Major Google Changes

Significant movements in rankings.

[Imaster]

Hi,

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]

[kpaul]

something's odd. at least, though, they kinda waited until the majority of the shopping season is over for most people.

i have a lot of internal links and dropped as well on a lot of keywords, fwiw...

[Hanu]

My own site is like a rock in heavy waters. Duh. Other sites jumping around like jack-in-the-boxes. Mine is rock solid at ... 15. Great! I guess some fellow must have forgotten to remove the algorithmic paper clip that pins my site to that worthless 15th position. I'm going to bed now. Sweet dreams everyone!

[madmatt69]

Yeah this is a weird one. Google's showing over 7000 pages indexed on one of my sites, which previously only showed about 1900, yet traffic is down 50%.

[uioreanu]

50% less google referrals would have been great! I experienced 90% traffic drop over the last 4 days. I hate this alarmist tone though.

I guess the most common sense thing to do now is to wait patiently until the index stabilizes.

[jimpoo]

Three of my sites' traffic were increased constantly during the last four weeks.
But these days all of their google traffic suddenly gone.
One site is a four years old site which ranked between #1 and #15 on a very competitived keyword, but now nowhere.
Google is just killing my business.

[norton j radstock]

After declining over the last 48 hours, one of my sites has effectively vanished from search results -I think quite a few people will be waking up with a headache today. Things are not helped by the fact that I also don't seem to be able to get MSN or Yahoo search at all here (I am in the UK).

However, with major changes at foot in Yahoo and MSN search, I wonder whether Google is adding to its vulnerability with changes right now. Wouldn't do to have a pile of disgruntled webmasters adding MSN search to sites that have bombed in Google......

[tigger]

although I'm in the same boat as most here loosing around 50% of my traffic and income I really think he should let the dust settle first as I've seen this a 100 times before that during the shuffle sites drop and vanish to return normally the following week/month once everything else drops into place

[MLHmptn]

All of you should just stop supporting google! Start concentrating your efforts on the other search engines! If you think your going to figure out google please write a book and I'll buy your first copy! Over these last 2 years I have never heard or seen one person that has google totally figured out! All your doing is stressing yourselves out by customizing your sites to what you think is google's algorithm and what isn't! All this is doing is minimizing the traffic you could and should be getting from the other search engines. Of course this is all my own opinion...Take it for what it's worth! :>~

MLHmptn

[joeking]

MLHmptn makes a good point that's been made many times over.

If your traffic is down 50-90% it should tell you one thing. Not that Google's broke. Not that Google hates you. It should tell you that you are far too reliant on a source of business that you have no control over.

If that 50-90% of traffic was truly valuablñe to you, why not figure out other ways of getting it to your website? If your website converts visitors into money why wouldn't you be doing this anyway?

It's like owning a shop with no store front and relying on one person to guide each and every customer to your door. The person starts showing those people to another shop instead of yours. What do you do? Sit in your shop moaning about him? Or kick yourself for depending so heavily on him for all your business?

[tigger]

>It's like owning a shop with no store front and relying on one person to guide each and every customer to your door

true but if everyone is using the same store to find products you have to try every resource to make sure your products are on display

[highman]

Sept 23 we lost 60% of traffic because of what happened at Google, that taught us a good lesson, get traffic from other places!
However, we have never managed to get back near to pre Sept 23 levels, until now.
Now we are exceeding those pre Sept 23rd levels partly because we concentrated on other sources.
So in summary you will find it very, very hard to replace Google traffic - it is the shop window for the majority

[brixton]

if they have so many DC and so many dances every few days why dontya guys do the same make 1000 of domains ,tones of spam pages so in every dance at least you got a 10% on the top,if thats the way the want to do it the only result it will be more and more spam.

[brixton]

i mean buy tones of old domains of high PR,and spam the net.

[dvduval]

>It's like owning a shop with no store front and relying on one person to guide each and every customer to your door

Yes, and it is a great relief to see the Yahoo update. Finally, sites that have been sandboxed by Google for almost a year now are getting quality traffic. With MSN about to unleash their engine, I look forward to yet another source of quality traffic.

For the most part, I have resisted paying big bucks for Adwords, and now I'm glad I stuck it out. The results Yahoo is providing for free are way better than I can achieve through Adwords in a couple of key areas for me. Once MSN rolls out their search, it will almost entirely remove my dependancy on Adsense, allowing be to go back to spending more money on design and development of quality websites.

[internetheaven]

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.

Unfortunately, I'm seeing alot of this with this update. Sites selling "widgets for the west coast" are number 1 for "widgets for the east coast" but not even the in the top 1000 for "widgets for the west coast".

