April 2008 Google SERP Changes - part 3

[Hissingsid]

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

I have a UK site and its been hit hard. 90 percent of my top listing pages have been thrown back by 6 or 7 pages.

FWIW I think that what we are seeing is a new update cycle. Things settled down last week, then I saw one DC change then that started to spread, eventually hitting all DCs.

Then this morning <using an online tool> there was a new set of relatively minor changes but a few much bigger changes on .co.uk. There are clearly two different sets of data being served to .co.uk or they are split testing a new geo filter.

I would sit tight for a while, it might well be that you come back as things settle. Is your traffic suffering? Maybe other folks are seeing your old positions.

Cheers

Sid

[edited by: tedster at 3:54 pm (utc) on April 22, 2008]

[netmeg]

Hrm. Now I'm at #7 for a very generic one-word keyword that I never thought I'd rank for without my location next to it, up from around #55. Yet my sitelinks are still gone. Sniff.

[jimhankmom]

I've seen horrifying drops in one of my sites. 50% loss of traffic since February 15th or so, when this all started going down. This past week I'm looking at the worst traffic ever.

And yet: I'm still ranking very competitively for most of my key phrases, I haven't done anything under the table, adding new content every day, lots of nice links coming ing (.edu, .gov, etc.). Some of the really awful sites that weren't much of a competition to me on my most competitive phrases are now ranking above me - and they are really, really awful. Like embarrassing awful.

So I don't know what's going on, I've read this entire thread (18 pages worth, oy vey), and I guess the consensus is to just sit it out and wait? Because honestly, I think I've got the worst case scenario over here for a site that has been number one for extremely competitive phrases for almost five years, and traffic has decided to take an extended vacation.

[delmiha]

The most interesting thing with this SERP changes - When I search with one of our top keywords from my office, our site is gone. When I search from home, our site is there. The same computer, the same browser. Only the ISP is different! Any ideas?

[tedster]

Yep - Google is sensitive to the user IP addresses too, and your Ip is different at home. If one of my websites acted like their search results, I'd risk getting banned for cloaking.

[gabriel_k]

Yesterday (April 23rd) I experienced the most terrible drop. About 50-60% loss of traffic!

I don't know if Dewey is the cause because on April 19th our server was down for 24 hours (it was responding only HTTP Status-Code 500).

I would like to ask high skilled webmasters to help me to tell whether it is Dewey or something else.

I have dropped out from SERPs for 70% of my key phrases.
15% of my key phrases dropped by 8 - 12 positions in SERPs
The rest is keeping its position in SERPs.

Almost whole website IS in Google index.

[Gissit]

For a *keyphrase* in the UK there has been quite a bit of flux oxer the last week or two but they do seems to have almost settled now. The interesting thing is that the top 5 places are now taken by genuine businesses that offer the service *keyphrase* with the next few being more like directory sites. Historically, over the last four, years there has always been a directory/links/interest type site or two in the top five. Now the five top places are not all well optimised sites and some have very little content but they are old and relevant to the term.

[Hissingsid]

Almost all of the DCs are showing exactly the same results except this DC has got me very worried.

[64.233.189.107...]

The results on there look like Florida all over again. For our top $ two word and 3 word terms there's a bit of shuffling amongst our competitors in the top 10, but we are completely gone. On other DCs we are #8 for the 2 word term and #2 & inset 3 for the 3 word term. In each case our index page is either the only or first of our listings. The terms have the same term in them. Like widget services and big widget services.

On this DC the first place I can find us is at #115 and the index page is not listed.

We are completely unaffected for other terms that we target and retain our #1 slot for these but in each case the index page has never been the ranking page.

When I do a site: search the index page/root is not in the Google index.

Last week I did a 301 redirect of index.html to / ,following instructions posted by very senior members of this forum, in order to address a problem on Yahoo (which thinks we have two sub domains). I have removed this redirect now in case this is what has caused our problem.

It would be useful to know if others are seeing differences on this DC so I have a better handle on if I've shot myself in the foot or am caught in a new algo twist.

Cheers

Sid

[tshirtdeal]

This DC shows my results the same as all others, no difference at all for me in SERPS..

BTW...I feel more and more we all shot ourselves in the foot the day we got involved in SEO....

I am ready to retire to a Brick and Mortor store....NOW :)

[delmiha]

word! :)

[Durbanite]

Interesting.....logged in I search a phrase and get 685,000 results.....logged out I get 92,000 results....log in again I get 98,200 results. Good point guys!

[c41lum]

Hi

Nearly all my positions have recovered after the HUGE drop off we noticed at the weekend. I have my fingers cross G has finished with Dewey, but as always with Google I am expecting to be kicked out any moment.

[Durbanite]

I just recently picked up on this thread after taking a breather. Call me wrong but I don't see this as a recent/new phenomenon....in my opinion its been going on since January. see threads back to [webmasterworld.com...] It still hasn't come right. My client's site with approx 130 pages bounces around in the serps with continuing regularity. Pages drop in and out of the index replaced by lesser pages, results jump around between thousands and millions, number of pages indexed from the site jumps around. Today results, tomorrow gone. Could an update honestly take this long or is this here to stay?

[romerome]

Has anyone noticed if you do a search. and then press on the search button again you get different results. It happens for me about 30% of the time.

