Dec 2006 Google Changes - Data Refresh or Penalty? (part 2)

[SEOcritique]

< continued from [webmasterworld.com...] >

Perhaps, based on Matts recent post [mattcutts.com] where he says:

....expect those (roughly monthly) updates to become more of a daily thing. That data refresh became more frequent (roughly daily instead of every 3-4 weeks or so)....

it is time to coin a new term, EVERFRESH. Google, it's full of Everfreshness. :)

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

Seriously though, let's take Matt at his word (if you find that difficult then for a moment at least) when he says:

I know for a fact that there haven&#8217;t been any major algorithm updates to our scoring in the last few days, and I believe the only data refreshes have been normal (index updates).

Instead of saying Google is broke why don't we ask ourselves what could be the causes that produce SERP fluctuations or the reports thereof?

For example:

1. SERP results for queries that produce smaller result sets are more subject to large changes because those queries enjoy less competition, documents are more likely to not be optimized, and changes to documents (or the addition or deletion of documents) may have a deeper impact on the SERPS.[/li]

2. SERP results for deeply contested search queries are more likely to change because active optimization is widespread. That means there are lots of link changes, content changes, and content additions afoot, changes that will change the SERP results.[/li]

3. People on these forums are actively optimizing documents hence they are more likely to be a part of group 2.[/li]

4. People who are unhappy with the SERP results or who are affected negatively by SERP changes are more likely to post such on SEO forums than those who are perfectly happy with how the universe is treating them.[/li]
   

Now that we are in the EverFresh era with daily updates I expect that SERP changes have become more obvious for the exact opposite reason that movement in film becomes more pronounced when you slow down the rate at which frames advance. We have been watching the length of time between SERP changes shorten with each Google upgrade. We have also witnessed, over the years, communication between the data centers improve and accelerate. Now, these have combined and moved so close to real time (when compared to the Google Dance days) that data center watching has become virtually meaningless over the last six months. (The Google Dance has become a GoogleRave.)

I&#8217;m not saying that Google never sticks a hot iron poker into their works (and I definitely think they have made some silly choices like, ahem, their no-follow policy). It&#8217;s just that there are far more, a near infinite percentage more, changes happening to the content and population of the documents on the Internet. I expect to see lots of change to the SERP results.

So, assuming that Matt is as honest as he is nice, what do you see as non-Google causes that can be responsible for noticeable SERP fluctuations?

[edited by: tedster at 3:23 pm (utc) on Dec. 25, 2006]

[mattg3]

Rankpulse

Is this normal winner and looser on the same day?

today's winners
www.imdb.com... beach +10
en.wikipedia.org... computer game +10
music.download.com... download music +10
en.wikipedia.org... martial arts +10
music.download.com... music download +10

today's losers
imdb.com beach -10
en.wikipedia.org computer game -10
music.download.com download music -10
en.wikipedia.org martial arts -10
music.download.com music download -10

[Sweet Cognac]

(The Google Dance has become a GoogleRave.)

Unfortunately for some it's become a GoogleGrave.

[whitenight]

Is this normal winner and looser on the same day?

It's holiday season, so I'll curtail my usual sarcasm, but I suggest you study the page a little deeper to understand what those numbers mean. :)

[WW_Watcher]

Hey OptiRex

Thanks for the clarification! I am sorry I mentioned your name in the same post with the MFA sites. I hope you can understand what I may have thought. I was really hesitant about even saying anything, because of your posts about all the employees of your company, which did not fit with the MFA leaches of the internet. (just so you know where I stand on the issue)

Sorry again,

Happy Holidays!
WW_Watcher

[jetteroheller]

Anyone else notice pages missing from Google Sitemaps (pages not indexed) and verification not working.

I started to ad last night some more domains to the site maps.

Verification not working, try later

Today in the morning (GMT-1 middle Europe) I continued to ad more domains to the sitemap.

Here I got the shocking message no page indexed, but site: in Google direct showed the usual result.

