I am seeing the decrease in my index using site: command, yet, some of main landing pages (attract top traffic) gone out Google's index. This is the first time I was hit. I am afraid that Google update their internal duplicate content filter.

Hope everything will go fine for everyone outhere.

Just to be clear, the reason that I asked people to send in queries was because we *were not* seeing major differences between data centers. So this is more for seeing what people are talking about and less for collecting feedback on some big update.

I know you were not seeing large differences. But when you reply, and you have, and you don't see any changes, you say - there isn't an update your aware of. This seems special, doesn't it?

Matt, Google did SOMETHING:

1) Old sites that have done nothing wrong suddenly dropped out of Google's index around the end of February, early March

2) Cache data has been inaccurate and appallingly unrefreshed even though the index reports that new content and links are working.

3) New sites take excruciatingly long time frames to be indexed whereas up until late February/early March it was a fairly quick and painless process

4) Your index numbers don't agree in Webmaster Central

5) Site: queries don't match up with inurl: queries

6) Many site: and inurl: queries which normally fluctuate for large content sites became "frozen" and continued to report the same numbers every day for at least the last two weeks

7) Less relevant results have floated to the top of many queries because more relevant pages have either dropped out of the index or (temporarily) lost their inbound links

So you don't have to call it an update but everyone else will. Maybe it's just a data refresh but it smacks of an algorithmic change that is more substantial than the usual daily tweaks.

Would you mind asking around to see what minor little things did change, because a lot of little changes still add up to a huge change in the users' perception?

"Would you mind asking around to see what minor little things did change, because a lot of little changes still add up to a huge change in the users' perception?"

Michael, I'm happy to ask around, but it helps to have specific queries or sites when I talk to people. That's why I wanted to give a feedback mechanism that people could use in private, just in case they felt uncomfortable giving specifics in public.

Matt, I'm definitely seeing some result shifts as well. Not sure what's up, but the folks who posted here aren't the only ones.

Tamar, definitely send a "dewey" report if you want; I'm happy to hear of any differences between data centers.

People are definitely worried. I have not seen this much traffic on the multiple IP address Google ranking checker at http://www.seocritique.com/datacentertool in ages.

Hey Matt,

I keep checking the results and it seems that they've shifted back. If I notice anything out of the ordinary, I'll send a report. Thanks. :)

Matt, can I have a job? Since google hasn't listed www.tuscl.com in the results for "strip clubs" my traffic has dropped 75%. I know your algorithms are working perfectly, but they are just missing something... PLEASE HELP ME!

How about we call this the "Screwey" update?

BB

Matt:

I also experienced some anomalies when logged in to Google Webmaster Tools when out of our 700+ pages indexed, using a site:domain command it only showed 130 pages. Instantly the thought was a new and improved duplicate content filter that in essence acts like a supplemental filter on the fly. However, upon logging out, the site: from Google worked just fine (and all of the pages were indexed).

Not to mention, the new social media interface that allowed you to (X) out or promote (up arrow) your pages within your your search results made a debut as well.

Any thoughts about this, particularly the missing 600 pages while logged in?

I am not a SEO I am a very worried site owner of www.lastminutevillas.net
Since the latest "Dewey" update my site has virtually disappeared fropm the main terms we were aiming at,bearing in mind we have been in the top 5 for "florida villas"orlando villas""florida vacation villas" for the past 7 years and the Google stats nopw show we are not even in the first 100 pages this is totally wrong,Google should understand they are playing (and I use the term literally) with peoples livelihoods.
If SEOs and owners listen to Googles marketing and want to be part of the best then Google should reciprocate and ensure the results are not flawed.
By all means Google get rid of the c**p but let us honest people survive.

We have seen a 62% drop since March 2nd. this is the firs time in 9 years our traffic droped from google.

I have to say that I agree with the comments of Michael Martinez. Sites are not getter spidered as often, new url's are taking longer to get indexed and webmaster tools information and actual search listings are not syncronised.

