Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
And now it has all completely changed to a result set similar to what wwas around a week ago.. gone are all the trivial bits of nothing.
Seems like somebody woke up down at the 'plex... "Oh crap, forgot to flip the 'make the results better' switch."
(Again, this only really applies to one word searches.)
[edited by: tedster at 4:37 pm (utc) on July 1, 2007]
back link check on cnn gives some really funky totals on those DC's as well
Vimes.
Is it time to rewrite the books? We may need to start building low quality sites and then encourage people linking back to become #1 in search results.
If the trend continues, Google will drop the site completely in a week or so :)
[edited by: tedster at 5:41 pm (utc) on June 5, 2007]
[edit reason] moved from another location [/edit]
The single keyword SERPs I've been watching lately seem to have spread as two different sets across the datacenters, wiping out a couple of results that were hanging on in there after it all started going south for me on April 30th.
Annoying that a really spam ridden, link spamming site is seemingly now considered an authority across most keyword combos in my sector. Oh well, time to move on, think outside the box again!
A URL jumped up to #10 on that search that was previously on page 5, and lots of the previous top ten URLs did a big shuffle.
This search has long been quite stable and the newcomer was a startling development. I know that this particular site has not been touched for over 2 years and the owners are doing no backlink work on it either. This all seems to point to a new algo modification. The search involved is not highly competitive, but a reputation management concern.
This all seems to point to a new algo modification.
Agree. Usually I reach a working therory within a day or three, even if it turns out to be wrong; at least something to investigate that might explain what is going on.
But this combination of weird geo components and high quality, authoritative sites dropping off on core searches has thinking that mulitple signficant alterations are happening simultaneously.
My best theory so far -- Two changes: Geo-related, plus some sort of relevance shift...probably related to a bad semantics assessment. At first I thought the relevance issue was age-related, but both newer and older sites are suffering in some respects, and only on some kw's. So I'm now looking at SERP's where good rankings fell away for sites that should still be ranking, AND where those sites still rank well some but fewer important terms.
A category that relates to my area of professional knowledge is of particular interest, but it't not hard to find areas to investigate.
For any of the wiseacres out there, it has nothing to do with P-P-C ;-)
oddly, I see this also for your KW; with movement all over the place.
But many, many other KW's are very stable (hence this thread is absence of noise, other than a few of you).
I tend to think that your KW is a target for testing.
[edited by: kamikaze_Optimizer at 6:27 am (utc) on June 7, 2007]
You can just about see the turn off/ turn on points by looking at stats.
In some sectors, much of the same junk that's risen to the top at Yahoo has risen to the top at Google
yeah, scrapers have pretty much good time so far. it's so damn nice seeing my latest articles appearing on the first places in SERPS making money for these guys. keep up the "good" work, google!
[edited by: tedster at 5:20 am (utc) on June 11, 2007]
[edit reason] moved from another location [/edit]
This is Google dance I know, but why it dances for me only...
Thanks in advance..
[edited by: tedster at 5:20 am (utc) on June 11, 2007]
[edit reason] moved from another location [/edit]
...high traffic for couple days and low traffic (as it used to be before June) for couple days.
Interesting report - you are saying the high rankings are something new for this domain, right? That makes me wonder if Google is testing a new SERP off and on, and seeing which one pleases their users more.
In terms of whether Google is "dancing just for you" I think many peopole here have been reporting a kind of yo-yo ranking on the SERPs that involve them. What the two states of the algo are is an interesting question, especially if your report for the bad times is "I am no where".
Have you checked the very last page of the SERPs on those days? You may not be nowhere, you may be suffering from the -950 penalty [webmasterworld.com] on those SERPs.
Have you checked the very last page of the SERPs on those days? You may not be nowhere, you may be suffering from the -950 penalty on those SERPs.
Just on time. I have been affected with that I guess. I was reading the threads about -950 penalty just after I posted my previous message.
So, I think I should update my post as couple days I am having the -950 penalty and couple days not. Isn't that interesting.
Has Googlebot gotten lazy or why am I seeing it visit a website once a week compared to May and previous months when it visited daily? And new sites are not getting deep crawled and indexed like before. Anyone else seeing this or is it just the new algo that needs a lot more backlinks than before for getting all pages indexed?
About spidering -- googlebot goes through cycles of frenzy and being laid back. I've always assunmed it has to do with Google assigning thier resources differently at differnt times. As long as rankings are not affected, I don't think there's any need for concern about these cycles.
well, I have conducted an "index test" , and changed a page on May 15, from "index,follow" in the metatags, to "noindex,follow".
since then the page has been spidered 5 times,
and guess what, the page is still in the google index with the "old" syntax (i.e. index,follow)
so, I personally believe they are having some issues releasing a "cleaned version of their index".
EDIT: , and I am not talking about the cache, their cache shows the new page. However, the page still receives traffic as it did before, indicating it is still indexed, and a viable search result.
pizzaguy, your picture is actually brighter than it was, not darker. You used to always have the -950 penalty, and now it disappears for 3 days at a time and you have first page positions!
Again for the last two days I am at the end of search results. I do not know what is happening but I guess I should reduce the optimizaton on my pages.
That makes me wonder if Google is testing a new SERP off and on, and seeing which one pleases their users more.
That seemed to be what they were doing but now I don't see the original results on any data centers or on comcast search.
Now they seem to just be playing with the varied new results.
Could they be following how often the results are being clicked on? It looks like the more educational results are down in the 30s while pages with free stuff and such are in the top 10.
Could Google results become nothing more than a big popularity contest? In other words could Google be starting with the top results based on the usual Google algo? Then are they refining it by looking at how many people are clicking on each result?
Google also seems to be going completely haywire in my areas. I've seen a whole page of Yahoo Answers returned, 20 Google books in the top fifty under a major keyword, article sites and blogs everywhere. They definitely seem to be pushing the commerce sites out of the picture in my sections.
They are (nearly) always doing that on some DC or another.
I'm definitely seeing a lot of screwed up caches where the terms aren't highlighting properly
Saw the same yesterday
