Update Jagger: Contacting Google

Okay, Brett Tabke decided to call it Update Jagger. Here are the ways that I’d use to contact us if you have feedback on Google search results:

Reporting spam in Google’s index
I especially want to hear about webspam that you see in Google. The best place to do that is to go to http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html . In the “Additional details:” section, I would use the keyword “jagger1” (that’s “jagger” and the number one with no spaces in between).

Reporting non-spam issues or problems in Google’s index
Do the search that you’re interested in on google.com, then click the “Dissatisfied? Help us improve” link at the bottom right of the page. Again, fill in details and use the keyword jagger1 so that folks at Google can separate out feedback specifically about this update.

You think your site has been penalized
If your site is not showing up at all, and you recently had something like hidden text or hidden links on your pages, I would recommend doing a reinclusion request. I wrote up my advice on the best way to do a reinclusion request. Note that a reinclusion request won’t make much difference if our algorithms/scoring are what is affecting your site though.

You see a low-quality site that is running AdSense
If you run across a site that you consider spammy and it has AdSense on it, click on the “Ads by Goooooogle” link and click “Send Google your thoughts on the ads you just saw”. Enter the words spamreport and jagger1 in the comments field.

You want to talk about data center IP addresses amongst friends, or “update speculate”
Lots of search-related discussion goes on at WebmasterWorld, but bear in mind that you won’t be able to mention specific urls or searches on WMW. If you want to mention specifics to Google, I’d go with one of the ways above.

Hope that helps to let people know where to send their feedback based on what they see.

222 Responses to Update Jagger: Contacting Google (Leave a comment)

  1. Hi Matt

    Great stuff.

    However, several webmasters have reported on WMW during Borboun, that reporting spam to Google didn´t give much results.

    http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html

    Are you telling us now that the folks at Googel Search Quality Team will pay much attention to “jagger1” spam reports?

    Thanks.

  2. I used to report spammers if i’d see them, then I felt not much changed after my spamreports. I started to write down some reports, to see if something would change; I checked it again right now, nothing happened with my spamreports from the beginning of August. Or does it take longer than 2,5 months?

  3. Thank you Matt for the update and advice on including jagger1 in reporting issues.

    When searching Google for certain domain names, Google brings up cache of totally irrelevant domain names.

    For e.g, the text for link says:
    Show Google’s cache of domainA.com

    but upon clicking the URL the domainB.com cache is shown.

    Would love to hear your thoughts on what could be causing this? The domainA.com and domainB.com have no relation whatsoever.

    Thanks again.

    SoftwareEngineer99

  4. Thanx for the info Matt, will do my part in reporting to get few spammy sites out of that top results – and hopefully my sites will move up.

    Regards,
    Sudha

  5. Ah. Cheers. This is helpful. I’ll put out the call to the spamhunters and see whether we can fill in a few reports for you. 😀

  6. Matt, here’s a question. When reporting spam should we be conversative or liberal in what might be unethical. I’m looking at a site which does not need JavaScript in any shape or form and yet has a large noscript area with keyword stuffed, h2 text and plenty of links in there too. It’s clearly a SEO attempt but is it spam on the scale that you care about?

    Do we report these or not?

  7. How can I report a software bug?

    I have noticed that googlebot rejects any URL ending with a directory (directory, NOT file) named “robots.txt”.

    Like this:

    http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Internet/Web_Design_and_Development/Authoring/Online_Tools/robots.txt/

  8. Personally, I think that this has been the worst update to come out of google ever, but I am glad that google is taking comments specifically on this update. I see results that are now clogged with ebay listing, mega info sites, corporate sites, and other irrelevant listings. From discussing with others in forums, the view on this update is about the same across the board.

  9. Re your comment on pagerank, do you mean the the pageranks are going to be updated, or that Google is going to take them more into account?

  10. Hey Matt, I think you killed WebmasterWorld (for the time being anyway) he he 😉

  11. “You see a low-quality site that is running AdSense
    If you run across a site that you consider spammy and it has AdSense on it, click on the “Ads by Goooooogle” link and click “Send Google your thoughts on the ads you just saw”. Enter the words spamreport and jagger1 in the comments field.”

    Not sure how much you can tell us Matt, but how is update Jagger related to Adsense?

  12. To be honnist, I dont really like the results ive left feedback and a few spam reports if it helps at all. So many websites have been knocked off the SERPS some people will be having a rubbish Christmas if it stays like this.

    Also WMW has been down the whole day…. How can I live without that place??

    rj87uk
    (WMW)

  13. What do we do if we think our website may have been banned, but we do not know why? A reinclusion request won’t help, will it?

  14. What if we want to talk about Yahoo partner site ads that are causing well known sites to rank for terms which their site isn’t about in the slightest? It seems this is working well for Epinions.com at the moment – they’re ranking for just about everyone else’s ads, which I don’t think is good relevance in the slightest.

  15. Low Level, I’ll pass that on, but that’s a great example of some jagger1 feedback to leave on the Dissatisfied link.

    rj87uk, I know what you mean. I was up late, so I haven’t seen WMW today–no idea what’s going on.

    Phil B, I just wanted to be complete; not everyone knows how to report a spammy looking site running AdSense.

    Rebecca, when PR/backlinks become visible, Google has usually already taken them into account. So from the Google perspective, it’s anti-climactic. But I understand that it’s the first time that webmasters get to see different PageRank scores in a few months, so it’s natural for them to consider that an update.

    Andrew, if there’s a ton of stuffing going on in a noscript area, I would be interested, esp. if the noscript content is different from the main page.

    Jestep, if you feel that way, the best way to convince Google is to send specific searches with the jagger1 keyword using the Dissatisfied link.

  16. Thanks for the advice on reporting AdSense junk sites. Normally I’m live and let live. But seeing content from many of my sites scraped to build junk AdSense sites has changed that.

    I’ve often worried that the scrapers would might one day make me look like a site with lots of duplicate content. It is an incentive to help diminish their number on the web.

  17. I’m seeing a lot of spam pages much higher up in the rankings post-update.

    I have reported a couple of them, using the “jagger1” addendum as you suggested.

    What I notice a lot more of now is pages showing up in serps, but when you go to the page, there is none of the search KW’s used on the actual page.. only in the search page “description”.. Seems to be exclusively scraper sites with redirections..

    Unfortunate, but I’m not even sure if these were already problems before the update, rather than symptomatic of the actual update..

    I guess my own sites falls have prompted greater study of the actual results than before..

  18. Love this update – LOVE IT!
    Every SEO trick I know is working like a charm. Keep this up and I’ll be able to retire in a year. THANKS GOOGLE!

  19. I does seem that Google is being clogged with mega sites and dir listings. I had many of my search terms beaten out by yahoo dir listings. Which I think is pretty strange. I don’t mind being knocked down in placement if the sites that knocked me down were more relevant or contained better content but this is not the case with this update. I really hope that things shuffle around not just because my sites have suffered but because I am getting irrelevant results when I am doing my own searches for information.

    Thank
    Jared

  20. So has the update come into effect as of now? I haven’t seen any PR or backlink changes as of yet… I will be taking your advice about reporting spam sites and blackhatters are you suggested using the “jagger1” keyword. Keep us posted =)

  21. Hi Matt – great feedback thanks

    However, I have a comp that has virtually dupped his site to make 20 other sites that all rank in G somewhere for 1500+ terms each.

    I have reported them many times using spam report etc etc etc and some have adwords – they have been high for years. How they dodge any dup content penalties I’ll never know — but they do !

    What really is the best way for people to have a look at these?

  22. Matt,

    How long does it actually take for Google to make any changes. Say if you do report spam or submit for your site to be reconsidered because it was dropped.

    Is there a time frame? or is it just when somebody gets to it?

    Also, do most of these submissions get review by humans, or are they reviewed with software in the next update?

    Thanks a bunch,

    Andy

  23. Matt

    I have noticed that some sites that have been hit in February (I assume by the canonical url bug) have come back strong in my sector.

    I know you said more flux to come – is this something that we should be looking out for (please please please please)

    Thanks

    Stephen

    PS. A bit of a question for you – I may have done something a bit silly :/ – to make sure that Google picked up my 301 from non-www to www I directed most (90%+) internal links to the non-www (I assumed that when this was fixed they would be passed along). But have I just told Google that my non-www is the Canonical url – but the links are not being passed through the 301 to the www – therefore I have messed up things further. Just dont know which way to turn at the moment :/

  24. I think it’s so important to report SPAM to google. Nobody likes SPAM.

  25. Matt, PLEASE stop supporting this named update nonsense.

    It provides no contextual relevance for people who don’t paste charts with names and dates on their screens.

    If we have to refer to updates, it’s best to refer to them by DATES. Nothing else.

    Thank you.

  26. Matt –

    Seems WMW is out, but I suspect Westhost is the problem since they cannot be reached either…

    I’m trying to find out if the changes are complete at this point. I’m in the disappointed camp because I’ve been working so hard and we took a beating in this last update (completely disappearing to page 7 (at least).

    So can you tell us Matt – is is over? If not, when do you expect the “update” to be complete?

  27. Well I think cracking down on dodgy Adsense sites is a good idea. Adense, despite being a great way to earn some cash, has led to tens of thousands of spammy sites polluting the web.

    Maybe you guys should make acceptance a bit more stringent…cut it off at the source. Review on site-by-site basis rather than one account and put them where you want. Other adnetworks manage to do this…might increase what you can demand from advertisers too…plus with Yahoo and MSN with contextual networks in the wings makes sense to clear the deck.

    Anyway, I welcome this more interactive approach regards this update. We lost about 100K unique users per day from Sept22. Hoping for good things over the next few days.

  28. What’s wrong with webmasterworld?

  29. Matt,

    Could you please update us if you find out anything about WMW? I am eager to read what people are saying about Jagger. WMW withdrawal is killing me right now.

    Thanks.

  30. Matt

    I see some less than satisfying results for a keyword, but I don’t get the dissatisfied link anywhere on the page.

    Also I recently tried modifying my robots.txt to block dynamic pages on my site using the wildcard method that it says Google supports. (/*?), but when I tried to submit the robots.txt file through the removal tool, it said that using the “*” was invalid. I submitted a request to Google about it, but no one ever got back to me. You might want to look into this problem.

  31. Maybe not an update issue, but do you ever plan to do anything about restaurant and hotel review sites which always appear at the top of search results, which never link to the official site of the hotel/restaurant, and thus make it hard to track down the real website.

    Try this search [prestbury house hotel] (hotel near Cheltenham, UK) – no sign of it (it appears second if you just do [prestbury house]).

    Or a search for [yuatcha] – no sign of the place. But lots of reviews.

    [La tasca essex road] – it’s website is http://www.lasca.co.uk but impossible to see among the reviews.

    [le montmartre islington].

    I’ll stop going on now!

  32. BTW Matt

    I submitted a spamreport early for a site who has it’s homepage packed to the gills with keyword stuffing and links in it’s noscript tag and what is really being shown on the page is no where near what the noscript tag represents….I included the jagger1 keyword at the beginning of my spam report.

  33. Thanks Matt – you are covering a lot of helpful topics that take hours to uncover in WMW posts! You’ve also got to be approaching some records for the number of blog comments to a very new blog!

