Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
No, that is zero sum game. The most useless posts here are from people saying the serps on some datacenter suck or are good because their own stuff ranks bad or good on that datacenter. Not only does nobody else care, there is someone thinking the exact opposite due to how their stuff is ranking.
In any case (repeating mantra from past several updates), a lot folks should consider that screw ups are not deliberate policies. Google has been a technical mess for more than a year now, just over two years really. Allegra was just a blip of an update, but was a huge technical disaster. Google also has a horrible time figuring out canonical pages, particularly when webmasters deliberately do inconsistent things.
This update seems to me to be another minor bit of shuffling, with the added "bonus" of a lot of anomalies, most caused by lazy or uniformed webmastering (meaning if you have been reading webmasterworld and haven't had a 301 on for non-www and www since at least last summer, you only have yourself to blame).
I see almost no changes in my niches, except... a HUGE increase in straight redirect domains. This tactical trash gets discovered fairly quickly but apparently a new tactic has been discovered and needs to be squashed; authority sites performing same as recently; sites still in the sandbox dumped back to pre-Allegra levels, while sites that got out of the sandbox with Allegra doing a bit better.
#1 before Allegra, #1 after Allegra, won't come up for company name after Bourbon. Appearance of a reversal might be illusory.
I agree, that's the case here, Allegra didn't affect us. Bourbon has and we've made no major changes, so what's different now?
LisaB
As you know - I am hoping that is the way my site will go soon ;)
Interesting though that things are still moving.
[edited by: Dayo_UK at 4:44 pm (utc) on May 27, 2005]
Second, I wish to thank all of you who have taken the time to study the top 10 of that search.
My aim was to illustrate two things:
1 - UK present serps aren't so good as some of you have mentioned in this thread. The question is which niche you are searching within.
2 - What you see as good serps might be seen by others as bad ones. All depend on your knowledge of that niche.
Furthermore I wish to add that allegra, the 23rd March 2005 and Bourbon have illustrated that no site is bullet proof when it comes to Google updates. You have seen for yourself several posts within this thread and other threads talking about quality sites which have vanished from the serps.
Once again, thanks for your feedback.
New sites showing up today in top 10 of some SERP's sets...sites that were never before in the running in certain result sets. Looks like they're going hog wild with semantic evaluations. Some of these newly appearing sites are good quality, but WAY too far removed from the intent of some searches.
Another weekend where I'll have to force myself to stay away from the computer. Ergh.
Could never happen. I'm so thoroughly focused on... what was I saying?
Sorry Brett.
Thanks for your note. I know that the SERPs are a constant "flow" of up and down. Not everybody can gain. But this time IMHO something went wrong.
Additionally I find suspicous that with some keywords the amount of results suddenlty increased about 30-50%... Maybe Google is going to merge their "supplemental index" with the "normal" index.
Obviously things are still going on. According to McDar a lof ot DCs show different SERPs again. This wasn't the case two days ago ...
>Obviously things are still going on. According to McDar a lof ot DCs show different SERPs again. This wasn't the case two days ago ...<
Therefore I donīt think the fat lady has left the building yet ;-)
things are still going on.
Yes, I'm seeing a competing site that was way down, showing up on the first page again, alas not so for me... yet.
LisaB
Yesterday evening the index suddenly reappeared for the main keywords, and today the internal pages are resurfacing like 2 at a time. It's a content site and not a big moneymaker, but it has information people are looking for and I hope it sticks around at least for the summer. :)
The number of pages indexed varies even more:
446, 448, 449, 478, 479
The Ratfink in #1 or #2 position depending on datacenters shows 33, 34 or 0 backlinks (one data center, I like it! - 64.233.161.147)
Also varies in the number of indexed pages:
134,169,180,182,185
Actually, Ratfink WAS in #1 and #2 position, but now he's #5 in some datacenters, for example 66.102.11.104. where you'll find my site prominently featured at position 135 (woo-hoo!) rather than the usual 142 seen elsewhere.
Interestingly, and this is very new, his page showing at #1, is the one that receives the most links and dominated the SERPs for literally years, is MIA for that (and other datacenters). That page is just a list of links and affiliate content galore.
The page showing up at position #5 on some datacenters is an internal page that receives few links (it's not popular or interesting) but in by some odd twist contains some actual information.
Speculation:
Fat lady fainted briefly, breathed her salts and started again.
TrustRank, or whatever fancy algo they're trying out, is a multi-step process requiring more computing power that the previuos algo, and more time to be carried out.
The main thing is there is no such thing as "UK present serps". If you don't say what datacenter you are looking at, you aren't saying anything.
There is one thing I don't understand. When I look in mcdar's tool I'm back on every DC on page #1 for my main keyword. When I ping for www.google.nl I get 64.233.161.104. However when I go to www.google.nl and search for my main keyword I'm still on position #180.
