Forum Moderators: open
It seems that a major google update is under way. I just checked www.google.com with the normal set of keywords that I generally use to monitor any changes and found what I believe is a major update. Now its back to original results. Its kinda on and off.
One of my site had a 50% increase in the number of pages crawled.
I hadn't much chance to check out whether the update spells good news or not, so lets keep our fingers crossed.
<Imaster adds>
The changes are visible on 216.239.39.104
[edited by: ciml at 2:15 pm (utc) on Dec. 16, 2004]
[edit reason] Addition [/edit]
Yes, I agree my index page is still number one in google for the main keyword, however ALL of my pages that have anchorlinks with the exact keyword are gone.
I use the names of a continent, a city, and two countries as anchor text in my navigation links on more than 4,000 pages--not for the sake of optimization,but because those are the major topics within my site. All four of the underlying pages show up in searches on those names, although their rankings aren't nearly as high as, say, [keyword] [continent] at #2, [city] [various keywords and keyphrases] at #1, or [country] [keyword or keyphrase], also in the top 10.
I doubt if the lower rankings for the single [continent] or [city] or [country] keywords are related to the use of single words in anchor text; more likely, it's because there are tens to hundreds of millions of other pages indexed for those keywords.
It's not unusual to be #1 for your own site name. I've had that since the second month the site existed, up until earlier this week when my site sank to #6.
Right now google has 650 pages from the site in its index, I am not even ranked in the top 100 for my site name - only those linking to my site (it is not a common name).
The results google is showing right now cannot possibly be correct. The site has about 20 PR4 pages. Is this normal during a major update? When might these results stablize? Guesses?
Based on the past, I might expect to see adjusting over the next week. They've lost a lot of good pages, and gained a lot of pretty spammy ones where we look.
Our own sites are seeing some minor subpage drops in a few isolated categories, and otherwise holding, but page one SERP's in a lot of cat's we watch have exchanged added some random junk pages (not related to the site's focus), and lost relevant pages from more focused sites.
Sorta the opposite of what you'd hope for and expect.
Some of the datacenters show significantly different results than the others, and those (imo) show the first improvement in some time. However, as usual, those seem to be the minority report results that will be overwhelmed by the weaker results. Four times in the past few months now I have naively thought (and posted), "oh a good tweak is appearing on some datacenters", then boom we go back to the unrelentingly mediocre results.
Anyway, when datacenters are this different, it really is not very good to say "these results stink" or that they are good. Remember, there is no "main google". We are all seeing results from a few dozen different pools of data, and they are often very different, as they are now.
People were still shopping for Christmas a few days ago. Now look at some of the sets of results they get. If they wanted to shop E-bay, they would go to E-bay not search Google.
wellzy
BTW, searching with my "Joe User" hat on today, I felt I was getting a lot of worthless results. Top results dominated by wildly off-topic pages, pages that didn't even contain all of the words I was searching for, etc. Ugh.
That was certainly true for me during Austin, when G for a short while showed the cleanest and most compelling SERP's that I'd ever seen. Of course, they chose not to keep those SERP's for reasons I'll never understand.
Times like this make me think twice when people say G would rather put up SERP's that make money with Adwords, than SERP's that are the best they could be. I'd like to think it's not true...but geez.
Also, the subdomains that I permanently redirected back to my real domain are now back in there ( they were removed back in november )
definitely seems like a rollback to me.. although I guess not to everyone. strange
the anti-aff, anti-commercial march goes on
...And yet, our 100%, commercial driven, shopping cart-type site has continued to creep up the serps, and several of our affiliates have hit the top ten for targeted serps.
So much for that theory.
It's too much of a pain to try and tweak/adapt to every google "tweak". I love the free traffic, but paying for it is much more predictable. As long as I can keep making $6 for every $1 I spend on adwords, I'll let you guys stress over these minor burps in google's algo. I think the next best search engine is right around the corner (google's really reminding me of altavista lately ;-)
Is this Vegas?
Judging be the flurry of posts in this thread, it sounds like it.
At the same time, I haven't seen anything but minor shifts in the kw's that bring in most of our traffic. I'm running a non-commercial niche site, of course, (just 300+ pages, and 700-1000 page views a day), but I scoop traffic by putting up pages geared to tourist searches, and they all stayed at #1, or thereabouts.
So, my apologies for contributing nothing to the thread, other than reporting that if you have an obscure, non-commercial, popular, PR6 site, nothing much happened... ;-)
Where I see spammers beating the sandbox for money keywords, I still see spammers beating the sandbox for money keywords.
No improvements whatsoever in the SERPS.
My site deals with a 100% legal product. It's not porn, or gambling or anything like that. But Adwords and Adsense guidelines prohibit me from advertising my site or placing ads on my site.
It's ironic, though, that if I do a search for any one of my keywords, there are several ads from a "major auction site" that "sort of" reflect the topic of my site.
I guess Orwell was right. All pigs are not created equal, at least when it comes to Google and its ad campaigns.
Is anyone seeing any increases in traffic as a result of the update?
Is anyone seeing any increases in traffic as a result of the update?Yes. My traffic has improved slightly.
You did mean the Yahoo update didn't you?
Surely. Some webmaster has gotta be #1 on a SERP. And they'll likely be happy about the increased traffic, unless their site is totally irrelevant for that search.
Im still ranking number one across the board for all the terms that mean anything to me. And then im still ranked for those that dont.
To be honest this is right now a dance for me but its only a case of differing pages swopping and differing snippets appearing for the same terms. Big tweaks out of the way?
Nothing different here than what we've seen a half dozen times since August. More fiddling, certainly no major change (and sandbox not touched at all).
(and sandbox not touched at all).I don't know about that. I think a dumptrunk just unloaded in my back yard. Fortunately, the girls were playing on the swings at the time. There's still four more days until winter though.
We also charged by google, we have move 3000 BL to 23000 BL, but drop in SERPS, we have more than 10000 keyword and get rank in first page (75% first position), and today we doesn't find in google. Our website get 20000 hit per day and now we get 2000 hits per day (90% lost in visitor)
Did anyone else notices a big change in SERPS today?
eddy
5 sites negligible change...For the site that took a hit on Sept 23rd traffic has doubled since Dec 17th