    I think Dr Schmidt should raise your pay at least .75 per hour so you can afford to buy a house near Google HQ.

  34. Hi,

    Travel results are 90% spam!
    See: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&q=val+thorens+hotels&btnG=Search

    apart from one result all presented pages are DB-generated witth duplicate content within the site. Make a search for Courchevel hotels and the same pages will show up. Just check:
    http://www.google.com/search?q=courchevel+hotels&hl=en&sourceid=gds

    You can try many more searches, especially for small villages in the Alps. All results are simply bad.

    http://www.hotels-universe-and-beyond.com – building such website shall give best rankings immediately, according to the results for Courchevel and Val Thorens hotels. This website would be largest ever and therefore most relevant…

    Google’s policy is “Quality of search results”. Today (for Google) Quality means Mass with no chance for good or even great niche sites built by those, who really know what they do and CARE about it.

    I kindly ask to publish this post and comment it in public.
    Kind regards,

    Michal Wlodarski

  35. Will someone let WebMasterWorld know that a router close to them is down, and has been like that for hours and hours. Have a look at http://visualroute.visualware.com/ (traces from Ashburn VA and stops at 208.50.59.138 (Global Crossing GBL).My own trace (from Birmingham, UK) gets to Boston but stops at 172.16.101.5.

    In similar vein, ThreadWatch gives a MySQL socket error!

    To complete this utterly off-topic posting, when first attempting to get through to WMW a router in my ISP’s network was down, although that was fixed within the hour after notification. Clearly, this is one of those days.

    Thanks for the space.

  36. Hi Matt,

    I’m dying out here with the recent Googles changes. I have been listed high on Google for all of my relevant search terms for more than five years now. I’m a small business owner and do not do anything bad to negatively affect my website listings. I have never hired anyone to get me higher in the search engine listings. I have made very few changes to the website over the years because our listings were always high. We would receive 800 to 900 hits per day on Google, now our business is dead, with fewer than 50 or so hits from Google per day. Is there anything you can do to tweak the updates you have made recently to get small mom and pop businesses back listed where they have been for years? I don’t think my business can survive with what has happened now. I’ve already had to lay off one of my employees in the past week.

    Please help!

  37. Supplemental Challenged

    Concerning a reinclusion requests. Just seeing you mention this is unfortunate. As you should know, 99% of the people effected by your Septemeber 22nd meltdown have no hidden text or anything like that. Why do you have a mechanism, and even mention it, to help people who were cheating, but have no mechanism to help innocent websites where Google has simply bungled their listing?

    My own site has no hidden text or silly nonsense like that. What is happening is Google is ranking above all others a URL that has not had a page on it since March 2004 (so long as the words were on the page in 2004). This means almost all my pages have stopped ranking. Where is the mechanism to do something about that? Why isn’t there a means for people to bring your screwups to your attention, but there is a mechanism to help those who tried to cheat you? Why can someone say “my hidden text is gone” but people have no mechanism to tell you “my page from March 2004, that you crawl to every single day, has not exosted since March 2004”?

  38. rj87uk Said,

    ” So many websites have been knocked off the SERPS some people will be having a rubbish Christmas if it stays like this.”

    Don´t worry. Its only the first phase of update Jagger. Just like during the other recent updates (Allegra & Borboun), several of the sites that are “knocked off” now might return back to their previous positions on the serps at the end of the update.

    Personally I´m more worried about the flux that will follow Jagger 🙂

    “Also WMW has been down the whole day…. How can I live without that place??”

    I´m sure Brett & Co will be glad to read your post. It just shows that the webmaster community of WMW is a GREAT one!

    And I wouldn´t be surprised if somebody post on forum 30 a reference to your sincere post on Matt´s blog 🙂

    Cheers!

  39. Thank you.

  40. click the “Dissatisfied? Help us improve” link at the bottom right of the page.

    i wish we had that feature in Google Germany, but we dont, so what now?

    cheers
    christian

  41. Hmm, has WebMasterWorld been “MattDotted”?

    (Google for “the slashdot effect”…)

  42. I see http://www.tripadvisor.com/ ranking for every single travel serp. Amazing!

  43. Matt,
    I’m not sure what you mean by “Note that a reinclusion request won’t make much difference if our algorithms/scoring are what is affecting your site though.” I submitted a reinclusion request for one site about a month ago – 9/20 – and it has not come back yet. Does that mean that ‘algorithms/scoring’ is what caused it to be filtered to begin with? And that a reinclusion request won’t help? Never did anything bad like hidden text on it. Had some duplicate content, but took that down a long time ago. Still no Google referrals though.

  44. Hi Matt

    Would you be kind to allow for this emergency post. Thanks.

    WebmasterWorld Offline for 11hours and Counting

    http://www.searchengineworld.com/index.htm

    ===================
    Brett_Tabke
    Administrator

    view member profile
    joined:Sept 21, 1999
    posts:16628
    msg #:3 7:55 pm on Oct 19, 2005 (utc 0)

    Update:

    Fibre cut apparently caused a main router to go out. The failover did not fail over properly.
    Ok – no problem – unless Cisco flys in the wrong replacement router.

    ===================================

  45. WMW is temporarily back at http://www.searchengineworld.com/.

    May I endorse the idea for a way to say “Hey, my clean site is swept out of the results by recent changes”. I guess the fear is (the very real possibility) of a million posts from agrieved Webmasters.

    Sigh.

  46. ” What’s wrong with webmasterworld? ”

    westhost has had a “technichal error” shall we say.

    To quote Rogerd:

    “Wednesday morning, the outage at WebmasterWorld continues – it looks like all of Westhost, the datacenter that hosts the site, is down.”
    “It looks like it’s a rough morning for SEO websites”

  47. ps. Matt you have a popular name Matt… look at everyone, Matt.

    *Camera shifts to you*

    Matt: “err….”

    – Glad ive not lost my sence of humor. 🙂

    rj87uk
    (WMW)

  48. Dear Matt Cutt:

    Why this link -> “Dissatisfied? Help us improve” is only for UK and USA (Google.co.uk, Google.com) ??

    What about Google.es, Google.com.ar…

    I can see “Adwords” or “sponsored link” in spanish, but I don’t send my opinion for a simply search.

    That’s evil to me, don’t you think?.

  49. Googles spam report is useless. Much ballyhoo was made about this site http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:9Bc2zbr4m4oJ:www.chefrevival.com.au/+chef+uniforms&hl=en being banned for using hidden text.
    As stated previously, this site has been using hidden text for many terms, for years, and despite being reported for just as long, here they are again, back in Googles results.
    In addition, in the same SERP’S for chef uniforms, wouldn’t this site Chef Uniforms by NEWCHEF Fashions, Manufacture of Chef Uniform be guilty of a sneaky redirect?

  50. Matt:

    The focus of your comments seems to be about spam, yet there are still very spammy sites showing high in the SERPS.

    Why, as so many other haves said, did “Jagger” remove some very legitimate “mom & pop” e-commerce sites, yet leave the Spammers?

    I just don’t get it.

    DriWash’d Up on Google.

  51. WebmasterWorld is temporarily at
    http://www.searchengineworld.com

  52. Just found this site, (not through Google I might add!) And seems that ‘Matt’ has an inside track here, so:

    From an end user perspective, not an site owner perspective, Google has just sucked, really really badly, for the last few days. Nearly nothing is relevant, nearly everything is spam or only marginally related to whatever you search for.

    What’s up with this? Is Google just plain broke?

  53. Well followed your advice and put in a reinclusion request even though I’m not sure why we are penalized since I never have found any hidden links or text, but keeping my fingers crossed that this somehow solves our problem with our listing in Google.

    Thank for all the help Matt.

  54. Thanks matt for the update.

  55. ManWare, we don’t have the “Dissatified” link translated for all languages, but you can do the search on google.com and use the link from there.

    Mr B, that site received a 30 day penalty for hidden text. Since the site didn’t remove the hidden text, it’s about to receive a much longer penalty. It won’t be back for a long time unless the owner removes the hidden text and submits a reinclusion request.

    islandlizard, it may be your opinion that “Google has just sucked, really really badly, for the last few days,” but unless you mention specifics there’s no way that I can tell what you’re talking about. WMW is a good place to discuss the update if you don’t want to mention specifics. If you *are* willing to talk about specific searches, then I’d use the Dissatisfied link with the jagger1 keyword that I mentioned in the initial post. That will get more people at Google reading your comments than commenting here.

  56. Matt,

    “WMW is a good place to discuss the update if you don’t want to mention specifics….”

    Technically, WMW is a highly restrictive forum that most people don’t have access to, and a large part of its active participants are pretty low-quality people who complain a great deal about — oh, everything.

    The criticism about your advocating one particular SEO forum — especially one with such a colorful reputation — is valid.

    And, again, please stop supporting the silly update names. People have a hard enough time accurately placing them in a historical context wihout Google rubberstamping the nonsense.

  57. Noticed PR and backlink updates in a few datacenters. Mcdar datacenter tool is a good place to watch when the update is going on.

  58. I’m tired 🙂

  59. Hi Matt,

    You’re obviously in the know about penalties dished out by Google and my question is what would be the likely cause of a site suffering an almost uniform drop of 30 places for all search terms? I’ve seen quite a few webmasters complaining about this phenomenon on SEO forums but no-one really knows what the cause could be.

  60. Hi Matt, I did send a couple of “jagger1” spam reports for sites holding positions 1 and 2 with tons of keyword-and-link-stuffed “noscript” text, or hidden by CSS. One of this sites is actually moving UP with the current update!

    Hope you can crack down on these!

  61. Matt,

    With so many posts about sites being penalized and so on this post could you please clarify an example for me?

    Is a site penalized if it ranked well on Google’s serps then loses its’ rankings and returns in the 5th page when searching for its’ domain name.

    Would that be a penalty, filter or mistake?

    Thanks fo any insight!

  62. How frequently does Google do a PR update?

  63. Spam report is surely important…that’s a good thing.
    But I think it’s even more important provide the right relevant results for each query, not cutting off tons of sites which aren’t spam and now (after this update), even if still indexed, are pratically nowhere to be found for their main keywords.

    How do you explain those “penalties” for many good sites (above all in the travel sector) and the fact that instead many other similar sites are still in the very same place, or even better, than before? Maybe there’s a “ratio” behind that…but really it’s not possible to get…

    Is it maybe a temporary glitch?

    Thanks.

  64. Hmm.. PR msn.com = 2 . What about that?

  65. Matt,

    First, thanks for your patience with all of us–you’ve been a big help and clearly it’s a lot of work keeping up with all the postings.

    If I understand correctly, I can determine whether or not my site’s been penalized by doing a search like site:www.myfabuloussite.com. If it shows a bunch of (non-Supplemental-Result) links, then I’m just ducky…if I’ve been penalized, there will be no non-SR results. Correct?

    Michael

  66. Jorge, thank you for the spam reports! Good to hear from you these days. 🙂

  67. Just searched google for [Matt Cutts]. This site comes top of the list:
    http://www.cs.unc.edu/~cutts/
    which was apparently last updated on, ahem, January 2004!

