February 2007 Google SERP Changes

[pinkopanter]

And here it is. 12:00pm CST My site magicly disapeared from Google's earth. 1st page for many majour keywords, now is no where in the first 9,999.

I think disater is about to strike. Good luck to everyone

[Marval]

Been watching the "adult listings" since yesterday when I noticed what looked like a larger than normal shakeup - seems theyve found a few of the college servers that have been hacked to list adult sites - but most of the .edu spam sites are still there.
Also noticed a slight decrease in the DMOZ expireds that have been bloating the adult listings with redirects and cloaked pages - but those dont seem to have been affected.
The .edu sites do seem to have spread throughout all adult listings now - someone has perfected the hacking of their sites pretty well

[dataguy]

My site was -950 for 4 months until the beginning of January, then it was back like nothing had ever happened.

Today at around noon we got hit again. No major changes to the site through any of it.

When Google is "on", we employ 8 people. When Google is "off", we struggle to make ends meet with just 3 employees.

I think I'm going to be sick....

[webdude]

Many normal phrases remain about the same, however, I am seeing some different phrases that we are ranking for being added for some of our sites. Unexpected suprise here.

[Inspired]

I'm just beginning to see a shakeup for several phrases... these results are like nothing I've seen in the last few months.

[petehall]

IP address?

[caryl]

OMG Dataguy!

My site was -950 for 4 months until the beginning of January, then it was back like nothing had ever happened.

Today at around noon we got hit again. (only early AM here)...

Just like a stinking faucet!

I had been noticing that there has been a "problem" with site:search starting Jan. 24th -

Every day I record the 'totals' for site search for each of my sites (just to monitor G for indexing problems).

My main site had been at 998 of about 1,540 for months.

ALL OF A SUDDEN: Starting Jan 24th I started to see results like:

338 of about 1,540
183 of about 1,540
177 of about 1,540
149 of about 1,490
37 of about 1,580
34 of about 1,580

Just now it was - 19 of about 1,490

Anybody else seeing these 'strange' site:search results?

As far as I can tell - only one c-block [ 216.239.59.* ]of datacenters has normal results.

Caryl

PS - I forgot to mention - Yesterday - ALL of my sites that were 'HIT' today (between 10:AM and 11:AM EST) were heavily spidered - they normally DO NOT get spidered syncronized like that.

[edited by: caryl at 8:06 pm (utc) on Feb. 1, 2007]

[SteveJohnston]

Google's 'site:' search is optimised for speed not accuracy. I am starting not to trust what it says when simply querying the root of a domain. Add additional keywords and the results change radically, particularly for big sites.

Steve

[caryl]

Steve,

You may have missed my point.

I was referring to stability. I monitor and record these results every morning using the same datacenter.

My site:search results have been STABLE at 998 of about 1540 FOR MONTHS NOW.

The change I started to see WAS an indication (OMEN, if you will) of trouble ahead. Google was dropping indexed pages from the results.

Caryl

[pinkopanter]

My latest observation:

All sites listed now for the keywords my site was listed are from DMOZ and Google directory and they are sorted by PR

Hmm... interesting

[patc]

Agh! February 1st Syndrome! (Although I seem to recall the Feb 1st syndrome of 2005 was on Feb 2nd, but the cache dates were Feb 1!)

My observation from my perspective is a big swing, geographically - i.e. one of my sites was up there in the top 10 if searching from the US yesterday but not today... searching from the EU/UK (where it is hosted) still brings up the old result.

[mattg3]

Now we are back to beginning of December traffic. Why ... all this?

[kamikaze Optimizer]

This is what I am seeing for my main keyword:

I was number 5 and 6, I am now number 3 and 4.

What was in the 3 and 4 spots, which is now on page 3; where 2 sister sites of the number 1 and 2 spots. They are a .ca and a .co.uk url and hosted. The number 1 and 2 is a .com site that has not moved.

Funny how traffic doubles when you go up above the fold.

[edited by: kamikaze_Optimizer at 12:02 am (utc) on Feb. 2, 2007]

[kamikaze Optimizer]

Just a thought, but I am wondering if this is not a shake-out of the new nofollow tags in wiki.

The only good links the 2 sites that droped down to page 3 had were from wiki.

[nonni]

I think the wikipedia no-follow effect is what I am seeing. My traffic from Google for one site has dropped to near zero - it is a site with one really good wiki link that is useful to wikipedia users, and has been stable for many months. Fortunately, MSN traffic to that site is way up for some reason, keeping things about average.

~obligatory gripe~ I have one page on 'neodymium widgets.' A well written page with references and new material not found elsewhere. Was #1 for the term in Google a few months ago. Now, the number 1 result for that search mentions neodymium mining at the top of the page, and biodegrable widgets somewhere near the bottom....its not even about neodymium widgets, for Pete's sake! And the next nine results aren't much better - pages with uniformative attempts to sell neodymium widgets (but lots of links from SEO effort).

Does content really matter? Or am I better off cranking out drivel and getting links to it?

