March 2008 Google SERP Changes

[FromRocky]

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

I have noticed that the numbers of indexed URLs from the sitemaps of my main site have been steadily reduced in the last two days. The reduction rate is about 5% per day. This drop takes place in all sub-directories and also shows on the results of a site command search. However, it seems that the fully indexed pages are not affected. Does anyone experience this?

[Lovejoy]

As I mentioned earlier my site disappeared as well, after being #1 off and on for over four years. I checked my stats and apparently my site was a 404 on March 16th when my isp's server went down briefly. As this appears to be about the time the rest of my sites were last cached by Google, could this be why my site has vanished from the ranks?

Lovejoy

[BillyS]

If you're getting US traffic don't downplay the Easter holiday. Many folks had off on Good Friday and Easter is like Christmas and Thanksgiving. It's a big feast / travel day.

[Lovejoy]

In my case it's not traffic, the sites gone ;~). I'm beginning to wonder if it has something to do with the new TOS regarding Privacy Policy pages? But I think if that was the case I'd be contacted about my adsense account.

Lovejoy

[tedster]

Lovejoy, your site was apparently really missing the last time googlebot came calling, right? If it's there the next time you're spidered, it should pop right back.

[a_chameleon]

If you're getting US traffic don't downplay the Easter holiday. Many folks had off on
Good Friday and Easter is like Christmas and Thanksgiving. It's a big feast / travel day.

I second that - and don't forget that Spring Break is here and that
always hurts my (especially blog) traffic year after year..

.

[potentialgeek]

There may be a few people here on the border of a 950 penalty. Or could there be a new dramatic penalty?

p/g

[tedster]

a new dramatic penalty?

Anyone who reads the recently leaked human editorial paper. If your site gets it 100% right, then you're guilty and your site is banned. ;) [a joke, please, a joke]

[Lovejoy]

That maybe more true than you know ;~)I was beginning to think my site lived a charmed life.....

Lovejoy

[Widestrides]

I am told by someone at Google that my site has not been penalized and should be back up in a few days. Hope so.

Three of my sites on the same server all got banned. No other related sites of mine on other servers got banned.

So, I fiugre it might be a penalty on my host server?

[edited by: tedster at 2:46 am (utc) on Mar. 24, 2008]

[a_chameleon]

Widestrides,

It might be a good idea to check on your host, and see what else they are hosting.

If it's a big virtual server, visit the other sites they are hosting.

Any link farms? Sites on the 'Phishing' no-no lists? "Cloaking" sites?

HTH

.

[edited by: tedster at 3:39 am (utc) on Mar. 24, 2008]

[Bewenched]

you might also want to make sure they haven't set some sort of traffic or bandwidth limit for your site. an old host of ours did once without telling us knocked our traffic down to 1/3 of what it had been. so instead of charging us for the overage, they throttled it down. needless to say we switched hosts.

[Johan007]

After my 20% loss this month, Easter has seen a 20% increase however we have worked hard to add more content and promote the site so I do not know if it is a result of the extra work or the sites ranking has been restored!

If your hobbies white hat content site like mine I hope your seeing an increase.

[leeds1]

Johan007 - can you say what type of promotion you undertook ?

[benmark2]

I've noticed adding rss feeds as well original content works well. I also seem to be getting indexed for more pages, still haven't seen the great word i came up in the serps for infact result totally disappeared starnge things are a foot.

[reseller]

At this moment, I see a vigorous reshuffling through out most of Google DCs. Looks like a Hurricane!

Folks!

Check your rankings using your testing key words. And keep watching those great Google Data Centers. Something is happening for sure.

BillyS!

Any weather report about how your site is doing? It use to be very sensitive to changes on the DCs ;-)

Wish you all, Good Luck.

[outland88]

Seeing nothing. If anything just Google shuffling some pages in and out via Universal search which is almost daily.

[HuskyPup]

Whoa! Seeing huge changes today for authority sites of my own exclusive products with many pages knocked from #1 down to 6~10 and some down several pages and being replaced by pages with hardly any information whatsoever apart from an image and one keyword!

It reminds me of Xmas 2006, or was that the start of the 950 penalty, all the same it was a sloppy change.

Just why do they do this?

[reseller]

Just wish to say that the DCs are still "boiling". Not settled yet.

[reseller]

HuskyPup

Just why do they do this?

The reason might be; Google Search Quality Team including the WebSpam Team are always working hard to improve the relevancy and quality of Google serps ;-)

[Bones]

Just wish to say that the DCs are still "boiling". Not settled yet.

Not seeing anything at the moment. Which particular DC's are you looking at?

[reseller]

Bones,

I'm looking at all DCs available at the Google Datacenter Watch Tools.

However, the vigorous reshuffling which I see at the moment might be happening on limited sectors (niches). If what I see now is what I think it is, the current reshuffling would expand to more sectors within a day or two.

[Bones]

Reseller, yeah that's what I was using too. I did see some movement on Thursday, which would've been very good news for us, but it seems it didn't stick. Hopefully it was a sign...

[reseller]

Bones

I believe "the real thing" has started today. Wish you luck!

[BillyS]

Reseller - we started to see a fairly big lift in traffic from Google starting last Thursday. The trend continues today.

[walkman]

my traffic is up today too. I HOPE it stays this way, unless it increases of course :)

[potentialgeek]

This may not be news--I may not have been paying attention--but I just noticed Google is crediting the domain name as the exclusive source of a keyword to rank.

In other words, if you got a page with, say, three words, and only two of them are "on page," and one is in the domain name, that third word is counted as if it's on page, good enough.

(I used to think you needed to have everything on page, in the Title tag, or alt-tag, and/or in the Description meta tag.)

p/g

[reseller]

BillyS

Thanks for feedback. Thats good news. One day we together might write an e-book:

The Secrets of Watching The Grass Grow Revealed :)

[Johan007]

leeds1 said:

Johan007 - can you say what type of promotion you undertook ?

We did two lots of marketing:

1. A very nice graphical web 2.0 face lift on the homepage that has generated interest.
2. Over 20 new articles when we usually only post about 3 to 5.

I have still seen my site stats restored but this week will be a test. I do not manually check ranking but stats show a slight increase in Google traffic and pages per visitor are also up.

leeds1 do you own large content site too?

potentialgeek said:

This may not be news--I may not have been paying attention--but I just noticed Google is crediting the domain name as the exclusive source of a keyword to rank.

Sorry PG I do not see this and you may be seeing coincidence.

[edited by: Johan007 at 10:30 am (utc) on Mar. 25, 2008]

[HuskyPup]

What a horrible tangled SERPs mess I am seeing for my sector this morning, mostly absolutely useless for people searching with the usual pathetic ebay etc listings.

Ah well, the last time this happened I just got referrals from much deeper within the index! Do they not consider the user?

[eljacko]

I have seen myself start appearing for competitive terms but still in the 50s but the term I was in the top ten for has now totally disappeared from the rankings, which last week the term was at position 15.

What could this be? Can the pages be over optimised or do I not have enough links pointing to the section?