Update Jagger, Google Update Oct 18th, 2005

When can we expect a new PR update?

[jretzer]

Continued from here:
[webmasterworld.com...]

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Anyone have any guesses as to when we can expect a new systemwide PR update?

[Hexed]

Here is one good theory to why people were dumped in the SERPs:

You were RE-Sandboxed if your site was registered pre late 2003. Read on..

I understand that this won't be the only reason people were dumped as I'm sure there are many deciding factors. However I think one of the main reasons is that the length of the sandbox was increased for popular terms.

Want to find out for yourself? Here's what yo do.

1. visit your favourite whois portal, or use whois from your command prompt if you're running linux or have a windows whois.exe. A good website portal is "www (dot) whois (dot) sc" if you don't have the command.
2. type in "www.yoursite.com"
3. Look at the creaton date and the first record date and record it.
4. visit google.com
5. type in your search term that you used to be ranked for.
6. take the first page of rankings (1-10 or so) and type in the web site domains in www.#*$! and record the date and first record date for each website.

I'm betting that most of the websites still ranking are pre 2003 or early 2003 if it is for moderate to hard search terms. I'm betting (if you were dropped) that your website is late 2003 to now.

Answer these questions in this thread:

1. What is the creation date and first record date of your website?
2. How about some of the competitors in the 1-10 spots in google?
3. How many results does google report for your search terms?

I'll start with one of my websites:

1. My creation date was Jan 2004.
2. My competitors are anywhere from 1996 to 2002.
3. Results 1 - 10 of about 1,680,000

The others which are pre-early 2003 are not dropped.

Hexed

ps - this is my first post here, but I've been around for years and years on other forums and as an seo professional.

[europeforvisitors]

Can anyone name one webmaster who hasn't achieved a number-one ranking under a high-traffic search phrase without doing this?

Sure.

[maximillianos]

Let's be fair to G. It is impossible to make everyone happy. There are probably just as many folks unaffected (or doing better) as there are affected and doing worse. Statistically this is how it has to be. Even if they spent all their money to try and make every webmaster happy, they would still probably end up 50/50.

IMO... The best we can do is focus on building our online communities, growing our user-base and focus on accommodating our existing users instead of the search engines. Remember the old cliche, it costs twice as much to get a new customer as it does to keep an existing one.

[2by4]

Hexed, that's a good attempt, at least you're thinking and studying, but that doesn't correspond to the sites I'm looking at, older, some quite old. Dropped. Some, newer, new domain name, haven't dropped. But you never know, I saw a similar thing in a category we'd dropped for, I went in, and almost none of the surviving sites used rewrite to www., but again, it wasn't universal, some sites, 2 or 3 did, that might just reflect general sloppiness in that category, chance that is.

maximillianos, let's compare the tone of this new thread to the old one, where usually sharp posters claimed they didn't even see an update, and I believe them, in the areas they were looking at, no real update. I would have said the same if I only ran 3 or 4 sites in certain areas, and didn't have access to more in other areas. Right now we're hearing from the people who have realized they've dropped. Time to share insights I'd say, complaining will not correct the issues, same thing I saw in Bourbon threads, lots of complaining, but a core of what turned out to be totally correct observations, followed them, and the sites returned. Save your energy, complaining won't get your site higher. Close examination of the problem may.

[edited by: 2by4 at 4:35 am (utc) on Oct. 19, 2005]

[Webmeister]

Sure.

Without adding content, acquiring links, creating proper internal links, etc.?

When I say #1 on a high-traffic phrase, I'm talking a phrase that has 250,000,000 or more pages competing for that phrase.

[voltrader]

europeforvisitors said:

Sure.

Well, what's the search phrase?

[Hollywood]

O boy as expected this thread is about to get real interesting... and yah I will join in, nothing like having an authority site and loosing 70% of the traffic overnight.

PS - what a dumb image link add on the top right of WebmasterWorld, the clear background of the image does not work on a black header choice. Just had to get that out.....

[optimist]

Hexed

Welcome to the forums!

I see sites created in 2004 ranking well for top keywords. The so called Sandbox Effect is also very similar to sites having penalties so I see where your coming from.

This is a penalty, most likely an auto penalty that you may have to submit a reinclusion form to G (Think I read that on Matt Cutts' blog) if you ever want to see rankings again.

Why do you think a PR update is in progress? and GG and Matt Cutts are telling everyone that there's a PR update relating to this update. It will more than likely drop and/or 0 many sites that -->probably do not deserve it, of course some may.

Following G's webmaster guidelines will not matter on this update. I believe it will require a manual removal if I am reading into all thats being said properly. I prefer to be wrong about this!

As for GG's comments on the DCs 66.102.#*$! they are exactly the same as G right now, so I am not feeling very Optimistic on this one.

GG a little Help Please!

[deanril]

Im with Hexed,

one of My sites created nov 2003, and what I'm seeing is a Re-Sandbox affect.

[optimist]

Penalties have the same effect on rankings.

The only other explaination is a new algorithm, which is generally the case on all Updates, but penalties are also the case on all updates.