OnGoogle, off Google, back on again!

Has anyone noticed this?

[sachac]

Yesterday, I checked the ranking for my best keyword to see if it was still #4. To my horror, it disappered completely from the listing. When I re-checked a minute later, it was back on. The same thing happened today.

Is this some sort of glitch or is this a sign of something far more ominious? I certainly don't believe that I have done anything to be penalized for.

BTW, my site is over five years old and this is the first time I have ever experienced this.

[RawAlex]

Yes, I have had a listing for the last 3 months that appears and disappears sort of randomly (and you should see what that does to the daily traffic stats!)... it is in the top 20 for a section with 58,500,000 listings (single word).

I am not sure why that domain does that... the PR stays the same, just it appears and disappears from the SERPs...

Alex

[BryantStevens]

I have seen this as well.

What I have discovered is that for some reason a certain Google data center drops my site for my keywords periodically.

I use the site [****...] to check all eight datacenters.

My site is still is seven of the eight datacenters for the keywords. But for the other one it is gone. I have no idea why.

So when you did the first search, you happened to be going against the one datacenter where the site had disappeared. When you did your search later, you just hit another datacenter.

[madweb]

When you have a database the size of google's (3,083,324,652 pages at the last count), distributed and backed up over 8 datacentres, there will constantly be fluctuations and differences between the different copies of the dataset.

e.g. perhaps your record got corrupted in one copy of the data but not in the others - so SERPs will depend on how google is distributing queries across its network today.

This thread has some discussion about the different datacenters:

[webmasterworld.com...]

Everflux may be partly to blame:

[webmasterworld.com...]

And / Or google may be testing new tweaks to the algo.

[wruk999]

, there will constantly be fluctuations and differences between the different copies of the dataset.

The only major fluctuations occur at the Google update [webmasterworld.com], about once a month. The database is the same on all of the datacentres.

The different listings through the month are indeed the result of the Freshbot/Everflux [webmasterworld.com]. You know which listings are the result of this, as you will see date tags next to the listing.

My site is still is seven of the eight datacenters for the keywords

There are only 5 live datacentres, which are: www-ab, www-dc, www-ex, www-in & www-va. The others are just redirected to one of the above. Therefore, I don't know why your site would not appear on 1 of them!

Is this some sort of glitch or is this a sign of something far more ominious?

Could your site have been offline while the spiders were out?

wruk999

[sachac]

No, my site was fully operational and online while the sipders were out.

[RawAlex]

Mine is even funnier, as it still appears in other SERPs, just drops off that term... the site is still there, still cached, just not in the SERP for a day or two... then it is back... that specific site has had that problem for about 3 months now.

Alex

[joeweb]

I'm getting this also. After the last update I was at a #3 on one keyword and #4 on another. I was still there two days ago.

I checked today I've dropped out of google alltogether for all of my keywords. When I do a check the domain on google it's pointing to a lower level newsletter archive page.

When I check the other data centers www2, & www3. I'm seeing good results on a search for my domain name, but for the keywords still nothing.

The weird thing is - since update Cassandra I've picked up a DMOZ listing and several inbound links.

Any suggestions?