January 2008 Google SERP Changes

I see a PR update and a changes in serps/traffic as well.

I noticed a major change in the backlinks reported. On one site the amount went from 230 to 1050. That's a huge increase even though its still nowhere near the real total of links. But interesting that they're showing so many more.

I think part of this update is Google floating garbage to the top to scrape it off. Unfortunately the last time I saw this happen it took nearly a week before our traffic came back.

I can also confirm that they report many more backlinks now. No change in SERPS yet

I suppose those of us currently benefiting should hope our garbage doens't sink down within the next week.

I didn't mean that offensively. But I have seen them tweak the algo or do a reverse algo then tweak it and re-do the serps.

I am seeing a site rank ranking #8 on a single word term (about 2 million pages returned on the search) that I can not for the life of me figure out how its doing it. It just showed up from nowhere.

SiteExplorer shows a whopping total of 27 pages on the site, and a rather underwhelmng total of 17 inobund links to the entire site.

Three of those 17 IBLs are from the same blog.

Two are from .cn scraper sites that SiteExplorer reports can not be found.

One is from what appears to be a remotely hosted links page operated by their SEO firm.

The site has a PR of 2, and no data from Alexa is available.

It was registered 4 years ago.

Almost like it was picked from a hat by random and promoted to page 1.

Just joshing you Bewenched ;)

I am now seeing some very wild swings on a couple keyword phrases...like 30% change in the top 10 -- rather than a shuffle, some are falling #1 to page 20...pretty big movements.

The #6 sites didn't seem to be affected.

[edited by: tedster at 3:03 pm (utc) on Jan. 16, 2008]
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That's the way to go G...fill the SERPs full of shopping site garbage...again!

I'm seeing some huge movements this morning for a 13 year old site with many totally irrelevant sites, as in absolutely nothing to do with the search query or at the least very tenuous, and most (90%) of the previous encumbants gone...whoosh, disappeared or demoted several pages.

I'm doing nothing, I'm losing no sleep over the goons' inabilities to stop tinkering at the plex, they've not been able to control anything for ages now and this just goes to prove it even more.

Interesting thing... I logged into webmaster tools and the Backlinks update that we saw a few weeks back appears to have been rolled back. The results I saw this morning look like October ones according to my records.

Oh, well, that shake-up didn't last very long!

Let's wait a couple of hours I feel sure they can screw-up something else whether intentionally or not:-)

The rankings for the core terms for my sites haven't been affected a whole lot. One got a tiny boost, but definitely nothing spectacular.

However, my traffic has dropped quite a bit. Don't know if there are less searches being done on my subjects, or if I'm not ranking for nearly as many long-tail terms.

The original traffic to my sites is nothing great anyways, so it's really hard to tell on my end....

I have coulpe of huge sites in Google (500k pages indexed, good supplemental ratio). And allways had a nice traffic for long tail keywords.

Recent changes in google really drive me crazy : almost all traffic is gone now.

Have good links, sites in google for half a year, PR4-5.

Have anyone noticed what changed?

[edited by: tedster at 6:11 pm (utc) on Jan. 17, 2008]
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This is a change (?) to how Google is giving SERPs, as opposed to a regularly discussed site SERP change, but I don't want to start another thread...

I don't know how Google's local search works, but some of my visitors are coming to my site typing:

yada yada yada [US area code]

yada yada yada [US city]

yada yada yada [foreign country]

Google ignores the location and brings them to me.

Thanks, but why?

If someone deliberately seeks a location-specific product/service, and my site has no location definitions/keywords/etc., the user is being misled and their time is wasted.

Instead of Google saying there are no results, or making a suggestion the best alternative it can imagine is my site, it is leading them straight to me. Why make those kind of assumptions?

p/g

Interesting to see two different directions being reported about the long tail. With the changed searching of the supplemental index, some members are reporting significant jumps in new long-tail traffic. But a few posts above this, DROvas reports the recent disappearance of long-tail hits that have been there historically for the site.

My hits are fluctuating wildly since the beginning of Jan. Went way up with more long tail traffic and now way back down.

A subdomain of our main site and another of our sites (both very tasty content and web 2.0 sites) have had the PR bar turn gray and are suddenly showing no pages in the google index.

Very, very strange times.

It appears as if Google is totally losing the plot but my gut tells me this isn't the case. We're just a couple of stages into a much bigger event.

If you have 500k URLs indexed and almost all traffic is gone this usually means you have been hit with a nice -950. This has nothing to do with long tail algo shifts.

I did have 500+ pages indexed but now nothing is indexed, site:url and link:url act as if the domain doesn't even exist even though there are plenty of backlinks from respected news pages etc

And the fluctuating hits and the nature of those fluctuations are not like anything I've seen recently.

I've seen a 50% jump in traffic on long tail searches and that's been rock steady since that day.

little addon to my situation: recently i found out, that some pl webmaster buld a huge .pl site, which parse google serps and use it as a content for his dynamic catalogue.

So, i had almost 100k backlinks to my site, BUT all were with nofollow tag.

At the beginning of jan all those .pl sites were removed by hoster. So, backlinks are gone.

Question : could this lead to my -950 penalty? i thought that it`s not easy to dump the site with external factors.

I've seen this huge .pl proxy, but it will not cause a -950, rather duplicate content problems.

i see their sites are still cached in google, but almost all of them are deleted physically.

noticed that my site : www.example.com is not shown on the fist page for 'example' keyword. first ones are good sites, who link to me with url in ancor. Sitename is rather unique.

What can it be? Google hate me or what?

I just noticed a large page count change when doing a site: lookup. Considerably lower than yesterday.

> I just noticed a large page count change when doing a site: lookup. Considerably lower than yesterday.

Exactly!

I agree and think this is just a anchor text tweak to scrape some garbage. Everything should settle down in a week.

Hi,

has anyone else seen the huge difference in pages returned when using the site: operator

my sites showing:

site:www.example.com 512000 pages

site:www.example.com/ 196000 pages (no *)

i'm still looking at the different pages showing but as i can't see all of them its proving difficult to analyze them, i'm seeing some changes on other sites but nothing as huge as my pages returned totals.

can anyone throw me a bone on the different totals is the lower total my non supp pages or is it a glitch.

Vimes.

[edited by: Vimes at 6:51 am (utc) on Jan. 19, 2008]

Vimes:

I see a much larger (and a more accurate) number when using the "/" at the end of the url site search. It more closely reports the number that I see reported in GWT.

I find it odd that you see less (or is that a typo?).

[edited by: kamikaze_Optimizer at 7:14 am (utc) on Jan. 19, 2008]

this is only happening on some DC's and isn't across all yet,

66.249.89.107
64.233.189.107

Vimes.

I just did both of those IP's and got dead-on numbers using both the "/" and not the "/" for my URL's.