January 2007 Google SERP Changes - part 2

[frakilk]

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

A very interesting article (including comments by Matt Cutts) has been posted over at PBS. It may be possible that it is related to the December/January changes
[pbs.org...]

[edited by: tedster at 8:00 pm (utc) on Jan. 11, 2007]

[chelseaareback]

hi mhes

but companies like hitwise are able to monitor not only how muc traffic a site gets but also the amount of time people spend on any one site and where they go afterwards

they reckon they get this info from the search engines themselves

[mattg3]

shows all my sites are no longer verified

I had this yesterday too, with a 2 day massive traffic spike. it tripled. Now it collapsed again to previous values and I reverified the site.

Additionally a mysql bug that we had 2 weeks ago for 1 day shows still up as crawling errors, network unreachable, although it says they accessed the site 7th of January.

Google has imo completely reindexed. Google is as stable as warm Nitro, these days.

[edited by: mattg3 at 2:52 pm (utc) on Jan. 11, 2007]

[sjgreatdeals]

Seeing big changes poping in and out on [64.233.179.104...] looks like google might be changing the way it handle plural words and small mispellings. Right now if you add an s on the end the term woudl still show up, i see completly different results on plural terms. Its hit and miss have to hit refresh a couple of times to get the new results

[mattg3]

A very interesting article (including comments by Matt Cutts) has been posted over at PBS.

Very interesting indeed. Still again and again the same message seems to be relayed that constant fiddling with the algorithm will result in even more chaos in the future with this everflux malarkey.

In the end it will also affect adwords buyers that can't rely on incoming traffic in all this chaos.

[vstevens]

Obviously,

something going down. Does anybodt know whats up with this specefic datacenter 209.85.165.104? My first page rankings have improved by 1 -3 spots on other DC's, but completely dissappeared from this DC? This is the DC in my location now and I have never even seen it being used as a DC in this area?

Is it trouble or will my traffic double?

Thanks.

[sjgreatdeals]

Looks like what i talked about is poping in and out on that one too, showing big changes with the way they handle plural words

[Tinus]

<<Looks like what i talked about is poping in and out on that one too, showing big changes with the way they handle plural words >>

I saw this too a year ago when one of my sites was hitting a filter for some months on my most popular keywords. Also when you have two keywords combined withanother word. "widget1 and widget2" was unfiltered were as "widget1 widget2" was filtered down some pages. I think it has something to do how filters work. As if the algoritm only is applied to exact matches and the plural/singular versions or extra words/spelling mistakes keywords are processed differently.

[edited by: Tinus at 3:24 pm (utc) on Jan. 11, 2007]

[randle]

Absolutely no improvement here. The supplemental page issue with the site command has been cleared up, but the fall in rankings that took place on the night of January first has not budged. Only thing we can think of is some sort of OOP due to an adjustment that was made in the algorithm. A few of these sites have been hanging around the first page since 1999. It’s strange because for us, it’s exactly like Florida; poof!

Well, time to start the slow process of stripping some sites down a bit, see if things improve. (oh, and crank up the Adwords!)

[soapystar]

Well, time to start the slow process of stripping some sites down a bit, see if things improve

are you sure thats as straightfoward as it sounds?

[chelseaareback]

just had 24 hours of jubilation and now we have gone back 24 hours and am back down to earth.

results now same as tuesday again

from where I am sitting anyway

think this year is going to be a right laugh

[mattg3]

results now same as tuesday again

from where I am sitting anyway

Had the same now they are coming back as if Google went mental..

Daily traffic variations in the 300% range :\ on +30.000 uniques

[randle]

are you sure thats as straightfoward as it sounds?

Nothing about whats going on right now I find straight foward thats for sure. The ill or the cure.

[tedster]

Here's an observation that prompts me to do some educated guessing. One of my clients has held the #1 spot for a given search over many years. For the same time period, the #2 spot was held by another domain -- the SERP was really locked down.

