Forum Moderators: open
Figure a week before things settle down and become consistent.
I'd suggest if you have any changes to make you get them done very quickly. The googlebot often spiders around/immediately after the dance.
If Ms G. shows up at your site tomorrow and you don't make your changes until the day after, you may have to wait TWO months to get them in.
<clarification> The update that is happening now is based on spidering for the last month. The spidering that is starting now will go towards next month's update. Miss this spidering and you wait until the update after that.
Unless, of course, you get really lucky and get caught up in the 'minty fresh' minor updates... but I wouldn't count on that. </clarification>
[edited by: deejay at 10:04 pm (utc) on Sep. 26, 2002]
As a few have been saying...there has not been much 'action' from the Mod's or "people with alot of posts" mainly because they have been there done that about 20 times before and you always get the same parinoia etc.
Lets just wait a few days till the update calms down before people start moaning about it!
As far as i can tell, the only thing the two sites that moved above me have better than my site is LOTS of outbound links. I have avoided outbound links as much as possible from my main page, but after seeing this update, maybe it doesn't matter as much as i thought. (or, maybe it's helping them somehow). Is there a positive effect to linking to another high PR site?
I never have quite understood all the PR stuff. I have always just tried to get lots of inbound high ranking PR sites. Should i also have a ton of outbound links?
If anyone can explain, please sticky mail me. Thanks.
my best ranking page has no more then 15 links on it, and is linking to 4 high pr'd sites.
so the answer is no
How do you check the PR on www2. By changing google to www2 and typing in webpagename.com the backward links can be determined, and keywords can be searched but is there anyway to check for changes in pagerank?
I see totally different results for some keywords, especially significant changes in the SERPs for some health terms. It looks to me like Pagerank and DMOZ listings may have heavier weighting this time around. For a number of health related keywords, many of the schlocky little sites promising instant cures for anything and everything are gone, and have been replaced with higher PR sites. Sites that had held #1 spot for months for certain terms that I track are now not even in the top twenty returns.
In my title I've got a few of the specific products that these games can be run on, and searches for "wig-83 games," "wig-89 games," "wig-92 games," etc. are all sending in LOTS of traffic. Hopefully it stays like, this, but it seems WAY to easy to SPAM the algo like it is right now.
BTW In case you can't guess, this is a small calculator games section ;)
#1)Keyword in title. As important as before, if not more.
#2)Keyword in URL. DEFINITELY this is VERY important without multi-keyword domain names (e.g. keyword1-keyword2-keyword3.com). From what some have reported, multi-keyword domain still work.
Thus, based on the 2 above, if I wanted to do really well for "widgets", I'd register widgets.TLD (doesn't make a difference if it is a .ws, .cc, .fr, etc.) with a page title of "Widgets". The strategies above are working in SERPs I'm checking.
#3)PageRank. Nothing new here. If you wanna be #1 for "widgets", make sure you've got decent PR along with #1 and #2 above.
#4)Decent keyword density. Still important, but falling down a bit.
#5)Inbound anchor text in links seems definitely lower than before. Whereas before a link was heavily weighted "I'm voting for this (or these) words on this page", now a link is more "I'm voting for this page", and Google is letting the page decide what keywords are important to it, not the linking page. IMO not necessarily a bad change. Why should *other* sites determine what keywords are important to *my* page?
Of course, some of these may not yet be fully factored in at this stage of the dance. Definitely I'd say at the end of the dance check and see if anchor text hasn't gone up in importance.
Confused ... :(
Some links count more/some count less than others.
-Could be certain types of external links count more,
-Could be internal links count less,
-Could be both.
I can find no pattern before/after update with regards to title text. In my industry it looks to count a bit less now. Also the some of the tops pages I am seeing have less topical relevance and keyword density than before. Which points back to an algo tweak in the linking as hypothesized above.
I don't think themes are an issue here. My themed sites have plummeted for the theme's topic phrases. Unless themes are being penalized, which would seem to be a really dumb thing to do.
If this holds, then the algo really is strange this time. However, in the past it has been my observation that the last thing to fully get factored in is PageRank. Last dance I was in the #1 spot for another keyword at the beginning, and got knocked down in the very end below another site with better PR than me.
I still have my old PR of 3 but thats ok because the domain was inactive for month, expecting a 5 or so for an initial PR value, but how do I check on WWW2 and 3?
Thanks
It is your experience that PR calculations come in to play at the END of the dance? That would mean "final" (insofar as anything is final at Google anymore) positions are established at the last moment. That is way different from saying that new PR numbers are finally revealed at the last moment of the dance. Is that correct? I am curious how you came to that conclusion.
I completely agree that keyword in title and keyword in URL are more important now. This update has been excellent for content and very harsh on spam and meaninglessness (who really gives a hoot what the inbound link text is).
My principal concern is that title being so important can lead to some silly results... like there happens to be some site that (inexplicably) is named after my keyword but sells completely unrelated Hong Kong action film DVDs, and they get two listings in top ten of www2 and www3 now. I'm thinking those won't hold though since I see a major change in www (back to the old results) a few minutes ago, but (long winded)... my other point is, I'm thinking (based on some comments here too) that new sites are going to see artificially high first month or two rankings.
A nice improvement Google, you still aren't perfect (I'll go to my grave baffled by some page rank issues), but you get better all the time.
They change it, but somehow keep the good quality results.
They (Google people) probably have a good laugh by reading this thread every month.
I have 3 keyword phrases that are all moderatively competitive, and each turns up around 2,000,000 to 3,000,000 results. 1 of the three still ranks fine - #5. Of the other 2, I can find one at around #60 (used to be top 10 for 2 years), and the third I have yet to find (has been top 10/top20 for last few months). All three of these have extensive internal links with the respective keyword phrase. The one that is at #5 has no external links (internal links and PR only). The other two are domain/subdomain root pages and have a variety of external links.
Based on skimpy evidence so far, it would seem this update is very incomplete. If it is "complete" then I can't distinguish a pattern as to what the new results are all about. I know many people say wait, wait, give the update a few days. The past 4-6 mos.(my memory is foggy) it seems that almost as soon as the update started it was done. And in the past what I've seen for my results at the beginning of the update has been what I saw when it rolled out.
PS - Please don't make "woo-hoo I'm #1" or "boo-hoo my site is gone" posts unless you can contribute some insight into the update. WebmasterWorld is getting huge, and this thread is getting hard to read for real analysis.
You are wasting your time for this update. Anything you do now will not show up until either the end of October or the end of November (depends when GGB comes by your site). Get some sleep.
teeceo.
This happened to me last month. Last month, on one keyword early in the dance I shot up to #1. Over the site I have been playing second banana to at Google on this keyword for half a year. Both out sites have everything right on page. Keyword in title, and decent density for this keyword. However, this other site has a PR of 6 on this page to my PR of 5. At the very end of the dance, they moved ahead of me.
Of course, nothing changed on our pages between the beginning and end of the dance. The only thing that I can see reasonably explaining this is they stomped me with their superior PR. Which makes sense the way PR is supposed to work. If you've got better PR than all the competing sites, and your page is well optimized for the keyword in question, shouldn't your site come out on top? The way I have it figured, unless the algo changes, I'm *always* gonna play second fiddle to this other site unless I can somehow get the inbound links to beat them in the PR game. I assure you this wouldn't be easy unless some PR7 page is nice enough to link to my main site's index.htm page. ;)
To your question at the end: yep, I'm convinced PR doesn't fully kick in until the end.
