Update Florida - Nov 2003 Google Update

Looks like an Old Fashioned Dance Baby!

[synergy]

www-in is showing some major shifting in all the serps I follow.. anyone else seeing this? These results were showing yesterday as well, but synced with the others late in the afternoon.

The results look really good.. hopefully this will reflect across all the datacenters soon. Seems like the spammier sites I compete against have moved down while the good honest pages have moved up.

[soapystar]

simply looks like the START of a new index without the filters...this is the way the last few updates have gone..can take up to two weeks to settle....i can now judge if filters are on or off by watching a selected few sites..these sites ONLY show in their positions when filters are off...so take the opportunity to note the sites that suddenly appear when the filters are off so you will recognise whats happening next time....

<blimey>just saw what googleguy said...dosent sound like are filters are off then..crikey!</blimey>

[Miop]

Dear Google
I wish it could have waited until after crimble.
Shop sales have crumbled over the past few weeks with the UK postal strike, and then the attack on Worldpay servers.
I'd just got over that and then pmmmph. :(

Sorry, had to have a moan.

January would have been better - no-one wants to buy much then!

[Yidaki]

>If you have feedback about the update,
>there's a couple ways to get feedback to me:

What could be better than communicating observations with a google update directly with google? This sure is the best place a webmaster can find. I'm amazed every day again. Good job.

[johnnydequino]

Looks like my index page in now gone on -ex. Great. Sigh.

[ct2000]

www-mc has some nasty backlinks - yuk!

even my DMOZ backlinks have gone - something is wrong ...very very wrong ...

I think the spam filters may be doing too well!

[GoogleGuy]

superscript, any update is going to make some people mad and some people happy. And everyone's going to have different (but strong) opinions about it. You and several other people have noticed that whitehats are doing better in this update. But any time that we change our data or algorithms, some people won't like it and some people will.

[GoogleGuy]

Yidaki, I love hanging out here. If people want to talk specifics, they have to send feedback directly though. I'll be listening on those channels as we discuss in here too. :)

[FrankWeb]

Before today was #1 for a couple of keywords. At the moment I can not even see my site anymore in the first 150 results.

That is very drastic..is this also update related?

I have not spammed or something like that. One of the #1 results is even an error page.

Mr GoogleGuy any ideas, or should I wait a bit more?

[More Traffic Please]

GoogleGuy, can you confirm that Google has implemented all the filters in this algo, or might we see some fairly significant changes in the near future as more filters are added?

[bobby_boy]

'You and several other people have noticed that whitehats are doing better in this update.'

What is 'whitehats', anyone?

[superscript]

Thanks GoogleGuy -

I'm a whitehat, and I appear to be doing pretty well out of the update as it stands.

[Chicago]

a whitehat is someone who plays by the rules - good ole seo ground up

a blackhat is one that may use underhanded tactics

[mil2k]

Thanks Googleguy for dropping by. I remember the last time around you gave us a hint of time limit (weeks but not months). Would love to get a general idea from you about a tentative time frame about this update.

[GoogleGuy]

johnnydequino, most likely is that the page was down when we tried to crawl it. That just takes times. Scoring changes can affect rankings, so I normally do a search like

site:yourdomain.com -asdfsdf

to see if we have pages from that domain. Last thing that affects only a tiny number of people is that we respond to complaints about sites, so if a site is outside our quality guidelines (e.g. cloaking, sneaky redirects) then that can cause problems.

More Traffic Please, I'm not going to speculate on what the future holds, other than we're always going to be working to find ways to make search more relevant. One of the best posts I've seen about good ways to build sites is Brett's "how to build a site in 12 months" post.

[GoogleGuy]

"If you optimize, you are gaming google, and regardless of what some might say, G hates it."

I disagree, NickW. There are tons of ways (adding site maps, making sure that you have static instead of dynamic links, etc.) to optimize your site that *every* search engine would appreciate because it makes a site easier to crawl.

