Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Happy 2008, everyone!
BillyS
"I've been staying clear of these threads but my traffic is up 40% since Wednesday"
Are we still talking about your same "watching the grass grow" site which had lost traffic in 2005/2006?
[edited by: tedster at 10:35 pm (utc) on Jan. 2, 2008]
Are we still talking about your same "watching the grass grow" site which had lost traffic in 2005/2006?
That's the one. I have to admit that 40% increase in traffic was an understatement. It was difficult to figure out what was happening with the holidays. Today's traffic is nearly double my prior "record" Wednesday. I'll assume that this change is unique to me and that others are not seeing such a drastic change in SERPs.
"I'll assume that this change is unique to me and that others are not seeing such a drastic change in SERPs."
I guess what you see now are the results of your "thorough cleaning" job which you had done for sometimes now. Lets say, GOOG loves ya again, BillyS :-)
The second money keyword (it's an exact synonym) went from #5 to #3 with the new website, and it has stayed constant at #3 right on through all the jumping around for the other word.
Hi Tedster,
My main site was #1 for years for our market's big money 2 word term. Now we move between 6 and 4 for this term.
If I search for that term with the second word as a plural we go back to #1. The plural of the word in question does not appear on the page.
Cheers
Sid
As walkman also reports, my traffic has now doubled from Google since around the December 26th timeframe. I noticed around that same time Google Webmaster Tools started to say we now had SiteLinks - something I always felt was some kind of "status" symbol.
I worked really hard at cleaning up our site (all 1,200 pages and four months later...). We also had a a dozen outgoing links to MFA sites. These were old links to sites that that owner had abandoned and were picked up by companies running MFA sites.
Other than that, I'm not really sure why we're experiencing this jump. But I can tell you that that this is not being driven by a single phrase or two, this is definately a long-tail jump.
Does it really change every month? or is it that webmasters realize the change the beginning of each month?
The mods make a new thread for each month simply as a way to keep the most current observations listed in a manageable length list.
"the monthly threads are the new DataCenter watch threads :)"
Exactly ;-)
And to our new WebmasterWorld friends, here is a bunch of those great famous evergreen Google Datacenters Watch [google.com] threads!
I wish I had something more exciting to add.
cheers
p/g
At 1 am PST on the 22nd my Google traffic crashed very hard, 80-90%--I have made no changes recently excpt for routine updates.
Same here since the same day. One website (steady/stable for over one year) dropped from 17.000 to 5.000 a day.
Same here overnight on December 21st Traffic went down about 60-70% and still has not recovered.
Nothing had been changed and for the past year and a half Google traffic had been growing - About 90% of traffic from Google has now been lost.
I've read about others who had this happen to them at the same time and was wondering if we could get to the bottom of it.
[edited by: tedster at 5:00 pm (utc) on Jan. 7, 2008]
[edit reason] moved from another location [/edit]
I am picking up results on Google's IP 64.233.171.19 that differ significantly from any of their other ip's that I've checked. On this IP we are sitting in position 1 and in the rest its either position 14 or 34 for our phrase. Does anyone have any idea if this could be a "pre-results" for newly listed sites or a "post-results" for sites coming out of their sandboxed period?
Hope it's not a stupid question!
[edited by: tedster at 5:08 pm (utc) on Jan. 7, 2008]
[edit reason] moved from another location [/edit]
Hey Hissingsid... Your page is likely ranking #1 for the plural even though the plural doesn't appear anywhere on your page because of the anchor text associated with the incoming links to that page...
Good idea, but I'm sure that that's not the reason.
I'm strongly in the camp that thinks that the Google algo has become increasingly "interested" in semantics and what pages are "about". The reason it does well for the plural IMHO is because it has the singular and other related words to the "right" degree of prominence and repitition.
Thanks for the comment though.
Cheers
Sid
Many moons ago someone said that they had noticed that the terms that had changed most for them were the ones that had "Searches Related to:Search Term" at the bottom of the results page.
I commented that this coincided with the big volume big $ terms on Adwords.
For me this is still the case. The term for which I am most affected (nothing dramatic just a drop from #1 to #4 on .co.uk and from #1 to #7 on .com) is the biggest $ term on Adwords in my sector and has "Serches related to:" at the bottom of the page. Dropping from #1 to #4 may not seem that important to some of you but it cuts traffic by 50% or more.
I've also noted that for other lesser volume terms which have "Serches related to:" at the bottom of the page where I'm at #1 for that term. Some of the terms listed as alternatives are pretty rare generally but I use them on the page at #1.
I'm convinced that the changes that we have seen over the last 6 months are for me strongly related to semantics and disambiguation.
Does anyone else here share this experience and either concur or reject my theory?
Cheers
Sid
As of Monday Jan 7 the brand name is ranking #1 again, and the company did nothing but fix two 404 urls (out of 20,000+) and submit a reconsideration request on Friday Jan 4. I really doubt that the reconsideration request made the difference - other sites that saw mysterious ranking drops around the same time also are returning without taking any action at all.
To me, it looks like Google has been making some massive data moves (at least partly related to new handling for the old supplemental index) and when ever huge amounts of data get shuffled, some stuff happens. But whatever the causes of the mystery, it's good to see those particular problems go away.
The serps in my area changed and now exactly match ALLINANCHOR queries.
Quality considerations appear to have disappeared, both in the results and the links counted.
Here's what happened. Google let a whole load of spammy worthless supplemental results back in the main index. Those pages had useful anchor link text for rampant link swappers/ buyers. Now those guys have shot to number one.
Check your allinanchor queries - you'll see they match the serps.
Signs of quality - in terms of a website listed seem to have been abandoned (there's a blank page at number 3 in one of my most competitive keyword areas). Likewise with links; anything will do.
This update makes google more like Yahoo or MSN - ie, even easier to game!
today, #12, and localized search #9...!
Yahoo #2
MSN #1
AOL #9
Alsta Vista #2
All the Web #2
[edited by: tedster at 5:06 pm (utc) on Jan. 10, 2008]
[edit reason] moved from another location [/edit]
Anyone noticed changes of ranking of their testing keywords?
There mightbe a backlinks update happening too!
