Oct Update part 2

[Brett_Tabke]

Continued from
[webmasterworld.com...]

[beadguys]

Is there a pre-dance? The last two weeks of Oct. my site jumped from 9th to 3rd on my most important search term. last week, I held 3 and 4. Now, I've dropped to 8th.

Strange thing is, while my rank looks the same (on a mac, so can't see #), I have moved up 3 places in the OD. I'm now 3rd in that category, and I also noticed that the #1 spot had lost some PR.

I just recovered from a PR 0 (server went down during dance), and I was rocking along with a bunch of terms in October. Seems that there must be a change in the algo, since I've gone up in the OD, but down on the terms.

Could traffic have played a factor? We had an emergency that forced us to shut down pages for about 2 weeks. These are .cgi pages that can't be seen by google, but the traffic to the other areas of my site slowed way down.

Jacqueline

[Brett_Tabke]

Nah, traffic shouldn't play a part. (if it did - we'd be pr9 by now - lol).

More everyflux effect:
[webmasterworld.com...]

[Chico_Loco]

This seems to be a very long dance .. one of the longer ones.

Results for my specific term are moving back and forth..
My inbound links have just about multiplied by a factor of 10 (from 62 to 504), yet PR remains the same, interesting.. Then again there are more internal links than anything!

[kfander]

PR values are still jumping around for my sites, sometimes from minute to minute. Overall, it appears that at least three of them have been lowered by one point, yet my standings in searches are, if anything, better.

[edited by: kfander at 10:29 pm (utc) on Nov. 3, 2002]

[Helpmebe1]

take the hint googleguy gave...take a long weekend away from the computer..another words.. maybe by monday things will start to settle.. personally.. Every backlink is missing and PR is fluctuating all over the place.. its driving me nuts.. i guess just wait it out

[alxdean]

Similar phenomenon here, but my jumps are more related to the old cache of my website vs. the new one.
So one moment I'm all hurray, new keywords, new pages and next back to ancient days,
always hoping that google won't forget to update the index with the new copy down the line.

IMO the update is fluctuating so much over such a long time due to ever increasing data. Update combined with the Everflux phenomena puts a big strain not only on bandwidth.
You simply can't expect all data centres to have the up to date copy over night.

[qball0213]

How are you seeing page rank values jump around, and don't they stay jumbled until the dance is over?

[yankee]

If you see pagerank changing back and forth between two values, ask yourself what was your pagerank before the update. Your new pagerank will be the other one when the update finishes, which should be by tomorrow morning. 4 of the 5 data centers now have the new index.

[rfgdxm1]

I thought Google had 7 datacenters? One Google Dance machine online indicates so. That indicates 6 of 7 have the new index.

[Helpmebe1]

well backlinks from yahoo and dmoz are still missing, plus all backlinks so not so sure whats up with that.. by the way they are PR5 links..

[trueMarketing]

This is irritating. First, I have PR 6-7 and coming up on page 1 or 2 for all my top keywords in Google.
Now I still have a PR of 6 but all of my backwards links seem to be missing and I'm now anywhere to be found on the first 10 pages.

What the *@&! is up with this? Does anyone have any suggestions here?
I have a lot of qualified links out there and I have been coming up on www2, www3, and www within the first few pages.

Now nothing.

[matthias]

I have the subjective feeling that the October update is rather bad. This has nothing to do with my sites but with my feeling as a normal google user. I have to scroll a lot in the SERPS to find useful sites. Does anybody else has this feeling?

[SeventiesMartin]

There are 7 data centers, and google indicates that the dance is 5/7 of the way there.

2 of the data centers are pointing elsewhere though (sj snd zu), I see new but different results on both those, so don't know where they are pointing to.

[QNetwork]

Lots of pages of my site were showing up in www since Nov 1. Suddenly they do not appear in www. I can still find them in www2 & www3. Is the update still going on? Should I be worried about anything right now?

Thanks in advance for all the help.

[lazyz]

Nope don't be worried, it is normal.

I've seen it go on for quite a while. If you check out some of the posts concerning the last few udpates, you will see the index takes up to a week to settle, maybe longer. Then you get the "everflux" thing going on.

[ideavirus]

One of my site is out of the index.Earlier the homepage of the site had PR of 5 and now its not in the google index, not even in www2 and www3!

Is it too early to say, i am out for real?

If that is true, why wud that be?

Thanks

[Belgian_guy]

Ideavirus, i'm suffering the same problem.

My site had a PR4 before the update and i had page#1 results for several pages/keywords.

Soon after the update started, i noticed on thursday that only 2 pages remained in WWW2 and it were old pages.
I was surprised to see that suddenly WWW2 moved towards WWW so i thought the update was over and my site was vanished.

Today, mondaymorning, i notice some things :
-the number of pages in WWW raised from 2 towards 14...
-the 2 old pages that were already in on thursday, now show the new version.
-It's weird that some of those 14 pages don't have a page rank anymore. Now it shows a grey pagerank on the toolbar, as if Google considers them as entirely new pages.

I guess there is still hope that the other pages will appear in the new index as well.

