Serp Fluxuations

[HayMeadows]

Lots of reason to be watching WebmasterWorld this week!

[walkman]

>> They don't work at weekends so it will start tomorrow

a few major updates I remember ENDED on sunday night. No need for everyone to be there. The algo tweaks can be programmed days in advance, and all they have to do is press enter. Monday everyone is there to clean up :)

[reseller]

Good morning folks!

I see this morning that on my testing keyphrases, top #3 and #8 have been dropped into oblivion for the first time on most datacenters.

Something for sure is happening this morning. Maybe an update ;-)

[pocoloco]

"Maybe an update ;-) "
or manual?

[itloc]

I am sure there is something cooking. Yesterday and today Gbot read nearly 100'000 pages from our website. Around 200'000 pageviews from GBot last week.

Definitely a deep crawl from what I have seen. And the deepest we ever had since the site is online.

Something is boiling...for sure...

[linkjack]

What's cooking?

Another record adwords sales season. That's what's cooking.

And by the looks of it, everyone dying to be cooperative with googleguy and tell him all the stuff.....it's not going to end anytime soon.

Can old school SEO pros declare this business dead already, or will people start getting smart now and shut up?

[walkman]

I see stability. Just tested 2-3 keywords and I they're all the same on all DCs.

[dataguy]

I see stability. Just tested 2-3 keywords and I they're all the same on all DCs.

I haven't seen any changes for the keywords I track, but they are definately still different across DC's

[giggle]

Update from me: Stats from Tuesday 30th suggest that our Google traffic seems to have returned to normal.

Phew.

<added>Not gloating</added>

[reseller]

giggle

>>Update from me: Stats from Tuesday 30th suggest that our Google traffic seems to have returned to normal.<<

So what I saw of movements through out the datacenters have affected you in a nice way.

Would you be kind to post which sector your site is related to.

Thanks.

[giggle]

Reseller.

We work in the travel sector.

Mick

[reseller]

giggle

>>Reseller.

We work in the travel sector. <<

Thanks. That must a good news too for fellow members within the travel sector whom sites were either dropped or lost part of their rankings on the serps.

[highman]

I'm more and more convinced that this is a manual attack on affiliates in the travel sector, or it is *meant to be* - for our terms only one easy to spot affiliate survives in the top 15, prob because they open the white label aff engine in a frameset.

What G dosent get is that most of the results are in fact affilates, but using XML rather than white label

[ScottD]

whilst looking for a specific hotel name my colleague pointed out that all the top listings were HTML pages, which may tie in to what you're saying here about an attack on travel pages. Our pages which are PHP have been blown out of the water, even though they're not actually content from an affiliate scheme. Only the bookings were via an affiliate. I think its an attack on scrapers for sure though, and we got lumped in with the rest

[johnhh]

Much the same as usual for us currently - 64.233.185.99 tested - both our main html and asp sites all look OK for tested keywords.

[Murdoch]

As a member of the travel industry website clique that seems to be posting heavily to this thread I felt obliged to add my 2 cents.

Our company has actually been climbing steadily for the last 3 months, using a number of methods. Oddly enough, linking strategies have been low priority (we already have over 120,000) and content has been the focus of the year. I'm curious to know if the rest of the people here have conformed to the "guide page" strategy that we, and many others, have used to rank well for a significant number of terms. On top of that, using the guides has a significant effect on the amount of indented listings that we get, provided the term is also visible on our home page. As of right now we are constantly developing new ways to provide content on a daily basis to our users, although it has been noted that this may draw our users further away from the main objective, which is conversion through bookings. Also, I think it is pertinent to note that that our site does use .html instead of .php and has been active in the index since '98. Anyone else seeing success through similar or different measures? I'm always curious to know the methods of others in my niche community.

[europeforvisitors]

In hotel searches for various European cities, I'm seeing all kinds of affiliate sites and, in some cases, combination affiliate/made-for-AdSense scraper sites.

One of the top-quality hotel affiliate sites (one that deserves to rank at or near the top) has slipped halfway down the first results page for various searches.

I'd guess that such odd results are temporary (the result of testing, maybe?). They certainly don't suggest manual intervention.