In the end I still end up with a few referrals from google these days.
Surprisingly the referrals from some dutch search engines have risen to the amount google used to have.
I agree..my theory is that what is happening is a multi-pass through the database - once on existing data and again as the sites are re-visited and re-cached. Possibly a filter is applied as sites are re-visited.
So a site position will be variable until everything is recached and a level "playing field" reached based on whatever variables/filters Google is using.
In order to banish the affiliate and scraper sites G has started penalizing linking OUT of ALL kinds! Think about it in regards to your own rank degradations this time around. Like I think I heard EFV mention too, the pages with the most external links have been degraded the most. So now instead of NOT losing PR for linking out, you ARE losing PR for each link offsite, so that if you have enough of them (i.e. the case with most scraper sites) your effective PR becomes 0 and you get dumped in the SERPs. Which also makes sense if you think about the concept that if you had content of your own, or something of your OWN to sell, you would not need to be linking offsite to someone else. Personally I think it's a rather elegant solution, albeit, perhaps not what the web was intended to be. Think about too how this will forever change the future shape of the net.
Naysayers better think about it long and hard in light of the current update results and G's recent agendas before just blindly, robotically giving the traditional response that "linking can never reduce your PR".
>There is one thing I don't understand. When I look in mcdar's tool I'm back on every DC on page #1 for my main keyword. When I ping for www.google.nl I get 64.233.161.104. However when I go to www.google.nl and search for my main keyword I'm still on position #180.<
Have you tried these two DCs too to see whether you are also on page #1 there?
64.233.183.99
64.233.183.104
Allegra (3/2005) - 6
Bourbon (5/2005) - 6.5
Florida (11/2003) - 9
...?
I guess it's hard to standardize....
Have you tried these two DCs too to see whether you are also on page #1 there?64.233.183.99
64.233.183.104
I'm on page #1 on those two DC's.
What does it mean? Will everything be allright in the end. These DC's are google English and my site is in Dutch.
"Be assured your site is not banned or penalized. As we add new pages and incorporate updates to existing pages, you may see changes in the ranking and inclusion of sites in the index. Because the index changes regularly, it's possible your site will regain its ranking in a few weeks."
The only thing I can really think of is to still wait patiently for at least a month. I cannot be found at all by Google, yet I have no penalty, despite the fact that every website outranks me right now. This tells me that maybe there is a chance that Google just has not reached every website yet. Who knows.
Have you tried these two DCs too to see whether you are also on page #1 there?
64.233.183.99
64.233.183.104
Why did you ask Bddmed to specifically try these DCs?
They won't tell you whether your site got penalized or not..
[Don't believe me? Go Google the term 'search engine' right now and ponder the order of the results. The more non-competitive, neutral, free content you offer (like published library book text ;), the more they'll like you.]
googled "search engine" and came up with all of G's direct contenders. google ranking themselves 5th. I am sure I am looking at a different DC than you, but I don't think your premise is correct. It is not exactly clear what they are trying to achieve with bourbon. Some DC's return clean, relevant serps...some don't. I just wish they would hurry up and conclude this thing so we can make some definite conclusions ourselves about this thing and make the necessary adjustments.
Originally in this thread, I mentioned that we couldn't be found for our "branded sitename" of 8 years
Now we can, again, in # 1 position. A great relief. We're in business, at least.
I've checked several datacenters, and it appears that we've totally lost position for some of our keyword phrases, but we've gained or held for others. (Ex., One slipped from # 4 to # 7 on SOME servers, but not all yet. Still, that's better than # 70, and to be expected overall.)
The end result is still a massive drop in traffic. But its a fantastic relief to know we're not still "penalized" as it seemed we were for a few days earlier this week.
One other note: I found a whopping 14,500 back links to us in Yahoo. We have many more backlinks than I suspected. Even Marketleap didn't find everything.
And we still have the problem of having Google list us with 6,100 results, when we only have 1,900 pages. I can't get at my .htacess file, so even if it is the "non-www" problem cropping up I wouldn't know how to fix it. (But I can find no searches listing us with a non-www URL...)
Song is definitely still on.
>I think you are 1/2 right too :-)
I'm thinking more a density thing.
I'm thinking it's more a matter of proportion of text to outgoing links. If you have a page with NOTHING but say 20 outgoing links, it is still going to be dumped.<
I have seen a page #1 on the serp for a competative keyphrase which contains 70+ outbound links (with very short snippets) and 100+ internal links.
Another page with nothing but 60+ outbound links and 100+ internal links and little text at top 10 on the serps for a niche keyphrase.
>But a page which say has 20 paragraphs of text with one link per paragraph is fine.<
Not always. I guess depending on the type of oubound links. I saw a similar page to that you described which lost its position since friday.
But as I said, Iīm still testing :-)
