What's afoot at google?

Something strange at the moment

[trillianjedi]

Not sure if anyone else has noticed this - for keywords I tend to keep an eye on google is returning far less, but far higher quality, results.

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

[John]

I just checked Adwords for 1-21st Oct and 22-25th.

The impressions for early Oct was 8000 per day for all the search terms in my campaign and I was converting 3.6%

For 21-25 the impressions dropped to 3000 per day and my conversions dropped to 1.7% Average position was 3.4 and 3.7 respectively and all clicks were fixed at 5 cents!

Aound the sam time I edited all the sub groups in the campaign to change the destinatiuon URLS to tracking URLS, nothing else.

Any one figure that?

I wish I had your problems with a hike in impressions!

[Kirby]

martini, I had a record day on the 13th.

[martinibuster]

My AdWords spike was the 13th, too.

Looking at my website traffic reports, I see that in terms of unique visitors October 13th was a regular day. However, October 21st saw a spike of roughly 25% over the average, then settled down to around 15% ABOVE of the average level.

What the hell does that mean?

I'm kinda busy doing analysis for a client so I can't put my noodle to work on it.

[edited by: martinibuster at 8:16 pm (utc) on Oct. 25, 2003]

[tantalus]

Sooo.. the bump in google referals experienced by jimbeetle and myself etc is not down to 'an increase in user search'?

Any other sugestions ideas...anyone.

[edited by: tantalus at 8:19 pm (utc) on Oct. 25, 2003]

[pardo]

We had an outstanding 'top' week from monday 29th September till Friday 3rd October. About 15% traffic less before and after...

[martinibuster]

'an increase in user search'?

In my case, it is. Looked at via AdWords, the impressions are up month over month by 15%.

Website traffic stats confirm that there is a month over month increase as well. According to my stats, the forecast is for a 22% increase in October traffic over September.

Those are TWO metrics indicating a traffic jump. However, those are my metrics. My serps remained exactly the same month over month.

If anybody's site was knocked down a peg or two in the serps then comparing that site performance with mine isn't valid.

As far as tantulus, you say you don't watch the serps, but I advise that you should. It will help you make sense of the traffic variations. It could very well be that your competitor redesigned their website and screwed themselves with flash and dynamically generated pages :).

I don't think there was an update on the 21st, just the regular algo knob twiddling.

The only update I nowadays see occuring, that I call an update, is the somewhat monthly PR update.

[tantalus]

I had thought about a competitor dropping out and still don’t discard that.

Maybe you’re right that’s its just an algo tweak or both. I was more interested in whether other people were experiencing a similar rise/fall.

And I would be interested to know though whether your spike of 25% on the 21st was due to Google referrals or across the board.

I’m not complaining, just curious :)

[martinibuster]

whether your spike of 25% on the 21st was due to Google referrals or across the board.

That's an excellent question:

October 20th
Google...50%
Yahoo....12%
MSN......14%
AJ........3%

October 21st
Google...51%
Yahoo....13%
MSN......10%
AJ........2%

October 22nd
Google...51%
Yahoo....12%
MSN......10%
AJ........2.5%

The percentages don't indicate a Google spike. The distribution of search engine referrals has been relatively stable.

[ogletree]

I am seeing a big difference at www-in as well. They are very different and seem more relavant. One search I am back at number one for my biggest keyword. I had fallen to number 2 for about 3 weeks. There is another one where I am not showing at all. All data centers except www-in are showing the sites that are poining to me with anchor text. I am still not there but it is funny that Google would put unrelated sites that just have my anchor text. The page that they are pointing at are still not listed. I wonder if that is proof that they are looking closer at anchor text.

[tantalus]

Hey I wasn't asking for proof, just a friendly 'across the board' would have sufficed. :)

Anyway as no-one else has come out and indicated similar rises/falls it looks like your above diagnosis accounts for the increase.

[kaled]

Just checked my traffic stats. I've hit my recent monthly average already so I guess that means a 20% increase. However, a couple of freaky spikes probably accounts for that.

A couple of people have mentioned DMOZ. Well, they appear to be having technical problems again. For the last few days, their search function has been pretty well knackered. It's possible that I am partly responsible for this. I reported a minor fault with the search function and a couple of days later it was a full blown monster. Perhaps they tried to fix the minor fault and made it ten times worse.

Kaled.

[markus007]

last weekend i had a 3x increase in google referals, for a period of 3 days my site jumped to number 1 for 40 to 50 keyword combinations. Then come sunday afternoon they all droped back to positions 500+.

[johnnydequino]

Last month, Page rank and backlinks were updated on the 26th. This month.....

jd

[johnnydequino]

Side note - alltheweb has updated their "backlinks".

link:http://www.widgets.com

Google next?

[oaktown]

Martinibuster and Kirby,

I saw about a 22% spike on the 14th. The most hits EVER on my site, and by a wide margin at that!