  68. Michael,
    Banned? prolly not, but penalized or filtered…maybe…
    Like us…

  69. Matt,
    Can you dispel the theory that Google is discriminating against the smaller mom and pop travel sites, whether it be in Jagger, or before,
    by not imposing the same filters, penalties, and or sand box against the larger, big name travel websites? It always appears that the mom and pop sites, and the affiliate type sites have the major filters and penalties imposed against them, wheras, the larger sites never seem to
    be subject to these effects.
    I’ll thank you for your answer in advance.

  70. Matt,

    I was reading your comment about a 30-day-penalty for hidden text. Do you have something similar for duplicate content?

    After removing dupe content via robots.txt and 403s I’m waiting for my site to come back after Sep. 22nd.

    Pagecount in Google SERPS is decreasing every day, however there is still some way to go. Any prediction about how long to wait?

    Martin

  71. we don’t have the “Dissatified” link translated for all languages

    Well Matt Google has translated the german version
    http://www.google.de/quality_form?q=help&hl=de&lr=&c2coff=1

    however they dont use it on the live pages, why bother translating it, fi you dont use it?

    cheers
    christian

  72. I was disappointed to see our site http://www.destination360.com lose 1 PR to PR5 even though we’ve been gaining alot of trafffic and links. Some of our competitors have gained PR.

    It seems the fresh content filter is turned up way too high. What about quality content that will last not just fresh blog content that lasts a couple days.

  73. I’m glad Matt has put a more visible voice to Google Search and unfortunately he gets all the guff when updates like this occur.

    Here’s my guff, this update sucks so far. Not just because my site has dropped so far – #5 to #400 for a term with 105M results, but more so because of the length of the update. A month long update seems to be over the top by about a mile. If I told my users (I’m a software developer) that it would be a month before they would be able to rely on their application to work properly in all phases of operation – I would be laughed out of the room.

    There has got to be a better way!

    Tony

  74. Spamers not dead ! Doorways forever ! Ha ha ha

  75. It is nice to see Google has addressed the keyword stuffing issue that has plagued them. Here is a top five result for “wedding invitations”

    http://www.partypop.com/Categories/Party_Wedding_Invitations.html

  76. Good info. However it would be very helpfull if there is a tool out there that can provide information if a site is penalizing the google’s guidelines.

  77. Yikes guys! Whatever you did have killed lots of good people. Talk about Google’s carma. But it’s nice to have your ears open. I personally don’t like the idea of spam reporting – just because I can imagine it being abused and it reminds me of Germany in 1930th when people were encouraged by gvt to tell on each other – not necessarily from pure motivations… Also, if Google’s mission is to bring the most relevant results – it hasn’t been accomplished. I just searched under “web design company” term and what do I see? Bunch of directories on first page that could possibly qualify as “web design companies” – plural – but not singular – linguist in me is dissatisfied… Well, what are we to do now to regain our appropriate SEPRs? Definitely we are revisiting Google Webmaster Guidelines thinking “hmm… how do I create search engine friendly websites building them as “if search engines didn’t exist.”

  78. Terrible update long and i suupose with no satisfaction.

    So much websites is going up with spam (hidden text and others)
    No link decides who lives or who dies:)

    Changing Backilink alghorithm broken It is big mistake i suppose

    Polish webmasters looking on it with no pleasures.

    Google is staying in this time on two ways road.

    Left road is to hell

    Right road is to stay one moment And think about new technical politics in Algorithm

    I suppose You will go rigth way.

    Best Reagard

  79. I think we all just need to realize that Google no longer returns relevant results for searches. I can never find quality, relevant web sites when doing searches, and I often see garbage web pages rank higher on searches than my own web pages, even though I can tell that my web pages are more relevant.

    The smart thing to do would be to go find a better search engine. It’s what we did when we moved to Google, and now it’s time to move on. Yahoo and MSN both have great algorithms, more relevant results, less spam… the ship is sinking, ready to jump?

  80. Matt,

    Personally, the updates haven’t done a thing to me, good or bad, and overall, I am much higher in traffic since the first of the year. Not a thing to complain or be upset or frustrated about.

    However, I would also agree that there have been a large number of mega directory sites that have hit the top of the index. My own search patterns have become much more frustrated. Honestly, Google’s own Local is all that is necessary, and having this followed by a dozen CitySearch/YP clones gives no additional info of any value. To any discerning viewer, site after site with the exact same set of directory listings is basically like a duplicate page.

    If someone is looking for a local address, Google Local has it. Yet in a search for a local coffeehouse, I get Google’s Local, two for CitySearch, two for yahoo.local, cityguide.aol, Switchboard, Superpages, addresses.com, and then several local business directories, all in the top 15. That’s nuts!

    Also, no offense intended, but it doesn’t seem that a couple of people hitting a Dissatisfied link somewhere, (and I’m not seeing it anywhere) is going to make anyone at Google decide that the 5 top mega-directory clones shouldn’t be on the first page. That seems like a corporate decision that has been made to at least allow that to happen and something that someone with the ability to do more than fill in an online complaint box is going to have to make the case for why it goofs up the results.

  81. Well, it seems we are still sandboxed or penalised in some way, but as ever the update season is proving to be entertaining.

    Am pretty pleased that the spam reports filed a few weeks ago have taken effect. I think that if this update does nothing but encourage everyone to report spam and be more proactive about it then it should be considered successful.

    Cheers for keeping us all informed. Ross

  82. Gday Matt,

    Just wanted to get your thoughts on our website – http://www.singerdesign.com

    We recently designed our website and now it appears to be banned from google – its been running for over 3years, with a pr5.

    I got our web hosting company to redirect a domain we had – http://www.singerdesign.com.au to point to http://www.singerdesign.com could this have banned us?

    I have taken the redirect off and emailed google … Is there any chance of us ever appeaing in google again? Thx for all your help!

  83. Thats a great information about spam reporting. How google knows that the reporter of SPAM itself not abusing the system ?

  84. accessible> How google knows that the reporter of SPAM itself not abusing the system ?

    Good question. See:

    C M…> … often see garbage web pages rank higher on searches than my own web pages, even though I can tell that my web pages are more relevant …

    CM’s garbarge is relevant to me.
    CM’s relevant site is my garbage.

    All of this thread sounds to me as plain old denounciation.

    And worst of all:
    G. (the alleged ‘noevil’ company) actively promotes and encourages it.

  85. “To any discerning viewer, site after site with the exact same set of directory listings is basically like a duplicate page.”

    This is something I wanted to comment about. I use the internet all day every day, and at the moment I use Google for my research – all day every day – I’m a writer and I need information.

    What sites are the best when you want information?

    There are two types:

    1. Professional, *non-spammy* authoritative sites that have accurate information and aren’t trying to sell me anything at all.

    2. Sites constructed by people who love their subject and who often know nothing about optimisation – but these sites are rarer. Gems when you get them though.

    What sites dominate Google and are returned in the listings more often than not?

    Directories and shops, eBay, Amazon (thank God Kelkoo has gone).

    I often do a search on something and skip the results that come in on page one or two and start at page three so I have a better chance at getting information. I don’t want to be directed to a shopping site or a directory!!! I want to know and find out about a topic, I don’t want to BUY ANYTHING!!! Yes, I know I’m a nightmare surfer… but there are many of us out there – we like to use Google like it is a library of information, not a shopping centre.

    It’s not always about money. It shouldn’t always be about money. I feel that quality of information should come above everything.

    I have to say, Google is great. It’s simple and uncomplicated. There aren’t any adverts on their main page and you don’t have to wade through a hundred news bulletins to get information.

    The information superhighway.

    Not the shopping superhighway.

    It’s not always about buying somthing. Surfers love quality information too.

  86. Ive reported lots of sites using blatant hidden text during the last year.
    They are still there even after this update?

    I cant see how these sites get in top positions in the first pace, surely there is a filter that can spot the same text colour on the same colour background.

    =TRUE adopt a penalty.

    Even if the above isnt possible, i’ve posted enough spam reports in the past that they should have been edited out by a human by now?

    The sites i look at with hidden spam text are in positions 1,2,3

    Im all for submitting these spam sites again, if something is going to be done about it this time, otherwise myself and all other users are wasting there time submitting these reports.

  87. I would like to know, why we since one year have seen so much talk about supplemental results, 302 links been displayed as a page in google, 301 redirecting, to soon omitted results, url only, hijacking, scrapers…

    Why dont any in the google sytem explain why all this mess has come and stayed, specail after they added those new “sites”.

    before there where NEVER talks about that, only about rankings and the sytem.

    Why dont we seen just a little fixing done to this?

  88. hey matt ive done this for this site: www*bluelaserdesign*com

    scroll down at the bottom and select the “blank” area, all hidden text, its been that way well over a year and theyve been at the top of the g-rankings all this time, its ridiculous, do u suggest i report them once a day or something so google will see it easier?

  89. Hi,

    For the last 5 years I have scraped a modest living as a full time poet. Like to think I’ve done a lot of good for people along the way. Have behaved, worked hard on my links, posted original content and for most of those 5 years have enjoyed page 1 for “anniversary gift”, “birthday gift” and “wedding gift” etc. NO MORE!!! Thanks to Jagger I’m dead in the water (about position 500) and this poet is now looking for a full time job. Matt, please can we have the old Google back? Pretty please? PS Please visit http://www.agiftofpoetry.com while it’s still there :o(

    Sad regards,
    Allen

  90. Does anyone have any idea when this jagger fiasco will be finished so we know whether we are going to be sent completely broke or not? We’ve gone from a high ranking site to somewhere in “slash your wrist land” – the emails have stopped the phones have stopped ringing and if we could afford it we’d probably take up drinking about now. Looking for accommodation anywhere in the Tweed region of Northern NSW, different pages on the same directories come up … one of whom just has every accommodation house in the region name and address – each on a separate page. No other information because he wants to charge us to join his directory ….. nasty way of getting rankings and a nasty way of doing business – but if we want to eat next month we may have to pay up!

    A mate of mine over in WA has had his site bumped from Pos#2 to 30 … in his place a site that’s under construction.

    As for my own searches … well I’ve moved to Yahoo as it’s returning far more relevant results than Google nowadays.

    By the way … anyone coming to Australia and looking for peaceful accommodation – can we do a deal for you

  91. Hi Matt,

    I believe after the update our site has been penalized for a duplicate content filter for a couple of reasons, one for a canonical URL problem which I wasn’t aware would hurt search results (specifically canakit.com and http://www.canakit.com) and another because we had an domain (www.electronic-kits.com) which was pointing to the same IP address (not 301 Redirecting as it should have been).

    My question is, how does Google determine which site to penalize? In our case, http://www.canakit.com has PR5 and is much much older and has more links to it as compared to http://www.electronic-kits.com, but http://www.electronic-kits.com seems to be the one not penalzied and http://www.canakit.com although indexed is nowehre in the SERPs. We have lost pretty much all our traffic since the domain that is NOT being penalized has 0 bank links and low PR.

    If the alogorthm arbitrary chooses one site over the other, wouldn’t people be able to copy sites and post them up for Google to index in order to hurt their competition?

    I am in the process of fixing the problems by trying to remove all links to the non-www domains from the index and redirect the second domain properly. How long before the penalty is usually lifted? Is there anyway for certain to know if you are being penalized or if its some other problem?

    Many thanks for your input and time.

