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Sites which usually appear (including a couple formerly at #1 but with little to no content) are still in the index, but now way down in the SERPS.
Interestingly, the old geocities problem (second completely unrelated geocities domain getting an indented listing) has also gone again (google have been playing with this filter for a while - it goes on and off).
Seems to me the on-page factors knob has been turned up.
Anyone else seeing the same?
TJ
The only thing I have been seeing is big fluctuations in the returned number of results.
They are certainly at the lower end today, but is this just not part of the continual update and will settle down after the deepcrawl update?
EW
but is this just not part of the continual update and will settle down after the deepcrawl update?
I'm not sure there is a deepcrawl update anymore, but you could be right - just flux and lower number of returned results.
Strange though, as sites which do not appear in the results at all at the moment are in the index if you do a search for www.domain.com
TJ
It will be interesting to see what happens when the PR is updated and it all settles down again.
(if ever :-))
EW
Kaled.
The number of results for my main phrase is usuallly around 600,000. In the last few days I have seen this increase upto 770,000 - now its down to 140,000.
Also my position has been no1, number 2, number 10, now back to number 2. I noticed when it was number 10 the sites between 3-7 were good quality sites but out of a 3 keyword phrase they were really only optimised for 2 out of the 3 keywords.
Maybe they have been testing, maybe its flux - not really sure, but we will find out. At least I am dancing with the bigboys ;)
Anyway, I have been wondering whether an update has taken place, as I can’t seem attribute the increase of traffic (Google referrals) to anything else.
I've also seen a marked drop in the download:hit ratio for another program. Very odd but I can't see how this or a rush of downloads on a third program could be related to Google - the SERPS just haven't moved nearly enough to explain this - at least they haven't when I've been checking them.
Kaled.
Am seeing different results on WWW-IN datacentre at the moment and no DMOZ descriptions
In addition, on IN I see 50% less results, old content, no fresh tags and odd SERP's.
GoogleBot is spidering my PR7 and PR8 sites deep at this time, but not the <PR6 ones.
Hope this helps...
It's skipped your PR6 so it could chomp on an extra helping of a PR5 for dessert ... my logs indicate googlebot came over to spend the night with my site and danged near woke up every file in the house. From the look of things, his from best bud from ATW had his back too.
Can't quite pull out relevant search terms as most traffic was coming from terms already in 1 and 2 positions (with scattered 3s). Might be coming from other variations that got a bump of some sort but are buried too far down in the data to dig out just yet.
Might also be just an increase in user search but percentage appears much too significant to explain that. Site sometimes gets traffic spikes because of other seasonal and event-oriented reasons but none explain the current increase.
If Google has "turned up the knob" for on-page factors I'll be perfectly content.
Jim
I have two main sections to my site widget items and widget manufacturers. The latter’s traffic has remained static whereas widget items has increased across the board and is the area I had concentrated on for securing incoming links. However the scope the section seems too broad to attribute to any one site dropping out the index and hence my suspicion some kind of update had taken place.
Either way something is happening.
Mcdermc: Any pecking order that Google uses comes down to PR (with of course exception to serps)
I made keyword changes to 2 x PR3 sites on 1st October 2003 and a further minor image change 2 days ago to one of them. The one site is already showing 'new' cache (including the 2 day old new image) in Google - whereas the other is still showing 'old' cache.
I mentioned on this very forum a few days ago that on one of my sites, my PR5 home page still has "August 27th" written in the cache.
Even if you were to postulate that Google regimented its "botting" to a simple formula like PR5 every two weeks, PR4 every month, PR3 every 2 months (and there's considerable evidence, mine included, to show that this isn't the case - my other site's PR4 home page gets a visit every single day, whereas my PR5 homepage goes months without a look-in (and has many more backlinks too...))
Sorry - I digress! - even if there WAS a formula, you may have been lucky with one site (got there just before the Bot) and unlucky with the other site (just missed him).
On a PR3 page, I personally don't expect to get visited more than once every 3 months - anything more than that is a bonus, but I'm going to choose my content on such pages so that they don't look stupidly out of data in Google's Serps. I'm after visitors, so a PR3 page which says "Last chance to buy a widget this April" is not the sort of thing I put on a page that might have an out-of-date version in the SERPS....
DerekH
Might also be just an increase in user search...
I'm leaning toward that explanation, at least to account for a large uptick in visitors with no improvement in serps and a very minimal expansion in keywords used to find me.
In a 69 message thread [webmasterworld.com] started in July that stretches into August a lot of members were complaining about the decline in traffic.
Ok, I think it's back.
Kaled.
On one blue widget type search, I've dropped from about 30th to about 230th. So much for anchor text. Several weeks ago, I changed the internal links to include keywords. I was skeptical about the value of anchor text, now I'm even more so.
I have seen lot's of spammy SEO work going on for that type of widget in the past few weeks...
Are you sure you droped 200 spots? Or did 200 sites come in above you?
Might also be just an increase in user search...
I threw that is just because I can't discount it. Can't find up to date usage stats but there was a slight seasonal increase in September (Comscore reported 3.1% increase in minutes) due to college kids returning to school.
The increase from Google I'm seeing on this site is much more than that, almost 20% starting this past Monday and sustained through the week. (The traffic for this site usually runs in a very narrow range day-to-day making it very easy to pick out anything abnormal.) And the increases from other SEs are negligible, 2% to 3% for MSN, AJ, etc., so for this site it isn't a user search increase across the board.
I know the terms the site should be starting to get extra hits for as we run up to the holiday season starting with Halloween next week, on to Thanksgiving and through Christmas. So far these terms are each at levels I expect -- fractions of a percent.
Of course, a .05% or .1% increase over many, many, many different keyphrases can easily account for the increase and won't register on my preferred keyword tracking tool, my eyeballs.
Still think it might be somewhat Google-related and, in light of trillianjedi's observation, at least enough to keep an eyeball on.
<added>Of course, there are always combinations of factors that happen to coincide and make it impossible to put your finger on the deciding one.</added>
Still in deep shock, any suggestions?
John
Sorry John.. no suggestions or ideas.
NB my pages are optimised heavily for on page factors.
My corporate site is experiencing record month over month unique visitors, and this month is another record.
My impressions are 16% higher on terms related to corporate B2B. This correlates with the increase in traffic my site is receiving. Of course, your mileage will vary.
Anyone else?
I'd be very interested though if adwords showed a rise between the week before the 20th/21st and the week after, as this seems to be the period that something happened.
I changed the internal links to include keywords
I did the same a while back and I dropped off page one to page 2. Changed them back and went back to page 1 higher than I was before. Not sure if density was a factor or not, but I think anchor text is more important off page than on.
You can spin this data any way you want. But it looks like a steady increase, and viewed month to month, it's a 16% surge in (exclusively search related) impressions.
Hmm... broad match only affected a few words, and I went in there and negative matched out irrelevant searches. The spike I mentioned above was indeed a broad match anomaly, so allowing for that, the true pattern may be steady throughout the month, but with a gentle upward trend.
[edited by: martinibuster at 8:05 pm (utc) on Oct. 25, 2003]
