August 2007 Google SERP Changes

[lakr]

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

I have seen some changes, none of my pages were listed in Supplemental index, however, those pages do not rank even when I type the exact title with quote.

Time here is 11.30 - 1 Aug 2007

[edited by: tedster at 5:08 am (utc) on Aug. 1, 2007]

[g1smd]

followgreg: What are you worried about?

You have a #1 listing and when that is clicked your on-site redirect gets the visitor to the correct location.

You have no loss of traffic. You're in an ideal position.

Google will flip the result to list the correct URL at some time.

I see nothing to worry about.

If you didn't have the redirect, your #1 would be delivering visitors to a 404 page. That would be a major problem.

.

The redirected URL should be a Supplemental Result; and if it is then that listing represents a change in the way that those now rank in the SERPs.

[Samizdata]

Clearly the current results are totally wacked out

I have a ten-year-old site that held the number one spot on Google for a one-word search for most of that time and has never been off page one. It neither sells nor advertises anything, it just provides free entertainment - exactly what those who enter the keyword are looking for. I have made no changes to it for the last three months.

Two days ago it was relegated to page seven and Google traffic is now zero.

No loss to me, but I feel sorry for the people who can no longer find it.

[Arctrust]

Hey Guys:

I want to add some unusual occurrences:

We have a 5+ year old site

Have been No 2 for 1 KW search for 5 years

Site has PR 5

Site still ranks high for 2 KW searches

Two days ago - poof! - totally disappeared from 1 KW search (checked all the way to position 900+)

The 1 KW search now has a competitor at No 1 - Wiki No 2 and endless garbage of blogs and Google Books about the KW...

What is going on?
I can't figure it out.

I've read a ton of posts but not many with these conditions.

Anyone make any sense?

ARC

[gehrlekrona]

Arctrust,
I don't think anybody can figure it, maybe not even Google.
I see the same as you do. Tons of crappy sites that don't even have anything to do with your search.
Tons og blogs again, spammy sites and a lot of other crap. Not a lot of good site that is right on the spot for what you were searching for.
My site(s) are still hurting and there is nothing you can do abut it since you don;t know if there is something wrong or not.
One thing I see every time this crap happens if that I have a couple of pages the comes up when my site looses rankings in the search. These pages are old ones and have a lot of spammy (yeah I know!) META Tags and it is interesting to see that these pages are somehow lifted up while the white hat ones are way back, pushed down by crap... It seems that this must be intentional from Google but why?
Are they using Urchin or whatever it is called now, to check the stats? What links does people click on and how long do they stay? Are they gathering info from this to use in their algo? Most likely!

[Arctrust]

gehrlekrona - Thank you!

Your answer is comforting only because I can't tell exactly from the posts that others are experiencing the same thing with the same conditions.

I have over the past years always taken a wait and see attitude and if the site was ever pushed down... it always came back... within days, but this one is a mystery.

Thanks again!

Lets keep this post alive and maybe between all of us... and Tedster who always seems to be on top of his game, can figure out where all the common threads are between us and hopefully, either fix something or wait till Google fixes this
Mid-Summer-Intern-Playground-Debacle

ARC

[followgreg]

>>g1smd >>> It's a question of branding and my boss takes me for an incompetent now. There has been some serious branding money spent on the new domain and Google keeps showing the old stuff.

So like every basic user my boss thinks that Google is always right, so I am the one who made a mistake...

It also is another example how Google's index is out of date and produces things that it should not be intended to.

Mid-Summer-Intern-Playground-Debacle

:) looks like this to me as well.

Trust given to some damains really amazes me and is so far to what a real 'normal' human being would give...

[c41lum]

Further update to out movements

25/7/2007 results re-appeared at prominent positions
8/8/2007 results returned to levels prior to 25th
12/8/2007 results back up again
13/8/2007 results down
14/8/2007 (around 1pm) results up
17/8/2007 down again
21/8/2007 back in.
28/8/2007. knocked out again.

** NEW **
30/8/2007 back in again at good positions

[belarus]

Aug 28,2007 my three sites lost #1, #3 and #4 rankings in google for 5-6 power keywords. Today i can find them on 5-7th pages.

[belarus]

Sites are 3, 1.5 and 1 years old. All in one niche for the same keywords.

[c41lum]

There is a tremendous amount of jumbling of our positions, only a day later and whilst we are still high the distribution of these high positions is entirely different than yesterday.

[c41lum]

Probably not as high overall as yesterday though

[oasisfan]

Looks like we have started pulling out of the dive just before we were going to crash into the ground... Google is giving us 76% of our traffic as of two hours ago (it went down to 25%) On the way up again it seems. It seems google are preparing something big, where we (all of us ) end up is anyones guess.

[g1smd]

>> There has been some serious branding money spent on the new domain and Google keeps showing the old stuff. <<

Yes. Google does keep hold of the old stuff for anything up to a year. However Matt Cutts has hinted that the cycle has been speeded up in recent months and will further speed up over the Summer.

Google keeps hold of the old stuff so that people who are looking for the old stuff can still find it. Your on-site redirect then does the job of delivering the visitor to the correct location.

This is the web equivalent of you posting a "This shop has moved to 50 High Street" notice on the windows of your old premises when you move out. People will naturally continue to go to the old location for many months after you moved. In fact, some people may still be going there for years. However, once the notice is gone, you lose that traffic.

