Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Continued from:
[webmasterworld.com...]
The same down-and-on problem here in Turkey.
But j3 goes on and off. No steady results. At least three different sets:
216.239.63.104 (I think with additional tweaks)
64.233.161.104 (still J2)
64.233.179.104 (J3)
But is this just wishful thinking (i.e. that pr power runs through the site from the homepage and this influences the serps). Is this how google works? (I don't have a clue!)
Well most of it surely - if your homepage/root has problems then the rest of the site will suffer.
>>> Ooops - sorry - I do tend to do that sometimes when I think a bit more. <<<
LOL
>>> There also seems to be a stage between 2&3 where the homepage ranks for other searches within your site. <<<
I haven't seen a good, deep crawl since this fiasco started; just lots of frequent crawls of a hundred or so pages. So even though everything's current and indexed correctly for us, I do think there's a huge pot-luck aspect affecting serps for many sites, depending on what data repository Google's looking at.
We spent a lot of time adding new, and updating older content, so Gbot has been pretty active. I suspect these frequent changes/visits have helped to push out old data, and have expedited this entire www resolve process for us. I also suspect these changes are directly responsible for the volatility we are now seeing in our serps.
What I really look forward to is a directory PR update. I know many here will regard that as irrelevant, but this will put an end to all this speculation about whether or not inbound links have been devalued/are being ignored. With the link issue crossed off the list, all other factors determining ranking can be directly analyzed/monitored, so are not subject to speculation.
I have the feeling that last comment will put me in front of a firing squad here, but I'm leaving it in anyway ;)
The link argument was only put forward by people who really dont understand what has been happening. (IMO of course).
Obviously BL benefit gets tweaked frequently no doubt and the odd site might get a penalty for bad linking practices - but it does not explain why so many sites cant be found for their homepage, and drop hundreds and hundreds of places for lots of phrases.
>>>I haven't seen a good, deep crawl since this fiasco started
No me neither (except by Mozilla Googlebot and that does not count)
I know - I was agreeing that it should be crossed off the list (except for perhaps one site in a hundred).
Pico_Train
It is just a rollback of PR - G dont seem to want to give up on the old Toolbar PR just yet.
Lol - dont thank her.
Google.co.uk just looks like the same as normal - UK people must just like your site Reseller. :)
That is exactly what happened to my site. All pr rolled back to exactly before the last update. The directory pr shows even more rank than what I currently had. This extended in to the added benefit of I am back in the sandbox just like I was before the update. Very exasperating.
It seems searchers are now going to 2nd and 3rd pages. It also seems that more traffic is coming in via deep pages that are now ranking. We weren't seeing this before - or maybe these were so few that I wasn't paying attention to them. Is anyone else seeing different traffic patterns?
Checking some keyword phrases I found Ebay first where on of my sites was before. My site offers an article about buying widgets. Entering "buy widget" (singular) brings up Ebay and another selling site first. "buy widgets" (plural) shows my site first. My article's headline is "Buying Widgets: How to blahblah".
I remember that, three weeks ago, my site used to show up first for "buy widget" too. I really did like those results. Apparently Google did not.
Conclusion for this day:
Going to start up a new site about danish bacon with eggs (layed in one basket)
I noticed a few days ago that 64.233.179.104 was treating singular/plural terms differently. On other DCs, where a site stipulated plural, it would still rank for both, whereas this DC was dropping the singular-term serps.
This still appeared to be okay on other DCs 2 days ago, but from what you say, this behavior has spread. I'll check this for our area in a while, but if this is correct, that's not good news ;(
To be fair - I think Google are getting closer to resolving a problem.
If my theory that Google is having problems determing the root page (due to canonicals/hijack) is even close to correct then the most important bit of my post was that some homepages were getting crawled that had not been crawled for ages.
A couple of other threads have picked that up too.
However, there is still evidence that although these pages are being crawled that they are still not being treated as the root and this might be holding G back a bit.
There seems to have been a crawl on about the 17th-20th (which picked up some uncrawled homepages) - which for me put a lot (not all) of the sites I monitor in the postion where site:www.domain.com returned the homepage first on most DCs (except the orignal J3s + and a few others)
These number 1 positions for the homepage on site:www.domain.com fell out after a few days.
There seems to have been another crawl on about the 27th-30th (which again picked up the until recently uncrawled homepages) - this did not however put the homepages top in a site:www.domain.com search.
For a couple of sites I have watched two crawls of the homepage that quickly are virtually unheard of in recent times (eg the cache date for the page when it appeared with title and description was probably February time.)
However, the most frustrating thing at the moment is the lack of noise coming out from Google..... are they working on something or is this just me reading the signs wrong :(