Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Old results (i.e. not recently refreshed in at least the last 7 days) ranking well.
New results (i.e. those refrsehed within the last 3-4 days) ranking poorly in relative terms.
Monitoring about 20 key terms, I have found that all the results above the fold do not have arecent refrseh on them, the refreshed results only start to come into play further down the page.
However some of the sites I have seen ranking for terms I am now looking at also do the same, but not for the search phrases I am looking for.
I know that ;) - my point is that since 3 days ago and the latest 'shift in results' I have not seen this behaviour before for the keywords I have been monitoring.
I have three main competitors, I am the only one that adds new content (as I manage a 6000 big database of companies and these are constantly changing) as well as having changing information and over 600 genuine links from similar sites.
None of the competitors can match this and also do not have the links - therefore spidering and refresh is far less often I believe.
So, the refresh currently showing for my site is 25th March. On the Google results page (my default is 20 results) there is only one other site with any date showing).
This is not usual for these monitored listings.
My site and the other one with the refresh date are usually in the top 3/4 and have been for a while.
So, is this a massive update where they are slowly but surely going through all the results datacenter by datacenter to get a completely new set of results, or is it just one of those things?
I think you hasve something here.
Our site has ranked in the top 10 for about three years for our major keywords, the site was crawled on the 25th and we are now in position 670 for our top keys.
Not good, hope this will change soon.
Bek.
I'm not seeing this, if anything it is the other way around.
I guess though, all we can do is sit and wait until it settles down a bit and then try to figure out what's happened.
Is there a pattern to the words that are being almost ignored? There's lots of talk about 'money words' and sandbox so perhaps there is a filter for certain types of words which has not been fully applied yet.
I don't think that's it, based on what I've been seeing. If it were, the emphasis in:
[place] travel
would probably be on [place], which normally isn't a "money word" by itself. Instead, the emphasis seems to be on "travel," resulting in SERPs that give greater weight to pages from Yahoo Travel, Expedia, Lonely Planet, and other sites that have untold thousands of "travel" pages but provide relatively little information on "[place]."
Obviously, it isn't easy to decide how best to allocate emphasis or weight on specific words in a multi-word phrase, and a one-size-fits-all solution is difficult to achieve. For example:
In a search on "Shelbyville travel," it might make more sense to put the emphasis on Shelbyville, since "travel" is a generic term that will yield millions of results and anyone searching on that phrase is interested specifically in Shelbyville.
But in a search on "carrot juicers," it might make more sense to place more emphasis on juicers because the person who's looking for a carrot juicer is interested in appliances, not vegetables.
So who knows--maybe Google is playing around with word emphasis, causing big changes for some searches. On the other hand, it could simply be that the "authority" factor hasn't yet been introduced, and that--when authority or theme is taken into account--a search on "Shelbyville travel" will yield more pages with a substantial number of internal or inbound links related to "Shelbyville" than we're seeing now.
That makes sense to me. Throughout my site the placename is the anchor text to deeper pages and this will hopefully kick in more and more. I'm a great beliver in hilltop and this would explain much of what I'm seeing. In other words, anchor text from authority sites plus internal themes still have to be fully implimented.
it aint over yet
too much activity between DCs
it has been going on since at least 3rd feb and still is.
This thread got some attention because of the back link movement but the rest of the *strange* 'goings on' never subsided.
If Googleguy hadn't stated that the update was done (back in early Feb) then I would have said we are still in the middle of it.
Looks like it aint over to me, either Googleguy is in the dark too :O), they have realised that whatever filter they have been playing with has screwed their results, or they are just simply playing with us at WebmasterWorld ;o).
I have been using teoma to find research stuff, trying to find some stuff in g at the minute is too much work!
We have our traffic back to pre-allegra levels (and more, except on sites that suffered from the 302 mess) so from a business point of view I couldnt' care less about the state of the SERPS, but as a user I would like to see this crap resolved.
Dazz
that fixed there mistakes are rewarded in this new update
sounds to me like you are confusing the 302 *problem* with allegra
we have sites that HAVE NOT BEEN TOUCHED and have still recovered from Allegra
totally unrelated IMO (apart from the obvious addition of new pages)
<edit>clarity i hope</edit>
this probably is one of the best Google's updates.(ie more happy webmasters then sad ones)
What does the happiness or sadness of Webmasters have to do with the quality of Google's updates?
What does the happiness or sadness of Webmasters have to do with the quality of Google's updates?
I agree. For every happy webmaster, there has to be an unhappy one. Whats more important is the relevance and quality of the results (which are usually biased opinions).
just my 2 cents
wellzy
The folks who operate WebmasterWorld name them. They are named liked hurricanes; first one of the year starts with "A," the next one with "B," and so on.
This year we had the Allegra update, so the next one will be given a name starting with "B."
This year we had the Allegra update, so the next one will be given a name starting with "B."
Here in the UK we have just the word to sum it all up then....
(And yes, I'm not going there...)
DerekH
Back to the "Backlinks Updated Today thread:"
I checked link:www.mysite.net on Google. I found the same exact number
of (displayed) links, and the same cast of characters as a week ago,
a month ago .. etc etc.
I know there have been changes, but they don't show on that display. -Larry
Here in the UK we have just the word to sum it all up then....
LOL - I can think of one too. Sounds like "ollocks" is a good contender ;)
As I said before I have not lost or gained in this sweep - but the results around me have most definitely got worse in more topics than not!
I guess; ciml & vitaplease & lawman & Brett Tabke shall decide on "BOMBAY" :-)
<update>I'm seeing the link count fluctuate back and forth now..Traffic is still painfully low.</update>
And our backlinks seem to change by the hour. Something ... odd... going on with Google I think. And the Google Dance sites show 3 identical results.
