January 2007 Google SERP Changes

[helpnow]

< Some of this discussion continues from the December thread: [webmasterworld.com...] >

We have noticed some moderate ranking changes in the past 24 hours, which have reverted to previous ranking positions dating back to the middle of December.

Our rankings are secure, so I am not writing this as a complaint, but as the sharing of an obersvation: there is a new shift occuring right now.

In addition, we have also observed a reduction in the number of double listing "authority rankings" for various sites over the past 2 weeks or so. Many of these previous double rankings were indeed redundant, so this removal of some double listings is a perceived good thing in our opinion, at least in the sectors we watch.

Is anyone else having these same sorts of observatiosn these past 24 hours?

[edited by: tedster at 7:25 pm (utc) on Jan. 5, 2007]

[mattg3]

Traffic doubled on one of my sites. Google will drive me mad one day.. really :\ ..

[helpnow]

MHes - I think you got it 100% right. I think everyone should carefully read your post and then go away and quietly consider what you've said and how it applies to their particular situation.

[zaneta]

I stil also same problem
When i search www.domain.com no pages of the site appear only the sites that are giving links appear

When i search site:www.domain.com i see site pages no supplemental pages but I can not find first page of the site!

site has lost all positions!

Any comments?

[Dead_Elvis]

More power to all of you, but unfortunately this is not a new phenomenon at all...

Many sites suffered from this exact same set of symptoms back in June of 2006, only to see their position in the SERPS jump up and then fall back down almost like clockwork on a monthly basis.

And that's just the first time I became aware of it because that's when it effected MY site... I'm sure it had happened before then as well. My sites eventually came back full force, but others have never recovered.

The weird supplemental results, the almost random looking "penalties" from one page to another, and even this thread trying to round up all the symptoms&#8211;&#8211;they all look frighteningly familiar to me.

Check out this site search from Webmaster World to get a bigger picture. Perhaps something there will help.

June 27th threads [google.com]

Good luck!

[edited by: tedster at 2:31 pm (utc) on Jan. 10, 2007]
[edit reason] fix side scroll [/edit]

[alexey9]

I stil also same problem
When i search www.domain.com no pages of the site appear only the sites that are giving links appear

When i search site:www.domain.com i see site pages no supplemental pages but I can not find first page of the site!

site has lost all positions!

Same here.

[zegiv]

I stil also same problem
When i search www.domain.com no pages of the site appear only the sites that are giving links appear

site has lost all positions!

I was in the same situation few weeks ago. I was beetween 43 and 83 for my www.domain.com

I saw that a bad apache configuration turn my website into a duplicate content (it was parcialy indexed in 7 domains...).

I delete all pages indexed on the others domains, and 2 days after my website back at 3 for www.domain.com

Now it is first.

Maybe you are in a Duplicate Content issue as I was?

[Armande]

I got a hit on the head as well. Not completely belly-up as it did in June of last year but the number of hits was cut in half overnight a couple of days ago.
I am determined not to be bothered with it. I did some frantic changes last time and I have no idea if that helped at all. And it corrected itself after 5 weeks or so, when I had decided to leave it alone.
*rolls eyes*

[adsoft13]

For me - big changes, as I see 2 main reasons:
1) Pages got out of Supplemental.
2) Some sites got out of sandbox, of course they didn't get to #1, but seeing them amoung top 50 for me already good sign ;)

[MHes]

Having read through the thread in June when a similar problem hit sites these are the areas which they discussed which are worth looking at even if they are not directly the cause:

1) Unique metatag descriptions.
2) Duplicate content issues.

On top of these I would look at:

1) Visit alexa.com and check your site. On the page about your site, look at other sites that in one way or another are mentioned.... ring any bells? Now look at the way you link to these sites.

2) The trigger for the problem of having normal pages dropping 950+ in some searches may be related to an association with other sites that rank for the same keywords.

Any feed back on this would be appreciated.

[tahiti]

MHes, thoughtful post. I strongly agree on most of it except that i have not much trust that MattCutt is here to clarify things nor to help. in fact i find his blog posts are pretty different from the reality we are seeing from the SERP.

Anyway, that's not what we interested to discuss here i guess.

This time, we have to find the minus ones.

Couldnt really think of one on the 'minus ones'... the only thing that comes close to me is that reciprocal links by now has a much lighter weight in term of Google ranking.

From where i'm monitoring, it seems buying links from relevant websites is still working well. sites with only purchased links seems ranking high from the past few updates. Other than that, domain names help a lot. sites with search phrase in their domain names often rank higher in the particular search phrase.

How about you guys? what else you see is changing? is there any ranking factor that has not much effect in the past play an important role by now? i wait for your thoughts...

[MHes]

>..reciprocal links by now has a much lighter weight in term of Google

Agreed, but this problem is an 'off' or 'on' type issue. Either you rank top or 950+ so it is not imho an issue of 'less weight' for ranking points but a trigger that brings you in or out.

