Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
am I the only one to find these new slightly different sERP a little 'not-that-good' in comparison to a few days ago?
this time I am notwatching spam that much but more relevancy and i find current results quite disapointing I dont think that it is time to prove MSN right when they say they will be more relevant soon, alright we're not there yet but still not much of an improvement IMO at all :)
I agree to a certain degree about the whole relevancy thing. Why I think that google does these test runs is because if you read through some of my big daddy posts when everyone was buzzing around about it, you will see that I have said things about relevance, subdomain spam, and other things that is starting to surface this week in different threads. However in retrospect, I am on the oppisite end and I do not see the subdomain spam, but i do still see some irrelevant sites and other spam type sites. Its just not dominating page 1 at this time. The only exception that I have really not had to deal with is the supplimental thing that people are dealing with.
I do not know, i am sure that its just me, but I am the type of person that will look out of the box, but only if it makes sense, and when I look at historical data and compare it to recent data, then consider that only select groups of people see the changes, then I have no other coice but to assume that this is a categorical phase push. Only time will tell if this is the case.
Keep in mind, this is only speculation and I bring this kind of stuff up because it seems that a lot of other methods have been disproved and i want to rule this out too so I can move on to the next one. :)
The relevancy thing though is bothering me with actual results, really - hmmm maybethese guys at googleplex have some masochism issues :P
I just though they were on to something real good with the big daddy index lately and BANG they more or less rollback (not really I know) to where link buyers are safe on top and nice miche authority sites drop quite badly...of course that's only my interpretation and it is humanly impossible to verify this across enought search queries, only GG can.
ahhh GoO come on :)
I'm seeing my link: numbers up to how they were before 27th December. Since that date I haven't been able to get any info regarding link: data. Then on Thursday all changed and hits went rock bottom again.
I'm putting my reduction in hits down to the number of supplemental pages that may have been linking to me and are no longer registering any PR. Don't know for sure though. Since no longer reliant on Google for business I'm just a casual viewer.
All the best
Col :-)
December 27th all pages for a site that had 2 other domains mapped to it went from holding relatively decent rankings to dropping to 9999. It was not 301'd at the time.
During this time frame I did a 301 as Matt had suggested with regards to the www. And non www. I noticed that within say 2 weeks all was showing www instead of the non www, and also the 2 other mapped domains pointing to that site were not showing up in google.
However, what I did notice was that the very few that DID show up as a different domain name from those mapped, never lost rank for their keywords.
Ok, now with that being said this is where it gets confusing for me. When doing a normal kW search for those terms that showed on of the 2 mapped domains it ALWAYS showed the 301 www. redirect to that domain they were mapped to. However, if I did a site or allin operator for those pages with the mapped domain names, they would show up in google. I do not know if that makes a difference or not, just tossing it out there.
I also added content to at least 75% of all of the pages within the 301'd domain between December 27th till last Friday.
I also used Xenus Link Sleuth and quadruple checked any links that were not right.
Also, this might not be related either, but is worth mentioning. The thread that Dayo has mentioned in this thread that deeply discusses RK values and Page rank (I recommend that if you have not read it you should), discusses rk.
I started to look in to this about 2 weeks ago (I think so any way) and when looking at the xml I noticed that within the sample of links that Google (may or may not be using to rank PR) had a link from within the domain that I am discussing in this post that did not exist on my website. After an exhaustive witch hunt, I managed to locate that URL's history. It was located in the wayback archives and it was referencing the previous owner’s page that he had in 1999. (we bought it in 2000 from that person).
So me being the try anything at this point geek thought to myself and said "well, if google might be calculating what I am looking at with regards to PR and the first link that I see is one that does not exist and I have control over that link, I will make that page".
So I made it, kept checking the xml and within a day that link was changed to something ELSE on the website that did not exist, so I went back to wayback and it NEVER existed (or at least was never archived) I decided at that point, if I see something different the next day that is showing me a link on my domain that does not exist, then Google must be deliberately trying to create a bogus page for internal reasons. So I left that be because I did not want to cause any issues.
On Monday when everything came back for me, I checked the rk in the xml again and low and behold on every IP I checked, that initial page was listed again (the first one), but now its not a dead link and has an RK of 5 instead of the three. (the domain I work on is pr 6). Again, don't know if this has much to do with it, but though it was worth mentioning.
Now on Monday, all of the pages that were on this domain went from 9999 to their respective rankings.
If anyone wants to expand on this feel free, I have no idea if any of this made a difference for me, but that’s what I did since December 27th for the most part.
I did NOTHING and still got hammered. I think it's a google thing
Those are the thing that I did and though i can not say that that is what was, but I have a full recovery.
Our site went from #6 to around 700+ on December 27th. Our number of pages indexed has also been changing wildly along with the cache dates. We don't seem to be suffering a supplemental issue as of yet.
We still have not seen signs of recovering. We run a respectable website and are very concerned like the rest of you.
We are also part of the Google Sitemaps which seems to be downloading daily and says ok.
I am very lost and terribly afraid that we will not return when this *big daddy* update finishes sometime this month.
Berrysharpie
I have control over that link, I will make that page
Creating a former link target page can be a very fruitful action -- especially when the linking page is still online. When you acquire a domain from someone else, or even just re-develop your own property, it is tempting to just "sweep clean". But there can be some gold in the existing urls and inbound links. A wise man will take note of the on-hand inventory.
Google must be deliberately trying to create a bogus page for internal reasons
Not exactly "create a page" but maybe check-up to see what your server does in response to some arbitrary url. I think you did exactly right -- just let it be 404. There are some sites that will dynamically throw together content for almost any url you ask for -- especially if there's a keyword in a referer. Google may well test for that kind of behavior. In fact, a "custom error page" that returns a 200 instead of a 404 is just asking for this kind of trouble.
OK -- so we're all pretty sure that we're not seeing a "December 27th rollback, and now this thread is just wandering into the same territory that severl other threads are covering. Since the topic is handled and we're wandering way off-topic, I'm locking this one down.