Last week the #2 fell to #4 - and none of the top 4 sites show changes (on Yahoo or MSN) to the number of backlinks. The top 4 have also made no content changes to these URLs in many months. So I begin to suspect that Google is shifting the way it weights backlinks altogether. Then, yesterday, Matt Cutts made this comment on his blog:

If you used to have pages in our main web index and now they're in the supplemental results,
a good hypothesis is that we might not be counting links to your pages with the same weight as we
have in the past.

[mattcutts.com...]

How might the weight of backlinks be changing? Obviously we can't know for sure, but one way in which I've been hoping to see this change is to get a little more semantic intelligence into the anchor text analysis. For quite a while it seemed to me that anchor text and page "themes" were running on mere text matches: a link from a page on "fountain pens" could boost a page about "drinking fountains" and so on -- I just made up that example but it is similar to the kind of loosey-goosey thing I've been noticing. So there's one idea.

Another idea would be that forum and blog links now are weighted differently. The previous #2 site is flooded with links from both forums and blogs - legitimate by the way, not placed by automated spam bots - but still a very heavy number.

I have no firm conclusion here, but I thought what I saw was suggestive and wanted to share it.

[edited by: tedster at 10:16 pm (utc) on Jan. 11, 2007]

[intravino]

Hey Guys,

I was hit on December 6th and off/on again several times. I was off Google for about 3 weeks and yesterday came back really strong # 5 and my traffic tripled.

Today, an other big disaster, I am out, no ranking at all on 6 keywords.

I dropped like a rock, It was good for 20 hours.

I think I'am done and toasted on Google. I don't see my website going back on Google.

It is weird.

Intravino

[MHes]

Tedster

>I...we might not be counting links to your pages with the same weight....

My take on this is that they are putting less emphasis on links to your page and more emphasis on links from your page. I think the whole 'links as votes' formula has become corrupt and a much better sign of quality is the way a page links out. A good page can take months or years to acquire natural inbound links and by the time that happens the content can be stale. A better method is to appraise the page while it is still fresh and the way it links out can signal quality and/or relevence.

Another effect of this is the goal of having 'information' sites in the organic listings, while pushing commercial sites who tend not to link out so much (on a page basis) into buying adwords.

[steveb]

What a clueless article that pbs.org one is.

Google screws up tens of thousands of sites, and somebody writes an article when ten get lost?

Dude, Google has a lame search engine that makes this happen over and over every day or two now.

Unfortunately it is clueless articles like this that perpetuate the myth that a handful of sites might get effected by glitches, rather than the many thousands a day Google is ineptly handling now. Google is powerful in their influence. They also suck as a search engine. They ineptly rank pages and sites every single day. Just because one site gets lost and then found is nothing to make note of.

It's like writing an article about one drop of rain in a monsoon.

[asgdrive]

Thought I would weigh in on this!

I have an ecomm site with over 2 million products, and 200k pages. The site is over 6 years old and was at the top of the SERPS for over 3 years for almost every keyword. We passed Florida and all the other major algo changes with no loss in rank or traffic.

With the current update we lost 60% of our traffic.

Observation!
All of the commerce sites in our category are slipping away. What replaces them is informational based sites. "how to install a #*$!#*$!X"

With one exception!
Google Base feeds are now showing up in the Google SERPS.
The product pages I used to have in the SERPS went supplimental, and are now being replaced by the googlebase/froogle feed items with a similar page title. Also keep in mind every feed uploaded to googlebase is manually checked by the Google staff.

I am sure this is just one of the many changes that are taking place right now. I guess we will just have to see how it all shakes out!
x
x

[Pirates]

Sorry the googlebase arguement doesn't work as its a US thing and people are seeing worldwide changes. You may be right in US though.

[edited by: tedster at 4:36 am (utc) on Jan. 12, 2007]

[SEOPTI]

I still see with affected domains that supplementals appear first followed by the non-supplemental results. Google fixed it for site: command but not for regular search.

[dupac]

Anyone who is effected by this update tell us if you have a strong internal linking?

