Google - The Self Correcting Prophecy
Posted on January 28, 2008
Filed Under Search Engine Wars
Interesting things have been happening in January with Google and her search algorithm’s. I will take the fate of one of my sites as an example.
Prior to the January PR update, this site was pulling approximately 300 uniques a day from Google based on a few strong keywords, but mostly on random long tail results that were deep within the content.
After the PR update, this particular site still stayed at a PR4, but all but dropped out of the Google rankings, only continuing to pull in approx 10-20 uniques a day from people who found it buried on page 30 of the SERPs.
The reason for this drop could have been many things, but there was probably fair reason that it was flagged by a computers point of view, however from a users point of view the site is a wealth of content.
However yesterday something happened that is being reported by many others across the sphere.
Google Self Corrected and my site came back into the SERPs. Not quite to 300 a day, but hovering well above 200 uniques from Google with my 1st page ranking for certain keywords again restored.
So What happened?
- My theory is that during the PR update, the system flagged my site and dropped it way down. Then over the last 2 weeks I still pulled in at least 20 visitors a day still from Google who found it buried. most of these visitors stayed some time on my site which has a low bounce rate.
- Google observed this that despite being buried, this site was being found useful by many people and hence corrected its own mistake and bumped me back out of the sandbox.
What can we learn about Google from this?
- Content is Still King.
- If you want good traffic, build a site that people use.
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3 Responses to “Google - The Self Correcting Prophecy”
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Hi,
I have experienced the exact same as you have described (dropped off, came back in serp even higher then last) but the twist is I have dropped off again, now for the second time.
I have an ebay affiliate site which I started in July 08 and during the first week, I pulled in traffic based on the long tailed keywords. But I discovered about 2 weeks into that suddenly I dropped off for my keywords on google serp.
This site is an aged domain and had some backlinks. I was using a free plugin “feedwordpress” then.
After my traffic dropped off, I started investigating…and found that the plugin I used produced do follow links as well as having many 404s after I deleted the auctions that had expired. My bad because I am a noob. So, hundreds of 404s, do follow links..I figured this was the reason. So I revamped the site, and redirected all the deadlinks.
In late July, google had a page rank update and this site earned a PR3. But I was not ranked still in serp. Then suddenly one day, I returned to the serps for more keywords and higher ranked then before!
The sad news is this “too good to be true” status lasted for less then a month. One day I just dropped off again for all these rankings. Just like that.
Granted that I have some articles I wrote on my site…I didn’t surround my listings with content…I still am waiting to see if my site will revive again.
In the meantime, I am still trying to see how I can salvage the site and what I can do to avoid this situation for future sites I build.
And also if I should purchase BANs or Phpbaypro from the money I earned.
You may detect that I sound very disappointed and I am. I am trying to earn a living from my ebay sites. Guess there’s still a long long way to go…
I found the the PR has nothing really to do with the SERPs results. Though aged sites with Non-ebay indexed content seem to do well…
Definitely get PHPbayPRO - it is quite masterful and worth every penny,