Your boss has the wrong expectations. Google is doing the right thing.

[edited by: g1smd at 12:11 pm (utc) on Aug. 31, 2007]

[Oliver Henniges]

> Check your Directory listing(s). Have they changed from the previous versions?

I don't check my rankings regularly, but a brief look yesterday showed some results not very satisfying. So I came across this thread and took a look at dmoz and the google directory. What I found was that due to some restructuring of some dmoz-categories my backlink from there has gone from PR5 to PR1 (toolbar-values, so this must be at least two months old). The green bar in the google directory still shows the old value, but I assume this is probably only a matter of time.

Despite this break my overall rankings are amazingly stable, but I have the impression that a number of search-queries, where my site used to be #1 without any competition, now lack some of those secondary links or have even gone a few spots down.

It is hard to distinguish all this from everflux, but I have the impression that dmoz still plays a very important role in googles overall evaluation of the importance of a site. The relevance of theses changes for the SERPs can hardly be overestimated, though any criticism on the content and quality of dmoz is of course justified.

[g1smd]

You might be the first person to confirm what I wrote about, earlier today, at:

[webmasterworld.com...]

[Arctrust]

g1smd:

What you are saying about the directory makes sense - but doesnt hold true to a test.

I checked the Google (DMOZ) directory last week and this morning.

The directory is automatically sorted in PR order.

In my niche, there the first 2 have a pr5 on the directory and the individual pages show the same.

Our site has a pr5 shows further down with lower pr sites.

It's possible that the directory hasnt been updated with the correct pr yet.... but my results for a 1 word KW doesnt show any of the pr5 sites at all.

So.... the mystery continues...

What makes a site show No 1 for a KW search and why do other sites just get lost.

Still no rhyme or reason...
MSIPD: Mid-Summer-Intern-Playground-Debacle

When do the kids go back to school so that the parents can clean up their mess?

ARC

[MrStitch]

"It is hard to distinguish all this from everflux, but I have the impression that dmoz still plays a very important role in googles overall evaluation of the importance of a site. The relevance of theses changes for the SERPs can hardly be overestimated, though any criticism on the content and quality of dmoz is of course justified. "

Really? Cause when I check the cache of dmoz's home page, google doesn't have anything. Tells me that they're leaving it in the dust.

[g1smd]

No. You need to read the thread [webmasterworld.com...] that I linked to above. (once it has been unlocked)

That tells you something about what you might now be seeing with the ODP and why. It is something completely new.

[wrkalot]

I am seeing a lot of the same craziness as others... massive fluctuations, ebay, blogs, craigslist, citysearch etc. The odd part to me (maybe some will explain this) is the results I'm seeing on google.com are completely different that on AOL, Comcast and others that are serving G results... these other results look much better than what google is serving up on their own domain.

[Arctrust]

UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE

Our search results now seem to be completely clean and has our site at No 5....

Looks completely different than what we were seeing just 12 hours ago.

What the H***L is going on at the GooglePlex?

ARC

[gehrlekrona]

I don't know the quality of the sites you guys have but I am TRYING not to be spammy (META TAGS), and trying hard not to violate anything Google says we shouldn't do, even though it is hard to keep up with their changes. Having that said, it is a mystery why you suddenly "disappear" from the search results.
The only things Ihave done lately is to add more pages, got a few more external links to my site. Nothing drastic at all so I can't figure out why my site was hit. It is not the first time. Whenever they have a BIG update it gets hit, and I have written before here, that I can, kind of, predict when a BIG change is going to happen because I have seen it every time.
What is happening to my site is that I suudenly get a big influx of hits from Google for a day or two. After that it just goes down and down and that is what has happened this time too. I thought I had hit the rock bottom the other day, but today it is still going down. By now I usually have 5,000 unique and today it's not even over a thousand, so the traffic is really, really crappy. I don't see the new pages at all anymore showing up. What I see are the old pages that usually shows up after a BIG change, pages that I don't really promote anymore but are still there. Not sure they even have any links to them anymore on the site.
It seems that when these BIG changes is in effect they just add whatever they have withou any filters at all. They let it loose just to gather data from their crappy results and we all get hurt, except the spammers since they seem to bubble to the top.
I use Google a lot at work, but it is harder to find anything nowadays. You need to go to page 5 and above to even get to anything relevant, that is if you don't type in a string long as Mississippi. Shorter version of a search string renders crap. Long tail searches being tested?
Can't figure it out so excuse my rambling :)

[TheSeoDude]

I said before I had a lot of pages loose rank and went supplemental. Almost all my content pages.

Well, Google started to put them back.
The important ones are ranking back where they did at the end of July and non-supplemental count is growing continuously every hour.

Finally. (I hope this will stay this way!)

[Oliver Henniges]

OT: Arctrust (and others in previous posts): the green bar in the directory is something comletely different from the toolbar pagerank bar. The directory-bar covers only seven steps in contrast to PR which ranges from 0 to 10.

on topic: g1smd thx for that link. I never spent any money on internet advertising before, but with this dmoz-thing threatening one of the most important backlinks of my site, I'm really wondering whether it is time to invest in a yahoo-directory-listing.

[g1smd]

When you look at the Google Directory be aware that some servers have the old copy from 2005, and that only a few are showing the new 2007 version so far.

< continued here: [webmasterworld.com...] >

[edited by: tedster at 4:45 am (utc) on Sep. 1, 2007]