    — Nima

  92. Matt,

    Sorry for the duplicate post, but on a separate topic, while researching the canonical URL problem, I have found some links to an illegal URL pointing to our site which have been indexed for some reason. The URL “-%20www.canakit.com” (yes that is – and then %20 ie. space character). Not sure how this happened but I suppose someone linked to us this way and because of the way the web server was configured at to respond to *.canakit.com, it was a valid link at some point.

    My problem is that these are Supplementary Results and I doubt Googlebot will try to refresh them ever and see that they are invalid now.

    I have tried to submit it for removal using the corresponding page on Google but it won’t accept the url “http://-%20www.canakit.com” saying it has illegal characters in the URL.

    How can I go about removing references to this domain since I am afraid this may be helping to classify our main site as duplicate (sort of like a canonical URL problem).

    Thanks for your attention.

    — Nima

  93. The jagger update in some areas I watch hit spam and others hit content sites. The sites who do a good balancing act of various types of seo and content techniques seem to prove that if you continue to provide fresh unique content in many forms with out focusing on one specific area of seo that this will ensure that you live long in google. And no I didnt do better or worse in the results, overall just a good wash.

  94. I am glad to know that Google has a way to report the bad guys who make the web no fun.

  95. Hello Matt!, did the update finished?, because i see in my website a lot of changes on the results, one day it is on first place, then on second place, and then on first place, what does it means?, it will change or it will stay like this?, my users has grow up a lot since this update, and my pagerank from 3 to 4!, thanks a lot

  96. Hi Matt,
    Can you take a look at our site and let me know if/why we’ve been penalised as we’ve done our best to make a good quality site by following your rules, but for some reason we are not getting anywhere in the SERPS.
    Are we doing something wrong?

    Thanks Matt,
    James

  97. Matt, I think Michael Martinez is right.

    Florida and Bourbon – which came first and what were their dates?

    I wonder how many SEOs can remember.

    I don’t really mind who names Google events (though I would prefer it to be somebody from Google), and I don’t mind them having a name, but they should have a date reference. eg ‘jagger10/05’

    NG

    PS Just to add my vote, I think jagger10/05 so far has been a shambles. Hope it gets fixed quickly.

  98. Don’t worry accessible, those SPAM reports are never read or acted upon. 😉

  99. The reports will be controlled.

  100. hi Matt,

    thanks for this great blog. But i have a questuion about beeing penalized. We have a price comparison domain, and it is penalized.
    We have and never had doorway pages, hidden text… but we had a duplicated content problem, with the german de and com domain, but since 8 month 1 have this problem solves with an 301.
    But the .de domain ist still in google and user come to us with the de domain. Many content stealing serach engines took our content and link back to us, so google could think we have doorway pages.
    what can we do, because i don´t know how to remove the DC of other sites.

    thanks for your help

    p.s the domain is http://www.outletters.com

  101. Google is ultimitely responsible for adsense spam. Did they think people would sit back and let a potential income source go by untouched by greed?. and is it greed to create a site that servives on advertising only? er isn’t that why google exists.

    splogs and google adsense based sites will continue to dominate until google decides to do the obvious.

    restrict adsense to approved pages only

    Or even easier. restrict adsense to pages that only receive a given number of hits. I am sure google is capable of counting unique hits. once a threshold is hit the site is considered to be legit unless proven otherwise.

    This way you know the page has someting to offer other than spam.

  102. Dear Sir,
    Can you possibly review my website and let me know why I have been penalised, as I have done my best to make a good honest and staightforward site by following your guidelines, but for some reason I have disappeared from view.. My site is not spam, and I have no violence or rudeness. The information is current and up to date.

    Have I done something wrong? If so please let me know so that I can correct it.

    Thank You
    Kevin

  103. Dear Mr. Cutts,
    I own and run the largest community portal in the state of south dakota, we’ve never included adsense into our portal, because we always thought it would drive business to our competitors from our site. We have seen this happen on other sites. I was just wondering if you had a good response for that. With that said… I have seen many scrapers and splogs that still our content. We’ve worked diligently on keeping a clean and SEO safe news, information and community site that is offered free to our area residents and we’ve consistanlty lost page rank. As a local we’ve even lost rank to those who have never been here and don’t know squat about the Black Hills. i.e. BlackHillsPortal.com That is why it now think “Google” has to do more to help legitimate sites. Cue: Once a site steals or gains rank… and traffic he becomes victor. No matter what one does… it’s almost impossible to gain that back with content. I think “Local” rank might have effect too! So if you do search for “City” then ford… Ford dealers in yahoo or some scraper shouldn’t get the credit. Just a thought. I’m kinda glad that maybe we didn’t put adsense in… looks like that might hurt us as well.

  104. Thank you for your article. Now I know what to do to report those spammers 🙂

  105. It’s frustrating. I am playing a clean game, I have pages with contents, I follow the rules and for my main keyphrase I am around the 50th position (shortly ago I was around 10-15th), while one competitor has the web site stuffed with spamming keywords, various kind of tricks (including doorway pages and cloaking), but for the very same keyword he is in the 2nd place. Reported to Google he is still there. What is the logic conclusion I have to make? GO AHEAD WITH TRICKS, Google doens’t care. In fact 80% of the sites in the first 3 pages use tricks and NOBODY cares. Many of them are also reported in consumers’ reports as bad businesses, but they work a lot, just because they are in the first page of results.

  106. Dude,
    Some of the subsequent posts after the rants have been useful and informative and I take your point completely. We are totally ‘white hat’ for our own and our clients sites. We have been strong supporters of Google/MSN/Yahoo guidelines for webmasters and have written articles on the importance of true organic SEO and following said guidelines. Our site and many of our clients sites are gone.

    I have to believe that this update is not over as the general feedback is that the so called “white hat” sites have been heavily penalized. Why would Google penalize the the sites following their own guidelines sending clients flocking to the black hats. Such a move by Google is simply unbelivable which is why I think making those claims is hysteria. What Google are being accused of is that they have deliberately devalued sites who follow strict guidelines and have rewarded sites using questionabl techniques. On the surface of it that does indeed seem to be the case but until the update is complete which is estimated to be another two weeks then we have to believe that the smart people at Google would not do something that insane and what we are seeing now is a phase of the changes which will correct itself in time.

    It took two months after Florida for the white hat sites to resurfac let’s hope its not two months this time or I might get hysterical too!!!!

  107. Google can not concern itself with a few webmasters who have good sites being upset while effectively addressing the complaints of tens of thousands. They are doing what is best for their users as a whole, and in turn, themselves.

    Since I have been out of Google’s index for what seems like an eternity, and I do a TON of searches every day, I think I can say without bias that Google has done a pretty decent job lately of getting rid of spammy adsense sites.

    I got very tired of seeing spammy, made for adsense only sites taking three or four of the top 10 results listed for most searches in my “niche”. However, I have not seen any of those in the last couple of days while actively seeking them on the first page of Google’s results. This is good news to me, despite my not being listed. It means those who only serve themselves are losing.

    If Google can keep sites like that out of their index, then it will no doubt win the search engine wars.

    I understand being upset because your site has dropped down since the update but after viewing one of the sites listed above in a complaint from someone wondering what happened, even I can see it is blatantly obvious. When you have the keyword phrases listed 50 times each on your homepage, what do you expect? You may have been number one for your keyword, but you have a “spammy” site. Try looking at it from a user standpoint instead of from your own monetary standpoint.

  108. I take it Mr. Cutts has quit responding to this blog a few days agao…

  109. We are in web design biz since past 10 years. Our site has always ranked high on the popular search engine of the day.

    When yahoo directory was the top search engine we were no.1 on yahoo, when our site dropped to 7th position on yahoo directory, AltaVista came along and we were no.1 on AltaVista. Soon they became the top search engine of the day.

    When our site dropped to 7 position on AltaVista search, Google came along and we were no.1 on Google, till year 2004. Now we are at position 5 on google.

    I am waiting for our site to drop another 2 positions and then it will be time for a new search engine to appear!!!

  110. Re Jagger
    Our website ‘http://www.loans4ukcars.co.uk’ has dropped from 1 to 47 over the past few days for the search term ‘Guaranteed car finance’. I note that the current number 2 site actually carries a very prominent link to our site, suggesting that we are still very relevant to the search term. are we being penalized?

  111. Hi,

    Gr8 Stuff !!!

  112. Hi Matt,
    I’m really confused about the present update with Google. Only a couple of weeks ago a website that I built for our community called http://www.resortsbc.com was on the first page of the search results for the name of the community itself which is Nimpo Lake. We are in a very remote area and very dependent on tourism. There didn’t seem to be a comprehensive site promoting our area for accommodations, activities, weather, transportation information, maps or even photos so I built one. I’ve read everything I could get my hands on to make sure I was following the rules for promoting the site with the search engines. Entirely ‘white hat’ techniques so the speak. Now, the site has disappeared from the results. This hurts the community and those accommodations owners that have trusted me to promote their business. Have I done something wrong with the site? There is another site called travel.bc.ca that has the name of every community in British Columbia but uses the same information for fishing, activities etc. for our community as it does for all the other towns it lists. Why would it list first for our area when the information is not only inaccurate but duplicated for all areas? Could you please let me know if I need to make changes to the site? Thank you JB

  113. I saw a strange phenomenon (reported via the Dissatisfied link) – a site: command showed mostly the .swf results (a tiny Flash effect on an otherwise text-heavy page). Only after selecting “repeat the search with the omitted results included.” does one see the text URLs.

  114. Hi,

    Hopefully, Matt is busy trying to fix the Jagger mess. From my own personal experience, I think Google have made a mistake as searches and $ ad spends will be directed elsewhere. Being solely on Google at the moment is like having a high street shop with the road outside being totally closed to pedestrian and vehicular traffic. Even worse, no one tells you the road is going to be dug up nor why they chose to dig outside your shop either. To cap it all, when you e-mail the “diggers” (or Jaggers), no one responds. Ring any bells?

    Regards, Allen

  115. like you Nigel Blackhall.

    this happen to my site too, which list in no 1 on each keyword for several competitive keyword, and drops for no 100, that horrible, and most of the first page was the sub domain and that was the second products they have,

    I already submit as Matt said and still waiting the affect.

  116. Hi Baker

    You site is still listed in Google (about 87 pages), just not ranking as high as you would probably like. Having said that, the SERPs for Nimpo Lake look good to me. In fact, since the update, I cannot say I find any non-relavant SERPs. Not perfect, but far far from irrelevant.

    I think the last people Google will listen to are Webmasters and SEO 🙂 For each one that is unhappy, there is at least another who is happy.

  117. Just face it, the complex alog’s will never be able to give relevant results. The proof is in the pudding. Stability and fairness will never be acheived with a mathematical formula. Google is one giant Yo-Yo, up and down for no logical reason. The more complex they make it the worse it will get.

  118. People need to take off the kids gloves with these comments. Google with every update, especially this one, is annihilating long standing businesses right and left. The mere mention of Google and it’s antics is beginning to make me sick to my stomach every time I hear the word Google. You people have become so obsessed with something (Lord knows what it is) no business is safe. I can’t understand why MSN, Ask, and Yahoo do things so correctly and Google fails in so many places.

    I personally have seen my own rankings and others decline ten spots every other day until they reach 250. Then they jump to position 70 and start the same process over again. This whole garbage started in late May. Now Google seems obsessed with every obscure term people might be making money on.