We had done nothing that would cause it and it settled back into a normal-looking pattern (albeit very slightly higher volume) on the 15th and has stayed there since then.

I saw something by Kaled earlier in this thread, that really caught my eye:

"It seemed to me that an update started (and may have even completed) last week and then reverted back just after I posted a message saying all seemed well at Google."

(Sorry, guys. I haven't figured out how to put quotes in the grey box.)

I'm just wondering if there is a way to connect the dots. Or are they just dots and I'm being dense?

[martinibuster]

Yeah,
Look for a thread with 60 posts where there are a multitude of people claiming the same thing. That's usually an actual phenomenom.

Occasionally you get 2-3 stubborn thread posters who keep insisting the sky is falling, although you have more people claiming it is not.

Go through one of the forums and go backwards and you'll see the patterns arise.

This thread is a good example of people coming together and teasing out what is or isn't going on. I think it's safe to conclude that there hasn't been an update (more likely an ongoing algo tweak), and that it's more a case of a general increase internet traffic more than anything else.

[oaktown]

As usual, Martinibuster, you seem to be spot on. I've been chewing my way backwards through the threads for quite some time, but I often get the feeling that around here we're a bit like the nine blind men and the elephant. I get a vague sense that we're missing something.

here's another dot

www-dc

479,000 10/21/03
1,500,000 10/20/03
593,000 10/13/03
271,000 10/12/03
196,000 10/2/03
188,000 9/27/03
Laser8 mentioned something similar

Also www-sj still seems to be down. Could G be pulling resources to work on this? And could this be a part of why we haven't seen the expected PR update?

[jimbeetle]

the true pattern may be steady throughout the month, but with a gentle upward trend

If I were seeing this I'd jump right in and agree that it's attributed to a rise in user search. But for the one site I'm talking about it ain't. It's a distinct increase starting the 20th, not the steady increase I would assume as we approach the busy holiday season. And while I am seeing a slight across the board increase from all other SEs, I'm seeing a very sharp increase from Google.

But yes, increase in search has to account for a couple or few of those percentage points.

I don't think there was an update on the 21st, just the regular algo knob twiddling.

I'd push it back a day to the 20th. And is probably another part of the increase as it just takes a small jump up the SERPs to drive traffic with some keyphrases.

It could very well be that your competitor redesigned their website and screwed themselves

Yep, all it would take is one site ahead of mine to get knocked out to see a significant increase in traffic from all those keyphrases that deliver .1% and .2% of visits.

It might, and probably is, a confluence of factors. I'm interested in if this is going to hold the same through the weekend and following days. If it follows the same pattern, well, still not sure what I think now so...

[ogletree]

Well my site fell back down to number 2 on www-in.

[martinibuster]

Never mind. It's late. Just got back from a Halloween party.

[Powdork]

It's late. Just got back from a Halloween party.

I went to one today also. Whats up with that? There's still six days left and the anklebiters are already bouncin off the walls. I wonder how different their chocolate induced buzz feels?
Someone tell me again about the lack of directory descriptions on -in.:)

[nutsandbolts]

...and I've noticed some site backlinks have just shown up today.

[viggen]

backlink and pr update is shown own www,

yahoo with 759.000 links

[trillianjedi]

backlink and pr update is shown own www

Definitely a change. Shame that we still seem to be missing our dmoz entries in the backlinks. A thread went around a little while back about this when they first went missing.

Has anyone else got theirs back, or still AWOL?

TJ

[tantalus]

Okay, if it’s an interest to anyone, the pages where I experienced a 50% bump in traffic are the pages where I received a significant PR boost.

Is it possible that the new PR / back-links are being reflected in the SERPS a week earlier than we are seeing them?

[g1smd]

I think -gv has the most up to date index at this time (however that may be changes from frshbot finding changes in the content of existing pages that I am looking at).

[layer8]

I don't want to speculate on traffic trend increases.

What I have seen is about 600,000 sites drop off my search results. Usually I see around 750,000 sites show up on the serps, now it's down to 140,000.

Is this unusual?

[jimbeetle]

Never mind. It's late. Just got back from a Halloween party.

And at some ungodly hour of the night, martinibuster checks in at WW dressed as...?

Back on topic. Does anybody have any followup to or substantiation of TJ's first post?

google is returning far less, but far higher quality, results

Is it sustained, or was it just a passing fluctuation as trillianjedi and Earwig were first surmising?

[quotations]

>What's afoot at google?

I believe that it is still 12inches.

(Why are fire engines red?)

>Is it sustained, or was it just a passing fluctuation as trillianjedi and Earwig were first surmising?

It is beginning to feel like the old dance days.

[kamikaze Optimizer]

It is beginning to feel like the old dance days.

So true, so true.

IN is dancing ever so mildly with some odd new algo..., right now.

It was doing this 48 hours ago, now it is back again.

I think we need all worry (I do) about what is going on at SJ..., it could be a real SEO bomb...