Update Dominic - Part 5

The saga!

[dvduval]

dvduval:
Indeed I am missing a PR7 backlink!

I checked also with the same result. I'm starting to breath easier (but that could also be the coffee wearing off!)

Worth noting: It is highly unlikely Google will reduce the size of its index. Otherwise they'll get hit with a barage of those "enlargement" emails (if you know what I mean), and that would be embarrassing!
;-)

[Chris_D]

"although Google and partners accounted for about 85% of search traffic, only about 9% of our total traffic was from search engines"

I agree - Search engines for most are about 'new client acquisition'

Most web sites are about serving both existing clients AND new client acquisition.

Around 6% of total site traffic from SE's is the 'corporate norm' for the sites I've analysed - and I'd agree on 85% of the SE traffic being 'Google index source data' (Google & partners).

It just depends on how your site is built, marketed, and what it does. If you think about it - on some sites, total site traffic should heavily reflect existing customers buying stuff. rather than new client activity & tyre kicking. Eg If I want to buy a book - I'd probably go to Amazon - rather than google; if I want to send flowers - I'll go to the online florist I've used several times before. Many people are creatures of habit - become their habit!

Bookmark, come back again and again etc.

Chris_D

[poorgod]

im march...
but i think there is no problem. Becase yahoo.com shows grey bar too :)

[jesserud]

jonrichd, thanks for the hosts file trick. My hosts file now contains these lines, and I just have to uncomment the line for the datacenter I want to use for PR checking.

# sj
# 216.239.35.100 toolbarqueries.google.com
# fi
# 216.239.41.100 toolbarqueries.google.com
# ex
216.239.33.100 toolbarqueries.google.com

Surprises:

* fi and sj return exactly the same ranks for the 27 pages on my site that I checked. (Both show ranks different from ranks on ex. ex's ranks are the old ranks.)

* Pages Google doesn't know about, such as 404 pages with no links, now show a gray bar rather than guessing that the PR is (PR of top level - url depth). I like this change :)

* A few of my PR7s became PR6s.

* Three of my pages went from PR4 or PR6 to PR0 (white bar).

* PR0 page A is still #1 on a two-word search, beating a PR6 page that's equally relevant. (PR0 page A is fairly new. Its subject includes a possible "poison" word, but with a different meaning than the one that could make it poisonous. The competing page was not PR0ed.)

* PR0 page B doesn't show at all for a two-word search for which it used to be #1. In fact, it doesn't show for any searches, and searching for the URL shows that while Google knows about the URL, it does not have the page's title or content. (PR0 page B is fairly new but has many links to it in www-fi's index.)

* PR0 page C is still #1 on a search for its title, even though other several competing pages have very similar titles. Unlike A and B, it still has its backlinks showing, even though backlinks usually only show when both sites are PR4 or higher. (PR0 page C is an old framed page with little or no text content.)

[Pegasus]

I'm noticing that the -fi results are fairly different to the -sj results, and generally a reasonable improvement. (Although half my backlinks are still missing)

-fi is still considerably worse than my current standings, but when all my backlinks are factored in, it could quite possibly be an improvement.

[sachac]

I have seen no changes in the ranking of any of my keywords and phrases. In my category keyword, my site is #4.

In the SJ server however, I am #20! My backlinks have fallen from 318 to 143. This is so despite the fact that over the past month I have added at least 200 links all >PR4.

The curious thing is, mine is the only site in the top 20 that has been affected. I am not sure what the reason is for this except that we have been moving up steadily over the past 5-6 months, while the others have been static.

This leads me to conclude that these are "old" results when we really had 143 links and was at #20. Does this make sense?

[jonrichd]

Jesse, glad you like the tip.

I noticed the gray bar on 'new' pages as well -- in fact you can see it in this thread. The old toolbar would guess the PR. However, I've seen some pages show PR0, and this page, which I'm posting now has a PR 6.

So maybe it's just some changes being made in PR, which is consistent with what we know about the update so far. Maybe that's why your pages are showing PR0, although still having good results.

[WebMistress]

poorgod, if you went online in March, you won't be showing any PR in -sj because it is showing an index done before March, but with fresh pages....your PR will go up when this dance settles

[steveb]

"ex's ranks are the old ranks"

ex's ranks are one month old.

sj's PR is two months old.

[poorgod]

webmistress
thanks so much

restless sleep until the dance over... :)

[Visi]

Have been reading the update information, watching the results bounce around. Pat of the database seems updated and current, some does not. However finally saw the directory listings move tonight, and they are back two months from where they were. No doubt about that. I noted over the past two months that freshbot was attacking 404 pages leading me to believe that Google did in fact load the old database, refreshed against this and is updating all of its directory. The step back this month that we are seeing is just that, IMHO a step back in time and then a complete refresh. Only time willl tell.

[iThink]

I am looking forward to reviving my old project of writing a script to sign a few thousand guestbooks per day. A lot of sites with no other links but guestbook links are showing for competitive keywords. I put that project on backburner after I read some experienced people claiming that guestbook links are worthless. SEO for google is easier than ever. Just sign a few 100 guestbooks and there you are on page-1 of any competitive single keyword and now it can be done in a few hours instead of several weeks or months that it takes to get links in the conventional manner.

Also I'm thinking of joining linkstoyou.com FFA link farm because some of the sites using that link farm came back from PR0 penalty in April update and the remaining sites are back on www-sj in this update, on page-1 of course, despite the fact that they are still proudly displaying the logo of linkstoyou.com on their index pages and linking to it.