    Listen up Matt we can’t all provide web sites or blogs for the pure entertainment of people without supporting our families and employees. Perhaps you can sit in your cozy little office philosophizing about the virtues of search but remember 85% of the world is engaged in small business (check the fact).

    It’s obvious in health sections now large business interests can just create a page about the keyword and gain top rankings. The problem is 99.99% of the web sites pages have nothing to do with the keywords or subject matter. It is legitimized spam Google has given the OK to.

    The old saying that once they become rich they don’t give a damn should be the true motto for Google. Have any of Google’s people ever read your guidelines? They are as volatile as the Iraq situation.

  119. Green Lantern, I provided a way to give specific feedback to Google, and there are people reading that feedback; Angelo, we’ve already acted on a majority of the spam complaints we’ve received in Jagger1, so I would definitely send us spam reports right now. Green Lantern, you didn’t provide any specifics in your post or provide a url, but I hope you’ll take the time to send info on your site using the methods in my post. I’m assuming you’ve checked at the newer data center (66.102.9.104), but if you still see ranking that you disagree with, the best way to get that feedback to us is to use the jagger2 keyword on the dissatisfied link.

    Hope that helps,
    Matt

  120. I played that game with GG and his Bourbon update forum. The forum was never activated and he never responded to any of my posts regarding the forum. I believe I still have the E-Mails as proof of my assertion

    Ironically the DC you list 66.102.9.104 just completely disposed of the entire page of results I was listed on. Interestingly the only two sites left standing for that page were two sites composed of 200,000+ pages. I devote my entire site to the subject matter but it is only 150 pages. These gigantic sites rank well when only a couple of pages are devoted to the subject. The commonality of the removed sites (which I cannot find for the specific keywords on 66.102.9.104) was the entire sites were devoted to the specific keywords and some were commerce sites. I did before/after print-outs for comparison. I have watched Google since may just lift entire pages of results in my areas and toss them anywhere.

    Basically what is going on is sanctioned spamming by large corporate web sites. If I tried the same tack and wrote pages on psoriasis, sun-tanning, weight-loss, plus a million other subjects I’d be kicked out in a moment. I complied with all the past guidelines.

    To prostate myself before you is something you wouldn’t enjoy if roles were reversed. I was in Google when it was composed of about 1000 sites. Probably before you even worked for them. For years I sat untouched but you keep changing the algos and guidelines (not that it can be seen). Hell I only try and rank in the top 50-100 on some major keywords because people find quality. But with the current shennagins since May you make it impossible to make money in Google without spamming or creating 100 sites.

    I won’t threaten you with leaving Adwords but people are becoming more cognizant of how Google is profiting off us but hurting us at the same time.

  121. I think we have to remember that while one site may drop, another takes its place. Bottom line, for each whine there is a cheer.

    Let’s hope Google doesn’t give the queakiest wheels the most oil 🙂

  122. Bottom line Dave doesn’t that pretty much go without saying without it being repeated a zillion times. Show some originality of though. Quit kissing rumps and denigrating OP’s posts to win favor with Matt or whoever with your personal agenda. I believe you know the words for it. Nobody ever learned anything from a yes man or a “glad hander”.

    Personally I can’t stand the “ ___ kissers” but if it’s in your blood its in your blood. I don’t run vanity sites and post two sentence non-chalant euphemisms you’ve heard a thousand times. It seems to me we had Katrina, Rita, Wilma, the oil companies, and now Google Jagger ripping at people’s livelihoods and hearts. You gotta fight for what you get in this world. Perhaps it was handed to you on a “gold platter”.

    Like Bon Jovi says “have a nice day”.

  123. I tried the reinclusion email, and got an automated reply. Thanks Google.

  124. Green Eyed Monster: No use taking your frustation out on me 🙂

    Like I said, you may have dropped in the SERPs but you have been replaced by another business who has probably thought that they should have had your spot years ago.

    Rather than moan and post here add some content to to your site and make it an authority and a site others want to link to. Crying never solved anything.

    I too have lost some page placings. However, I NEVER rely on one, or a few search terms to bring in the bulk of my traffic. My biggest traffic bringing phrase only accounts for 1% of my total traffic.

    Content is still King!

  125. Jimbob, you get an automated email initially just so that you know we got your correspondence.

    Green Lantern, now I’m curious. What’s your site? Use the dissatisfied link with a keyword like greenlantern and let me know when you’re done. Shoot me specifics in a way that I can get to, or post ’em here?

  126. Matt, a month ago, I was really happy to see Google closing AdSense and Blogspot accounts that were splogging. This has stopped. Also, I’ve following your instructions for reporting splogs and they also remain 100% active.

    http://www.kbcafe.com/spam/?guid=20051027130534

    In other words, I don’t believe you. Something better change in the next week, or I’m going on a rampage.

  127. Matt I thought I was rather specific. You know how honest you are and I know how honest I am. But neither of us knows how honest the other is. In situations like that on the Internet I always advise people to weight the retaliation capabilities of the other party. I especially tell people this when communicating with search engines.

    Let me explain what many webmasters already know about the Health sections of Google. Lord knows Travel webmasters in Google, MSN, and Yahoo sometimes see it as a worse problem than they have.

    The problem is large unfocused Health sites. These sites have learned Google gives them free reign to spam any health category or keyword with small fluff pieces. Google sanctions their spamming by algo and PR. If I attempted the same thing I would be banned in a heartbeat.

    Take a minimum of 1,000 of these unfocused Health sites plus add .gov and .edu sites into the mix and nobody can make a penny with Google but large corporations. Voila with any health keyword the first 100 sites ranked are a fixed proposition. There are exceptions with any statistical analysis so albeit somebody can always point out a site that slipped through.

    Jagger though breaks the mold further and floods many health areas with thousands of sub pages from any type of large site. An example url might read: http:/www.notevenvaguelyrelatedtocategory/subdirectory/sub-subdirectory0725/health/conditions/diseases/1875392/p234/subject.htm. Most of these pages haven’t been updated for years and won’t be unless the increased spamming warrants it.

    To top it off though Jagger is not content with just the large money keywords they want to flood every less trafficked search term with the same thing.

    Bottom line, and I haven’t been wrong in 10 years, is Google is no longer a viable search engine for most small businesses. Small businesses sell to employ people and can’t devote endless hours develping content related to the history, evolution, specification, etc of every product. In effect only large corporations, spammers, vanity sites, and hobbyists can stand the barrage of continually changing Google algos. Content is one thing but the monumental amount of trash being produced to increase rankings is another thing.

    Last time I looked at Google Adwords there wasn’t a 5,000+ plus page site running ads in my areas. Google gave big business the search engine why pay. But the money men at Google know that already. Squeeze the little guy. History never changes.

    Dave quit trying to promote your sites with redundant unoriginal blog spam. Legitimate webmasters and business people don’t produce your type content. Most know 99% of blogs are just for professional spammers to enhance rankings.

  128. Hi Matt,

    Yeah, this Jagger is blah, blah, while other people studing Google’s algo and having tricks that lead them in retirement for a year we that use SEO ethical methods and follow Google guidelance are affected with this Jagger.

    I just wonder if it could be found elsewhere a Google algo source, how long it takes to study the source and finds new tricks that can make a site being ranked at top for a “short” period.

    Thanks,
    Joshua

  129. Green Latern

    Not sure what I have done to upset you. I know loosing rankings can be frustrating. But believe me, you are better off focusing on your own site rather than wasting time & energy ‘bagging’ all those above you in the SERP’s.

    The x posts to this Blog complaining about the SERPs would better serve you if you used the same energy to add some content to your site. You would have at least 3 pages of relevant content by now. Do that each day for a year and I bet you will like Google again. It’s a sink or swim enviroment for some I’m afraid.

    There are many here that are willing to offer you free advice, but you seem to have something to hide and will not show your URL???

    >

    It’s one site actually and as I have not posted the URL I think you should again focus on your site rather than attempting to ‘bag’ me 🙂

    >

    I would love you to tell me what my type of content is that you say I am producing.

    >

    LOL! You sound so very very bitter. But thank for your heads-up on Blogs I will keep that in mind should I ever start one.

    One last bit of free advice, considering starting a Q&A forum if you do not have one already. It’s a great way to get quality on-topic content for very low cost!

    Best of luck in the future.

  130. “”””To prostate myself before you is something you wouldn’t enjoy”””””

    Greenlantern,

    I don’t think that is something ANYONE would enjoy ;).

  131. “You’ve got something to hide.” Let’s hope Google doesn’t give the queakiest wheels the most oil.” Gimme a break, you’ve got to be some fourteen year old. The only way you’ve created any content in this blog is by attacking others. Nobody was even speaking to you but you feel some child’s need to follow Matt around like a puppy chiding others. Nobody seems to me snooping around for url’s but you. Would it help you if I sent you a porn site url. Snoopy little fellow.

    A fourteen year old doesn’t realize producing content just for the sheer point of content is total stupidity. Are you letting Google dictate that much of your life or have you lost the capacity to think. Plenty of webmasters shouldn’t produce content, I hope you get the hint, because they weren’t born to be authors. At this point in time so much content has been replicated and stolen by Adsense sites we don’t need people endlessly producing more drivel.

    What actually is your point in being here? It’s totally unclear to me.

  132. 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.

  133. You are a very bitter and angry person green lattern. All this hate and anger will chew you up before long.

    I have tried to offer you advice but you seem hell bent on making personal attacks.

    Your posts say a lot more about you than me I’m afraid.

    You have been asked to supply a URL for your site at least twice, but you will not?? Perhaps, as you do not want to publicise your URL, you are positioned appropriately in the SERPs.

    BTW, do you REALLY think Google are going to manually put your site pages to where you say they should be?? Dream on!

  134. Dave the 14 year old go away and let the rest of us discuss Google. Nobody came to hear your advice. Are you that full of yourself.

    Most of us see you’re posing as an alias an anonymous shadow of Matt. Get A life child and quit pestering people.

  135. Matt, do you think that with the last update new sites with attinent and rich content are gonna be given the credit they deserve, or is there still that so-called sandbox that might preven those sites from doing finally better? It is quite frustrating to be a newcomer, work hard on SEO, being in the sandbox, and then finally when you thing it’s almost time for you to come out of it, the algorythm changes and all your work is probably gone before you could even see if it was a good job.

  136. Hello Matt,

    I think Jagger really hurt me even though I used purely white hat seo tactics. My site was banned as it was hosted with a shared hosting service who apparently let evil spammers put their sites there as well. I have since recontacted Google 2-3 weeks ago and changed the hosting company already . However, I keep getting automated replies. Please advise.

  137. LOL! You are a joke of a person you are green latern. Perhaps you were not loved as a child, or felt left out all the time? Maybe it’s time to take off your green latern suit and face the World 🙂

    RE: “Most of us see…..”

    I guess that’s a green latern skill is it 🙂 Do you often speak for all member here?

    There, now I’ve stooped to your level so maybe you will understand.

    I truly feel sorry for you, you come across as very bitter, angry and frustrated person. I can only imagine how you must live with your panties in a constant wad! You should learn to relax and listen to advice you have been offered. The World will not change to suit you my friend, you must change and learn to adapt.

