Update Saga. Part 5

[Brett_Tabke]

What say you?

Over and done with?

All done all through?

[steveb]

Like every update for the past 18 months (30 months even), Google is having trouble. The weird fresh date/cache date disparities, the lack of a supplemental/canonical fix, the lack of a full fix for the Sept22 meltdown... all these things are signs of Jagger3 problems. They don't want to pull the trigger on it because it isn't very good. Certainly Google is not a significantly better search engine than it was on September 15th.

Yahoo's way is not beter than Google's. Yahoo just introduced a very poor index across the board. How is that good? Google has different datacenters to test and gauge reaction too. That is a good thing, even if for some unknown reason some webmasters like to say "are we there yet" over and over.

[followgreg]

I think that like2golf is right, it might also be a timing issue, of course Google works hard on their SERP's but aso they have a public relation situation to handle!

[g1smd]

>> <So has anyone done anything yet?> <<

I was horrified to find that a friend's 140 page site, showed only three pages (in a site:domain.com search) before the "Repeat this search with omitted pages included" message appeared...

Page titles were all unique, but I found he had used the same meta description on every page of the site. The pages were edited to change the meta description, and after just a few days about 30 pages were showing up before the "Repeat" message in the SERPs, and a week later it is now up to 60 pages showing...

It seems that Unique meta description per page is vital more than ever now.

[texasville]

g1?- are you speaking about the meta tag "description" specifically?

[g1smd]

Yes. That was the only change made.

The snippet had been showing the same text for every page (not sure if the meta description was used, or the ODP description); but they are all different now - the snippet is different for every one of the 60 page showing now. The snippet shows the old version for the rest of the 140 pages, and the cache date for those is a few days before the changes were actually made...

[King of all Sales]

Donelson,

It seems like your problem may have something to do with the contextual search that Google has incorporated into Adwords. Perhaps your ads are showing up for a lot of searchs where they are really not related, hence a low CTR. I know that we had that problem some time ago, but it seemed to have been fixed. If you can check your logs to see what search terms people are using, it might give you a clue.

[texasville]

g1- I have noticed a lot more traffic from google during the last month. I changed the description tag about 6 weeks ago. I now use snippets from the main body of the text from each page that seems to describe the page. Before, they were all the same and described the site as a whole.
I have been making changes for a while now trying to make each page unique and stand alone instead of making the pages combine to make the site as a whole. Still making changes and each change seems to help my rankings. (I also am finding minor mistakes on several pages doing it this way).

[Great_Scott]

Dayo_UK,

I have read your expert advice on canonical issues. Many thanks for the tips.

Do you think Jagger Update will eventually settle down with these issues resolved. Or are we barking up the wrong tree?

[g1smd]

I finally see some very small changes to the number of supplemental results in several datacentres, the number shown on several searches has reduced a little, the biggest drop being at 66.102.9.104, and no change at all at 66.102.7.99 which has a different set of supplemental results anyway. This is still a very long way from being fixed, but is the first movement in many months.

[Patrick Taylor]

g1smd: I finally see some very small changes to the number of supplemental results... 66.102.9.104

On that datacentre, for a site where this time yesterday a search for site:www.domain.com showed jumbled listings, they are now more logically ordered with the homepage first and the supplementals and URLs-only at the end. The same applies but to a lesser degree for site:domain.com -www.