We too have been hit badly by the Dewey. Our home page isn't indexed at all. We are not even listed under Izziwizzi Kids (the company name) anymore. This has had a crippling effect on a growing business offering outstanding service to our customers. Agree that Google most definitely needs to consider the livelihoods of the people affected by these uncommunicated updates. The most annoying thing is that I can not put right what is wrong with the site with such a lack of information about the update. I have worked tirelessly in keeping content interesting and useful and Google friendly. Most definitely has affected us more so than a standard upgrade.

It's affected us too, quite dramatically. I thought I had been de-listed. We used to show up towards the top of the rankings for "mom reviews" and "baby product reviews" and now we are pages and pages back, if at all.

So with the various comments posted and peoples livelihoods in jeopardy I am interested to know what Mr. Cutts intends to do about it if anything,these are genuine people with genuine businesses that have been affected who have followed Googles rules and demands yet in my case there are sites appearing high for the terms we aim at (and disappeared from) that clearly do not follow the same rules.

My site is optimized for the term "search engine optimization" and seems to be changing hourly (Datacenters?) between postion 2 to postion 10.

Google has been playing around since January with mistakes in Caches of sites etc. Any chance that this update will correct all the recent faults.

All these dozens of BILLIONS of dollars you made thanks to search (with a market valuation of about $100-200 BILLIONS) - I would like to suggest you invest 1% of it into hiring staff that can support honest webmasters who are worried about their jobs when Google decides to swing sites around.

You may now have all the powers in the world, but the contempt you are showing for webmasters' lives and jobs may some day backfire on you.

Our site has the best content and interactive tools in our (small) industry, and we've been ranked #1 for 5-6 years. Now for some reason we're down to #10, and I'm under fire at work. We're close to laying off people because sales are down.

PS: A Google search for "Google market valuation" brings stories from 2005 and 2006...

Definitely a downgrade in results as far as I see. For instance. Run a search for "ray ban sunglasses" and the top spot will be for the company, which is a good thing. Problem is the next two results as I have been seeing for the past couple of weeks, are less than quality sites. The one in the #2 position is part of a mini-net. The main page to that domain links to an almost identical site on another domain which again links to an almost identical site on a third domain and so forth.

The site in the third position has no contact information, phone number, address, nothing but a contact form. Fishy, suspicious at best.

So, I would say whatever Google's doing, the black hats are getting the benefit of some of it.

Our traffic from Google is back and the results seem to be back to what it was before the change. I learned a lesson though, don't depend upon one source for traffic!

All of these posts, and Matt Cutts doesn't even offer any advice or support. Google is the devil in disguise.

This last Google update has set us way back. It is hard enough to compete online without the, what appears to be, completely random swaying of Google's algorithm. It's a sick feeling to have first page rankings one day, then wake up the next morning and everything is gone. We work tirelessly at SEO, because doing it right takes work, and lots of it. So where's the benefit?

Joe, I know what you're saying. I seem to have been wiped completely for my keywords and about moved to 8th for my own company name!!! adzooks is higher with my details!! I filled in the form and can only hope.

I just hope that google sorts this out.

Crushed, yes completely crushed.

My site has bombed from 15,000 - 20,000 uniques per day to 200. I was found for over 140,000 unique keyphrases last month according to Awstats and now I'm ranking for none.

I have been completely wiped off the map in a matter of hours. Revenue down from $450 per day to about $1, and i have some other site i have never seen before that links to mine showing as my cache snapshot.

Great.. Just great, thanks Google this has ruined my life.

I might take the motto "Do No Evil" as my own, it seems you don't want it.

You will not see much different results between Google DC's themselves but you will see "huge" different between countries. Same "Google.com" but "ranked differently" in each and every countries. I think "Dewey" update is prefer about local filter.

