Google "Honorary Update" - Buffy

June 2007

[tedster]

Ever since Update Jagger, which prepared the way for Google's new Big Daddy infrastructure, the changes and shifts to the SERPs come so frequently that we haven't called an Update in over a year. Instead, we've been trying to watch the SERP changes in an ongoing, monthly thread that shifts with the irregular roll, pitch and yaw of the good ship Google.

But something quite major is now going on with the Google SERPs. Members are reporting major changes in the single word search results, most particularly, but lots of other things are stirred up as well. On one of my single keywords, I've just passed wikipedia (yeah!) and jdMorgan reported the same for one of his keywords.

So it's time -- we are officially declaring Update Buffy. We'll begin with recent posts from our June SERPs Watching thread [webmasterworld.com]. What do you see going on?

< So why name it Buffy? Let's say it's in honor of someone who just
left her job but knows a whole lot about Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
We've never gone with someone's formal name for an update. Tip
of the hat to reseller, goodroi, and jdmorgan for their input >.

< further note - Matt Cutts says [mattcutts.com] that in his mind this is not an
update. OK - so we'll call this moment an "Honorary Update". >

[edited by: tedster at 7:27 pm (utc) on June 19, 2007]

[BillyS]

< spliced from our SERPs Watch thread >

Is there an update going on or something - my traffic from Google doubled in the last 24 hours and it's continuing the upward trend by the hour.

[edited by: tedster at 2:11 am (utc) on June 18, 2007]

[zaneta]

For the last month when searching www.example.com the showing results were few 950 less than the indexed pages that were around 2850
last night my site dropped to 750 with a basic keyword but when searching www.example.com results showing are 9350! Any comments?

[edited by: tedster at 6:12 am (utc) on June 14, 2007]
[edit reason] switch to example.com - it will never be owned [/edit]

[tigger]

you know I really think G is loosing the plot with these results & updates as they are so poor. I was checking my stats and noticed an new term coming in when I check it against G it was off the mark down at 60th but the top 20 results that I'd expected to be packed with sites didn't have one relevant result! the same search on MSN & Y pulled great results in

[James45]

Something went on over the past 36 hours. I was #8 for my main keyword with my homepage and then poof. I'm now 780 for the same keyword with a different page. The homepage isn't in the top 800.

[trakkerguy]

James45 - It sounds like you might be a new addition to the -950 club. [webmasterworld.com...]

Is it just one search term you are missing on?

[vikram lashkari]

hi,
It seems something strange going on. I was ranking #1 to #3 for some really strong keywords since last 4 years and today they are no where near till #900.

Google is just unimaginable. why they want to do it now.

is anyone experiencing same problem?

thanks
vikram lashkari

[reseller]

For me it looks like the good old days major updates!
But it mightbe just a major reshuffling too ;-)

Lets wait and see.

[nektotigra]

Lets wait and see.

One can get a nice heart attack with these constant updates.

[thecityofgold2005]

For me it looks like the good old days major updates!

Not that I'm neurotic or anything, but which DCs do you see this on?! I'm rock steady across all DCs as far I can see..

[SEOPTI]

vikram lashkari: you are also a -950 club member.

[reseller]

I know this might sound crazy.

It seems that Google now is able to update all its datacenters at one run in the speed of light!

Previously we could see changes on some of the DCs then that changes migrate to other DCs within days. Maybe not any more.

I recall Matt Cutts once mentioning something to the effect that with time it would be rather difficult to do datacenters watching. Maybe we are seeing now what he meant :-)

Maybe you should keep monitoring your site traffic and watch out for big changes in either directions. And as during the good old GOOG's updates, some of you (not all of you) would start seeing either remarkable boost or decline in traffic.

[mirrornl]

back to watching growing the grass than:P

[BillyS]

My traffic has gone up 4 fold since Tuesday and this is what I'm seeing...

All of a sudden I'm getting long tail searches - which I never did before. I just looked in Analytics and it's all basically a ton of search terms - not one term sending a lot of traffic.

So it's not like I made page 1, it's just a lot of page 2s and 3s.

[tedster]

BillyS, that's a fascinating change. If you can share anymore detail as time goes by, I'd love to hear what you notice. I'm scratching my head as to what kind of algorithm change would make a site suddenly rank for a variety of search terms.

Sounds almost like winning a prize at the carnival!

