Google "bug" hits a few sites - per PBS Media Shift

PBS' Media Shift offers some insights of interest

[weeks]

Here [pbs.org]
is a link to PBS' Media Shift yesterday which did a bit on Google admitting to a "bug" as they adjust their search results. The author got good quotes from Matt Cutts and Danny Sullivan.

(An aside: It's amusing that in the comments section the erotic sites got their shorts in a knot about PBS not linking to them. First, they want to be outside the mainstream, then when they're treated as being outside the mainstream, they whine about it.)

[tedster]

This "story" was all over the blogs a week ago, or even more. Seems to me there's a much bigger Google story brewing right now, but PBS may need to wait for the blogs and forums to pre-digest it and then spoon-feed it to them.

[arnarn]

"..Seems to me there's a much bigger Google story brewing right now.."

any insights would be helpful

[tedster]

Let's take in a wider picture for January:

AdWords disruptions [webmasterworld.com]
AdSense Outages [webmasterworld.com]
Webmaster Tools Reporting Issues [webmasterworld.com]
Increased "URL-only" Listings [webmasterworld.com]
Site Root Pages Disappearing [webmasterworld.com]
The 950 Penalty Increases [webmasterworld.com]
False PR 0 Reports [webmasterworld.com]
URL Removal Tool Troubles [webmasterworld.com]

There's more, too. This presents a picture to me of some massive data movement, all around the Google farm. Why? To what end? We don't see a clear picture yet, but these disruptions to normal operation, all occurring at about the same time, seem like they might be related to a bigger picture of some kind.

[itloc]

"We believe this situation is fully corrected and the very small number of impacted sites have been returned to their proper ranking"

In my opinion that is a little bit cynical. I am still running on 10% of what I had before...

itloc

[arnarn]

We've certainly seen a lot of volatility on our important key words and key word pairs, and haven't encountered anything of the magnitude of the identified "bug".

There's also been dramatic differences between data centers in results for the site command so we're trying not to react to those results.

In "general" things (for us) seem to be getting "better" or at least look more stable.

We've also noticed how our AdWords burn rate has almost doubled this month to date (compared to our average monthly cost for the last year). Maybe that, too, is a "bug"?

Is somebody turning the "make more money" (aka MMM) knob?