Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
If you want to search G books, videos, maps, news, god-knows-whats-next, you can do it through the appropriate categories - you don't need it in the main serps.
Natural search results do not earn money. Google is spending more and more money trying to monopolise the web as quickly as possible. Therefore, they have to make the natural search results still relevant enough to retain people whilst cramming in as much commercial items as possible to fill the war chest.
--> I notice you are frustrated with the Google-spam but made no intimation that you were going to stop using Google? They obviously haven't crossed that line for you yet. <--
As Google grows, the amount of traffic generated from the No.1 natural search spot will decrease at a similar pace. Remember, sometimes you might be losing traffic because 3 new advertisers jumped on the Adwords program and the sponsored ads are above your listing now. Nothing to do with ranking issues at all.
[edited by: tedster at 11:25 pm (utc) on Oct. 1, 2008]
p/g
[edited by: MLHmptn at 4:53 am (utc) on Oct. 25, 2008]
Can someone tell me what the f#$@^ they are testing on
216.239.59.104
before i waste a whole weekend on Google nonsense?
Thanks!
"Completely depending on Google (or ANY limited set of sources) for your traffic is a recipe for unhappiness."
LOL
g1smd, reseller, p/g, cain, pageone, et al.Can someone tell me what the f#$@^ they are testing on
216.239.59.104
before i waste a whole weekend on Google nonsense?
Great question, I am seeing the same thing. I have seen weekend testing like this going on over the last three to four weekends, but see a significant change in testing and results between last night and today.
Over the last 6 weeks I have seen what appears to be a large discrepancy between two main sets of data. Of course we all know each DC is different, testing and applications are made daily, but int his case, there is a distinct split between two sets of data, rolling back in and out every 3-4 days, a pattern that is reflected in traffic for many websites as well.
Some big testing going on pre-holiday season perhaps?
216.239.59.104
There’s not a lot new with that DC. What you’re seeing is the results before they apply all the filters or their special sauce. I sit top five on hundreds of keywords on various DC’s like that but it doesn’t mean squat.
What you’re seeing is the results before they apply all the filters or their special sauce.
hmm, gonna have to disagree.
In the sectors that are causing me to ask the question, I'm seeing unexplainable junk, not just the usual:
- filters removed results
or the
- float the crap to top during an update junk
Some big testing going on pre-holiday season perhaps?
This sounds more in line with what i was thinking.
My first intuitive thought was that it "felt" crazily similar to the Position #6 rollout from last year.
Completely different results, but the same kind of "feel" to it.
Are you seeing those results "folded in" to the new SERPs anywhere, like they've been doing the past month?
Adam Lasnik:
"Completely depending on Google (or ANY limited set of sources) for your traffic is a recipe for unhappiness."
When are the Goog atty's gonna let him come and play again?
I promise to not engage him in legal loopholes if he refrains from statements like the above "as help" ;)
site:www.anydomain.com**
it returns
Results 1 - 10 of about 1,690,000,000 from
now the same results show up no matter what domain name you put in there. bizarre.
My first intuitive thought was that it "felt" crazily similar to the Position #6 rollout from last year.
Completely different results, but the same kind of "feel" to it.
Yes - it does feel that way. Position #6 was later admitted to be a bug, but the essence of what I saw was that Google was learning to force certain urls into positions that were "not natural". A new type of time-dependent Yo-Yo appeared soon after that, and I've suspected that this was the infrastructure that Google was developing.
Is anyone seeing dynamic shuffling of the rankings at different times of day? It becomes very hard to gather a lot of data over different time slots but I've recently begun to suspect that this is part of the picture.
Are you seeing those results "folded in" to the new SERPs anywhere
I've checked many GB of recent server logs over 100 internationally targeted domains, and none of them show 216.239.59.104 traffic in the last two weeks, not even once. However, do you mean that the results from 216.239.59.104 are being folded in on rresults from other Google IP addresses?
The only thing I've seen that might be something like that is a dynamic position shuffling between several urls, instead of just two urls that switch back and forth. Only occurs on certain query terms, a very small sampling.
However, do you mean that the results from 216.239.59.104 are being folded in on rresults from other Google IP addresses?
Yea, this is what I meant. Trying to figure out what we can learn from this odd DC if anything.
The results are so different, there must be some meaning to it.
Now only to use it to an advantage.
The only thing I've seen that might be something like that is a dynamic position shuffling between several urls, instead of just two urls that switch back and forth
I only run a few small <widget> related websites <that target individual cites>.
One of my city specific websites is completely gone out of SERP for the KWS it used to appear and its position is taken by my another Portal which deals with many cities and is a much larger site. Both are hosted on same IP and do not share any content.
Any clue?
[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 7:26 pm (utc) on Oct. 26, 2008]
[edit reason] removed specifics [/edit]
Of course, having experienced such a significative loss like this one, I'm looking for the cause reading thousands of posts like this one and trying to fix one thing at a time and analyzing results.
I'm explicity asking from you heroes, gurus, and seasoned webmasters to give me hints or clues about what is best to do and best not to do al all. Thanks in advance,
grippo
in a older than a decade domain, 100% white hat, lost almost all traffic from Google.
There are many possibilities here, but since you mentioned that the domain is quite old, has its backlink profile gone stagnant?
I read that reducing the size of the sitemap is a good idea as Google may be timing out Is it possible?
Sure it's possible - timeouts happen - but I don't think it's a major issue. I think it's wise to do whatever you can to help Google crawl your domain efficiently - that includes using text compression, keeping irrelevant pages out of the crawl, removing canonical problems, responding accurately to If-Modified-Since requests and lots more.
