking in my previous position while my site – with the original content – is out of the top 100!!!

I find this totally bewildering.

QUESTION: Does a ‘links’ page elsewhere on a site (with about 30 relevant links on it) affect SERP ranking this much? Will removing this page or placing nofollows on the links reverse the situation?!

BTW, why no help for George from you or Francis? Or, do you 2 only abuse those who do try and help others? I get the impression you would both abuse the Red Cross if they knocked on your door.

I am in the unneviable position of actually having seen Dave (Original)’s site. While it was some time ago – a few months maybe – I doubt that much has changed.

Put it this way. I am not surprised that he isn’t too keen to air it for public scrutiny. To my mind, it is the worst kind of Spam, because, unlike most Spam, which is blatant, it is Spam masquerading as “content”. Loads of “articles” written purely as SE fodder. Pity the happles user whos stumbles on Dave’s site, and mistakeny asumes that its content was actually designed for human consumption.

It’s like Dave (O) generated a site based solely on Google’s guidelines…nothing else. As you can tell from so many of his posts, he seems to believe that these guidelines eminate some kind of magical power.

What is it? Drop the link if it’s so bad.

In one day (after 7 years with no changes in traffic regardless of google updates and changes) all the traffic (except about 150 visitors) from Google suddenly vanished. So, I had to let my employees go and now I don’t even earn enough to pay my expenses.

So yes, Google can whipe out a site, not just individual pages. My site is very large and searches came in from thousands of different search phrases, not just a few ‘high ranking keywords’. The whole site was wiped out, not just rankings for individual pages.

Im not crying or complaining, Ill make it back and I’ve learned something valuable from this experience. I just want to point out that relying on one Web site (and one search engine) is a big risk, especially when you have people working for you.

It’s clear that something went wrong on the 27th. It doesn’t make any sense that people that weren’t affect begin to preach and condemn the affected sites claiming they take part in shady SEO.