[Rlilly]

@romerome

I confirm that happens. Not sure of the percentage but quite often

[Hissingsid]

Phew,

I've reappeared on 64.233.189.107 @#1 & 2 for the 3 word term and #7 for the two word term. It's as though Google put me on one side, sorted the others out and then made them shove up to make room.

Cheers

Sid

[celerityfm]

Just to followup on my previous post.. where we had for the first time stayed on page 4 during the day from our nighttime position, we are back on page 7 again during the day. FUN TIMES!

It's time to put the thread down for a while and crank away at new content- it's the only way to fly ;)

[jimhankmom]

"It's time to put the thread down for a while and crank away at new content- it's the only way to fly ;) "

I agree....all this stats naval gazing is absolutely crazy making!

[cleanup]

Very,VERY disatisfied with this update.

Positions down <in a competitive market area>,.. OK seen that before and recovered.

What really worries me is the email conversion rate and also the adsense CPR% have fallen through the floor indicating that searchers are not finding relevance in the SERPS. That is very frustrating.

I have also noticed a very large increase in SPAM emails since this update happened.

Looks bad for me and I would say it looks bad for Google.

Cheers.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 6:15 am (utc) on April 25, 2008]
[edit reason] removed specific [/edit]

[gawnd]

Ah, these bankers hours SERPS are driving me crazy. 2 different sites, competitive terms in competitive niches, ranked 1, 4, 6 for 3 separate terms all during US business hours today. Now 17, 22, 62.

I guess I can't complain about being up there when the traffic's up.

[gawnd]

I should add, the higher rankings are consistent with what I was seeing on the datacenters back when the first Dewey whispers were starting. Just now seeing them on google.com

These are also young domains < 1 year - but all links are legit and on page SEO is optimized, but conservative.

[flanok]

< moved from another location >

I have just lost a first page position over the last week or so. I presumed it was regarding the recent algo changes, that is or is not happening depending on who you speak to.

However I noticed I had gained 60 pages when I actioned the site command.

These pages were listed, but these pages no longer exist because I had removed them via sitemaps and off my server, months ago, they just became 404s.

It was when I removed these pages moths agao i got my "first page" ranking.(cleaned up the site)

Checking on sitemaps now, I noticed that these urls were still classed as removed by sitemaps.

I checked my robots txt file, (that needed to be in place for google to remove these pages), and this is OK also.

So to me this means two things.
My pages are attempting to come back and the robots file and sitemaps are being ignored. (Maybe because an external site is linking to them)

Or

Google has backdated the results and showing things as they were say 4 months ago. Or showing an old, out of date data center.

Mark

[edited by: tedster at 2:04 am (utc) on April 25, 2008]

[reseller]

Folks!

Fasten your seat belts, please :-)

What I see now on the DCs, could be a very vigorous reshuffling of top 10 sites for the sectors I watch.

[HuskyPup]

Ah! My authority keyword.tld site that's either been at 950 or MIA has bounced back to #5 today:-)

Let's see how long this lasts.

[edited by: tedster at 5:36 pm (utc) on April 25, 2008]

[seo_pg]

Today I was checking the Google Webmaster Toools crawl rate graphics and it looks like my crawl rate has drop for April for many of my sites.

Has any one notice a decrease of crawl rate reported in Google Webmaster for the last days of April that can be relate to this Dewey effect?

Just wanted to check if this something others are seeing before I start digging around my sites.

[cangoou]

I don't know if this is important, but searching for a keyword like "kéyword" (which is misspelled) gives me almost the old SERPs before the update. Any idea what this could be? Seems to turn off the new filter.

I got a lot of grey- and black-hat technique-sites which came up during the update. So should we go back to the good old blog-spam to get a good ranking?

[Atomic]

I have to say that some results look a lot like they did before Google's latest shenanigans began.

[Hissingsid]

I don't know if this is important, but searching for a keyword like "k�yword" (which is misspelled) gives me almost the old SERPs before the update.

Good observation.

Puts me back to #1 for the term I've had problems with but no change on the terms where I'm #1 now anyway. This adds weight to the theory that they implemented a phrase based algo on a list of commercial phrases.

Odd how its the big $ adwords phrases that are affected. Must be just a coincidence, they wouldn't peek at what terms advertisers think are worth spending big on and target those with a new algo. I know that the data is available to them but we have to trust good old Google that, tempting as it is, the data is safe in their hands and they wouldn't do anything that would increase Adwords income ;)

Cheers

Sid

[extremegolfer]

My rankings are still top 5 as they have been for over 2 years. No movement whatsoever. However, when I called into my SEO's office today, he stated they are observing sites whose backlinks began to count in the last 2 months and were doing quite well up until about a week ago, but are now being negatively effected. So his newer clients had dropped back into their old positions. He anticipates the re-indexing period to be complete within a few weeks and the results should return as those backlinks will be counted.

Hope this helps.

[CainIV]

Odd how its the big $ adwords phrases that are affected.

It's not odd at all, since the big adwords phrases that are affected are the same core money terms that SEO's research and target, and that Google is well aware of.

[MLHmptn]

It's not odd at all, since the big adwords phrases that are affected are the same core money terms that SEO's research and target, and that Google is well aware of.

I think that was his point there Cain :)