However, this sure is a weird update and i don't like it at all b'coz www and local googles (google.fr and google.be) are reflecting a (partially) new index even before the update is over which results in less trafic coming from google at the moment.

[lowbwtom]

I know someone here knows this...
How often is the average site crawled by google? My logs show no evidence of crawling, but the index has changed to reflect changes to some of my pages. Do they use some other crawler agent name than "googlebot"?

Also, let's define the terms...
Is the Google Update the crawling or the update of the index? or both?

[doc]

I have a new site domainname.ca that was in the last index, but was not found at the start of this update. Yesterday I added a couple of links to it and now it appears (as well as the links to it) on www and www2 and has a cache date of Nov 2. Even though the toolbar is grey it appears on page 2 for the main keyword. Is this part of the update or was I just lucky to get it re-indexed so quickly?

[Helpmebe1]

Lowbtom,
typically you are crawled once a month.. possibly two if you have a kicking PR.. plus minty fresh updates..but disregard them.. worry about the deep crawl.. the update is the posting of the crawling that took place.. for example..people are getting crawled right now.. that will post at the end of november..typically you get crawled right before, during or after the dance or what is otherwise known as an update..

hope that helps..

[nutsandbolts]

For me this update has been excellent apart from one thing. Yet again someone thinks caching the entire front page of my (profile) site is a "good thing" - which has, yet again, caused a duplicate problem on Google. Surely a plain text link is fine and dandy... And yep, my site is the one that gets booted! Oddly enough, it's still got a nice and fluffy Pagerank of 5 too...

[ideavirus]

lowbwtom :

I have a similiar problem for another site of mine.

No sign of google crawling my site in my logs, but my homepage in the index shows the date of 1st nov 2002! Also it has updated the external links to my site...

what's worrying is that...I don't see googlebot in my logfiles! :(

I am going N.V.T.S .... Nuts!

[Monkscuba]

Re : duplicate pages.

We have a couple of very similar sites. One is our main site, the other we initially made exactly the same (before I read any of WW..) We have made a lot of changes to the sites titles, descriptions etc... But one or two pages remain the same across both sites. The second site will soon be completely overhauled and be completely different.

For the pages that are the same, Google is listing only one - the other just vanishes from the listings, but suffers no PR penalty. Actually it's good to see that Google can do this - if it sees two pages the same, it assumes a mirror site and lists only one. No need for a PR penalty or to ban the site - not being listed is penalty enough.

However it also shows that Google does not pick it up if you change the title and description. One competitor has 17 sites, all very similar but with small changes to avoid being dropped automatically. What a swine! Myself, I'm worried enough with 2 similar sites to go ahead and change the secondary site completely. Don't want to be reported....like the other guy will be.

[trueMarketing]

I'm on the East Coast and have had people in CA and TX checking www2, www3, and so on with our network of websites.

I had a quick question about one website we have in particular. It's fairly new - about two months old - and has a PR6 for most every page within the site.
We got a bunch of directory listings with some reputable online directories for this PR.

My question is: Does it seem likely that the Google "freshbot" spidering the site gave it an inflated PR or is it likely that the site will hold its PR for the next update later this month or into next month?

We have about 42 quality backwards links to other sites, search engines, and directories with at least a PR4

Thanks for any input

[Lawd Have Mercy]

Hi,

Everything that is weird is happening to my site also.

But for me the weirdest thing is that it is changing my content pages to my homepage. So when someone searches for one of my keywords I rank well but he sees my homepage title and description, that may have no text on the keyword he is searching for, though I do have pages that are VERY relevelant to that keyword in my site.

I too have lost page rank (been a PR6 for a year now PR5). A question on links...

If a PR7 site gives you a link on its link page that is PR5 which does Google count, PR7 or PR5?

Thanks this is an awesome thread!

[europeforvisitors]

Lawd Have Mercy wrote:

But for me the weirdest thing is that it is changing my content pages to my homepage.

I've had a weird experience, too: A page that ranks #1 for a two-word search term is showing the URL of another site that links to it with a redirect page.

In other words:

[mysite.com...]

is showing up in Google as:

[hersite.com...]

The page title and snippet display correctly in Google; only the URL is incorrect. In other words, there's no real harm done, since a user clicking on the link will be redirected to my page by the other site, but it seems odd that Google can't figure out how to list such pages at their correct URLs. I've seen the same thing happen with a certain "network of sites" (rhymes with "snout" dot com) where non-existent pages are still listed in the Google index because they're redirecting to other pages or sites.

[bether2]

Lawd Have Mercy,

I belive Google counts the PR5 page, i.e, the page that your link is on.

Beth

[nutsandbolts]

Have I missed something over the past few years - but since when did people start linking to other sites by using a front page cache and re-direct of the site they are linking to? It's kicked my site out of this month's index and I had the same problem 3 updates ago with another site too. Very annoying and scary that this can happen...

[Main_Mike]

I have been searching through the posts and now I can't find it... does anyone have the link to the PR checker. I remember it was www.something.org/prchecker. Thanks.

By the way, for anyone who's site isn't showing up or hasn't been crawled, My logs show I was crawled just an hour ago. That said, I guess I wasn't forgotten, and maybe you haven't been either.