    Oh, still no URL from you 🙂 I think we can all guess why 😉

  138. You can never get rid of a 14 year pest like Dave once they get started. Seems the only people looking for url’s are Matt and Dave. He’s even more incensed once his alias is exposed. Why not become Google Guy 2 now.

  139. RE: “14 year pest like Dave”

    That is soooo funny coming from someone who thinks they are the Green Latern. LOL! Too funny 🙂

  140. Is there anyway to get you Dave/Matt the 14 year to go away. It seems to really have incensed you that I’m revealing your’re Matt’s alter ego. If you’re advice is so good why don’t you go start your own little blog and leave the rest of us alone. I wish you had some imaginationother than the typical 14 year old alias “Dave”. What a loser.

  141. Matt,

    Our site has been listed for years and suddenly dropped out Thursday. The only thing we can find that might have been a problem is some test at the bottom of the page that went direct to category pages. How can we tell why we were dropped? How can we get back in? We submitted the reinclusion form but this is a very bad time of year for us to lose Google traffic.

    Thanks in advance,

    Nathan Focht nathan @ focht.net

  142. So Matt,
    See u haven’t been here of late. any comment yet on why our
    domain continues to be penalized?

    Thanks

  143. Yes, I agree . Please let me know. Mines is a mom and pop operation and it’s seriously affecting our start up. I know that we shouldn’t have hosted within the wrong neighbourhood but we didn’t know that at the beginning . Hosting has since been changed and I haven’t heard any response from Google yet for a month.

  144. BobL Said,
    October 20, 2005 @ 1:15 pm

    It is nice to see Google has addressed the keyword stuffing issue that has plagued them. Here is a top five result for “wedding invitations”

    http://www.partypop.com/Categories/Party_Wedding_Invitations.html

    BobL, thats excellent, very funny, had me tittering out load. Good to see a 96 style retro google SE

  145. Matt,
    Good morning and I hope you are well. Our site, http://www.mohotta.com, has been listed on Google for years and all of the sudden dropped off. I am not sure if I am blacklisted or what and I am hoping that you could possibly assist me with figuring out what I have done & how to correct it. Thanks in advance and have a great day!

    Jimmy Kelley
    http://www.mohotta.com

  146. Matt,

    If you’re still reading these comments and responding to them, I would like to mention a site of mine that was penalized by Google a while ago. I sent in several requests to Google asking why the site was penalized (because it does not, and never did, use any prohibited tactics), but was never given a reason – nor was the site unpenalized. I am just asking for resolution of some sort to my predicament. If Google is neither going to unpenalize the site nor send me a reason, at least PLEASE ask them to tell me so, so that I can reach resolution with my situation. I have been in a state of limbo for quite a while now.

    Thank you.

  147. Matt
    My site http://www.chessbaron.co.uk has dropped from number 3 to number 110 in Google.co.uk for the phrase ‘chess sets’ and from 10 to ‘nowhere to be seen’ on Google.com. The site is not spammy, no affiliates (is all our own stock) and has PR6. The site has hundreds of links, no sudden increase, and is recognized as an established store. We’ve just invested in $40K worth of stock for Christmas, and suddenly dropped away…
    Pleeeeese help….
    BT

  148. I’d like to add that…. really…. it’s not good to suddenly pull the rug up from our feet – I mean, couldn’t you make the change in February or something. Sites that were not showing don’t have stock for the increase in traffic and those that were showing well lose perhaps an unrecoverable amount of money through much reduced traffic – and all for what? My site is a good search result for people looking for my product.

  149. So noone is retired by now except those nones that are driven with theirs vanity to respond. EHEHEHHE

  150. Hi,
    My site’s (www.e-austenite.co.uk) PR has been increased from 1 to 3.
    But it had been indexed 7 th September 2005, after that no index has been made.
    But I can’t find any reason for this. It will be very helpful if anybody can help me in this issue.

    Thank you.

  151. hi matt, seems we have all experienced a major decrease in traffic from the most recent jagger updates. please keep us up todate on data centers that have the most current jagger# version applied. thanks.

  152. Hi Matt,

    I was going through the various comments here and found it difficult to follow the multiple conversations… to connect your replies to the questions. So I thought maybe a forum application would be an alternative platform for discussions. Then I saw Search Engines Web suggesting that there be a Google forum. I think that would be a great idea. This way, different people can help you answer questions and WMV isn’t the resource people would be directed to. Also, the forum application would split the replies over several pages so it would be easier on the reader to wade through them.

    I agree with Michael Martinez’s evaluation of WMV, whose members are kind of rude to hijack your blog to discuss their site. I know you’re so sweet and nice that this probably doesn’t bother you, but I would guess non-WMV readers of your blog might be peeved to have to weed through those posts in your blog comments.

    Thanks for having this awesome blog!

    Thu

  153. Ad Sense Defender

    http://www.inkjetcoders.net One of thousands of (YOU KNOW WHO) new attempts to use google adsense to rob google and their users from quality on the internet. Please put them out of their misery once and for all.

  154. Hello,

    I have just discovered and started to use the Google Alerts. Of of the Alerts created was ” New Inventions”. I received an alert 8th November 2005 at 10:03 –
    “From gunpowder to the next big bang
    Orlando Sentinel – Orlando,FL,USA”
    On using the link, I get the message that, “The page you requested was not found”. Doesn’t the Alerts only provide valid sites and not those that have expired?
    Google’s is great but let’s hope this small irregularities can be rectified.
    Thanks.

  155. Hey Matt,

    Our co. along with several others were recently banned from google thanks to digidogstudios turning us in over several months. We know now that hiding the keywords can get us banned so they have all been removed.

    My seo person intentionaly hid keywords to get above all the misc. sites that have nothing to do at all with web design but still clutter the top 50 rankings. So instead of non-relavant sites being the target of digidog, he decided to go after actual web development companies in the top 5 out of 4 million plus results.

    Our problem along with several other companies is the way we were harrassed via online forms from our websites and messages left randomely on the internet by the kid that bugged google until we were removed.

    After researching the kid that turned us in we noticed right on his own site he is using techniques listed in plain site on the form to turn in abusive sites from google?

    Do you have any advice besides a reinclusion request to get our site indexed again with out the hidden text that has been removed.

    Also are there any LEGAL actions you know of to take against this other person for the slanderous emails we have recieved.

    Our attornies are not internet law savvy, but advised on multiple defamation of character law suites once we track down all the companies that have been affected by this kids unprofessional actions.

    Our ring of local companies didnt mind so much getting banned, it was the taunting, rude messages sent via email and online forms.

    Thanks for any information you can provide.

  156. Hello!

    My site (domain) was just fine and had great placements in jagger2. Now, when jagger3 did it’s thing over the weekend, the sites I have are wayyyyyyyy back in the returns (ie #253 etc). Please note however, prior to the Google update in late July, I also had great placements for years and they disappeared then reappeared with jagger2!

    I am also noticing that the referrals I get from Google now are mostly from Europe and Asia! What happened to the USA referrals?

    I do not use any spam, I don’t have bogus links to link farms (although I find they have linked to me somehow on their link farms when I check Alexa), I don’t have hidden test or css, and I’m confused as to why my sites have gone down the tubes with jagger3 when they were so good with jagger2. My referrals from Yahoo and MSN are of course increasing every day.

    The sites have been in magazines like Scouting News and are referenced in libraries all over the USA, they’ve been in newspapers as a great garden site to visit too! If the public loves my sites so much, why doesn’t Google?

    Thanks, Matt, in advance for any enlightenment you can offer on my dilemma with jagger3.

  157. line of thought 1:

    “I think its quite commonly accepted that a lot of directories have lost pr, been removed or penalised over the recent 18mths because they have been over SEOed or have been too top heavy with PPC listings.”

    Response:

    Seo’ing of directories is hardly a danger to serps. Directories that are basically paid admission free-for-alls is more of a danger. You line up 600 directories and pay a few thousand to get in. At some point, all those links become age-recognized by google and bam—your site takes off.

    I posted about this once before: I saw a site buy a half million links on a huge network of online newspapers. The site went into the sandbox and I thought “wow, google is on the ball”. Then 4 months later, out of the sandbox and on top of the serps for the site’s keywords.

    Why did this happen? Because google allows the links to age into maturity. Maybe the thinking is: if the links are stable over time, they’re reliable. All this means is that if you can buy a ton of directory links or keep paying for a ton of sponsored links, you can buy your way to to the top.

    The google engine is simply not as smart as many would think, and certainly anything but intuitive.

    line of thought 2:

    “You have Yahoo, Zeal – that’s good. Try MS Small Business directory, Yell.com then leave it at that and monitor the traffic from those first. It’ll take some time to get the figures and get an accurate measurement, but is worth it. Measure and monitor.”

    Response:

    Most directories, even dmoz, are relatively useless for building traffic since most web users (99.99999%) have never even heard of them. As far as I can tell, they only serve the purpose of building backlinks.

    Yes, they are crap backlinks. But I know of a couple sites that have gotten to the top of VERY competitive niches by simply having tons and tons of these crap links. Based on these very recent observations, I can only conclude that to google a link is a link is a link. And while some links are more relevant than others, in most situations it simply does not matter where you get your links from. It’s freaking sad, really. It’s like the articles sites. Want a couple thousand backlinks? Write 10 articles, submit them to 20 articles sites and once they syndicate those out, you’ll have all the crappy, but google-recognized, links you need to ride the spam highway

  158. Thank you for the info , I was getting worried about sites just going upto PR 4 even without a single BL . Could you tell me when does this Jagger 3 end ?

  159. Dear readers,

    What to do if you get an undeserved penalty? (WE, a dutch SEO company > http://www.optimalisatie-website.com) have been penalized and we don’t know why. We didn’t use hidden techniques or spam. All our content is VISIBLE!!! We used to have pagerank 4, now we have 0. We think one of our competitors filled in a spam report and that Google just banned our site, without checking it properly.

    Does anyone have good tips what to do in this case? Wich department of Google is best to contact? We already sent an e-mail and we had phone contact, but no answers on our questions! (Why did you penalize us?)

  160. Just contact (mail) google about this, they`ll surely remove if you haven’t done anything wrong. I had bought one banned domain accidently, sent them a mail and was listed in a week. 🙂

  161. Hi, applerock.com has dropped after the Jagger update, I was wondering if anyone knows what it might be. I’ve taken a look at the site, and I’ve found “display:none” on external CSS, but no code calling it in HTML pages. I’ve also found non-related external links. Might those be the reason wny applerock.com is almost nowhere to be found in Google?
    Please help.
    Thanks,
    Paul.

  162. What a great way to thwart the efforts of the “SEO Experts”. Congratulations on a superb disinformation campaign. Goolgle must be so proud of the way all the “experts” hang on every word as if it is some kind of new delivery of stone tablets that will enlighten them as to the ways of Google.

    Why not publish another patent appliaction with all of the changes Jagger has introduced so that everyone knows what is happening at Google, or will tie themselves up in nots trying to figure out.

    Drop the odd site from the index here and there. The occasional big one and hey presto you have the minions eating out of your hands.

  163. I have a site http://www.prescriptionsfirst.com which was hosting before one month but still didn’t index by google.i have listed it in so many directories and search engines but it is still in cache but the pages which listed it has been index…so please let me know can i get index my site in google .

    thanks

    morris….