[jetteroheller]

OptiRex You here, in the good times, we discuss in the AdSense forum, in the bad times, we discuss here.

[ruip]

This is not new, but i never saw this in this numbers.

Maybe this explain drop in e-commerce sites results. In middle of 2006 we saw some tests with group separator in SERP.
Now, in local country searchs, number of group separators growing day by day, for ex: a search in google.de for -> post it, have 2 or 3 groups, same in google.it or google.pt but not in google.co.uk or google.es or google.fr. I see a large number of products with this type of results. This not a language issue, google.com.br have same language of google.pt but i can't see any group separator. I drink to much last night (xmas) maybe i see...

Happy Holidays

[reseller]

SEOcritique

So, assuming that Matt is as honest as he is nice, what do you see as non-Google causes that can be responsible for noticeable SERP fluctuations?

I believe that Matt is as honest as he is nice and helpful. However the problem with Matt is that he is kentuckian and it seems kentuckians (like boxer Muhammad Ali) have their special way of explaining things (with all due respect to our kind kentuckian fellow members) ;-)
You really need to de-code what Matt say and write to understand what he means :-)

I have noticed that the way we understand an algo update doesn't need to be the same way Matt understand it. And some of us just don't agree with him on that.

We as webmasters and site owners deal with consequences of those Data Refreshes and see and feel their powerful impact on our sites; changes in rankings, changes indexing, possible changes in backlinks numbers and continuous fluctauations in Google's serps.

While Matt see those Data Refresh as "minor" part of a technical process. It might be therefore he keeps saying there hasn't been a major update ;-)

IMO, the reason for fluctations in Google serps are those Data Refreshes which are taking place very close to each other and causing the continuous changes I mentioned.

[cornwall]

So, assuming that Matt is as honest as he is nice

Sheesh, that is a big jump in logic

[steveb]

From one perspective something is minor if it effects .1% of things.

From another perspective, .1% of the webpages of the world are millions of pages.

So, from Google's view, their daily data-refreshes/index-updates losing or mistakenly penalizing pages or whole sites, may not seem like a "major" thing, but obviously to the people who own those sites or pages, it appears as a devastating effect.

Google's ongoing mistakes on top of mistakes on top of mistakes leads to the cumulative degrading of their search product. It gets worse every day, but they are clueless at the 'plex because it isn't "major"... and since it would take about a thousand years of daily screw ups to fall to the level of their pathetic competition, that surely encourages their blasé attitude.

[Powdork]

Surely they must be able to see the insanity of all this. I've been home from work for about two hours during which I've tried a number of searches and seen at least three completely different (meaning very few of the same sites on the first page). This occurs for virtually every keyword having to do with my location. They are missing big time on all the three R's (rhyme, reason, and relevance).
Can you imagine visiting the wikipedia page for water the first time, and it only had info on ice, the second time it only had info on water (liquid), and when you visited again it only had info on water vapor.
Can you imagine visiting any authoritative resource about anything and have it give you completely different (and quite often contradictory) info each time you visit. It would only be a short time before it was no longer considered a resource.
On the other hand, this might be a good time to test some things. Who else but us geeks is actually thinking about Google right now?;)

[edited by: Powdork at 9:50 am (utc) on Dec. 25, 2006]

[OptiRex]

Hey jetteroheller - Glückliches Weihnachten

Just a quick message this Xmas morning as I fetch grandmothers for their annual booze fest:-))

I'm definitely seeing significant movement first noticed from Google.ca referrals however most odd, on a specific three keyword trade term I optimise:

keyword1keyword2keyword3 - no where to be found
keyword3keyword1keyword2 - #1

Oh boy...let's have a great day and fingers crossed the silicon chips are working hard at a resolution.

