Filters and Updates October 3rd, 2005 6:21 pm

Last week was one of those week’s workwise where you just wish you’d stopped in bed and not bothered to get up! The start of the week started off with a virus scare. Some useful tips learnt from this are (1) keep your internet security updates up to date and valid and (2) it is not good giving users viruses via your webpages. Several security password changes later and thankfully a quite reasonable audience meant that damage was limited.

The biggest worry was more “what could have happened” as opposed to “what did happen”, but it’s important to learn from near disasters. Also, we’ve finally invested in third party back ups rather than rely on ourselves to get it done. (and some of you reading this will think why haven’t they done that before and others will think hmmm I better get that sorted).

If that wasn’t exciting enough a couple of our domains suffered the Google filter experience. The cause is something many are speculating over at Webmasterworld and despite having read through several posts it’s not really clear what’s going on, why it’s going on, and if it’s yet over.

Rather than waste time worrying about the changes time was used to look at the areas affected. Firstly a bug meant that duplicate content could be an issue. Whilst the bug had been fixed so it couldn’t reoccur, the old pages could still exist and in Google they still exist. Therefore any tweaks Google are doing is based on old content. To combat this the offending pages have been recoded to generate updated pages that are not indexable. In theory this should remove them from the index.

The above bug was the common denominator in two sections - a third section exists that has already suffered the same fate - this will be recoded this week with new content.

In another domain area though the bug did not exist, but duplicate content could have played a part. However, the other factor is backfill - e.g if a user searches for X Televisions through shopping feeds and there are none a PPC backfill is shown instead. Similarly if they search for Y Televisions through shopping feeds and there are none the same PPC backfill is included. In essence these could be duplicated pages.

From the discussions it does seem that it’s not just the pages involved that are penalised, but the rest of the pages in that domain. This is obviously worrying as overnight, like many on WMW, search engine traffic could disappear. How long for is anyone’s guess, but it does highlight the frailty of an internet business if it’s short term dependence relies on one factor. I don’t know if the changes we’ve made will get the filtered domains back. What happens next is something that no one really knows.

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