May 16th and 17th changes - what happened?

[firstmark]

I noticed on the 16th and 17th that google results seemed to be dramatically different at least for my site and its sectors. Did anyone else notice this.

[angiolo]

I do not see any update in my niche.
I see slighty changes every day but in the first ten positions I see about the same sites.

[tigger]

I don't know what G was testing on 16/17th but I saw my traffic vanish! 17th was the worst day but fortunately I pulled everything back on the 18th, what a bad few days they were

[frakilk]

I pulled everything back on the 16th and lost everything again on the 17th. I don't have a clue what they were testing but in the keywords I watch it was a rollback to pre Dec 27th levels. Actually this gives me confidence that thing may again return back to profitable levels again. Hell if it happens for 1 or 2 days it has the possibility to be switched on full time. Here's hoping.

[tigger]

just out of interest was your site an affiliate site?

[frakilk]

Yes and no Tigger. The site primarily is a community with forums and blogs (i.e. LOTS of original content) but I added an affiliate store as well. Up until Dec 27th rankings and traffic for the store were great and then tanked. The rest of the site was unaffected. Then on the 16th it all came back for 2 days.

In my case Google seems to have gotten better at penalising certain areas on my site and leaving others untouched. My guess is that they are tweaking the duplicate content filter as I take product information direct from the merchants' datafeeds.

[tigger]

my site vanished on the 18th for a day and thats 50/50 affiliate with some content from the affiliate mixed in with my own - but I'm now in the process of trying to remove all the affiliate product text, not an easy job

But I did notice on the 18th the lack of affiliate sites in the serps

[frakilk]

Tigger -

I am going to leave the affiliate product text in my site so it could be interesting to see if you see a change from removing the text and if I will still be stuck in the dump.

I'll be following updates :)

[g1smd]

It helps a lot if you report the IP address of the datacentre that you saw the changes in.

Google still has several different versions of their index running of different IP addresses.

[tigger]

I was dropped from 66.249.93.104 but have returned now

[reseller]

tigger

"I was dropped from 66.249.93.104 but have returned now"

Now you see tigger. Now tigger dropped. Now you see tigger. Now tigger dropped...

Welcome to the New Google, my good friend, tigger :-)

[frakilk]

64.233.189.104
and
66.102.7.104

...are showing my great rankings from the 16th and 17th but if I browse directly to the IPs I don't see the same as it is reporting.

[edited by: tedster at 6:29 am (utc) on May 21, 2006]

[avalanche101]

Re:

64.233.189.104
and
66.102.7.104

Double click search at theses IP's and you should see those great results again.

I'm probably completely wrong, but I think those great results will come back over the weekend.

[ulysee]

My nice pre dec 27th rankings are still on these centers:
64.233.189.104
216.239.57.104
66.102.7.104
216.239.53.104
216.239.63.104
216.239.57.107
216.239.53.107
216.239.57.147
66.102.7.147
66.102.7.99
216.239.57.99
216.239.53.99

[frakilk]

ulysee -

Just checked and I am back on all of these. I'm guessing they are not in rotation though because I'm not seeing any traffic.

Just what is special about these DCs? Hmmm.

[avalanche101]

Those are defintely the Pre-this hell, DC's with a little re-finement.

[phpdude]

On the 16th Google decided to indent my index page under a non existant sub page when searching for the company name. Result, after 5 years of being #1 for the company name, it's now back on page 5 indented.

MSN and Yahoo don't seem to have a problem with it. Just this so called new and improved Google.

[Tinus]

On 16 and 17 may traffic on one of my sites grew more then 300%. The SERPS for me where at 16 and 17 mai the same as before the filter of 22 september was being used (I think the filter was part of BigDaddy). Exacly the same rankings for words it was optimized for as before. Hoped they disabled the filter.
Alas on 18th of may traffic is back to it's normal level.

[donnajean]

Me too - wild results on the 16th and 17th. I haven't been able to bounce back after jagger in Oct. and on May 16 and May 17 I started see great SERPS for a lot of my keywords in google. It disappeared about 7pm on May 17. We have back down to position 50 for my major keyword. Does anyone know what happened on May 16 and May 17 yet?

[avalanche101]

re:"Hoped they disabled the filter."

Hi Guys,
I don't know if its a simple as that.
As an example, on 22 sep our site disappeared for a few days and then came back as normal.
This continued until early march and then it disappeared again, not ranking at all well on any DC.
Also, site: command returned all sorts of bizzare results, huge page numbers etc and home page not listed as the first in the list, dmoz description appearing now and again.
On the 16th of may this all seemed to change, 90% of the DC's were showing our pre-march positions, with very little change amoungst the other sites listed for "our" search terms.
Then as we have all seen this changed back on the 18th.
The site: command on DC's giving favourable results for our site returns the rightish number of pages, with our home page listed first correct description etc.
The other DC's - the not so favvourable ones show the junk when site: command is run.

So I can only assume that Google is doing a lot of work in the background to sort this out. It would be nice if, while they were doing this they showed our favourable results :).
Hopefully they will come back when they have resolved their issues.

I do think it's unexpected issues that they are dealing with, basic infra-structure changes should not have this kind of effect.
Unless we are all being led up the garden path and really there has been an algo change as well, which Matt's recent post regarding "who you link to and receive links from" would suggest. An update in all but name.

Again, I don't think its a question of just a filter as I'm sure many more sites in the area we monitor would also be affected.

[trinorthlighting]

Something happened that day. I had a lot of pages drop out of the index and I also had a lot of links disappear.

[donnajean]

for some it was positive (like me) and others not so positive.

[yummybanas]

Some of my pages dropped on the 17th. No supplemental.

It has nothing to do with affiliates links. I have a few with affiliates that didn't drop.

[g1smd]

Be aware that the site: search for hyphenated domains, or where you use a trailing / on the query, is currently broken.

See other recent threads for details.

[avalanche101]

Thanks for the heads up G1SMD, that would explain alot, seeing different returns with the site: command at different data centres, ours is a one hyphenated domain.
The results I see are the usual wacky page numbers on each IP, however there seems to be 2 distinct results. They either start with the main domain listed first, or the start with the same sub url.

What that means is anyones guess?

[firstmark]

So the 16th and 17th change was specific to certain sites or did everyone see it.
It looked good to me but was gone the 18th and after.

[MissusC]

"On 16 and 17 may traffic on one of my sites grew more then 300%. The SERPS for me where at 16 and 17 mai the same as before the filter of 22 september was being used"

I see this same effect for my ailing site too. If I am tripping some kind of filter, I can't figure out what it is. But I am caught in some kind of Google hell and have been for quite a long time.

I think at this point, all I can do is continue to make changes and hope I change whatever it is which the Google God doesn't like about my site.

[frakilk]

My nice pre dec 27th rankings are still on these centers:
64.233.189.104
216.239.57.104
66.102.7.104
216.239.53.104
216.239.63.104
216.239.57.107
216.239.53.107
216.239.57.147
66.102.7.147
66.102.7.99
216.239.57.99
216.239.53.99

ulysee -

I have noticed that these DCs have now given in and become like all of the others. Are you seeing this?

Still had some hope that they may have been testing something on these DCs prior to a full rollout. It's looking increasingly unlikely now :(

[avalanche101]

As of this morning, it looks like they have all gone over to the "Dark Side"

[ulysee]

Yes frakilk, I'm seeing the same........