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Today, everything seems to be back as it should be; the index page is returned when I search on the site name, and it has been boosted a couple a places from its pre-Dom ranking.
Is anyone else seeing this problem getting fixed for their own sites?
Index pages are coming and going - you may be lucky and stick, or may see it disappear again in a matter of hours or days.
The situation has improved slightly on a week or so ago, as at that point none of the 'twilight zone' sites were stable.
Hang in there and hope they stick. For those that are still fluctuating (some of which seldom appear... but do sometimes) let's hope that they settle down as well.
I've actually made a number of these into test zones, loosening anchor text (that which I had influence over) and so on (I had to do SOMETHING!). We may see in due course whether this has any effect.
By should(?) I mean we have added new content, picked up additional quality back links from high PR industry leaders and have been around for 4 years.
Sometimes a page will be #1 on all 9 datacenters than in a couple hours completely gone again or only on 1 or 2 centers.
Maybe Google will work out this bug sometime soon.
A page completely vanishing and resurfacing #1 every other day has nothing to do with a "rolling update", rather a really weird ploy by Google or a problem with data.
Each web page is treating as an independent entry in the database(s) and analyzed for its content relative to the keywords in the given Search. The question of whether the most relevant web page is say an index.htm page or something buried within a website will be determined by that individual webmaster. For Google to assume that internal pages are automatically more keyword relevant than index pages would be less than wise.
Since I have high faith in the brilliance of the Google crowd, I am sure that they take all pages at face value.
Barry Welford
noticed from my logs that a seriously deep crawl is going on. Seems to have kicked off today.
Anyone else noticing stuff in their logs?
I now seemed to have dropped an entire rank throughout. Now I have PR3 on my index page and PR2 on a load of deeper pages. :/
Fortunately, the index page has returned to the SERPS (as so has our traffic). Whatever was wrong, whether lost data or bad filter, seems to me to have been corrected.
There just was no logical explaination that I could find anywhere that would justify the SERPS as they were. Still no comment from GG.
This time however, the index page is not dropped out of the index completly, just moved down to be beat by new pages, established sites and doorways even though I still am #1 for anchor text.
For a few days they were solid all the way across and now once again, they starting to drop.
Looks like Google is still not done doing whatever it is they are doing.
The funny thing is for one term that is equally optimized and #1 in anchor text has stayed solid through the whole thing.
Very weird stuff. I rank at the top for allinanchor/url/site.
Certain data centers show my index page first search, on the second its gone, (sj/zu).
This leads to me to the conclusion that :
A:) Google is applying a keyword filter to sites that have overoptimized allinanchor.
Filter gets taken off, you appear, it goes on, you dissapear. There is no other reason!
We can wait for it to settle, hopefully when it does settle we are there in a good position.
If there was a filter, why would they take it off?
Either they settled this thing down a bit or the chief knob turner took an early 4th. :)
Dave.
Here is the test: Open up i.e type your url, if it comes up with a green pr7, you dont need to worry.
I think they are making it difficult to find pr results through the serps.
Is anyone seeing backlinks changing? Mine have been constant for a month or more, suggesting that all the hopping of pages, is still some kind of transition, rather than a rolling update.
Anyone?
Their at it again.
So this is the new Google, totally different SERP listings every 3 or 4 days!
One day my index page is deemed the most authoritive. The next it's not.
Now that's conisistancy!
I manage a lot of sites and am seeing a lot of all the above.
Great listings the one day and page 20 the next - for many of the sites.
Its really terrible for us webmasters and for all of you that think the average user doesnt know or care about the instability then you are VERY wrong.
Many people find websites and remember how to get back to them by remembering the search term they originally used - not everyone bookmarks!
Ive seen this statement a few times. Many years back people ONLY bookmarked. As search engines developed and started to provide fairly static results yes, perhaps people just assumed that the site would always be there when they go back again.
But why is this a problem for users? they still have to remember the query. I myself never have kept track of sites this way, and im on the web and use SEs a lot. Is there really any evidence that users, as opposed to webmaster's use this method a lot?
Now it looks like we are moving to having more "dynamic serps". People will just change their behaviour again to bookmarking to compensate, and have the added advantage of seeing new and more sites more often. Its a behavioural modification thing, and if the sERPS seem relevant to the user each time, I dont think they will see a problem. When you use the web which changes all the time, you learn all the time how best to use it...
Works for my client.
For my part, I am bouncing between #1 and c.#15 for my main search term. Last time round, it stuck for four days and I got my hopes up. Changed this morning and I have to start praying again. This is no way to run the net's most important search engine.
