What Did Google Change Last Month?

What are the reasons for the big changes in the google results?

[Mr_Who]

Hello guys,

I know there was one topic about major google changes but in this topic most of the posts were about what is going on and less about the reasons.
I want to ask now what do you think are the rasons caused the big changes last month?
Is there any major changes or just PR update?

I think there a few think google changed:
1. The importance of the PR is decreased. I see a lot of sites with with less PR on the top positions. I even saw a .txt file ranked in top 10 for a competitive word.
2. On the other hand the sites with less keyword density are ranked well that leads me to a conclusion that there is may be some 3th very impotrtant factor determinig the results.
3. What is this factor? Is it the freshness of the content? I still can't find it.

What do you think?

[Dugger]

This past update was screwed up - I would wait till the next one before worrying about what to change.

[filo]

When will the next update be though? A week? A month? 6 months?

Who knows... Whatever google changed, it's hurting us now.

[Crush]

IMO nothing changed to much. Same old serps, same old serps.

[graywolf]

if you dropped did your PR drop as well?

[markus007]

i'm seeing more spam, and some wild changes in traffic on some sites.

[dazzlindonna]

Turned the knob on the dup filter hard to the right.

[HayMeadows]

Being as the "end of 2004" is upon us, I assume Google is capable of continuous updates.

Not much evidence of this though.

[madmatt69]

Since the calamity of the last update my site's been steadily regaining it's positions..Just wait it out, no need to touch anything yet.

[AjiNIMC]

I too see my sites dropping for some major keyphrases and few sites coming good, this happened in last one week, may be some small changes.

[suggy]

There really does seem to be a huge difference in opinion about what happened last month. It seems to have split the forum down the middle.

Half say, "what are you talking about? What update?" and whilst others bemoan massive changes and, predictably, loss of SERPs.

I can't work it out - unless Google is targeting particular sectors (like travel). Is it worth discussing the generic sectors where some people see awful changes, or is that against board rules?

Suggy

[newsphinx]

One of my clients' website is jumping up and down for his key phrases which used to be on the 1st page for nearly one year. He's keep asking why and wants me to fix it ASAP. However, I decide to wait until I know for sure what's going on on Google's side. God bless me though, we are ranking on No1 in Yahoo for many of his key phrases.

[buddhu]

Yep, the dupe filter got turned up. We got hit by it. Fortunately our PPC account contact looked into it for us and provided an explanation.

In our case a tracking URL got listed intead of our basic domain. We also got temporarily dropped from the index.

The problem is resolving itself and we regained our correct primary listing and ranks. Still some issues with missing backlinks (according to the very unreliable "link:" tool).

PageRank devalued by 1 point on some pages too.

All in all, from a personal point of view, this last one sucked.

Also noticed some very spammy sites from my competitors ranking highly. Many of these are newish sites with few detectable backlinks but crammed with keyword spam.

Hey Google, get a grip...

[kwngian]

I think google is addressing the site scrapping issue with this update. All the sites that have part of my page's text has gone into the supplemental result.

This is especially so with those that copy part of many pages from different sites.

[kwngian]

[delete - double post]

[webnewton]

I can see the Google changes as full of spam results on the top of SERPS.

[picasso]

I see a lot of pages, that sometimes have only once the keyword on the site (with a quite competitive keyword).
IMHO there seem to be more importance of the filename.

[Bentler]

I think GG is looking at sites from multiple for-hire spiders now for comparison and penalty. They may also have hired out to a large third party research lab to analyze patterns and relationships in spidered data to distinguish original content from scraped, expose networks, etc. Based on my observations.

GG's results also seem sensitive to traffic fluctuations due to e-mail.

[Liane]

I can't work it out - unless Google is targeting particular sectors (like travel).

I have a travel site and have seen very few changes in the SERPS. Some did occur though nothing dramatic or anything which affected my site (or income) as a whole.

I think scraper sites took a beating ... finally :) and perhaps some dupe filters were tweaked upwards as well.

Sorry I can't be more help. I'm not seeing it.

[GerBot]

I think more SEO'd sites have been hit.
I don't like it but the results do have higher quality sites - but not always the best niche site.

I think scrapers and blog spammers have been hit.

[raptorix]

After the update my results where screwed and all my backlinks disapeared, after 10 days my backlinks came back (even better) and my rankings also went up. I have seen this more then once. I would advise people to stay calm and just wait some time before you are gonna change stuff.

[howiejs]

Interesting comments.

Any thoughts on internal anchor text being devalued?

[newsphinx]

I always think internal links values less than external links. But there is a spammer keeps doing very successfully on many very competitive terms. One domain he used was banned last month, but he soon recovered his position in the serps with another domain. I you want to peep into its internal link structure, PM me.

[matt21811]

I would have to say that internal backlinks were severely devalued to nearly nothing.

I have a page that competes for "cheap product name" and "discount product name". I was ranked 3rd for both. External links had anchor text cheap product name and internal links had discount product name. I'm still 3rd for cheap and nowhere for discount. It could not be more obvious for me.

I'm not hit by any duplicate penalty so I cant comment on the effect of that.

[punitseo]

After analyzing my sites i m feeling they have add sometthing to analyzing the backlinks...

[Mr_Who]

I found something else very interesting. There is a site having great positions for some competitive adult keywords. When I traced inbound links to this site I saw something very strange. All the sites linking to this adult site were sites about software. They were totaly out of topic. I traced the history of that domain and found out that there was a software site on this domain before. So am I wrong or there is no matter who links to you? If there is matter this site is not suposed to be on top positions for adult keywords.

[walkman]

dupe filter tightened and many sites got caught by the refresh meta tag /302 google bug. They turned the filter up without fixing their bug. Perfect storm and this has been going since September 2004, just not all sites keep getting caught in the middle.

[howiejs]

"After analyzing my sites i m feeling they have add sometthing to analyzing the backlinks..."

what does this mean?

[GranPops]

5 small niche sites that have been No.1 since even before Florida, without links.
Traffic approx. 1000 per week.
Last week disappeared completely.

However no change on a real estate site.

[Raymond]

My traffic remains the same, keywords ranking is almost the same (very slightly dropped), PR the same, but Google dropped almost 100 of my backlinks.