[Marval]

Opti - Ive been seeing that effect for some time - started in August for me - many two word terms that one site had ranked top 10 for 3 years suddenly dissapeared for those terms - but the reverse started ranking which had never occured before - and continues to this day. This is without any real optimization either way - but very noticible over a few hundred phrases

[mattg3]

It's holiday season, so I'll curtail my usual sarcasm, but I suggest you study the page a little deeper to understand what those numbers mean. :)

I was neither critising you or the site, I asked a question. :) Is it normal? That's all.

If it's not normal, I would say these are heavy fluctuations.

[mirrornl]

sites are indexed in sitemaps again

[Martin40]

SEO Critique said:

and I definitely think they have made some silly choices like, ahem, their no-follow policy

Could you (or anyone else) please elaborate on that? What's wrong with nofollow?

Google's ongoing mistakes on top of mistakes on top of mistakes leads to the cumulative degrading of their search product.

If you do a search on a less than popular term, you'll see that Google is still considerably better than MSN/Yahoo. But if you search for a popular term, then Google's results become very conservative with yet another wiki, alibaba etc, which is the result of their emphasis on links and TrustRank. The irony of the matter therefore, is that to the avarage user MSN/Yahoo may appear as better search engines, but since neither of them is putting it's full weight behind search, Google can get away with an aweful lot. In fact, it's surprising how little freshness there is in the search market. No engine is really trying very hard to make an impact. During the dotcom boom things were far more exciting. Since then a total lethargy has swept over the Internet. Maybe the French project can stir things up a little.

[gehrlekrona]

Over at DP I posted about the changes the other day but none really responded so I went here to see if anybody else is seeing the same as I do.
On Dec 20th I could see a lot of changes to my site(s) starting abroad (uk pages and scandinavian pages) and the visitors from Google dropped to almost nothing. I guess it is easier for google to changes smaller sets of data first and go over to pages in english agter that.
Pages went supplemental again with cache dates as of May-September all over the board. Pages I have asked them to remove came back in the index as supplemental.
Last night, for a couple of hours, I had no visitors from Google at all and checking my stats my server wasn't down since I have other sites on the server that I track. The queries people used to find my site before the 4 hour Google black-out didn't give the same result anymore and after that number of visitors dropped and the ones that do come do it with totally different queries.
MC honest? I think he is just "splitting hairs" with us. He can't tell us anything and when he does it is just to defend what they are doing. There is nothing NEW in what he says. What he SHOULD be telling us is that we ARE GOING TO DO A CHANGE THAT INVOLVES THIS and let people know what to expect. Everything he says is just "after the fact" and is of no help at all.

[gehrlekrona]

Another interesting thing is that for one of the phrases I check I now see tons of pages of sites that has spammed every site they can find with links to their spam sites. Sites that has been gone are back again in the SERP's with better ranking than before.
Site that redirect to <an infamous spam site> are back in the index with full force.
Now, is this an update, data frefresh? Algo change? or is it just old Google crap showing up again?
Seems like Google is wishing us a MERRY christmas and HAPPY new Google year with crap like this.

Here's a search you can test: <Sorry, no specifics. See Forum Charter [webmasterworld.com]>

[edited by: tedster at 6:57 pm (utc) on Dec. 25, 2006]

[whitenight]

Oops, sorry matt3g.

Actually the graph at the top is the more telling one.

When ever you see it hit above 12,000 in the past in coincided with
what many here call an 'update'

Unfortunately, it's only showing the past 6 months.
If you could see the graph over the past 3 years you'd see it spikes above 10k whenever there was a cpnsiderable algo tweak.

[camchoice]

First of all Merry Christmas everyone.

I also noticed there is a lot of crap in the search results. Some of the top 10 positions in our niche are held by pages with 1 iframe only, auto generated keyword pages with flash file redirects, sites with no content whatsoever and the very first position is even held by a java redirect page. Pages build in less then 10 seconds seem to rule right now.

Found a lot of people that have copied our whole content, very popular right now it seems, but it might be one reason why we are all dropping positions. People are pushing so much of this content online that SE like google have hard times to deal with this.

