Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
complain about a real problem
Can't see the sandbox being a "real" problem, or a problem at all. It's there to stop the SPAM. If I start a new company called Mesothelioma Lawyers Ltd you reckon I should show up in the top 500 purely because that's my company name?
Sure, the "sandbox", whatever it is, hurts some. It hurts people who are creating sites for free traffic. Many of them are spammers/freeloaders. It also hurts others. They - particularly anyone starting a new business with a business plan that relies on free SE traffic - are probably better off staying unemployed (or employed if they can find a job). Any new site starting off on the premise that free traffic will sustain it deserves to fail.
So, if you remove the sandbox as a reasonable cause for complaint, and remove most of the other whining, we'd reduce this thread to one page and those that can't even be bothered to read it will get a personal reply from Googleguy because he owes them.
[edited by: walkman at 6:08 pm (utc) on Feb. 9, 2005]
In my usual searches I too am seeing a huge improvement in quality (even though I, personally, have lost traffic).
I am afraid that I cannot concur with your findings. It seems to be very much dependent on what you are looking for. I am looking for a new PC and I just did a search for computer dealers on the .co.uk site and I got one computer dealer in the top twenty. This is not what I would call a good result.
While looking to buy a small boat with the boat model and state info ( sorry if keywords to specific remove if a problem mods )
the results were interesting below is a summary
First
G found 9 very relevent results in first 20 and 3 pure spam out of 621 results
Y found 4 very relevent results in first 20 and 7 pure spam
out of 147 results
MSN found 3 very relevent results in first 20 and 12 pure spam out of 934 results
this was just as a joe surfer and even though I have been hit by alegra on some sites so did not used advanced etc.
and still felt G results were most reliable and interestingly serps pages most uptodate
just observations on one search so not proof of anything i'm afraid
Also for a giggle hit do you feel lucky on G and bang on
steve
Update's over...improvise adapt and overcome.
Update's over...improvise adapt and overcome
This should not be neccessary unless yourr intention is to game or spam the serps.
One of Google's mantras is 'build sites for visitors not search engines'
They are making this impossible and forcing people to do what they themselves discourage - the situation they are creating is peverse when viewed from Google's supposed ideals and stated aims
The snippet for a PDF file in search results always used to be the first few dozen words of the file. For some results that I have looked at many many times that has been true for a couple of years now, and still is in www.google.com results.
For the alternative datacentres like http://64.233.171.99/ I see that the keywords entered as the search query are now appearing in the snippet too. They didn't use to do that (unless by chance those words were also in the first 10 to 15 words of the PDF document itself).
.
That alternative 64.. datacentre has a 50% increase in the number of results reported compared to www.google.com at this moment.
A search I have been looking at for several years reported around 12 million results for a very long time, then in the "index inflation" event a few months ago, grew to 20 million, then 30, and more recently 40 to 42 million results.
My site has been stable at #2 or #3 for the last few years in www.google.com, but on the 64.. datacentre it is now #5 in 60 million results. I see that 6 of the 10 sites in the new top 10 are not in the top 10 of www.google.com, and that some blatent spam that was at #4 for several years (and previously cached and fresh-tagged daily on www.google.com until the day after it was reported as spam) is now no longed being newly cached on www.google com and has completely disappeared from the 64... datacentre results.
Of the 4 sites from the www.google.com top ten, that are in the 64... top ten, their order hasn't been completely changed. The #1 site is still #1, and the #2 site has gone down to #5. The #2 site in the new index is up from #11 in the old. Sites #3 and #4 in the new index, are new to the index. I am guessing that a lot of factors in the scoring have changed, as well as lots of new sites are being brought in from somewhere.
>> DC1 has much more pages indexed but DC2 has clearly fresher and better results. <<
For my search "DC1" has 41.5 million results (www.google.com has 42 million) and the top 20 looks about the same as www.google.com, and "DC2" has 60 million results. That's the opposite of what you are seeing.
I will agree that the results in "DC2" are completely different/new/fresh, even though my site drops a few places to #5. The new #3 result isn't too great; but at least the major spammer, fake directory, multi-pop-up, forced trojan download, site (which was a URL-only listing for a year or more, with a blank cache, but cached and freshed every day until 2 weeks ago {I reported it 3 weeks ago!}), previously at #4 is way down now (on the third or fourth page, hopefully heading towards being completely dropped).
[edited by: g1smd at 6:48 pm (utc) on Feb. 9, 2005]
Maybe the count of the indexed sites is wrong...