It is also on a page basis as far as ranking is concerned. The site as a whole may be subjected to a flag which means that additional filters apply, but some pages still rank for some search terms and thus survive the addidtional filters applied.

If you have a page that ranks for one competitive phrase, but not another, the key must be how those search keywords relate to the page and finding the difference.

[dazzlindonna]

If you have a page that ranks for one competitive phrase, but not another, the key must be how those search keywords relate to the page and finding the difference.

Sounds like an OOP flag for those keywords, possibly. Optimized just a bit too much for certain keywords? Too many alt tags using the phrase? Too many anchor texts? Just throwing some thoughts out there. I don't know this for a fact, obviously.

[MHes]

dazzlindonna -= You are right, but effected sites can still rank for a very competitive phrase with outrageous keyword density or not rank in the top 950 for a non competitive phrase with little optimisation. It does not seem to be consistent, but having said that, all these factors come into play.

[zaneta]

Checking now our site:www.domain.com we have found more pages indexed and the extra ones are in supplemental list
Those pages are old products that are deactivated but the urls are still existing in our server
because we might activate them in the future

do you think that this is creating problems in our site and we lost all our positions?
with site:wwww.domain.com we can not see our index page but we can see lots of other pages

do you know if the supplemental pages have affected our site
is it better to erase those pages?

[dataguy]

Well, after 111 days the penalty on my site was lifted Saturday afternoon.

Today around noon it came back, and at the same time sitemaps shows all my sites are no longer verified. I sure hope this is some massive screwup on Google's part and it reverts back to what how it was at the beginning of this week...

[Martin40]

Reading Adam Lasnik's post on duplicate content, I don't think there has gone a super-strict filter into effect (but don't go hog-wild, the message is). Right now (I may change my opinion again) I'm assuming that all of this is simply due to Google testing the SERPs, which happens periodically. What this could mean is that Google wants to test new sites for popularity (based on user behaviour), sending sites with known popularity to the background. The latter tend to return better than they were before. This isn't new, has been happening for many years, but the intensity may be new. Sites that were never affected are now down.
As for my own site: I did come back stronger in the data refresh following 6/27/06, but to be down 3.5 months a year is a bit much, if you ask me.

[edited by: Martin40 at 9:36 pm (utc) on Jan. 10, 2007]

[Daithi123]

(Mods - feel free to delete if you think this is just more of the same, but heres a quick report on my situation;)

I have a 7 page site (PR2) which comes up top for a single niche phrase (average about 100 hits per day)... until yesterday. Then I noticed about 11am this morning that the site has completely disappeared of the SERPS.
The 'site:www.mysite.com' command was behaving as reported in this thread -> returning the 6 sub-pages but not the index.
After reading through this thread, I checked on 72.14.203.99 at about 6pm, where my site was coming up No 1 and the site: command included the index page.
Checking now at 10pm my time and things seem to be completely back to normal on google.co.uk - and adsense starting to catch up as well. So for me it looks like it was just an 8-10hr hic-up (fingers crossed!).

[mirrornl]

@Martin40

Google wants to test new sites for popularity (based on user behaviour), sending sites with known popularity to the background

i like that theory, or is it proven somehow?

[shogun_ro]

Sites still recover!
Yesterday at 14.00 (GMT+2) another site recovered doing nothing for that.
One more remain for me.

[steveb]

The idiotic random revolving door continues... one page moves up from 950 to number 5, another goes from number 1 to 950.

What a messed up search engine.

[chelseaareback]

for what its worht results in my sector (at least for me) have reverted back to pre dec 28th.

almost as if last two weeks was an experiment.

I think the theory that g is testing results based on users behaviour has an awful lot of merit

obviously i hope these results stick but cant say I will be surprised if they dont

[purple]

My site hit on dec 20 came back about dec 26 went 5th Jan back 7th Jan, gone again today 11th Jan
Seems like I have two different sets of results, as one high traffic page and term is back but have lost traffic from 95% of other pages and terms.

In last 30 days site has been getting traffic more than not.

The site:www.mysite.co.uk results show home page first and not supplementals. Where in previous traffic dips supp have come up first.

So still none the wiser at why these dips are happening.

I am trying to increase IBL but dont want to over do it in case it is deemed I have added too many in too short a time.

[MHes]

>I think the theory that g is testing results based on users behaviour has an awful lot of merit

No tracking urls evident. Few people with toolbar..... I doubt this theory.

[geniusloci]

My page rank of 4 has gone to 0 for <snip>

however if I only type in the site its still 4?

[edited by: engine at 12:25 pm (utc) on Jan. 11, 2007]
[edit reason] See TOS [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]

[Tinus]

Geniusloci,

This event is described here:
[webmasterworld.com...]

< continued here: [webmasterworld.com...] >

[edited by: tedster at 8:01 pm (utc) on Jan. 11, 2007]