We have also put a 301 redirect to avoid duplicate content on www and none www , could be a reason for our drop?

There is not much anyone can do, the speculate and pray right now. Good luck everyone ;)

[gehrlekrona]

Guess my post got edited. Didn't know about not posting certain things.
Anyway I hope this is ok to post. If you do a search and then add BRACKET/urlENDBRACKET to your search you'll see millions of pages index with spam links.
Note: replace braket and endbracket with keyboard keys. Couldn't post the real ones here

[jetteroheller]

Anyway I hope this is ok to post. If you do a search and then add BRACKET/urlENDBRACKET to your search you'll see millions of pages index with spam links.
Note: replace braket and endbracket with keyboard keys. Couldn't post the real ones here

Please could You clarify, what do You search, what URL in what sorts of brackets.

[gehrlekrona]

It's not hard to write down but I am not allowed to post and searches here :(
Try this search : BRACKETurlENDBRACKET***discount***BRACKETlurlENDBRACKET
You need to replace BRACKET with the bracket on your keyboard and the ENDBRAKET with the one on your keyboard.
BRACKET looks like this [ and endbracket looks like this ]

[Martin40]

Thanks to SEOcritiqe for the sticky about nofollow and the link to an article about paid links.

I'm amazed with all the rethorics:

Quoting Google:

To sum up, even though improved algorithms have promoted a transition away from paid or exchanged links towards earned organic links, there still seems to be some confusion within the market about what the most effective link strategy is.

What's the point of issuing such statements while every SEO can see that link buying sites go top in their search categories?

Meanwhile, I'm not buying or selling any links, but nevertheless my PR is penalized and I'm ranking 800 on my main key-phrase.

Merry Christmas Google and thanks for the card.

[gehrlekrona]

You're right Martin40. Link-spammers, paid links are good for google. I do not understand how they can tell if a link is bought or not. I guess Blog's might be a way for "organic links" but I see millions of link-spammers in blogs so whow is Google going to decide what is an organic link and not a paid link or a spam-link?

[SEOcritique]

As for identifying paid links that can affect the SERPs, Google cannot identify all paid links, but they can identify many. Some paid links have characteristics which give away, to varying degrees of ease, that they were purchased. Some link brokers actually publish their portfolios of the domains on which they place links. It's a matter of catch as can catch.

[followgreg]

I thought that Google was saying they became good with detecting spam links/domains AND PAID links?
The current SERP's I watch are nothing but PAID links and IT WORKS.

When I say "nothing but paid links", I see sites that really don't have even 1 backlink that is not a paid textlink and IT WORKS even in very competitive / saturated industries.

The guys at Google maybe testing something but with my limited understanding of what they do, I have to admit that I have a hard time understanding why they would pull up low quality SERP's?

...anyways, it's not all bad at all BUT they obviously do not detect what is paid links and what is natural in my opinion. (or they just don't care).

[reseller]

followgreg

...anyways, it's not all bad at all BUT they obviously do not detect what is paid links and what is natural in my opinion. (or they just don't care).

I believe Google, especially Matt Cutts [mattcutts.com], care to fightback on link sellers. However, I think Google doesn't have the capacity or not as effective as it should be in that field.

Therefore I suggested previously that webmasters and sites owners co-operate with Google in reporting link sellers. That could be done within Sitemaps, the same way as reporting spam.

Haven't heard a word from Google about that suggestion, yet ;-)

[gehrlekrona]

Here's my suggestion. Why not skip links as a measurement totally since it is just causing a lot of problems? Why not just use the content of the site and rank that somehow? Link measure is "old fashioned" and worked years ago but not anymore.
My problem with incoming links is that competitors don't want to link. Advertisers don't want to link since then they might send a client to another advertiser that visits the site. So, where do I get incoming links from? A blog that talks about my site? Maybe, but they are all full of blog-spam-links now so Google needs to remove the "importance" of links from blogs.

It's just a mess in google right now :(