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Update Austin - January 24, 2004

on DC: 216.239.37.99

         

paulk

5:22 am on Jan 24, 2004 (gmt 0)

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DC: [216.239.37.99...] Major Shuffle, looking worse then ever, results look very bad, anyone seeing this?

lasko

10:23 am on Jan 24, 2004 (gmt 0)

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Oh my god, I am going to have to sell my house

What and buy a bigger one?

union_jack

10:30 am on Jan 24, 2004 (gmt 0)

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>>> What and buy a bigger one?

no a cardboard box.

lasko

10:33 am on Jan 24, 2004 (gmt 0)

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:)

Search results are too erratic for me.

Can't believe we have such big swings in results from one day to the next.

Some really good sites that did well then gone, then back again, then gone again.

Give this a few days to settle, then look for a new home :)

nevetS

10:33 am on Jan 24, 2004 (gmt 0)

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Need a roommate? :) I've got a friend that works at U-haul. He could get us a sweet deal on one of those wardrobe boxes.

You wonder if these shakeups aren't meant to increase adwords revenue.

glitterball

10:37 am on Jan 24, 2004 (gmt 0)

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;-) Still laughing from that Cardboard box post.

Seriously though, looking at travel-related serps, Google may as well just produce random results, as page content no longer seems to have anything to do with SERPS.

union_jack

10:39 am on Jan 24, 2004 (gmt 0)

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I thought Florida was bad, I put my car up for sale.

What next, google wants my soul!

JoeyBall

10:42 am on Jan 24, 2004 (gmt 0)

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This update is s***, what is with updates these days, i thought florida was bad but this, its much worse.

I lost 4 sites in the florida update and now i've lost another 2.

1milehgh80210

10:45 am on Jan 24, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



the trends I see in the last few months:

-mega $hopping sites will flourish,
-mega content (expertise) sites will do well
-mega spammers will do well
those caught in the middle, with some content and seo ability will get flushed

kind of what we see in the real (non internet) world

lasko

10:47 am on Jan 24, 2004 (gmt 0)

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This update is s***, what is with updates these days, i thought florida was bad but this, its much worse.

Who said it was an update, GG said that only www2,3 would be found through DNS all other datacenters may not function correctly.

I think because we see something different everybody thinks this is an official update.

At least this time they are not seen by Jo public unless you know the IP address. Again i wouldn't be surprised if these set of results change dramatically.

Their is no evidence to suggest that these serp's are moving to other datacenters or to the main index, plus backlinks are unchanged so we should wait until we see changes on www2,3 like we did in the old days. Then we can start to buy cardboard boxes in bulk :)

nevetS

10:48 am on Jan 24, 2004 (gmt 0)

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Hey wait a minute. Just rechecked one of my keyphrases on netscape.com - it's back at #1!

could it have been just an update to their index that made queries different temporarily?

It happened to me once after a deep crawl a week ago where I lost all my SERPs, freaked out, and then found them again hours later, along with another 200 indexed pages that freshly showed up in my inurl query.

nevetS

10:51 am on Jan 24, 2004 (gmt 0)

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" Then we can start to buy cardboard boxes in bulk :) "

I see an opportunity here. Who wants to go in on boxes-for-ex-seo-guys.com with me? :) Maybe even .org

We should be able to finance the boxes with adsense click-throughs.

union_jack

10:58 am on Jan 24, 2004 (gmt 0)

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>>> nevetS

Put me down for 2 boxes, but I want a phone line though, to see how much money I am not making.

I had 30 no1 sites before Florida, 2 staff and a happy wife.

After Florida, 6 no1 sites no staff and a unhappy wife.

And if this DC happens to spread its wings. I will have no no1s, no staff and no wife. :) well there is always a silver lining.

percentages

10:59 am on Jan 24, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



>Then we can start to buy cardboard boxes in bulk

I've been selling cardboard boxes for years....Google is great, it's even gonna increase the market size for me :)

I'm convinced this update will roll, it is a Florida+ algo.

Anyone know of Mentholated Spirits merchant with a good affiliate program? ;)

lbobke

11:04 am on Jan 24, 2004 (gmt 0)

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Personally, I wouldn't even bother to check rankings yet - IMO chances are what you see now won't last for long.
I mentioned earlieron that the cache of many pages I looked at today looked much older than yesterday...

Laurenz

centrifugal

11:10 am on Jan 24, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



These serps look pretty random to me. I'd be at a loss to describe the changes in the algo, Im stumped.

One thing to me that does appear from my insignifigantly minute tests is pr matters more again, but thats just my niche.

I don't like these serps although my own sites are mixed.

union_jack

11:12 am on Jan 24, 2004 (gmt 0)

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>>> Personally, I wouldn't even bother to check rankings yet

Wish I hadn't.

But there is a 90% chance that it will move over.

So you might as well look and start making plans.

djgreg

11:14 am on Jan 24, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



I think the most important thing in this algo is anchor text. Sites which have hundreds of backlinks from sub-sites and subdomains (which in fact are only forwarding sites) dominate the first SERPs. I can't believe that this is more than a test! If it is, it's the worst "update" I have ever seen

steveb

11:20 am on Jan 24, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Normally when there is a significant update the original data is from older caches, so seeing an older cache is definite eveidence this is a major update.