[Duke_of_Url]

Glad its not just me seeing a change, my unique visitors went from a Thursday average of ~4k-4.5k up to nearly 8k, so something has changed. Not sure I'm comfortable with things changing so quickly... :-/

DoU

[tigger]

these results are so over all the place I've got a site ranking for a competitive term thats not been touched for over 4 years that includes both content & links! also as the registration & hosting is shown by a company in Holland you'd really think it wouldn't rank well when searching G.co.uk and for uk only results - WRONG its 4th LOL

[BillyS]

>>I'm scratching my head as to what kind of algorithm change would make a site suddenly rank for a variety of search terms.

It's almost like coming out of the sandbox for a second time.

For example, yesterday I got one or more visitors on 1,900 search terms from Google.

One week earlier (same day) I got one or more visitors on 200 search terms.

[reseller]

BillyS

Should I understand that you stop now your popular "watching the grass grow" or "watching the paint dry" (:(

[2oddSox]

I'm seeing much the same thing as BillyS. Very large increase in traffic across more sites than not. One in particular practically doubled overnight, and it seems to be the 'long tail' keywords that are doing it.

Feels like 2004 all over again.

[thecityofgold2005]

I am still seeing no change anywhere.

Could the increase in long tail traffic be something to do with the 'Searches related to:' at the end (and possibly the beginning?) of serps?

[reseller]

One of my sites which was hit by Allegra Update (Feb 2005), lost 75% of its Google's traffic and never really recovered since, has doubled the remaining of its Google's traffic since yesterday.

Maybe the current possible algo update is The Allegra Equalizer, who knows.

And thats bring us back to suggest names. Maybe Update Vanessa :-)

[outland88]

I can top you tigger I've got pages 5-7 years old that never showed in results now showing up on first page. Something's definitely going haywire because on another search I've got four results in the top ten. I'm also getting pages swapped in and out of supplemental. A lot of web sites seem to be going untouched if they're in the top 1-3 results of the long tail but the rest are in total churn.

Well I guess they'll fix at the end of summer.

[BillyS]

For the record I wasn't watching data centers, I was watching my traffic. ;)

[nektotigra]

I see some movement on Google's ".ca" and ".co.za" national domains. Hope, it will spread to the ".com".

[reseller]

Ok. Are we talking about old sites recovering? because my site which seems recovering is from 1997 if I recall correctly.

tigger, BillyS and outland88 mentioned old sites too.

Maybe we need to ask Brett kindly to drive to the Corner of Haight and Ashbury [webmasterworld.com] for some news :-)

[trakkerguy]

Over the last few days I've seen:

Old sites coming back from the grave.

New sites whose rank has fallen back to what they were a couple of months ago.

Perhaps they've increased the weight of backlink age in the algo?

[walkman]

something is still cooking. Not sure why but there is a lot of movement. Over the past 2-3 days I have a noticed a small decrease in referrals (10% or so) but still up compared to what I was getting before May 24th.

I had some trust issues so I hope they release the juice :) in stages, with this being only part of it. I have a PR5 and many old links. About 1/3 of my pages are taken daily from Gbot so I have a lot of good backlinks apparently.

[tedster]

One of the oddest things I've seen in the recent SERPs -- and I've now heard three other reports on this kind of thing -- is the occasional clustering and indenting of two different domains.

#1) In one case, example.com was clustered with example.de -- its translated content.

#2) In another case, the two domains were only related by topic. Matt Cutts blog was clustered and indented under another SEO blog of unrelated ownership. This happened twice, with Matt's blog clustered under two different domains that discuss him.

#3) A third and possibly related oddity I'll call the case of example.com and ex-ample.org.

Example.com has been ranking from number #9 to #12 for several years. The domain was a partial dupe of ex-ample.org, a domain that never ranked above page 12 in its 5 year history. After two frustrating years, the owner pared that content down to a smaller amount of material, and he launched that near duplicate site as example.com. The content ranked much better in the more lightweight form, as i said, hovering around #9 to #12. But the owner left the old, fatter domain live.

All of a sudden, for a few days earlier this week, ex-ample.og blinked in replacing it's lighter weight duplicate, then in about 36 hours, the SERPs reverted.

[steveb]

Suddenly about.com, and worse, answers.com are being fawned over almost as much as wikipedia.org.

For a top of the line, competitive one word search term, suddenly a PR2 domain with a grand total of 39 worthless backlinks ranks at #20. (For comparison, #19 is PR6 with 35,000 backlinks from all kinds of authority domains.)

The multiple word searches in this niche continue to be the best in years, so this ongoing weird lameness with the one word term is very bizarre.