I've been through about 300 or so of our targeted keywords today and the results are so irrelevant I can't even laugh about it. It's not even that these sites are spamming intentionally, some of them are spam sites but are targeting completely different keywords!

I'm afraid I'd have to disagree with the "less importance to internal and more to external links" theory from the results I'm seeing. (I used Google and Yahoo to check backlinks!)

I never thought I would ever be persuaded to start using another search engine, but if these results last more than a week I'll have no choice. I can't even find non-commercial things now! - searching for data/history on WWII brought up gun-sellers .... I think Yahoo's results are awful, but right now Google's are MEGA-awful. I can't imagine users putting up with this either, where do you think they will go?

[frances]

Am i the only person whose sites have moved no more than in a normal rolling update?

[JuniorOptimizer]

Francis, no. All but 2 of mine stayed still. The 2 were beaten like red-headed step-children.

[needinfo]

frances,

we've had some sites go from around position 4-10 move up to position 1 where they were before Sept 23rd, but other sites go down to the second page or much further such as position 387.

[edited by: needinfo at 1:08 pm (utc) on Dec. 19, 2004]

[Dayo_UK]

I have sites that have gone down - and sites that have gone down further. :(

[brixton]

ho ho ho mary xmas.........see ya in spring update....anyway i made my money...ho ho ho

[kevinpate]

Frances - nopers,you're not the only one :)

But for the sheer size of this thread catching my attention, I wouldn't have known of the changes this month.

The limited areas for which I use an SE (as contrasted with bookmarks, direct type-in) are largely unchanged.

I suppose I'm just boring and don't tend to delve into the really competitive searches, and the site I mainly care about is right where G has placed it for some time.

[howiejs]

I setup Google Alerts for link: and site: for my main sites - I have been getting multiple emails per site each day since Friday . . .

My main site which has 3k pages - Google is showing 18,000+ pages in site:

[renee]

has anybody noticed the lack of supplemental tags on 64.233.171.147? is this the end of the capacity issue? the sandbox?

[a389951l]

I noticed this too. But the year on the cache is still from 1969? I wonder when this will settle down.

[DerekH]

I have a lot of supplemental pages where the cache is December 1969.

Yes, on the URL you quote, they're not supplemental, but the cache is still b*ggered.

DerekH

[Armi]

Hello,

I have examed german shopping portals after devaluations (the most important
sides of course).

I see big devaluations at the followings:

Ciao.de
guenstiger.de
yopi.de
dooyoo.de

I don't see any devaluations:

idealo.de (although obvious duplicate spam with preisvergleich-idealo.de)
geizkragen.de
shopping.zdnet.de
kelkoo.de
testberichte.de
evendi.de
current preisvergleich.de
geizhals.at

Of course I don't mean the main pages but the product sides and search
after product name.

The similarity theory could be right. At this one
devalued sides could

a) all product sides are too similarly > they need more "content"
b) these sides aren't very different from other sides (> Clones)

Of course there exists lots of other possibilties......

Therefore I hope that perhaps the one or other find out something important.

Regards

Armi

[eZeB]

All the changes haven't filtered thru yet -- 64.233.171.147 is still different (and better).

I saw an odd thing yesterday -- on a search for ultra competitive terms, a small note appeared at the bottom in grey text -- "Would you like to search for keyword variant" Its gone now -- more changes to come

[nick35]

"All the changes haven't filtered thru yet -- 64.233.171.147 is still different (and better). "

This was brought up already and we were told to ignore
64.233.171.147 because the results are half of the other data centers, unfortunately.

[Marval]

Checking that posted IP - I see around 68 mill results for a keyword that normally shows 400 mill results so I dont think that is the "final" version by a long shot

One major thing Ive noticed in all of this rollback - huge database errors in Google where they show a URL that exists on one domain but is listed with a different domain - and doesnt exist on that other domain - just had it happen by seeing a huge increase in 404 requests from Google - after checking I noted that the domains were not related in any way, one belongs to a friend of mine in a different country on a completely different hosting companies servers and IPs A Class - and we verified that he was seeing the same thing with other peoples domains - and to check and verify, we also ensured that there were not link exchanges by any of the involved domains.
I posted on another board about it and it turns out its a rampant problem since Thursday - so Id have to say that there are some major database crosslinks and errors that are affecting a lot of people.
At first I thought it was a fix attempt by Google for the site scraping problem, but if it is they have definitely made some sort of programming glitch thats showing itself.

[nick35]

One thing I've noticed all over the place is duplicate results for every website that shows up for the keywords that I check. Each site has two pages of their site showing up one after the other in a search