Google Update Katrina

I have to add my voice to the whining, pining and moaning of webmasters who woke up this past Sunday or Monday to discover that Google wasn’t sending them nearly as many visitors.

Not this site which along with several others has remained stable. Then again none of those sites ever had 20,000 – 30,000 unique visitors a day like my mine, my purely personal site.

I’ve visited various SEO and webmaster forums and weblogs to see if anybody knows anything. There are lots of guesses. Nothing more than guesses.

Some capture me for a moment. Too much internal optimization? Mine have always had interlinking navigation by category and age. Breadcrumbs too. I did that because the sites I used to visit – like the old PCMag website – had the same. It made getting around easier.

Anchor text? Sure. When I was reading about the semantic web I was told I should have that.

I’d never heard of SEO back then.

My site – almost all of my sites have been scraped. Lots of people who’ve experienced the same haven’t been hit by the Google update some are suggesting should be called Katrina.

Bad inbound links? I didn’t ask for them. But I sure have them. People will link to anything trying to fool Google. But if bad IBLs were damaging blackhat SEOs would have been doing massive crap links attacks against their competitors.

Does anybody know why hundreds of thousands of websites have been – seemingly senselessly – slapped down in the SERPS? I don’t think so. Google engineers may. But I don’t know how much they really know will happen until they plug the latest algorithm into the system and watch the results. (Much less how they evaluate the results.)

The solution?

Ignore it.

Keep writing, working on your site.

Probably the Google engineers are twiddling with their latest refinements as I type. Maybe some of the key phrases that made my site popular will be restored to me. Maybe not

There’s always the next update.

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