In some cases my traffic doubled. In other cases I dropped. I was hoping to rebound from the Dec 17 changes.
If you search for ubiquitous terms the results seem to be fairly good. There are certain term that could either mean a type of health insurance or a type of mustang.
I just noticed something interesting, for everyone affected by this update.
For well ranking sites, if you do a search for domain.com, you are returned a proper listing with descriptive hyperlinked title and snippet.
For my site (and maybe all affected sites) do a search for yourdomain.com and you only get yourdomain.com returned with no title or description hyperlinked to your site.
Could this be some clue that your site is banned/penalized for any number of reasons? Could we possibly understand what these reasons could be?
I'm sure mydomain.com for my site used to return a proper listing and snippet, before this update.
Question: How can you tell which data centers have already updated, and which haven't? In other words, how do I know which results are the new results in the updated index, and which are old results?
One of Google's mantras is 'build sites for visitors not search engines'
They are making this impossible
That hasn't been my experience, but--as the expression goes--your mileage may vary.
Could this be some clue that your site is banned/penalized for any number of reasons? Could we possibly understand what these reasons could be?
Not sure sounds unlikly, i run 5 websites and 3 of them are sandboxed, when i search for my domain on some datacenters it comes up but on say 60% of the datacenters it dosn't show anything. Ive also noticed alot of sites are being affecting by some kind of bug where when you serach for your domain it comes up without the www just the http and your domain. My sites are in no way crosslinked, i don't even link them to each other from my links page so i havent a clue why they have all been affected.
What do you get when your search for yourdomain.com?
I get different results on all three of these, for example:
64.233.161.99
66.102.11.104
216.239.39.104
As far as google.com, in the sample keywords I monitor, there seems to have been a change then a rapid rollback.
If Allegra is over, looks like there's an even bigger huricane developing out there in the open ocean.
As usual, europeforvisitors is right on. Not counting the many clear problems, this is the best Google update in fifteen months. The quality of the results are head and shoulders above the competition, the amount of pure useless drivel has decreased, the amount of stupidly sandboxed sites has decreased. Overall, clear improvement.
But still the redirect/hijacking/disappearing issue got worse; the dumb sandboxing of many quality domains continues; and a merry-go-round of keyword.subdomain garbage manages to serially beat the sandbox for a couple days before disappearing.
These bad things are bad, but the improvements are quite good. The only major worry would be unlike the lost sites in Florida that did naturally come back with subsequent crawls and re-rankings, here the pagejacking and ongoing sandbox offer no signs of hope that affected sites will naturally be healed. It is reasonable to expect Google to fix the pagejacking thing, but they sure haven't yet.
Now if there was only a "no whining about the serps if you haven't sent a googlegroups feedback" button to push....
ROFL. :) Yeah, it's looking to me that the time is near. This update, if not over, is close to that point.
paulbay
What do you get when your search for yourdomain.com?
Depends what datacenter i hit, if i use the mcdar tool some dont show my domain just sites with my name in them such as linkpartners, others show my domain like this
http://example.comif i click on Find web pages that contain the term "my domain here" then it shows up has
www.mydomain.comthe funny thing is the datacenters where i only show up without the www they have a title that i havent used in a while.
Now if there was only a "no whining about the serps if you haven't sent a googlegroups feedback" button to push....
steveb,
I sent feedback.
Now I will see what transpires.
But just between us critters there is no way some of this should have happened.
Now repeat after me:
theBear can whine because he sent feedback ;).
Now I shall see if I can find any other things to report.
Sorry, I haven't made myself clear.
Search: "mydomain" for my site I get about 1500 results.
Search: "mydomain.com" I get just "mydomain.com" returned with no title or snippet.
I'm sure before I got axed a search for "mydomain.com" returned a hyperlinked title and full description snippet.
I'm thinking a penalty gets thrown up for returns containing "mydomain.com" since this update.
I've lost all the clout I used to have for all of my main keywords. I used to rank in the top 5-10 for dozens of keyword combinations. I'm lucky to get 5-10 hits/day from G since this update.
[webmasterworld.com...]
paulbay
Sorry, I haven't made myself clear.Search: "mydomain" for my site I get about 1500 results.
Search: "mydomain.com" I get just "mydomain.com" returned with no title or snippet.
I'm sure before I got axed a search for "mydomain.com" returned a hyperlinked title and full description snippet.
When i search for mydomain i get 115,000 results
When i search for mydomain.com i get
http://mydomain.comwith a title but no snippet, on other site of mine i dont get the title or snippet.
might fly pigs :)
