Google Update on the 6th July

[Entrusteddev]

Hi Mozzers,

Has anyone noticed a Google update on the 6th July?

A price comparison site I optimise has fallen off the SERPs for most generic terms, however still getting traffic for longer tail phrases.

Cheers

Aran

[AdamThompson]

Yes, a site I worked with lost all traffic on the 6th. See http://www.seomoz.org/q/website-penalized-3-times-by-google

It sounds like it was a change in the duplicate content algorithms.

[Entrusteddev]

it may be worth us swapping some ideas/findings.

if I find anything of value, I'll be sure to let you know.

[AdamThompson]

My current strategy is to

1. Reduce the number of duplicate content pages by adding noindex tags to pages that don't really need to be indexed.
2. Add unique content to pages with duplicate content that I do want to be indexed.

[Entrusteddev]

I've done a similar thing today,

1. Removed thin, stale pages from sitemap and implement noindex.

2. Begun to revise Duplicate content, however i have many many pages populated by xml feeds on a daily basis. eek...

[AdamThompson]

Yes, it's a lot to do, and only time will tell how much we have to do to get results...

[dmac]

Our previous site was complete flash with ZERO html pages. It and all the other pages were PR2. I think we had PR2 because we had a nice site, but Google had no way to verify what was really there.

We redesigned our site and removed almost all of the Flash. This was about 3-4 months ago. Google dropped all of our pages from PR2 to PR0.

Spent a lot of time prior to 7/6 improving things here and there. On 7/6 our home page jumped from PR0 to PR4 and a few went from PR0 to PR2. Most of the other pages remain at PR0.

We are still improving many things on our site. I can't wait until Google re-rates us.  I'm pretty sure it's going to be a good thing.   

[AdamThompson]

Keep in mind that PageRank is based soly on the backlinks pointing to your site. Having a "nice site" won't directly influence PageRank in any way. Also, PageRank is only 1 of many Google ranking factors...I recommend that you not pay too much attention to it.