Example - Your have targeted "keyword1" and this keyword has been searched most in these countries
1. USA (12,455)
2. UK (8,744)
3. Canada (3,254)
4. India (2,735)

Then your site ranking will be fine in most countries except 4 I listed above. My own site which targeted "keyword1" ranked #3 in all Google DCs and #3-4 in almost countries except 4 countries

1. USA (95)
2. UK (20)
3. Canada (10)
4. India (8)

How can my site ranked well and steady in some countries which I never got linked from such as France, Turkey, Australia and more? I think this update is no good in filter some spam site. I have seen many spam sites come up in the first page. Many of them done in black hat method (keyword stuffing, cloaking, etc.)

Well one of my sites has AGAIN vanished, can't find it anywhere, gone from about 3000 page views a day to about 50. What the fucken hell is this search engine doing. And you know this is twice this month!

Our site has also vanished again. It's so frustrating.

Why the hell is Google doing my site keep vanishing then reappearing, before this update i did well then plop right at the back and back to the front again, few days ago vanished again!!!

I use Google tools, and my site keeps vanishing, twice this month in fact, revenue has died thanks to this update. WHY HAS MY SITE VANISHED?

I have a site I have been working on now for about 3 years. One particular URL did very well and then a week ago it vanished completely from Google. No warnings, no messages - NOTHING. I have gone from 20000 visitors a day to 400 - 500 a day. The worst part is I have NO idea why or what really went wrong. I have no idea if it relates to to "Dewey" or not. All I know is the URL still has not come back and I have a bad feeling it won't be.

Hi,

Site vanished from serps around the end of March. In fact, site is completely gone from the results, including the domain name itself. Google webmaster panel shows links pointing to site and says 14 urls from the site are indexed. However, when looking at google webmaster overview says no pages exsist in google index. Submitted a reconsideration request 3 weeks ago.... no response from google. Hmmm.... site vanished, conflicting information in the google webmaster panel and no response from google about reconsideration request. Very frustrating.... what is a webmaster to do in this case Mr. Cutts?

I think the worst part here is the fact the communication between Google and us webmasters is very poor. While I understand they probably get inundated with hundreds of thousand of emails/request per day, I think it would be more beneficial for Google to communicate the issues with us. If they (Google) actually let us know the issues at hand with our individual sites I am sure most of us (yeah there are some out there that are intentionally trying to "trick" Google)would want to get the issues fixed so we were re included. If we got the issues resolved it would benefit Google in that there would be more quality sites based on their guidelines. The lack of communication I am sure has alienated more than one webmaster and gave up on Google and just concentrated on getting listed on the thousands of other search engines out there. Most webmaster have learned to not put all their eggs in one basket (meaning SEO for ONLY Google). Personally I have begun optimization on my URL that disappeared form Google for a few other search engines and I am already seeing results, and at this time I have gotten NO response from Google on my re inclusion request or any other communication as far as if there is truly anything wrong with my page. If I received an actual message stating what the problem was I would be more than happy to fix the issue. Can't fix what I don't know is broken.

Google are doing a great job alienating just about every small business owner on the planet with their constant tweaking with no regard to the effects it has on peoples lives, jobs, businesses, family relationships etc. I know it's free to be on the organic listings but when you have this much power over people it comes with some responsibility. One day their contempt for us is going to be their downfall.

.. I wouldn't mind if it filtered out the bad stuff, but it's getting worse not better. I spend so much time constantly jumping over the hoops Google set, to stay legal etc.. and I know of sites in my business that are highly ranked even though they've got hidden text, spammy lists of area names and not much else. Search quality on Yahoo is defintely better now.

i was thinking there was something wrong on commenting on blogs from blogrush then put your link and luvcomment .. or that inter linking six pr 2 and 3 blogs is not good that are related . but its looks here that it is not just blogs . i was thinking google hates wordpress blogs . i am even thinking of going back to html .. i was also thinking it was the h2 in category that i cut the link out , or the h2 that i reduce the font size . or was that i was too hurry in changing topics of my blogs .. but then this is not just blogs . i guess i am not the only one staring at the sun ..

