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Anybody else noticing anything,
Around midnight eastern time on Friday or Saturday night.
I think Google should not be allowed to update during weekends. It affects so many people's social lives. Unless, it offer a free dating service.
I also noticed some keyword listings change position today.
Has anyone had any pages added over the past week
Yes. But I put them on my site 2/22 (not linked from home page). Took a little longer than usual to get added to the index. However, they're down at the bottom of the SERPs. No PR yet.
Seems like my new pages used to show up closer to the top and then later move down a bit.
Beth
Put up 76 pages, two days ago. Six of the pages were in the serps within 20 hours.
InternetHeavan, I simply have a suspicion that the next update will move back in the direction of Florida/Austin, but that's just one man's guess. In my own feeble mind, those updates did bear some resemblance to tidal waves.
Regarding timing, it would not be too unusual for a new update to occur about a month since the last one. And lately they seem to hitting the shoreline on Fridays.
OTOH, with G, truly, one never knows. :-)
In fact, I think I can feel the water being sucked off the beach right now. ;-)
A nice reference, by an amusing poster (is this still permitted on WW?)
Extremely low tides precede a tsunami.
I guess many of us are feeling pretty philosophical about this now though. If G wants to present more rubbish serps - go ahead - our customers are already turning away.
Just make them really cr*p and end it for us all.
I haven't tried the search... but doubt amazon and ebay have any xanax. :) ...ROTF
It's too bad this is happening... a lot of serps look eerily like AV's did about 5 years ago... right before the shift. I am beginning to think that the attack on seo just awakened a "sleeping dog".
I can only hope that the new update, whenver it arrives, represents a more balanced approach to providing *useful* SERP's.
Useful to who? Commercial webmasters, or the average searcher who rarely does commercial searches? Google on their own site state they see their mission as categorizing the information on the Internet. As opposed to making it as easy as possible to buy widgets. There is Froogle for that. And, let's not forget the reality that Google makes money selling Adwords. If .edu and .gov sites tend to dominate over commercial sites, then I'd say that Google is on the right track.
Another one of those massive upheavels like a wek ago underway now on 216.239.57.99 and apparently elsewhere.
Wow, this sooooooo creepy!
To be honest I wouldnt mind that much if we were on page 3 and 20 of the sites above us were good, relevant sites. The reality is most of it is fluff, crap that mentions our KW once in linking to someone else, spam heavy dross with hidden text and all kinds of doorway pages - and worst of all a competitor who went out of business 2 months ago and was the biggest spammer of guestbooks in known history.
Even I've given up searching on Google now, at least Yahoo stays the same from one hour to the next.
You know tweaking the algo every day might seem like a good idea, but in reality searchers want consistency. They want to put in the same search term they put in last week and find the same results by and large. They dont want constant change - no one does, its the nature of humans. Remeber, if it aint broke and you mess with it you WILL break it (is that how that saying goes?)
I remember 3 years ago saying search engines were a canny lot, every time you think you have it sussed they would move the goalposts. But this is ridiculous, there ARE no goalposts... for gods sake get some normality back in the Googleplex.
[edited by: ntrance at 3:21 am (utc) on Mar. 11, 2004]
>>>rfgdxm1
Reference the meaning of "useful" and "information". I don't see being able to locate pure information when needed and finding a product when thats what you're after as being mutually exclusive. I don't find it difficult to determine which type of site I'm going to using what Google displays.
Useful to who? Commercial webmasters, or the average searcher who rarely does commercial searches?
A bit touchy rfgdxm1? :-)
My meaning was: Useful to *searchers*. It escapes me why some insist on distinguishing between types of searches. To paraphrase one of the Web's founders, a great search engine will be able to take all the information at its disposal and intuit the best set of responses regardless of the search term, to address the needs of the searcher.
FWIW, 99% of the sites we run are information based, supported by advertising. If info searches do badly, so do we. Let's be careful not to make assumptions about the intent or background of posters.
Regarding usefulness btw, I think it was pretty well established that the usefulness of the SERP's at times during Florida and Austin was poor. OTOH, the early Brandy results, before they started twisting too many knobs, were as good as any I'd ever seen on the Web.
But what I glimpsed that prompted my last post was pretty bad...meaning, not useful results on wide variety of searches. Except for those who love books and news. Me, I don't need G to find books and news. ;-)
Ugh. I feed that tidal wave approaching...
I'm not seeing much change at all the past few weeks. I'm still waiting for them to update their cache on my pages that were changed LONG ago. I think at this rate just adding the new cache would be enough to create a major change in the results because it seems like it's been in limbo FOREVER.
Somebody wake me up if they ever do it.
Hate to rile people up, but I have to agree with good old rfgdxm1 about the info versus com stuff. For straight knowledge searches, I'm finding it decent and no great change. For commercial stuff, it's the same old... thousands of sites duking it out over camel rentals in Patagonia, or whatever.
I have to agree about Amazon, (wherever that was in the thread...) the thing is nothing but spam. It's blo*dy riduculous having that thing popping up on every other search.
It might be the case that Google sticks with 2 or 3 different, but stable algos, but alternate which results they post (like each data center having a specific algo -- or something).
I am okay with this. It's the only way to do justice to both big important sites and smaller authority sites.
