The Google Mass Delist
Fellow compulsive SEO’s the world over have had one subject on the tips of their tongues this week, and thats been the massive de-list of websites from googles indexes.
At the moment there is no definitive answer as to how many sites have been delisted from the index, but a conservative estimate is that 10 to 12% of the entire index has been purged. That would work out to be around 9 billion webpages from the index!! As to why this has happened, well like everything relating to google there is no straight answer to that right now - but its safe to say that they have just been concentrating on sites that seem to be created primarily for SEO purposes, and cutting down on sites content with tens of thousands of pages indexed. One personal example is my poker forum which had 3000+ pages indexed up until a week ago, now its total site: yield is 1200, so its lost 60% of its indexed pages.
Why is this important? Well, using my example of the poker forum, I derive on average for the last 3 months, 842 clicks from google’s non-paid searches. That accounts for around 15% of my total traffic - and with 60% less pages it stands to reason that I will get 60% less clicks next month. That calculation doesnt take into account the fact that 80% of the clicks come from highly context sensitive searches, which will ofcourse decrease my overall loss in traffic, but all the same I would expect to lose maybe 100 u/v’s next month on the back of the “correction”.
My poker forum site though is of course just the tip of the iceberg - I am aware of sites with 75,000+ pages indexed in google that have disappeared entirely. These sites are primarily MFA sites (made for adsense) which is ofcourse against googles T.O.S.’s, hence giving need for the correction. I would imagine that these webmasters are a little upset as their sites will have almost overnight lost 100% of their adsense revenue’s, but as they say, live by the sword, die by the sword.
Many sites are ofcourse unaffected by this de-list - and those are the sites it would seem that have never employed active SEO practices. Another site of mine that has been unaffected is a political blog, which has both .gov and .edu backlinks to it, perhaps these have given it some credence with the big “G” and therefore it has been left untouched following the adjustment.
It remains to be seen of course if there will be a major pagerank update on the back of this re-index - in my guess there will be an adjustment, in the same way as there was last month during the directories “black wednesday” update - as ofcourse all that linkjuice from listed pages has now gone. This could be worrying if your webpages off site SEO revolved around backlinks from the sites most affected, such as directories, forums and other database driven SEO based sites.
I guess to sum up, its a lesson for the grey hat SEO specialists that just concentrate on total link yield, to look at their practices and build more context sensitive links rather than just buying mass links from services link TNX and so on.
Anyway, my calimocho has run out so Im off for some egg-nog!
Buenas Tardes Muchachos!
MM
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