Better evidence though is the results are intermintenly on Netscape.

It's not a coincidence one of the Google folks suggested a month ago that people build larger sites, and not a bunch of puny interlinked ones. Major authoritative sites are doing well, and spam is getting its butt kicked.

Also, one terrific thing I see is for my main keyword the keyword.com site has dropped from first to tenth. This is excellent, and at least thirteen months overdue. Thirteen months ago the content on keyword.com changed so it wasn't really much about the keyword anymore. It still hung on though to this hyper competitive term purely from the domain name (not anchor text, it isn't a highly linked to site). I don't know what algorithmic ingredients were boosted to drop it more toward where it should be (about 75th I'd say), but to me this is a clear, plain sign of drastic improvement in the algorithm.

SEOtop10

11:33 am on Jan 24, 2004 (gmt 0)

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I am getting the new data on the main google .com server.

#23 from #1, which I was holding on for more than 6 months.

Arun

lasko

11:42 am on Jan 24, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



The end resultfor Google will be exactly the same as it was for Alta. Challenge me on this in January 2007, and I'll be happy to tell you "I told you so".

Its like football in the U.K.

When the very first team was floated on the stock market it became a business not a sport.

I remember when i checked Alta Vista alot plus i would hear the buzz word "Alta Vista" they were big before Google and while yahoo was busy with their directory.

Bit by bit Alta Vista's logo was not as noticable they tried to squeeze to much out of something good.

With talk of Googles new look and them pushing other areas like Froogle and news are typical indications of a shift towards a portal type business.

Maybe the Googlebot has become to clever and indexed more useless pages then ever. i see more session pages being indexed and Googlebot revists the site and indexes the site again doubling the content. (treating all the pages as new pages)

We also see Googlebot going past 2 paramaters in Url's, so maybe Google has more information then it can handle unlike other search engines who can still only crawl basic pages.

:)

Marcia

11:50 am on Jan 24, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Main Google looks the same as it has here in Southern California and really, all we've seen is some SERPs shuffled around in different order. No backlinks have been seen to have changed, and this may be interesting but it's really much ado about nothing.

[edited by: Marcia at 11:51 am (utc) on Jan. 24, 2004]

webdev

11:50 am on Jan 24, 2004 (gmt 0)

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Results confirmed on AOL too

Brian

11:52 am on Jan 24, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



The way my site works, I can see very clearly what Google has done here. It's very crude. A pain for me since I have to spend half a day reoptimising (and not what Google intended, since my site is very highly regarded, nonprofit and public service.)

The losers may be the unweildy spammer sites with the thousands of junk pages who (hopefully) lack the flexibility to respond cost-effectively. I say: good.

The real winners, in my opinion, will be the professional SEOs. Go back to your clients and say, well, hell look what they've done to you. Want me to fix it? It's like in the movie Breast Men where they billed women a fortune to put in implants, and then billed them again to take em out.

Chelsea

11:53 am on Jan 24, 2004 (gmt 0)



Much earlier someone wrote:

the more words you use the less chnace it decides all those words would appear together so ignores the pages where it does

This has been a real puzzle ever since the beginning of Florida. On this DC I now do OK again on a my 2 main KWs - suggesting some relaxation of Florida - but on 3 KWs, knocked out.

lasko

11:55 am on Jan 24, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member




No backlinks have been seen to have changed, and this may be interesting but it's really much ado about nothing.

You can say that again!

Their is nothing wrong with Google testing on a Datacenter!

A more detailed analysis should be done when the main index has changed.

webdev

11:59 am on Jan 24, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



>> You can say that again!

>>Their is nothing wrong with Google testing on a Datacenter!

>>A more detailed analysis should be done when the main index has changed.

The index has changed on Netscape and AOL so this is now live...only a short while before the rest all change over.

Haecceity

12:12 pm on Jan 24, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



I'm joining a bit late, but to me the update looks good on the whole. On my main (non-commercial) keyword the results are unchanged. On my main two word search that is commercial I now have the top two spots (and I haven't done any optimization for ages).

On another search a site I don't want to be in the top ten has moved up to 3rd place despite showing no external backlinks at all. That worries me, but then it's a new site and new sites seem to rank well at first and then often drop away.

So no real complaints from me, but then I mostly (like the vast majority of Google users) to informational searching. If I'm doing commercial searches I generally go stright to a trusted store or use a comparison site.

percentages

12:25 pm on Jan 24, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



>this may be interesting but it's really much ado about nothing.

I can confirm this SERPs are on Yahoo.com (with the usual Y! variance from Google) and AOL.com.....hardly "much ado about nothing" for those feeling the pain.

[edited by: percentages at 12:26 pm (utc) on Jan. 24, 2004]

adfree

12:26 pm on Jan 24, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



>this may be interesting but it's really much ado about nothing.

I can confirm these SERPs are on Yahoo.com (with the usual Y! variance from Google) and AOL.com.....hardly "much ado about nothing" for those feeling the pain.

[edited by: percentages at 12:27 pm (utc) on Jan. 24, 2004]

nileshkurhade

12:28 pm on Jan 24, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



The news of US government passing a bill to ban govt. work outsourcing came at the same time as this update. So it should be called appropriately to commomerate the occasion.
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