[Stefan]

I'm wearing a white helmet... it seems to be working, I've barely budged in the -in serps, still #1 for all the important kw combos.

[textex]

I play by the rules and almost all of my sites are gone from SERPS. Still in index when I search for the URL and still have pagerank.

Googleguy, are these sites gone for good? Or are we still dancing?

[Nick_W]

Now now GG, you know that's not what I meant ;-)

Nick

[GoogleGuy]

Actually, I thought that's what you did mean, but I apologize if I misunderstood. :)

To me, whitehats stay on this side of our quality guidelines at [google.com...] and blackhats are willing to go to the other side.

[pchristensen]

"GoogleGuy,
Are you hinting this is a major spam busting update?"

Seems to be. I am seeing my competetors who were hiding text are now gone from Google. I would also be watchful of any <H> or <P> Tag image swapping techniques too. <g>

[soapystar]

well....someone said it looks old data with a sprinkling of new...thats what i see...sites that fall in a certain time frame..say that burst onto the scene around novemberish to marchish are badly affected..sites outside that arent..as long as they are whitehats..anyone else see that?...even you googleguy!

[subway]

One of the best posts I've seen about good ways to build sites is Brett's "how to build a site in 12 months" post. - GG

Do you mean "how to *re*-build a site in 12 months following the Florida update"? :)

[Nick_W]

No GG, I'm talking about:

• KW density
  
• Buying links
  
• alt tags, title attributes etc optimized for kw's
  
• etc etc

All within the guidelines but not appreciated by G I think..

Nick

[Robino]

Do you mean "how to *re*-build a site in 12 months following the Florida update"? :)

Yep, looks like I may not be sleeping for a while.

You gotta love this stuff!

[More Traffic Please]

It's hard for me to imagine this is a major spam busting attack by Google. For months I have reported a high PR site with the most basic same color links as the background pointing to 25 other sites owned by the same person and they are still there with this update.

[ntbktrader]

>say that burst onto the scene around novemberish to marchish are badly affected

My site was added in October and seems to be doing quite well. I like this update. :)

[edited by: ntbktrader at 4:53 pm (utc) on Nov. 15, 2003]

[Chicago]

I have been studying the serps for a few hours now. This is starting to appear to me to be the *smartest* indexing i have seen.

It is almost as if G is moving beyond simple filters to understand contextually what is and what is not relative given the context of the search and potential result set.

Cleary spam has been cleaned up here with some simple linking/dup cont/cloaking and other filters, but do you notice that authorities are being pushed higher, even in lower optimized scenerios, whilst tightly optimized cleanly linked sites (white hat) are doing really well.

This is a *smart* update ~ that seems to have the searchers interest (intent) in mind. i wonder if applied symantics has a part in this new logic.

[Nick_W]

MTP, I'd say that meant that G didn't see it as a problem for the SERPS. Why are you worried about it, spend your time on somthing more profitable ;-)

Nick

[skipfactor]

Googleguy - why would an index page just go missing?

johnnydequino, most likely is that the page was down when we tried to crawl it.

Nope, ye olde Google dropping index pages bug is back. Gone, vanished, poof, so much for Xmas.

[PhilC]

GoogleGuy seems to be making out that what's happening right now is just a normal update with improvements to the algo. But it isn't. There's no way that it can be normal for Google to simply drop so many perfectly good index pages. If they'd dropped black hat pages, fair enough, but they've dropped white hat pages and they surely didn't intend to do that - at least not as permanent measure.

I've seen white hat index pages that have been solidly in the top 3 positions for particular searchterms since Google began. They've been that relevant for that long. Today they are not in the top 100 and probably not in the results at all. Weren't they relevant before and now Google has just realised it? Of course they were relevant, and they still are. Those pages aren't even in the race today - they are not being considered for the rankings.

Something has gone wrong, or Google is doing/trying something temporary. I'm sorry GoogleGuy, but there's nothing normal about it.