They're at it again with the -sj server

different serps and backlinks

[waynet]

Looks like they are testing the www-sj.google.com server again. I see 384k backlinks for yahoo and the serps are different.

[jady]

Our 1344 backlinks went to 320 and got beat out by a joke of a site on our keywords - hope they arent thinking of using this algo! MSN would definately continue to rise!

[beachlover]

Markus, we checked one of our sites on the 26. of April, when www-sj was acting kind of strange. There was an increase to 6, too. So I doubt that this is a good indicator. If so, the dance might even have begun on the 26.

But I doubt that this is the new dance.

[DaveN]

internal or external backlinks - jady

DaveN

[jpjones]

..and just to add - another of my sites listed on -sj has dropped back to the same number of pages that we had in last months' index.

Conclusion: No update taking place.

[needinfo]

DaveN

Are you asking jady because you think the sj server is slashing internal link as suggested previously in this thread somewhere. I mention this because when I look at my competitors sites, a few of them seem to do much better on the sj server and their backlinks are almost all internal.

[DaveN]

needinfo, just building the picture thats all.

DaveN

[anallawalla]

It's not so much an older data set (as people have reported seeing recent sites in it) but an older algo. On one SERP that I watch I can see a site I had reported as a spammer and which has been absent for a couple of months.

Try looking for such banned sites.

- Ash

[Receptional Andy]

>>On one SERP that I watch I can see a site I had reported as a spammer and which has been absent for a couple of months.

With recent reinclusion requests i'm expecting a lot of ex-banned sites to come back. I don't think this indicates that the algo on sj is any older.

I think if any analysis of the sj serps is going to be useful, we need to get away from the idea that might site doing worse= bad results. The link count is drastically different which is having a major effect on the results, but I see no evidence of the major spam influx that everyone seems to be talking about here.

Sooner or later Google will have to modify the way it looks at links, even if it sticks to the current principles. If PHP Nuke can consistently be the number 1 site for 'god' without even mentioning the word on the page, then they need to look hard at relevancy and the current algo.

[Zapatista]

I agree that if this is their new algo, Google is in some deep poopola.

[mil2k]

The reason i am saying that this the index has old data(coupled with some new one) is bcoz one of my sites shows no #83 and my competetior's as #56. This were the exact positions we held 2 months ago. And the last two months position for me has been #12 while my competetor was on #20 in march and #5 in April.

[Receptional Andy]

>>I agree that if this is their new algo, Google is in some deep poopola.

I seriously doubt that. They might annoy some webmasters and SEOs, but when where the serps supposed to be for us any way? I've been using sj for my day to day searches since I saw the changes and relevancy has been pretty good. Never really noticed the difference. I see no major problems with those serps from a joe searcher point of view.

[needinfo]

I've just checked one of my new sites (2 months old). In the live index it has 73 backlinks and on the sj server it has 0. Other older sites have had backlinks slashed, sometimes as much as halved.

Just confirming what others have stated before.

[vitaplease]

Ive been wrong before, but:

- I think its early to show an update approx 2 weeks after deepcrawling?
- Google has no problem in showing and playing about with Fresh results without showing Fresh date stamps (-sj is now in some cases definitely showing some fresher results than google.com)
- I have not seen external backlinks show-up for links put into place on the third of April

[Receptional Andy]

You're completely right vitaplease. I personally do not think this is anything to do with the update.

What I find strange, however, is that the sj results are showing up on www.google.com quite often. I'm looking at a visitor from the different sj results on one site right now, referred by www.google.com.

This I don't understand and makes the sj results, update or no, something of major interest to me, whether it be a glitch, mistake, prank, update or simply an indicator of what maybe to come.

[Critter]

I'm sure hoping this isn't the new update as well...my site has COMPLETELY disappeared off the SERPS (and I'm squeaky clean) after having around 10K pages crawled in April.

I would highly doubt this is update material.

