The Steady Climb Of Facebook Against Google

Shortly after reporting the issue, a Google representative stepped in and confirmed they were experiencing a problem. On October 25, Google reported that the issue had been fixed, stating that content from the 19th-24th October would be reindexed again shortly.

However one month later, we are still seeing reports of missing pages and lost rankings in the comments section of our original post. Some of the comments we received include,

November 10, 2010 and still way below normal in exposure. I wish Google was responsible enough to actually correct the problems they cause.

As a result of these issues I too noticed a drop in page's. Most of our lower ranked pages completely disappeared from the face of Google while our strongest page (home page) dropped to a second page listing for certain search results. It has seemed to have gotten better but still seeing some mixed results compared to usual.

I think is not fully fixed as yet, because it's happening to me too and as I read through all the post on webmaster sites, there are many people still complaining of index lost.

After further investigation of the issue there is a possibility that Google made a tweak to their ranking algorithms around this time. According to a blog post on Alexa, sometime around October 21st, they noticed a change in traffic for a number of websites. A quote and screenshot from the post can be seen below:

There were some indexing issues that happened prior to the change that caused some sites to report problems as early as the 19th, but according to our data the change to Google's search results went live on October 21st around 3PM Mountain View time.

There's also a 14 page discussion on Webmaster World with a number of other users also seeing changes in their rankings and Google traffic. There have been discussions around the impact on long tail keywords, but it's tough to confirm the exact nature of this update.

If you've experienced a ranking of traffic drop around this time, let us know how it has impacted your website below.