Google Update Bourbon - Part 1

Has the sandbox been busted?

[Dayo_UK]

continued from: [webmasterworld.com...]

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Seeing something happening on 64.233.163.104 and 64.233.167.104 - might be worth keeping an eye on.

[Tigrou]

we need to wait till sunday. By then everything will be clarified.

awww, walkman spoiling all the fun by talking talking logically. :-)

Google dances (like this one) are all about Christmas Eve nerves. Especially this time as it seems that junking of scapers means that almost every white hat here is a winner.

[spaceylacie]

"spaceylacie: If you show your page at #1 even for a while ,i bet you it will stabilize there in a few days,fingers cross."

All of my fingers are crossed! If this isn't an update, I don't know what is. My second most sought after keyword, also #1 out of 700,000. Third, which is a 2 word phrase, also #1. On Google.com but not when I go to AOL or Netscape. I had serps like this last Christmas, haven't seen anything like it since.

[oldpro]

Well...I was one of those that was not hammered during the "minor reshuffling" phase of this update. Now I am doing like a rock across all DC's. Not only that I am seeing a slight drop on MSN.

The only thing I have changed in the past couple of months is add a sitemap and a little content to my index page. Must have done something wrong. I have a feeling that I am looking having to do a major overhaul.

Only thing is...anything I change will be total guesswork.

[Powdork]

I am excited. Still not getting much in the way of Google referrals but at least I am at #50 for my name in quotes. There are several keywords I've identified where I am on page 1 where I was at about 50 prior to this. I still have lots of URL only listings the updated datacenters though.

Does anyone else get a message saying cookies are disabled when trying to switch to 100 results on a specific datacenter?

[oldpro]

seems like in some sectors they are turning the serps upside down

[spaceylacie]

P.S. My #1 keyword, which jumped from #14 to #1, out of over 32 million!

[RobinK]

Powdork, yes I get the same message about the cookies.

[skunker]

I am out of the sandbox now for 2 of my sites!

[spaceylacie]

OMG, who is as excited about this update as I am?

I'm checking stats like crazy and LOVE what I'm seeing!

A site I started on May 6th is out of the "sandbox" too. It's coming up #16 out of my most targeted 2 word phrase. Out of 155,000 results showing. Not bad for a new site, I think!

[spaceylacie]

Oops, meant to say site I started on April 6th, not this month.

[CathyM]

Hmm. In the main Google SERP's my site that took a dip on March 25 is now back to it's full rankings. However, on the data centers mentioned in this thread it is still at the March 25 levels. And my site that has been sandboxed since August is fully out of the sandbox on the mentioned data centers but not on the main google site. The sites are not related in topic.

Don't know which one to wish for to stick. I guess either way, it's an improvement for one site. And maybe these results will merge over the next few days.

[hdpt00]

Anyone seeing the new results migrating to google.com? On one of the datacenters wheremy site is finally out of the sandbox I don't see on the main google.com yet.

dvduval: is your site that is out of the sandbox showing on google.com or jsut some other datacenters?

When do you all think the propogation will be over?

[helleborine]

I very much look forward to some hints as to why Google, which correctly ranked my site #1 for my keyword, now views it as a "scraper" - how do I make my site less "scraper-lik"?

I'm still buried at position 150.

[skipfactor]

Wow, non-comm info site out of the penalty box in less than 4 months with this one. 2 or 3 negotiated incomings, a few more not-asked-for, zero internal anchor except for homepage anchor (subpages only link back to homepage via the top left corner logo w/ no alt txt), elementary seo and no recips. I'll have what he's having...

[hdpt00]

Checking on all datacenters I am only #4 for my main keyword on 3 of them. Could these be the first 3 that are showing up? Everything else I am the same. What is evreryone else noticing?

I am just hoping that these 3 are the ones that eventually propogate. As you can tell I'm pretty nervous as I've never actually ranked anything above a few hundred before.

Well, good luck everyone.

[seoArt]

I'm seeing old PageRank on my sites, from before this last update. Anyone else seeing that?

