Fellow HN'ers. I feel like I'm dating Google. Every now and then we go out for dates (crawls), and if I order the wrong meal, wear the wrong shirt - she gets pissed.
My problem is we set up a wiki to sit alongside our site, we thought "great! content! Google's gonna love us". So we set up a Mediawiki installation.
Now I guess Google had us down for a certain set of terms (pre-wiki) - it had learned what we do and was sending us a reasonable amount of traffic.
Now, post-wiki Google thinks our most significant word is "Media wiki" - our traffic has dropped right down to 10% of what it was. Essentially, we confused Google as to what we did.
My question is: now we've removed the wiki link from our site, and added the /wiki directory to the robots.txt - when the crawler comes back, will it effectively reverse the changes? Will Google "forget" the old content?
Anyway, I'm glad we learned this now - and not in 6 months time.
Very much appreciated for any insight/wisdom you guys might be able to offer!
We've seen these changes take on average 2-6 weeks to get noticed through webmaster tools. We've made many rapid changes to a few of our sites and it has clearly confused google. These few sites have been listing the wrong keyterms for months and we haven't seen any sign of them changing. One site even randomly switches back and forth between listing relevant keyterms and listing latin leftover from our Lorem Ipsum that was accidentally released while the site was being built.
Moral of my story is to not make too many drastic changes to your site, but if you've made a few, just relax and let google run it's nonsense. If it doesn't return to your old content, then I'm not sure what you can do.
The most important thing to learn about Google is that there really isn't much you can learn. Just pay attention to numbers and try to get a "sense" for what is going on. I'm not an SEO or Search expert, but I think experts just have a lot of time in front of the numbers.