[reneewood]

Is anyone else seeing the sj results bouncing around? My site was #2 in sj for the past week. Those results migrated to www2 and www3 where they have been since the "dance" began. Now suddenly I've dropped to #23 and #24 on sj. (Two appearances of the exact same site). I guess I was under the wrong impression. After reading the threads, I thought it was suspected that the sj results were supposed to be the new index when the "jig" is finally over. (And why have I ended up with the exact same site taking up two result spaces next to each other?) I just wondered if anyone else was seeing the sj results bouncing. Any ideas? It's a little strange.

[Krapulator]

yep - bouncing around like mad here renee

[reneewood]

All right. Back the truck up! My main page (that has been in the index at the #6-#8 position and was most recently #2 in sj, www2 and www3 ) is completely gone from sj and www2 and www3. My catalog page and media page which were never in the index at all are at the #23 position. Don't mean to panic, but I do happen to receive a majority of my sales from google traffic. Please tell me some of you are experiencing some weird shuffling.

[mrguy]

Weirdness is going to abound for the next couple days or longer.

We might as well all sit back and enjoy the ride.

To try and make any changes now could end up really hurting once it has all played out.

Renee, I think if you read everything from start to finish you would in fact see that the SJ results are not going to be the end result. Those results do not have newer backlinks or spam filters or recent crawl data in them. According to GG, those will be added as we go. So, the results will undoubtely swing wildly again.

Believe me, I know it feels better to jump on here and post, but in the long run all any of us can do is wait and see what happens.

[Sunny_M]

Wow, my index.html sites are back on -sj and .de has new sites from May, 06. This "update" is really exciting.

[Dieter]

My site hasn't shown up in the Google index for 5 months - before that it was always #1. [e-mail] confirmed my site was "clean", but had no helpful suggestions.

Now all of a sudden it's back at #1 on -sj, -fi, www2 and ww3, but what worries me is that there is no cached version of it and the PR is grey. Will Google keep it in it's index without a PR?

[amazed]

yeah looks fuzzy to me...
sj has lost 5/6th of the near 100% of my pages it had yesterday, fi has been showing stable 1/3 of the pages, freshbot grabbed an old page yesterday listed by both of them but not in active google to the public and is proudly showing it to everybody with fresh tags today. sj lists my homepage twice #3 and #4. fi lists referrals.

looks like fi results going to sj, I wouldn't bet on it though, might be going circles.

[Sunny_M]

@Dieter
I don't believe that your sites will stay in the index without having a PR. There are many sites with PR0 (no backlinks or spam) but I've never seen a grey PR site indexed.

[MaxRISC]

Now this is interesting...I was going through my stats and noticing a trend here. Over the last several months there have been 9 bots deep crawling my site week after week. After one finishes then the next one begins the following week.

Now consistently they have been going in order plus or minus 2-3 days. I wonder if this would be a key as to predict when deep crawls are coming from Google.

Jeeves is currently eating the hell out of it and I never even submitted to it and my pet's Googlebot is next in line for a deep crawl. This would explain the time offset between deep crawls across my client's site.

Now that everything has seemed to settle and the dust has cleared and I've stopped sweating so much. My rankings all went back to better than what they were plus there was this big spammer competitor that loved to stuff his URLs like /productx/widget1-widget3-unknownwidget4x-widget3-productx.html and he is now beneath me like 30 or so while I hold numero uno with clean straight pages

I'll accept this until the deep crawl comes back to update my cache which gives me more time to add on theme content.

*big smile*

[rfgdxm1]

At the moment strangely enough -sj has my site's home page indexed, and backlinks correct, but isn't crediting that page for any inbound anchor link text with the allinanchor: command. Which is why that page is languishing way down the SERPs. I can only hope this is part of the dance weirdness, as this is odd.

[coconutz]

>>but what worries me is that there is no cached version of it and the PR is grey.

I'd give it another update before worrying as it probably needs to be crawled and re-indexed. A penalized site that was added back via a reinclusion request last month had a gray bar, no backlinks and no cache, but ranked well in the SERPs. It was deep crawled and now has a cached page but still has a gray bar/no backlinks. From reading some of the messages posted I think that may change once the update settles.

Welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com] Sunny_M, Dieter, amazed and MaxRISC.

[sparks]

Hi,
If I use two key words find my site # 15 on -fi.
However if I add a 3rd kw (location) I jump to # 1.
Odd thing is, the result for the 3 kw's is a newer version of my index page. (Changed the "title" slightly)

[darkroom]

Since i see totally new results in sj and www2 and www3 now..should we assume the update has begun.....will the current results on sj, w2, w3 be the updated results for this month?

[mat_bastian]

[webmasterworld.com...]

[webmasterworld.com...]

Just follow the links back. There's been well over 1000 posts on it already.

There are alot of threads out there that I couldn't immediately find, but theres alot of reading to do if you are just coming into this thing now.

[darkroom]

i know this..but what i want to know if if the current results on w3, w3 and sj are the final results or not?..since the backlinks are now being shown..what else is left?

[kevinpate]

I've been out of pocket and haven't had a chance to review all five threads in full myself, but it does seem to be an interesting shakeout, to say the least, and from the posts I have read, it doesn't seem to be anywhere near finished with the shimmiee and the shakes.

[mrguy]

The only people that can tell you that is Google, and so far GG has said the newer data and filters will be phased in over time.

He did not give a specific time frame but hinted that once they were, the SERP's would probably change.

If you read over all those threads, clue in to GG posts and draw your own conclusions because right now the only constant is that there is no constant.

[darkroom]

<null>

[edited by: darkroom at 7:21 am (utc) on May 7, 2003]

[ariff44]

A few hours ago, things were going haywire! Now it seems like the servers have settled down although this was and still is a truly significant update.

Whats the most significant change? I think it is more focus on the keywords and less on backlinks unless they have significant anchor text. What do you guys think?