[reseller]

Talking about the travel sector. For few days ago a kind fellow member stickied me few travel related keyphrases and mentioned a specific www.site.co.uk travel related site.

So I ran few tests on the Dcs and then on Google.com. And I was really surprised of how that site "control" top 10 on almost all keyphrases that has something to do with, cheap widgets, cheap widgets cityname/countryname, cheap widget2, cheap widget2 cityname/countryname etc...

So I ran command site:www.site.co.uk and there were about 320,000 pages!

I thought such site MUST BE asked to pay a house rent to Google ;-)

And talking about Adwords. If that site lost its top ranking and started purchasing Adwords. Can you imagine the BIG $$$$ the said site would pay?

Don´t get wrong. I´m not asking to remove the site from the top of the serps. I´m just suggesting a business opportunity for our good friends at the plex ;-)

[europeforvisitors]

I thought such site MUST BE asked to pay a house rent to Google ;-)

AdSense for Search reserves the right to charge fees for publishers who generate large numbers of searches in proportion to revenues. Maybe Google Search should try something similar with zillion-page sites that inhale huge amounts of hard-drive space and bandwidth at the Google data centers. :-)

[FromRocky]

I thought such site MUST BE asked to pay a house rent to Google ;-)

Yes, it pays its rent in terms of AdSense earnings.

[Murdoch]

I thought such site MUST BE asked to pay a house rent to Google ;-)

I'd imagine in conjunction with AdSense most of these companies already use AdWords too. Although our site is closer to 16,000 pages I definitely think the 150k per month we pay out in AdWords costs gives us a sense of stability in the SERPs as well. Due to this we show many times TWICE on the first page (sometimes even 3 times due to indented listings, which we've almost mastered) and if anything I believe that in and of itself convinces others to pick up and AdWords account, so being high in the natural results and on the sponsored links, IMO doesn't hurt Google. Granted I'm also saying this because I'd rather not drop on natural results simply because our company is a large AdWords spender. That wouldn't be too sporting would it?

[walkman]

Murdoch,
I doubt what you pay has any direct effect on SERPS. However, if your site is hammered during an update, (and you make a call or email), the Adwords manager might shoot an email to his engineer friend to take a look at this big client. It happens on every workplace, I don't see why Google is any different.

[reseller]

Good evening Folks

I see at the moment very Vigorous Movement through out the datacenters for my testing keyphrases related to advertising and marketing. It must have started during the last few hours.

Thought you should know ;-)

[texasville]

reseller- thanks for the heads up. Just noticed some movement also...but to be expected. Labor day weekend should be very interesting.

[reseller]

texasville

>> Labor day weekend should be very interesting.<<

No..please. Otherwise walkman win ;-)

msg #:20
[webmasterworld.com...]

[texasville]

I've got to say this-I was just doing some comparison searches and saw something I have never seen before on google. a yahoo local result 3 down from the top. And a yahoo.com ad for yahoo shopping among the ads to the right.?... have I just missed something? Has this been going on for a while and I just never noticed?

[andy_boyd]

Had a scan through a few SERPs I am interested in and see no movement ... could be just the usual flux. Then again, it has been a while since Bourbon. ;)

[reseller]

Folks

I´m getting now this message from the DCs:

---------------------------------------------
We're sorry...

... but we can't process your request right now. A computer virus or spyware application is sending us automated requests, and it appears that your computer or network has been infected.

We'll restore your access as quickly as possible, so try again soon. In the meantime, you might want to run a virus checker or spyware remover to make sure that your computer is free of viruses and other spurious software.

We apologize for the inconvenience, and hope we'll see you again on Google.

---------------------------------------

Any of you see the same?

[patc]

Reseller - I think you've been refreshing the SERPS a bit too much. Google gives you so many requests per day to stop massive scraping as far as I am aware - you may have exceeded that.

[Dpeper]

Ive gotten that message before but I cant remeber what I was doing I am on a university network though so it very well could of been a virus or something of that nature.

[reseller]

patc, Dpeper

Thanks for feedback.

Guess Google isn´t happy with me watching the new "Hurricane" in progress ;-)