  164. Will (Bluelaserdesign),

    It is quite funny how the guilty point fingers. You cheated, you hid text, you got banned, it is simple. There is nothing illegal about that. Whoever reported you had every right, whether if it were me or anybody else who reported you, it doesnt matter, if you werent guilty then you wouldnt be under any heat from Google..

    On the other hand, it is quite typical of a blackhat SEO to defame those who point out your techniques with result. Digidog is completely whitehat and your claims of anything otherwise has absolutely no backing to it.

    You cheated, you lost, it is how the game is played, so just move on.

  165. Hello,
    I have been listed on page 1 under the search term “gift baskets” for the last 3 years. There have been no significant changes that have been made since that time. I have recently added a sitemap, but this should only help my other pages get spidered. Since that time my site has moved to a page 40. (last time I checked) Today I checked again, and it dropped even further. I have good quality content, many quality links, and no hidden text or anything that I should be penalized for.

    Please help!

    Respectfully,
    Candice Paul
    Gift Baskets by Candice
    Tel 888-628-4474
    sales@giftbasketsbycandice.com

  166. Hi Matt

    Reading this blog comments I feel that Google is trying to cut spam but their are many who are hiding hundereds of keywords. web design…..etc etc hundreds of keywords But Google can not capture and punish them. Do i show you examples. So what is Google doing to check them.

  167. Great Google

    Throw away the spammers. Hope honest sites goes up.

  168. Hello Matt,
    I am in hopes that you can help me out. I’m not sure if anyone else is having problems with Google’s last Jagger update in their key word rankings, but they might want to check to see if Google has their http://www.domainname and domainname indexed. I found out that Google has my site indexed each way and with page rank for both, so I am being penalized for duplicate content. They are supposed to realize that the site is one and the same but after the last update a lot of web sites are having this problem. My understanding is that the more of us that file a report with them the more likely they will be to put a priority on fixing the problem. There is a permanent 301 redirect you can do but I’m not sure if this will cause being even further penalized even though it is something Google actually recommends. Basically we are stuck until Google decides the problem is wide spread enough to put effort into fixing it. With this happening, I went from a page #1 for the term “gift baskets” to a page 75. What is even more frustrating is that I found a very sexually explicit pornographic site ranks on a page 11 for that same keyword I’m trying to get placement for. Very frustrating!

  169. I found low-quality site that is running AdSense with no “ads by google”.

    http://www.cambodia.com/

    I think they are large network that send to another layer web before send to google.

  170. Dear Matt.

    Some of spam blogs still in ranking after jagger,

    Thanks for info.

  171. Still no change in my ranking. Still a page 75. Not sure what is going on with Google. I emailed them to find out what I can to improve my ranking. I got some automated response. I was ranked a page 1, #6 for the last few years. It doesn’t make sense to me that my ranking took such a hit. Once again, the pornographic site is still ranked very high for the same term I am trying to get good placement for. I’ve sent an email to Google in regards to this, but the site still remains with good ranking.

  172. 12/13

    Reading all the messages from the spam hunters, makes me wonder who made them the experts on spam. What is spam to one may be exactly the information another is looking for.

    Killing off sites by artificially sending adsense messages will eventually distort the Google revenue stream. And I doubt Google will allow that to happen.

  173. In regards to Candice’s messages about the porn sites. It seems they will always come in front of an ordinary site because of the seemingly millions of porn link farms.

    Why is porn so easy to find? Maybe human nature…

  174. Opinion:

    “Although you thought you were gaming G. G is actually gaming you.”

    Putting it in this perspective pretty much explains all the internal contradictions regarding Jagger updates and their effects, beneficial or damaging, mentioned above.

    Most of the SEO used is simply to battle other SEO – the optimizations are mostly relevant to what the sites actually offer. The taboo about hidden texts etc is arbitrary since excluding on that basis doesn’t directly increase relevance. The SEO marketing grew out of the ease of manipulating G SERPS derived by a dog simple algorithm. Its simplicity is how G doggedly managed to scrape together the biggest repository of internet content in history (now probably no longer the biggest.)

    G has simply created random enforcement of an arbitrary rule about optimization hoping fear of being sandboxed will correlate to improved content. I think we can all see that the content shuffle (dance) results in quality of content remaining equivalent, especially when comparing G SERPS to MSN or Yahoo SERPS.

    Because the spot checks randomly penalize a minority of SEO’s (as is done to unique offenders in penal systems to set an example,) it means that all must continue to SEO to combat the majority of escaping competitor SEO’s. In that sense it is now simply too high risk to build your business around natural index references from G. Either you follow rules and are delisted/down listed or you break rules and are top listed then sandboxed etc.

    To hedge the growing lack of consistency G has added other types of services to keep a draw to the SE/portal. Maps, Blog tracking, Data Base, Shopping etc. all to keep the idea of using G, for other than paid results, drawing traffic. This is necessary, since the SE is becoming a paid inclusion index and when the transformation achieves critical mass competing SE’s will be at parity for results with G or will be better as is now the case with MSN and Yahoo.

    G has juice because it promises to pay off in traffic, money and conversions. It promises to pay adsense members a handsome revenue share and it promises to pay advertisers/content providers a handsome share of traffic with a high conversion rate, because it knows what traffic demands by way of the SE query.

    In practice, outside of paid inclusion, delivery on promise is proving increasingly difficult to manage as the number of participants dwarfs the service’s capacity to manage itself. Adwords/click fraud, Adsense/non transparent revshare, legal overhead, sporadic payouts, Organic SERPS/corrupted, no count of pages indexed (as G used to display on the home page.)

    The end result is that G must contrive all manner of rational to explain away the fact that it must improvise on a moment to moment basis to cover all its bases and stay ahead of encroaching competition.

    In a nutshell the truth may be that G has simply become a paid inclusion SE with some additional services including spotty organic results.

    I offer this commentary without judgement – but simply as an opinion about where the SERPs are headed and how they will fit into the future of search engine marketing using G.

  175. My question would be how Google handles authority sites that are engaging in tactics that other sites would quickly be banned for.
    Example:
    http://www.dentists.com/ohio_dentists.php
    Look at the “lines”.

  176. Google just fell below Yahoo and MSN, Could this be related to the campaign google has started against the Traffic Exchange industry. The Traffic Exchange industry is not going away no matter what google does. When google figures out the difference between auto click and auto surf, and recinds the active campaign, I think they will find their url banned from traffic exchanges which got punished in this silly campaign. I have seen other large internet companies
    go after small business but I think this is an extreme injustice to people who help new sites get seen and invest time and money in the internet as a whole.
    Killing small business is wrong in any manner and the only traffic exchanges that should be punished are the ones abusing the system. It is obvious to me that gogle can’t seperate the bad ones from the good ones so the are going after them all. What a way to help the internet.
    Kevin Hillman
    NWT sites

  177. Still having a problem with ranking. Site shows up under “gift baskets” on page 2 for server http://64.233.179.104, but won’t show up under any of the other remaining servers. Have written Google several times, but only get some automated email response. Nothing has yet to be done. Also, once again the pornographic site still wins in ranking, beating many of the other legitimate sites trying to make a living. I’m starting to give up on Google, as I have seen that there are many high ranked sites that have nothing to do with gift baskets.

  178. Matt,

    Just curious if you respond to any of the comments. I made a comment Nov 30th to you, but never any response back.

  179. Hi Matt,
    You are to be commended for staying cool in your comments amid this Google bashing. I have seen odd results as well but slamming you or Google here isn’t accomplishing anything.

    Question – you mention here that the new data center is 66.102.9.104.
    I am hitting 64.233.179.99.

    Is this part of the new data center or will it all soon be going to the 104 IP? – the results are different between the 99 and 104 IP’s..

    Also – this search for resume asp
    http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=resume+asp&btnG=Google+Search

    my resume has been #1 since around 2000, it has been replaced by the W3C XHTML Validator page… ha! Oh well I guess that’s the long way home but it would be nice if it was back to the way it was.

    Thank you,
    James H. Summer, Jr.
    http://tentonweb.com/

  180. Hi Matt,

    Some information for you that may or may not know, I was amazed at google new addition to there site which enables webmasters to remove website pages from google which helps to keep google clean of rubbish and dead pages, “BUT”!!! it cannot clear out pages from the actual domain name eg: http://fred.com, I tried and it removed my total site, and gogoles says you will have to wait 6 months before your site will be shown again, even though they spider me every day, though this totaly my fault, I do think that the implemtation of this option is wrong, they should clear out the pages then allow those page names to be used again say a month later after all the data servers are clear.

    Now A really big security problem with all this, I had three other domains which I did some checking with, one of the domains had one page in so I got Google to delete the whole site, then I put up a lot of pages, Google index all the pages, but never made them available to the world, BUT!! as I used 4 different domains for my experiment it suddenly struck me, I could put any domain in and google would delete them THAT IS A SECURITY HOLE BIG TIME.., if you need to see a domain that I have used that no longer is in the index check http://www.sapphire-designs.co.uk.

    Thanks for you time Matt..

  181. Hi Matt,
    Our family business was struck very hard with the BigDaddy update with pages lost and an extreme loss of traffic. Needless to say I’ve been pulling my hair out trying to figure out why we have taken such a hard hit. We don’t use any bad or spammy practices and have a lot of good content on our website. We did have another domain name, but it has been set as a 301 redirect for some time now and was able to get DMOZ to change the link name.

    We have started using Google sitemaps to try and help the situation by adding only our most important pages, but it has had little impact although the errors section has been very helpful.

    I’ve used the Google tool to check for our listings
    site:www.sfxperformance.com and we are down to about 17k, but we used to have around 170k or more prior to the update.

    I recently did another search thinking that if I excluded the www portion of the domain that it might make a difference however when I searched like this it returned all of our original results, but they are

    -www site:www.sfxperformance.com

    The strangest part is that all of these pages are under SSL / https:
    They only way to get to SSL on our site is either through our cart system or putting it in by hand. How could this have gotten into Google this way?

    Also we have fallen victem to many “scraper” sites stealing our content and even going as far as copying our copyright statement and using it to display their google adwords pages. I’ve reported many of these to Google, but they put them up so fast these days I’m sure ten more will take their place soon.

    I know you are a very busy man, but if you could look at this I would be most appreciative. Thank you again for your advise and your time.

    Kind Regards,
    Chriss

  182. Hi,

    Our website is http://www.animationindia.biz and Page Rank is 3. We have changed our web hosting. So, my query is

    1. If any effect in Page Rank?
    2. If any problem in search engine listing or result?
    3. If site’s popularity will go down?

    It will be very cooperative if anybody can assist me in this subject.

    Thank you

    Bikash
    animationindia.biz

  183. I saw that you have a page that discusses patent-related resources at http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/update-jagger-contacting-google. I wanted to suggest adding http://www.freepatentsonline.com to the page. This web site has free PDF downloading (instead of having to page through TIFFs like at the US PTO). It is by far the best free patent searching site.

  184. What do you do if your website listing appears to be corrupted and the home page regularly drops in and out of the index? For instance the page rank is still 0 after 2 1/2 years and pages are often listed twice with and without the ‘www’ and then put in the supplemental index as though they were duplicate content even though the content is original. We have had a 301 redirect on all non-www URL’s for over a year. To the best of our knowledge we have never violated any google guidelines and the website has not been dropped completely so a reinclusion request makes no sense.