Can someone pls tell me what 13-page brochure sites with crap sitewider and blog backlinks and about 3 pages of commercial content altogether are doing above my years old 200+ information filled site in the serps?

Apparently Google reversed everything it stood for so far. No content, 2-week old sites with blog and unrelated sitewiders are the future now...
If you want to rank high, take everything in the Google webmaster guidelines and reverse it.

My site was dropped too from the listings for some keywords that ranked well before , I don`t know what to do ... So in two small words : "google s.u.c.k.s"

How come in all the datacenters my site shows to be on the 2nd page of Google Results using this tool: http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/multiple-datacenter-keyword-position/
Yet in the real search Google.com it appears on page 33 of results??? This has been going on Since Late January of this year! A Strick White Hat site that is over 2 years old...

Went from #1 for my key word. Now I can't find my site at all. This move by google just killed my site and my income.

Thanks google
Thumbs up to you.

I am having the same issue on my site with ranking. http://www.chicagostripclublist.com

6 years #1 or #2 for main keyword then index page is gone, rarely indexed now and doesn't matter anyway. Sites with hidden text and all kinds of guideline violations replacing me. Took away $25K-30K monthly out of my pocket for almost 3 months now. Thanks. Webmaster tools reporting inaccurate results on search terms, seems like a useless tool now. Having to file reinclusion requests for not doing anything wrong and surprise nothing happens. I'm not wasting anymore valuable time of my life on it and just taking my 5 figure monthly adwords spending somewhere else. Nice doing business with you.

Actually, google this time has made a very nice thing! the new challenge is per country! now you will have to target your backlinks per country...

actually, it's the first time i understand google's algorithm. google is not bad just trying to give you the most relevant results from your country. (even if the most relevant are not so relevant:)).

To me it is very clear that Google is destroying competition by downgrading all directories. I run a strip club directory. When you searched for the words 'strip club' it had a top 3 ranking. It now has a ranking in the range of 600 - 700. The disturbing news is that this happened also to all my competitors (stripclublist.com, tuscl.com, bbones.com). A few months ago we were all in the top 10 now we ALL are in the same 600 - 700 range.

When you now search for the most relevant combination (city + strip club, e.g. New York strip club) you only get completely irrelevant results (youtube, wiki, newspaper articles, etc).

To me it is clear: all sites that are competition in some way to Google (Adwords) have to be removed from the top SERPs. At the end Google wants to convert all generated traffic into Google earnings. Hopefully Microsoft succeeds buying Yahoo so they can start some competition.

I run a strip club directory. Until recently the site had a top ranking for the words 'strip club'. It now is in the 600 - 700 range. The disturbing fact is, that this also happened to all my competitors. We all had a top 10 ranking, now we are all in the 600 - 700 range. The top rankings are now for wiki, youtube, new articles, etc. This is also the case for the combination 'city + strip club' (e.g. New york strip club).

To me it is clear: Google does not like directories in the top SERPs, because they compete with Adwords.

And Poof Google dropped all my directories (6) out of the top SERPs. It started in March & i lost one after the other.I dodn't even rank for my company name. I am using the same (popular) script for all my sites. Could that have anything to do with it? I think big G doesn't like that script anymore. I don't get it, they shoot themselves in the foot : adsense income dropped 80 %

Oh yes we where hit by something too for about a year we had 20 to 30.000 hits from Google and then 2 days ago it went to 4000 no I tell you that suck more than you now. We haven't changed a thing so my guess is Google did something (and did not tell anyone about it) we now faces closing of our business so I can certainly say Google sucks. I hope someday someone will fight Google I really want the worst to happen to Google. If you have the power to control people and there life use it wisely or else people will turn there back on you.

WindowBlinds.com (12 year old domain) went from #2 for "window blinds" (the domain and company name) to # 45 overnight.

Have any of you gotten a resolution to this? Anyone coming back?

I know you were not seeing large differences. But when you reply, and you have, and you don't see any changes, you say - there isn't an update your aware of. This seems special, doesn't it?

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