Peter

[jady]

Dave - it looks like both. Because our site is only 100 pages or so so even if all of our internal links were taken away in this algo, wouldnt make up for the other missing 900. I dont see any apparant reason for this - we are a development firm so our Client sites have our copyright and link at the bottom of their pages - yet and still, some pages are still counted and some are ignored. Some sites that are in the SJ site index just dont show at all. Still shows us with a PR6, just with less backlinks.

[mfishy]

I am seeing all the s-j results on Google.com now?

[mfishy]

Back to normal.

Strange that they would let these spammy, weird results go live to the public.

[beachlover]

I guess the absence of GoogleGuy in this thread and his comment here [webmasterworld.com] are a very good indicator that this is not THE_update.

I think we all should relax and enjoy the weekend ;-)

[Canary]

GoogleGuy is probably asleep at the moment!

Relax and enjoy the weekend - good idea :)

[hetzeld]

Hi all,

It's kind of a mix between 2 months old and fresh SERPs.
One of my new sites only shows one entry in the index, as it was during february, not having been deepcrawled at that time.
My main site shows a mix of new and old stuff. It's evident, as far as my site is concerned, as I renamed a directory (using 301 redirects) that doesn't show on www yet, although it shows up on www-sj with both new/old names.
That makes me a good client for duplicate content :)

Dan

[needinfo]

beachlover,

I was just thinking that I have only ever seen GG's comments in a thread when it was not the update.. so my reasoning is as follows : GG is not in this thread...hence it IS the update!

I'm just going outside now to get a real life!

[trillianjedi]

Google are obviously playing with the algo at the moment on SJ.

I don't think they'd be likely to do the update until they're done.

I would say the update is more likely to be near when SJ *stops* showing strange results for a day or so.....

TJ

[beachlover]

Needinfo, GG tends to join a thread later into the update - as he did during the last update [webmasterworld.com]. So my observation is that he is always around in the update-thread during the dance to absorb the feedback.

[onebaldguy]

I am not too worried about these results. If google actually provided these SERPS, they should probably just include a link to a "spammers guidebook" in Adwords as well because 40% of the first page across our industry is one company that owns 5 sites and is interlinking them all. They have less than 3 outside sites linking to any of them. Also, 2 of the sites have identical content other than the links they have on the left hand side of the menu, one looks like a throw-back site to 1999. And in many SERPS they are ranking 2-3 for both.

So I am not worried, but if they do, I am going to hire my 7 year old nephew, because I think he could figure out how to manipulate the SERPs.

Paul Gardi made a Google one-liner at the Pub Conference about how they use a technology that is 4 years old and how they use newer technology. I hope this dance does not give credibility to that comment.

[pixel_juice]

Lol, it isn't possible to see a thread that mentions 'google update' in it anywhere without the whole thing becoming one long list of complaints about spam.

If a spammer is beating you, he's done a better job than you of getting high in the results. Either out-SEO them or get over it please :)

I personally would love to see a major shift in Google's algo. The current one is too well known and too easy to abuse.

[poet22]

the cache they are using on sj is 2 months older than the present cache for my sites.

[ncsuk]

I would like to point out that if you do a search on www2 for my serp.co.uk which only went online after the last dance it is actually showing up in the results so this is definatly a new database / algo or something.

Really really quite strange.

[edited by: ncsuk at 1:48 pm (utc) on May 2, 2003]

[sergio00]

Everybody's talking about www-sj but, has anyone noticed different results from www-fi.google.com?

It's not the backlinks (at least, not the ones from yahoo) but some serps are different. And it appeared in google.com. One of my sites has fallen some positions in that index, and it gave me a nasty surprise.

[Goanna1]

pixel_juice, the current Google algorithm can't be too bad when you consider Google's dominance of the industry. The fact that no other search engine comes even close to rivaling Google, again suggests that spam is not as bad as many people on this forum would have us believe.