  185. On the subject of webspam and reporting via the Google spam report form….

    I recently noticed a site that consistently appeared as top result for a number of mildly competetive local search terms. The page that was appearing most was the homepage which contained virtually no text.
    Looking at the source it was immediately apparent that this site was using CSS to hide heaps of spammed tags and paragraphs of keywords in many different combinations. I estimate there were about 2000 words there.

    I reported this on via the form, and understanding that there was bound to be a delay left it at that. This started around a year ago and I think I must have resubmitted it on 2 occassions. Nothing happened.

    Then I unearthed a useful email address (I won’t publish it here unless Matt says its OK) for reporting spam at Google. So I tried that.
    Within a week I received an automated response and within another week the site was dropped waaay down the SERPS.

    So it does work, people at Google do listen. But it seems you get to the people that matter via the email address rather than the form.

    Anyway, hurrah for Google!

  186. I have been reporting spammy sites and notice a great deal of them have a “powered by http://www.peakclick.com” link in them. This might be a good place to start in eliminating some spam.

  187. Hello,

    Thnaks Matt Cutt,
    I think organic seo work will be ended in the future and only adwords/adsense will run becoz search engines like google is deeply watching the site contents.
    Even ethical way is also take unexpected more time.

    Whta about mt thoughts ??

  188. Hello
    I think There are three reason to penalize a site in Google.
    1 – Copy of the content.
    2 – Dont have relavant Links
    3 – and Using Black hat SEO Techniques

    So tell me the exact reason of Penalize a Website in Google.

    http://www.brainpulse.com

  189. I always enjoy reading everybody’s comments it seems we are all working so hard at cleaning up the internet and boosting our own web stores.

  190. Hello, when Google assign a pagerank? My site is active from 4-5 month and have not pagerank assign. But i ve a lot af link,from good site..i remember that the last pagerank calculate is in January. The next? Thank you, and excuse me for my English Thank you

  191. Hi Matt,

    Like Andrew I am finding lots of sites that are using comment tags and noscript tags to hide keyword stufiing thereby sending them to the top of Google for certain keywords. I have reported them via the http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html link but months later they are still there!

    Its so frustrating for those of us who aren’t trying to hoodwink Google into giving us top positions for the keywords we want our customers to find us for but who are trying to make a living on the internet. Why isn’t Google doing anything about these sites!

    Kind regards,

    Elaine

  192. Hi
    I was just curious how the PR system worked and after how much time the PR would get updated. (Like many questions on the page) ?

    The real question I was wondering is, do mobile sites get higher PR and better search engine rankings ? Since there are very few of them.

    Cheers
    Rehan

  193. I i’m also interestedin was how the PR system worked and after how much time the PR would get updated.

  194. I have always read about Jagger update that has taken right step to spam the sites for many reasons. But after Jagger is there any other updates.

  195. The Indexing policy of Google is changing frequently and it is hard to follow .

    But the no of back links and keyword frequency is major factor determines page rank in google.

    Sometimes yahoo and Google displays different no back links for Same site.

    http://howtogettrafficonblogs.blogspot.com/

  196. nice explanation. but what does this term mean Link Vault and Digitalpoint Co-op

  197. Hi Matt,
    leading on from what Dawn mentioned about PR I was just wondering what the state of play might be with PR getting replaced by a Trust Rank? – I have sites at the moment where the backlinks suggest a decent PR and the Google results are great both on UK and global, but which aren’t getting the PR score. I have a friend with an English/ Chinese web site suffering from the same scenario. I’ve never has this problem before or experienced it before, just over the past couple of months. Might it be the the implementation of a Trust Rank is what is slowing things down or changing the criteria behind the scenes, or do I need to be looking elsewhere?

  198. Is PR that important? I know sites that are listed top3 and have been for a number of years with a low PR on major keywords, however they are relevant and the content is good

  199. Hi Matt,

    What’s the best way to report proxy sites that have stolen site content? Is the google spam report appropriate? – this seems more concerned with spam that affects users rather than that which affects the website thats been copied. Also if I use this method how long would it take to get the pages re-indexed? Although the copied pages are not ranking for any keywords in the google index, they have caused my pages to be de-indexed.

    The whole of my site has been copied on this site but at present only two of the copied pages have been indexed. Obviously I am now concerned that the rest of the site will gradually dissapear as google caches more of the copied content in favour of my original content. My website is only small (17pages) so the loss of any pages can have a big effect and i’m obviously anxious to get the pages re-indexed ASAP and the copied content de-indexed. It was only by chance i noticed that two pages had dissapeared when doing a site search. Checks using Copyscape.com identified that complete copies of the site had been made on a proxy site.

    Thanks,

    Anthony

  200. Google didn’t seem very easy to contact.I needed to contact Google about an error but I wasn’t able to do it

  201. Are subdomains considered black hat? i had 15-20 subdomains related to my keyword on the site.

  202. How some webmasters try to fool google : -(

    I’ve found something,
    which is one of those things what Matt Cutts and Google wants to avoid.

    U can see here how one webmaster places link text in different sites with many, many keywords phrases ( many of them repeated ) all leading to his site.

    It almost seems like as if the owner of the 1st site/blog mentioned below didn’t realized the unfair methods of the webmaster taking advantage of every single link text with keyword phrases all leading to his website in order to get good search results.

    Every single outgoing link goes to the same website, lots of links with keyword phrases.

    1.)
    blog with too much outgoing links: xxxxxxxhttp://aziroet.com/hipotecamix/

    2.)
    site with too much outgoing links:
    xxxxxxxhttp://lacomunidad.elpais.com/floren-martin/2007/9/12/-cuanto-cuesta-cambiar-nombre-coche-

    The website we are talking about is currently joining top positions in the spanish search results.

    Matt, what’s your opinion about that?

  203. Matt,

    I spoke with you briefly the last day of SMX about reporting SPAM and quality issues for local.

    Can you post the best way for us to communicate with the local team?

    Check out http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&rlz=1T4GZAZ_enUS224US224&um=1&ie=UTF-8&q=breast+augmentation,&near=San+Diego,+CA&fb=1&cid=0,0,9610073403769252562&sa=X&oi=local_result&resnum=1&ct=image

    At the time of this post results 2-4 were the exact same address with spammy titles instead of real business names.

  204. Hi Matt,

    w w w . c o c h e s – b e l g i c a . c o m

    This website was using constantly illegal practices to get top-rankings joining top-positions until google detected the fatal behavior.
    Now we are wondering that this site is joining again top positions in the spanish site with exactly the same top-results like they did before when they used houndreds of repeated keywords splitted on 3 or for 4 websites linking to them.

    Is it a cache problem and if not, how is it possible that google miss something like this?

  205. Sorry forgot something regarding to the previous coment:

    Of course we understand that a reinclusion could have happen
    but it’s strange that this site is joining again the same top-positions with more than 10 keywords from the beginning of the reinclusion or experation of the imposition.

    Matt, is this normal?

  206. I agree. I’ve tried contacting Google too, with no luck on issues. I wish it were easier to get an answer sometimes.

  207. This guy is funny.

    Basically it comes back to “create exciting unique content” and people will link to you naturally and you will not get penalized.

  208. thank you very much matt. i knew few unknown tips in seo..

    very nice

  209. Thanks Matt, i`ll do my part to get a few nervyish spam sites out of the SERPS. A lot of pages with good content and informations out there, but almost only e-commerce sites landing in the top search pages.

  210. I think it is important for Google to enable this spam function for people to report spamming websites. Google are getting better all the time with search relevancy.

  211. Aaron! i really do listen to you!

  212. How it is that some sites blatantly violate Google webmaster guidelines yet never get penalized. I know of one site who runs multiple domains for the same business and fake review sites all pointing back to the home business site. They are being listing in the top 10 and hogging the serps. They are tricky though, registering the domains under false or divergent entities, but the adsense ID on all sites is identical. Matt Cutts needs to check this one out and explain how they are getting away with spamming Google!

  213. Thanks for the valuable info here – i know this post is old, but its still relevant and i have seen an increase in webspam recently, so will take note of how to let Google know about it.

  214. Though this is a old blog post, It is still useful regarding seo. thanks 🙂

  215. Hi Matt,

    From time to time, I get offered marketing tools that spin articles, create web 2.0 profiles and otherwise spam the Internet. All the time, I get messages from such tools in my Twitter feed and alerts. This is by far a bigger problem than reporting a single site violating Google’s guidelines, “and still, they come”.

    I would like (as, I’m sure, all the other ethical people online) to see Google take decisive action against web spammers on a massive scale. Basically, the more spam you allow, the faster Google will go the way of the dinosaurs. Clean, useful information is what the people want and they are voting with their fingers and going to Facebook. In the meantime, honest online operators are losing business to junk sellers.

    I know you can do it!

    All the best,
    Gal

  216. I personally have seen my own rankings and others decline ten spots every other day until they reach 250. Then they jump to position 70 and start the same process over again. This whole garbage started in late May. Now Google seems obsessed with every obscure term people might be making money on.

  217. Matt I have been working with google places/ Maps for 5 years now and since google new algo change the biggest spammers which to what i can see is stress free std testing
    Which if you look for more than 2 sec will see why !!!
    Google need to look into this especially since your the head of the new spam team.

  218. My wordpress site was hacked in August 2011 and 6,000 spammy pages were added to Google index. I think I have found and removed all the hack code. I did the robots.txt thing that Google wants, the hacked pages go to a 410 page. I requested Google remove the pages from their index. Yet 926 pages remain that Google won’t remove despite a second removal request. Plus 3 reports about being hacked and my results of removing the code being sent to Google which obviously resulted in little to no results. I am paying a site security company for security at this point. It would be great of Google actually honored its own instructions to the webmasters and actually removed pages we want removed. It seems Google thinks they know better than the webmasters what should be in a site the webmaster owns.

  219. Dude, you’re using WordPress. Of the three sites I’ve ever worked on that were hacked, two of them were WP and the other was hacked because of Hosting Controller (something a former host installed). Using WP without significant customization is like hanging a sign in front of your house with the schematics for your alarm in the hope that if someone breaks in, someone else in the community will patch the hole. It doesn’t make sense and it never did (and yes, I’m aware that Matt uses it for his blog…but he’s also aware of the risks and has the ability to test/control things using his blog from a search point of view that we don’t).

    Besides, you “think” you found and removed it. If 926 pages remain of 6000, chances are you didn’t. And it’s not Google’s fault you got hacked…the blame lies with one or more of you, your host, and/or WordPress itself. No sarcasm intended here…do yourself a big favor and try to figure out how to build/operate your site without WP. When you learn that, you won’t have any of these types of issues.

  220. Matt,
    I’m not sure what you mean by back link analyzer. I submitted a reinclusion request for one site about a month ago – 11/20 – and it has not come back yet. Does that mean that ‘algorithms/scoring’ is what caused it to be filtered to begin with? And that a reinclusion request won’t help?never add muti contents , Had some duplicate content, but took that down a long time ago. Still no Google referrals though.

  221. Blackhat seo techniques actually banned the domain by google …………..Matt pls help in regarding black hat

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