July Update?

[Heywood_J]

Is it me or does it look like a significant update is going on at google. I am noticing a number of SERP changes for a few of my sites and they've been fluctuating for the past few days.

Anyone else noticing any major changes?

[troels nybo nielsen]

From where I look the SERPs seem to be back in the old pattern known before the update with small changes from day to day. Backlinks still look confusing. Guess I'll have to accept that this is not a glitch but on purpose.

[rrl]

Google has indeed become the worlds largest link farm. No matter what the criteria, spammers will always find out what google is up to and exploit it. For now, it's links. For my phrases, if you're search for a lawyer in the cities I'm optimizing for, the first several pages are full of useless spam directories full of sponsorship listings and flashing banners. Nice job, google.

[rrl]

For lawyer-related phrases, the new big dog on the Internet is a website promoting studying in a foreign country that loaded up with tens of thousands of anchor text with lawyer phrases in it.

[crankin]

link numbers way down, SERPs filled with junk. My widgets are very specialized, people don't chat about my widgets, there's no 'widget history' to look up, they search to buy them and move on. Top results when looking for 'special widgets'? An Amazon book with the words 'special' and 'widgets' sprinkled in the title. A site explaining that to get the special widget required by the Skunkville County Board of Commissioners, you'll have to come in to the courthouse and talk to Madge. And so forth. You wanna buy widgets? Hey, the AdWords guys are selling widgets, imagine that...

My Google traffic is in the trash. For 3 years now, I've been faithfully doing what everyone says Google likes to see - good content, clean pages, no funny anything, relevant links, etc. I've gotten decent results, people are happy they find me because hey what a concept, I actually have what they are looking for! Now we have a repeat of the Florida fiasco, where overnight, everything that was good about my site is now bad, and the Skunkville County website is trying to figure out how to pay for the bandwidth.

I'm not sour-graping, I'm what-the-hecking. This 'update' is nasty.

[HayMeadows]

From here, it looks like more of a back-date than an up-date. Time to roll in the new data hopefully! Bet this one brings us to rolling updates. Bye-bye Google of old.

[schenz]

I seem to be one of the victims of this update. My site was listed in many top 10 positions for various keywords, but now I seem to have fallen out of even the top 100 for many of these.

How am I going to get those positions back? This is killing my business and we need that placement. It really sucks that we have not changed our site in years, and are suddenly basically dropped by Google.

[jdancing]

schenz,

Maybe the fact that you have not changed your site for years could be the problem. Others may have changed their site to keep up with the times leaving your site behind.

[schenz]

My site changes almost daily (new products added, prices updated, etc...) What I mean about no changes is that there has been no major site restructuring.....No major changes to site design, how pages are linked, etc.....

The actual content changes frequntly. I'm sorry that I didn't make that clear before.

[schenz]

Also, we have made changes to ensure that we were following basic rules (relevancy, keyword optimization, page design, etc...)

Now suddenly we are out of the top 100 on terms we used to be ranked #1 on for several years.

[seo2004wow]

Hi

I see a big diff. with backlinks, used to have about 255 and now 11, drop from high on page 2 to page 3.