Webmasters On the Edge with July 2008 Google Ranking Changes!

July 2nd, 2008 | 2,342 Views RSS Feed

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Couple of days ago, while I going through the clients' weekly ranking reports, I noticed that, there have been substantial fluctuations in the Google SERPS.(Search Engine Result Pages). It was an unexpected occurrence, that was later confirmed by the Webmaster World thread, that these fluctuations were indeed happening due to the beginning of the Google SERP changes for July 2008.

For instance, a highly targeted website with appreciable performance has suddenly lost all traffic. The Webmasters also report that for the month of July this year, the short tail searches are starting to surface but long tail results have completely disappeared.

Our readers might remember a post that I came up with last month in regards to the sudden and a dramatic traffic drop from Google. Even for this month, there are very few Webmasters who can say that their site traffic has normalized since last month.

Now it's quite understandable, that our readers, especially the Webmasters might be facing a lot of trouble as the Google SERP changes are running parallel to the June 2008 Yahoo! Search Index Update, that I had reported about two days ago. With both the search engines running updates simultaneously, many of us are feeling as if we are stuck between 'a rock and a hard place'.

However, as with every update, I would again advice everyone to ride this out and “let the dust settle.” The inconvenience should be over soon, so just hang tight and keep an eye on those numbers.

Here are some interesting excerpts from Webmaster World

“Has anyone recovered from June 4th catastrophe?”

“No recovery so far.“

“one particular site of ours which was badly hurt has started to see a few shorter tail terms begin to slowly come back up, long tails are still nowhere.
its basically a one-page information-heavy (kind of cookie cutter looking site)”

“The only chance I see is to take a deep look at sites in your niche which have not been affected by June 4 desaster and to make a new site based on these facts.

Chaning current sites makes no sense at all since in most cases you need to change the url/file structure.”

“our target term, very niche, is four words, we've always dominated for it. contains the word "home"
now it's buried – out of sight.
but if I drop "home" bingo, back on the front page.
Wild “

“My positions have completely dropped this week for a site that has enjoyed good ranking for years.

It happened over the weekend.

On sunday, i jumped to position 4 for my major phrase, then when i check on sunday, it had completely dissapeared.

Even when searching for my sites name (and we're the only site called this, plus i have all the domains, .co.uk, .com, .net).

Now when i look, the first listing of my actual domain is on page 6, all the previous entries are pages about my site.

I'm really hoping this is a glitch, its only been gone for 2 days.

I'm going on holiday tomorrow, i hope that when i come back 18 months work hasn't been wasted.

I'm using exactly the same, safe link building techniques as i use on my other sites, all which have kept their positions.

Has anyone else suffered any similar problems where their ranking came back after a few days?”

“No change here and if anything its worse now than it was a few weeks back. More and more keyterms that we used to have in the bag are droping 3-6 pages from being at nos. 1 pror to start of June. So I have decided to do something about it as I can't wait another month.

Complete site overhaul and upgrading from static site to Drupal. Hope to complete by end of July. Will keep 90% of content add some fresh pages, blog, etc, new
navigation but keeping same URL structire, will also move site to a different dedicated server. Small and tightly controlled â€œhello, over hereâ€ link campaign.

This has hit us hard and I wish I could have done the overhaul when we had more time at the end of the year but G habecome impatient and so we must obey : (

Will post back if that 'redeems' us!“

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Comments

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48436 Responses2008-07-02+13%3A05%3A33Navneet+Kaushal to “Webmasters On the Edge with July 2008 Google Ranking Changes!”

Joey Ross Says:
July 4th, 2008 at 10:12
Nice post, but I cannot for the life of me figure out google, I tgook a bit of a hit in the last few weeks, but I just continue to work on backlinks and directories, which helps me hold my ground. My web site is # 3 in google for my keywords, for now, but I spend about 1hr everyday submitting my site,to relivant directories. This seems to work for the long haul.
wisconsin mortgage Says:
July 11th, 2008 at 09:24
I had my 3 year old domain go from 400 visitors to under 100 in one day on july 1st. I also lost all my local state and city specific rankings, many of which i used to rank #1. Granted this is a terribly designed site it still always ranked well and had content added to it consistently. The only thing i can figure is i had some duplicate descriptions.

I also cannot see any results when i search for my name, noting on my site comes up at all form over 2000 pages? Very weird!

But this has happened before in the last 3 years and traffic always comes back, although it has never taken this long.

I am just crossing my fingers because the adsense revenue and leads this site provided made me alot of money over the years
Smilesquare Says:
July 14th, 2008 at 05:34
I just noticed that my site also has traffic dropped from 700 visitors/day to 200 visitors/day. For many of my keywords that were in #1 and #5 all were disappeared from Google search. Although my domain has pr4, but it's not help from this disaster.
James Jenkins Says:
July 21st, 2008 at 06:32
Hi – I am from the UK – I noticed a hit which reduced my site visitors by half from google a few days ago. Most of my internal pages have disspeared from the google serps but my main domain is doing better slightly than normal and has not dropped out of the serps.
Has anyone noticed this before?
Ian Says:
August 13th, 2008 at 14:15
It is now August and my site has still not recovered. It even seems to have dropped even lower over the past two weeks!
Rica Says:
October 14th, 2008 at 23:08
It's OCTOBER, and my site has not recovered yet. I've done everything SEO-white hat as possible, and yet I still for the life of me can't get it back to where it was before. I used to get 2,500 unique visitors a day, it's dropped to 900 visitors. I'm having a stroke, and I'm only 25.