Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I've wondered too as to why some search terms are affected more than others and some result pages are changing around while other barely move.
Has anyone seen any relationship between how popular a search the term is and how much movement is going on?
As to when it will end I don't think we can predict as nothing quite like this has gone on before.
[edited by: tedster at 2:48 am (utc) on June 1, 2008]
If you want a doctor to diagnose an illness remotely you have to describe the symptoms in far more detail than that.
Go and dig around to see what has happened to your rankings etc and report back.
Cheers
Sid
[edited by: tedster at 10:47 am (utc) on June 19, 2008]
So, for once we have an INDEPENDENT means that we can all use to see this effect - in fact, I see no reason why we should ALL not try to find as many examples of the graph shape for as many websites as possible and post them all over the web, just to grab Google's attention, as I believe there has not been one single word from them on what they did on 4 June.
Unfortunately, I am really starting to believe that this was a deliberate action to demote some larger sites in an attempt to increase lost ad revenue. Looking at the current advertising on Google it seems that there are more and more general ads from the large corporates and less and less from smaller businesses. Time for the hat change tomorrow.
I see big changes in travel sector for UK results this morning.
uk site, uk targeted, uk host.
1. Up to now is see more eb** and auv*** pages coming up in top ten serps.
2. Many of the pages do have a non seo url, like index.php?caterogry=#*$!&file=#*$!
3. all the sites in front of mine had been a life at page 3 and down at the serps or where never been seen before.
4. Many of the subdomains from my competitors do not show up in serps any more ( that is a good thing )
5. Many site in top ten serps are ->easy<- html pages with little links on it but text and picture ( this would speak for a stronger seo filter ? ) -> forums and price compare page are in top ten, too. ( trust rank ? )
As far as I can recall, I have never seen a Google change where you can 'see' the impact on OTHER websites graphically. Just hoping some SEO / Google guru 'sees' what we can 'see' and runs with it!
I have revisited quite a few of the sites that I looked at and added some sites that I know have a mix of membership traffic and natural search traffic. Yet again, I can see the pattern repeating on them (increasing traffic late May which must be from natural search) followed by a drop but not as large because their traffic rank stats have the underlying membership baseline traffic as compared to the large drop on my site which is purely natural search traffic.
Some of the really big UK boys have taken a hit and the graph is continuing downwards. I think that it won't be long before they notice that they have a problem.
Looks like this is the 'Houston' update as 'we have a problem' that we can SEE!
Server is hosted in the US. 90% of the traffic from the UK.
Sid
May was my best month ever. My experience has always been a surge in traffic from Google before a massive decline.
Seems like affected sites are all long established. Could it be that G has just lowered the importance of site age & sites are affected to the extent they were relying on age for rankings?
This is just the same -950 critter as it was before but with different positions, I think the patent used is the same.
One point:
Pagination, most sites which are not affected use a letter based pagination. Most sites which are affected use a numbers based pagination.
Alphabetical (letter based) pagination is more user friendly.
[edited by: SEOPTI at 7:37 pm (utc) on June 19, 2008]
Believe me, this is the -950, have you also made a few thousands queries?
I don't believe so, I am seeing very confused geo-targeting results.
G is trying to learn to where a site is focussed and making a right mess of it at the moment.
i really think its likely we have arrived at the google of the future
a tweak here and then one there will not disrupt services for the punter but will make everyone else have a long hard look at their models and chge or die accordingly... we cant blame google for trying to improve thier profits...isnt that what we are trying to do?
- Web Page gets spidered.
- Web Page disappears from index shortly thereafter.
- Web Page re-appears in 12-24 hours of disappearing.
- Web Page that normally appeared on Page 1 for a given keyword
term, is now appearing on Page 3, 4, or 5 for me.
- This cycle is repeatable.
Some other nuances of the above:
- Frequency of spidering of the effected pages has increased
dramatically. Whereas I was seeing a typical page get spidered
once-a-week, I am now seeing excessive spidering of 1-2 times
per day per effected file, 4 or 5 days per week.
- The disappearing/re-appearing sequence noted above occurs
regardless of whether or not the physical file has changed or
not. As a matter of fact, in my case, 90 % of the time the
file has NOT changed. This leads me to believe that Google thinks
my page has changed, when in fact, it has not.
I am noticing several of my keywords are stuck at position 11 through 14
Are you a "thin affiliate" using a lot aggregated content. I'm trying to picture the amount of original content factored into recent algo changes.