Google has been giving a stong emphasis on internal linking along with external. My analysis shows that its possible they may have devalued the internal links. And if your pages were ranking higher becuase of internal links they may have gone down in ranking.

I saw drop of pages on our website from google index. We were ranking 10th for one keyword and now we are no where to be found and our home page is ranking 95th for that page keyword.

[skweb]

Dupac, I would agree with your hypothesis only if all search terms were equally affected. We have situations in which two keywords that rank high solely due to internal linking: one is on page 1 and the other just vanished.

[dupac]

Is the term for which your page vanished more competitive than the other?

[mirrornl]

@dupac

strong internal here yes
competitive keywords gave downgrading in serps

less competitive not down that much

indeed, seems good thinking

[vbjaeger]

I am not so sure this whole "update" is done yet. My main site was number 1 yesterday where it has been for 2 years and it is gone from a standard google search today. Different DCs are showing different results. I wouldn't panic yet if the site is highly relevent to the topic.

[shogun_ro]

I still see with affected domains that supplementals appear first followed by the non-supplemental results. Google fixed it for site: command but not for regular search.

Correct.IMO this is the problem.
In all of my sites I use the same internal linking schemes.
6 of them recovered but 1 not.
6 not have webmaster tools account but that one have.
6 hosted in my country ,that one hosted in US(80% traffic from my country for all)
6 not have AdSense,that one have.

So?

[surfing1]

When Google claims all is well these days I just laugh. Over the past month one of our sites on a very competitive KW term dropped off the front page after being there for many years. Then I (along with one of my competitors which is a publicly traded company) completely disappeared from Google's main index for several weeks. We finally re-appeared (my competitor too) several days ago...that is until today. We have moved back off the front page again. During all the chaos over the past month, many of the DCs were maintaining different results. I am not even going to get into the fluctuations we experienced in the months prior to this.

Unfortunately, when many consumers click "search" on Google's home page, it is like hitting a mystery button these days. Each day they may get drastically different results. Regular fluctuations like these are horrible for consumers and Google's reputation. If you type in a KW one day and find a site you like but can't find it the following day using the same KW, it is extremely frustrating. Most people don't memorize a domain name after going to it once, but usually can always remember how they found it.

The Corp I represent gets many of these complaints. We have started instructing our customer service teams to recommend Yahoo and MSN when they get complaints like these as they usually provide more consistent results. I believe in time the frustration due these inconsistencies will provide the MSN and Yahoo with some more market share.

[CainIV]

Unfortunately as well to me that article make little sense, and didnt really address anything to me that could explain the loss of ranking over 10 000 (or maybe more sites)

Unfortunately, that post fails to addresss the issues at hand:

Google Search Snafu Can Have Huge Impact on Niche Blogs

really could have been listed as:

Google Search Snafu Can Have Huge Impact on Many Sites in the Index.

What was interesting was the way the article which first seem to want to tackle the issue, simply instead caved in and went along, citing information passed along to us via other channels as usual.

However, what IS interesting, is his response regarding newer cache dates on supplementals and how traffic can come from supplementals (which is an about-face from what I thought I knew about supplementals) suggesting to me that supplemental could really, in essence be ALSO referring to pages within a domain that are not trusted?

[edited by: CainIV at 4:07 am (utc) on Jan. 14, 2007]

[Pico_Train]

CAIN IV

Interesting idea about the supplementals and trust relationship but not wanting to toot my own here, I don't think it applies and disagree politely.

I have a few supplementals, pretty much all the duplicate URLS created by my WordPress Blog, and I know with some certainty that my site has a high level of trust so I don't think that is at play here unless it's a weaker rather than stronger relationship.

[edited by: Pico_Train at 7:27 am (utc) on Jan. 14, 2007]

[jetteroheller]

3 of my major income subdomains escaped the filter.

2 escaped December 30th
1 more one week later
3 escaped on Saturday

So from the 10 subdomains, 6 good working, 4 still filtered.

The still filtered is 1 major income and 3 not so important subdomains.

Some search positions are even better than before the time from September 30th to November 2nd