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Google killed me

In March and April, Google made a big update to its search algorithm. This update, nicknamed "Dewey", hit many websites. The result for these websites being a drastic decrease in search results ranking. The rankings have even changed a lot over the last weeks, sites moving up and down in search results. This is known as the Google Dance syndrome.

Given the domination of Google in search, this kind of update is something really feared by webmasters. Your very successful website can fall in disgrace all of a sudden because Google decides it should not appear at the top of search results any longer.
This is what happened to my websites, SharpToolbox.com and JavaToolbox.com. When a site used to get 1000 visits, it now receives around 330. 2/3 of the traffic is lost! I hope this will improve, but I don't see any sign of this. It's too bad that you work hard to develop websites, and lose almost everything in one day...

To evaluate the rankings of my sites, I search for keywords such as ".NET tools", "dotnet tools" or "Java tools". SharpToolbox and JavaToolbox now appear several pages behind, when they used to appear on the first page for these keywords. Incidentally, my rankings are still good on Yahoo, and not so good on Live. But this is of minor importance because, 2/3 of the traffic was coming from Google, the rest from referring links or by direct access. Almost none of my traffic is coming from other search engines.

Have you been hit by this Google update too? Would you have ideas on how to survive it?

16 Comments

  • I have been hit by this too.

    i was ranking page 1 position 6 for my travel site and it suddenly dropped overnight to page 4.

    You might find the following link useful...
    http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/016754.html

  • Don't understand why to blame google... Your site traffic should base on incoming links from other sites. That's how your site's importance is calculated. Links are money of the SEO. If you lay purely on search engines then don't be surprised when you lose traffic when algorithms change.

  • Most likely your sites are indexed as links sites nowadays and they have been downgraded because of that.

  • Gunnar, I'm not surprised that my sites (and others) get downgraded. I'm mainly concerned by the extent of the change, and the power Google has. One day you have something valuable and the next you have nothing.
    Now, it doesn't seem worthwhile to maintain my websites, while they seemed useful a few days ago.

  • JV, this sounds like a good explanation. It could well be it. Too bad, because this is what the sites are and where their value lies.

  • That just means you're not good enough.

    Stop hacking the system. People haven't linked to you or thought you where relevant in the context of your query.

    If they improve their search-algorithm to be more accurate, that's great, the only problem I see is if the change in rankings have alternative motives.

  • > Stop hacking the system

    I don't see how I hacked the system in any way. Artificially creating a lot of links to a website for SEO purposes, that's what hacking the system is. A lot of people do it, even for a living. I didn't do it, and now I'm penalized.

    Of course, I agree that if not so many people have linked to my sites it's that they're not appreciated that much. I don't discuss that.

  • A solution maybe is to capitalize on a keyword or a brand.

    The keyword NDepend went from 300K to 57K. it doesn't mean anything else than the name of the product NDepend.

    Meantime the number of visits increased slightly, but still not enought to assert that Google brings me new customers.

  • A product name or a company name isn't useful for search. Sure, people searching for NDepend will find it immediately, because NDepend.com will always be number one for an "NDepend" search.
    The same is true for my websites.
    The visitors I used to get from Google were searching for categories of tools (".net reporting", ".net memory profiler", "c# to vb converter", etc.) or tool names (".net reflector", "aforge", "sharpmap", etc.). These are the persons I'd like to visit my sites. People looking specifically for SharpToolbox or JavaToolbox will always find them.

  • Looking at SharpToolbox.com, I think you would get a lot of benefit from more semantic markup. In my experience, that can be a huge factor with Google these days.

  • Dave, I'll investigate semantic markup. But can you tell me quickly what you mean by that? Would you have an example?

  • Good insight Brendan. But the thing is that SharpToolbox and JavaToolbox are not "link sites". Of course, they link to tool and vendor web pages, but there is a lot of content in them. All the texts are hand-edited and are not copied from other sites by some robot, as is the case with a lot of other sites.

    The purpose of SharpToolbox and JavaToolbox is to present concise and marketing-free descriptions of development tools and libraries. I think that these sites are different than link sites, and bring value to anyone searching for development tools.
    I understand and support Google's (supposed) move toward a better word, but I consider myself a collateral victim.

  • Semantic markup is basically separation of concerns for your presentation layer. The idea is that the structural markup should convey information about the content, not how it looks.

    Removing the table layout would probably be the first step. Making proper use of H tags is important too.

    Also, the hidden "DotNet" text near the top is dangerous. Google has been known to penalize adding hidden keywords like that.

    Finally, I don't know if this has anything to do with what happened, but paid links that aren't nofollowed have resulted in a lot of penalties this year. It doesn't appear that any of your link ads are nofollowed.

    If you clean it up, there's a good chance you could regain ground on your old ranking, and probably even improve over where you were.

  • Dave, thanks for your help. I'll see what I can do based on your advices.

    I can try to remove the table layout, but I don't really see what else I could use as a layout.
    I'll remove the DotNet text, which is useless anyway.
    I already use H1 and H2 tags on the tool, category and author pages. But I'll give them another look. I don't think that I can do much more on this side.
    I'll add nofollow where appropriate, even if I don't believe that it can make much of a difference.
    I'll try also to use Sitemaps. I don't know if it's worth it though. I wonder if someone has feedback on this. Is it worth the effort?

    In any case, I think that the only way to get more traffic, and at the same time becoming less dependent on Google, is to have more incoming links to the sites. This is more difficult to get than simply me updating the site, though.

  • Fabrice,

    see my latest blog post for a tool you might find useful for generating your sitemap (link in my name) and keyword generation also.

  • Will do. Thanks Guy.

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