[mattg3]

I have inbound link from the German Wikipedia to the site that's affected here. The one that has inbound links from the english Wikipedia has been hit in December and is stable since then.

So that doesn't fit unless it was the December snafu.

Should it be nevertheless the case it is quite interesting to note that Google is now even more a Wikipedia outpost... :)

Google will be downsized to two employees and will be accepting donations from rich pseudo commie kids and governnment paid bored employees soon ..

[almir]

I dont think Wikipedia has anything with Google caraziness.

It started on the beginning of December, and Wikipedia added nofollow tags much later.

And my sites that dropped to nowhere on the end of december were not listed in Wikipedia

[kamikaze Optimizer]

Almir: These changes that I am refering to just happened yesterday for my key word. The results there had not moved in over a year for the top 7.

So something different is going on today. Maybe other keywords move about more often, but not this one.

[mvander]

I also had no Wikipedia links at all, and my site just about dropped to nothing starting Feb 1. So I don't think it has anything to do with wikipedia and nofollow links.

I hope things change around again soon or this is going to be a long month...

[Jordo needs a drink]

I've lost the same site that I lost in early December again. It's gone from ranking 7th to 700's. Very similar to last time. In December it came back after a few days, so we'll see.

One thing I have noticed is that Googlebot hit the homepage over 10 times in the last 24 hours. It's still crawling the entire site, but it keeps hitting the homepage a lot. It did the same thing in early December.

Also, it's the homepage of this site that ranked 7th, now it's a different page that ranks in the 700's, not really sure where the homepage ranks. If I search for the site name, the homepage does show up as #1.

I wonder if they're trying to implement a new bot or changes to the bot that get's confused about something or doesn't like something on my homepage? It's a pretty standard cms homepage and I have other sites that use the same template.

[htdawg]

Just curious to see if anyone has had the same problem. My site disapeared from all of google's datacenters about a week or 2 ago but googlebot visits every few days or so. Would that mean just to wait and see if google will index me again?

Thanks

[vikram lashkari]

hi,
Same happens to one of my client to..it is same behaviour as of 26th dec...my clients website is nomore coming for any of its keywords in SERPS. he is totally out same as 26th dec..

What is going on is very hard to say..No one can just rely on google even after being very honest webmaster..its shame that it keep hurting good people

thanks
vikram

[madmatt69]

I'm sure it's all just a continuation of the crap updates that have been happening since dec / jan.

[freelistfool]

What I've seen is all the scraper sites and redirected link spam sites that showed up during January have dropped out of the first couple of pages for my keywords.

[Bewenched]

Just a thought, but I am wondering if this is not a shake-out of the new nofollow tags in wiki.

I have no links in wikiworld and we have been affected. What i'm seeing is sites from blogspot, shopping sites and a crud load of yahoo stores showing up in our sector.

Pages heavily dependant on title where a couple of weeks ago it was description tags. But I am starting to wonder if google isn't starting to look at keywords. The top five spots for a specific 4 word phrase all have very fleshed out keywords. Curious

[trakkerguy]

Sorry to be dense, but what do you mean "fleshed out"?

[Jordo needs a drink]

One thing I have noticed is that Googlebot hit the homepage over 10 times in the last 24 hours. It's still crawling the entire site, but it keeps hitting the homepage a lot. It did the same thing in early December.

It's now hitting this site's homepage twice an hour like clock work. Every 30 minutes. A few minutes past the hour and a few minutes past the half hour. It's up to crawling the homepage 31 times since 8 o'clock last night.

I've also noticed it's doing the exact same thing to one of my feeds. Hitting it twice an hour also.

In the meantime my site (that was ranked 7th yesterday morn and in the 700's this morn) is now not in the serps for the keywords it was ranked on. It's getting worse.

The feed it keeps retrieving and the home page do have one thing in common... The feed contains random widgets from this site. And its title and links to the feed indicate so (5 Random Widgets). That's all the feed contains, so the feed changes every time it's viewed or crawled. My homepage contains a section that displays 5 random widgets. So even though the rest of homepage (the majority) is not random, it's still different every time it's crawled because of this section.

Just guessing, but maybe Google increased the "page changes to often" dial a little too much?

[Oliver Henniges]

Just a sidenote: As for this afternoon, for the first time my webmaster central console reports no crawl errros.

Ever since I set it up last year, there used to be quite a number of crappy errors, which had nothing to do with potential internal broken links, nor wrong inbound links. It seemed to me, that there was just something completely wrong with googles link-database, an issue that might be resolved by now.

All of the time my ranking has been relatively stable, but I'd like to know if others made the same observation, maybe with correlated effects to their ranking and listing.

[crobb305]

Matt Cutts keeps reminding us that they are doing updates and data refreshes closer to a daily basis now, rather than monthly. We could have these new threads starting everyday if we don't get use to this change at Google.

See his blog post from January 28th for this reminder.

[macman23]

Yeah, the "daily" changes are almost more frustrating than the monthly ones. One of my sites that disappeared from Google more than six months ago came back pretty strongly on February 2. On Feb. 3, my ranking was gone again. I've done everything I can to follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines. Talk about frustrating.