[steve40]

I don't want to hurt anybody's feelings but we are only on 1st day of an update be carefull if you to happy about your rankings or pretty pi? , still major filters to be applied up till tuesday lunchtime if as per normal
and some of the most lethal are applied last of all

Give till lunchtime tuesday before celebrations or desperation , go for a pint or 3 tomorrow

steve

[randle]

I'm seeing old PageRank on my sites, from before this last update. Anyone else seeing that?

Yes, we are seeing that also.

[walkman]

that's a very good point. On feb many of us got about 4-5 days of great only to be thrown to no man's land.

"I don't want to hurt anybody's feelings but we are only on 1st day of an update be carefull if you to happy about your rankings or pretty pi? , still major filters to be applied up till tuesday lunchtime if as per normal and some of the most lethal are applied last of all"

[mickeymart]

seeing the same behavior re: pagerank

was hoping that wasn't the NEW rank

[Trisha]

This may be the first time I've ever posted in an update thread, or at least I haven't done it very much anyway.

I don't really track specific phrases in the serps much, most of my traffic comes from lots of little phrases. But, I have noticed that on my site with Adsense, my impressions are way down today, cut about in half, and so are my earnings. ctr is fine though. So I think this update must be hurting my rankings for that site. Which sucks because I have spent a lot of time writing content for the site, all white hat, nothing black hat on it. (Sorry for the whine.)

On the other hand, and this may be of interest to someone - another site which lost almost all of its google referrals after Allegra and wasn't showing up for the site name, presumably because someone linked to the site without the www and I didn't have a redirect set up for it - is now in the top 10 for its name again. But sorry, I didn't keep track of when I set up the redirect for it but it was after Allegra. And of course I can't be certain that was the problem, but its a pretty good guess.

[helleborine]

Trisha, it what you said was true about the www. redirect, I wouldn't be experiencing such a big drop, from position #1 to 150+.

I never had a re-direct, and it didn't give me problems before.

What I do have is a sudden surge in inbound links, and an index page with a list of internal links to all my 450 pages. Methinks Google don't like this no more!

[arubicus]

Are you saying 450 links on the index page?

[Trisha]

helleborine - I don't know what your situation is, but I know there were some other people with +/-www problems who recently set up a redirect also, plus other people with possibly similar problems that google saw as duplicate content. I thought other people may be interested in how long it might take a site to recover from a problem like that once the redirect was set up. I haven't checked logs yet though, so I don't know how the google traffic is, but I think seeing the site showing up for its name again is a good start anyway.

[arubicus]

We were nailed also. But it wasn't the www redirect problem. We have a fix in place long before. But we did have tons of 302 pointing to us. One directory had 90% of our site with 302 redirects. We also seen bad acting (google problem) 301 redirects from a 2-3 year old previous structure change.

A bunch of cleanup later and we now have a few hundred pages in and yesterday the index page finally decided to pay a visit in search results. I don't care where it landed right now it being in there was a relief and a half.

I have also noticed that some keyphrases I watch were so far scraper free. At least the top 20-30 were scraper free. I hope that don't change anytime soon!

[blend27]

This is the best Search results for Google for the past 18 month I see. My site is still Banned or Sandboxed, But, But, But, But - nice, No Srapers, No Srapers, No Srapers, No Srapers,!

I have to say - Great Stuff!

[oldpro]

It seems like a lot of you folks are being freed from the google dungeon and I am glad for you. On the other hand, Since last weekend my site has dropped about 3 positions #10 to #13...to make matters worse most of the datacenters have me in positions as #21.

Its just a simple website with about 10 pages, however all of my competitors are always copying my content...sometimes verbatim. I'm not the scraper, but the scrapee! I know ya'll are experts...would this cause my downward trend in this shake-up?

[sierra11b]

So I haven't had a chance to play with my site for awhile except for once.

All my links are still active except now I have 3 more major links. 1 on a PR5 sites, one on a PR6 and one on a PR7 site. All are reputable sites that play by the rules.

My PR was 3. Now it's 0? #*$!?

Could this be because they're still in the middle of the update? Or is the PR i'm seeing google's final answer?

[blend27]

This PR Dance is very intrigging, looks like it jumps 3 month back for some reason, and the bounces back. I am watching 3 of sites that I have build. Back and forward for the past 3 hours.

[dvduval]

Yes, many people are seeing a PageRank rollback as well. This is going to be an interesting update indeed.