They are folding current results INTO 216.239.59.104
(Dammit, where's reseller?)
Which would make sense after last year's #6 catastrophe.
Im making a very "reseller-like" prediction and expecting that once this DC is "done",
it will be the annual "holiday rollout" SERPS
You heard it here first! ;)
I think your post is referring to a visit from a Google crawler but I am not very sure about what you are saying in your post mostly because I am not as familiar with this as you are.
Can you please explain? Holiday rollout, DC is "done"
Thanks.
This is the big secret ;)
[edited by: jatar_k at 3:16 pm (utc) on Oct. 29, 2008]
The conspiracy theory is that small to medium sites are hit the hardest so that they then have to rely on adwords to get business during the busiest part of the year for them.
Effectively, if your busiest sales season is Nov 1 to Jan 1, the "holiday serps" will come looking for you!
Now this is all conjecture but I recall a very smart lady on another forum providing some very convincing anecdotal evidence.
[edited by: tedster at 4:42 pm (utc) on Oct. 28, 2008]
Hey everybody, i see on the google server 216.239.59.104 the new "google searchwiki". See please the (german) news about it:
I think your post is referring to a visit from a Google crawler but I am not very sure about
what you are saying in your post mostly because I am not as familiar with this as you are.Can you please explain? Holiday rollout, DC is "done"
Gouri,
Not a google crawler. An actual datacenter, or different set of SERPs.
http://216.239.59.104/ [216.239.59.104]
see [webmasterworld.com...] under "Datacenters" for more information.
Hey gford!
ha, we had some great SEO testing discussions on another board (under different tagname) a few years back.
No need to call it a conspiracy theory. I think everyone agrees there's a major update before holiday season.
Whether it's geared toward Adwords profits or not, I guess depends on who's affected by the update. ;)
Now the two sets are merging which is making for an interesting scenario - some very new websites mixed in the with the expected websites. I don't see the position 6 phenomenon thankfully.
I do notice that some websites are delayed in the cache. I think this is indicative of the folding as well....keep current data sets intact, mix them up, then re cache the entire new set. Of course this is purely opinion :)
Tedster I notice the dynamic caching as well, especially for newer terms, inner page terms, where the page has not cemented more authority as a topic in the field. Searching for the position of those keywords becomes more of a chore than ever now (and reiterates the notion that ranking reports are becoming increasingly less important, while web analytics reports and study are more important than ever.
I think as we move into the Xmas season and New Year we will see a lot more user-centric metrics folded in, making what is traditional now look unsteady.
In one of the sets, you may rank and in the other one your sites may not be there. Do you guys think if your site is not in the smaller set, it will not be ranked when the "holiday data set" is used?
In one of the sets, you may rank and in the other one your sites may not be there. Do you guys think if your site is not in the smaller set, it will not be ranked when the "holiday data set" is used?
Gouri,
Basically, this is what we are trying to figure out.
That smaller datacenter isn't "done" yet, in my opinion.
But I would keep an eye out for it, to see who's ranking and why.(if you're not ranking)
(When I say "done" i mean alot of sites that shouldn't be in the results are still there and those that are missing and deserve to be there may be folded in later.)
Of course, this is just my opinion based on how Goog usually rolls out updates,
but Goog could just be testing it and then scrap it later.
This is my first post, i would like to share my opinion with you so if something i said is not realistic please let me know...
I have this 4 years old site and it was 4 years ranking on first page of google.com and google.com.br (here at brazil most people search on google.com.br). This site used to have 15 keywords some of then of low relevance but still driving 100 users per day to my web site. Suddenly from nothing on last September my website had 50% of this traffic cutted.
I mean from 15 keywords only 2 are performing well in google.com.br and no one is performing in google.com (i know my site is .com.br but it always showed well at google.com and some of my formmer customers some of then now competitors are appearing well in both of then... What have i done? site has absolutly nothing wrong, i suspected that time it was a duplicated page so i deleted all duplicated pages there was only a couple of then. My site has a good density of words and keywords and it is totally friendly to google. I examinated my compepitors web sites and realized google was giving to many importance to TITLE tag so i changed a bit my titles. Also i realized the competitors were using some links exchange program so i used a couple of link exchange programs too, and placed a thousand new pages in my site to increase pages volume composed by tutorials to my customers without linking to my home directly... Since the end of September my old external links increased a thousand and google crawled all my new inner pages max 5000 per day, and BOOM after 20 days my site stayed one whole week on top first results from google.com and google.com.br was better than ever... But on my face i was checking the 15 keywords and was ranking well then on my face this last monday morning all keywords disappeared from google.com and 50% of traffic disappeared from google.com.br again it seems worst than before... During this sage i was desperated and ask for google reconsiderating my site but it was wrong because it was not under penalty because it is indexing well all pages and sitemap. So i think some conclusions regarding this:
1) titles are more relevant
2) increasing drastically internal and external links helped during one week
3) dont know if reconsiderating the site or the fact that i deleted my site map (it has just 10 pages all already being indexed) seems had to helped (if nothing get better i will delete site map again and see if make any changes like acelerate the expiration of any possible cache)
4) tried to get indexed by dmoz but still not there yet (hope someone place my site there soon)
5) another consideration i have is the fact that this fatal monday morning google crawled arount 200 pages (10% new pages) and it increased the YET NOT ASSIGNED page rank consequently decreasing my global rank?
6) or finaly as i was desperated for doing the right thing last week during the good rank i had ressurected i cancelled the reciprocal links and some inner pages so maybe this damage my google dumping factor or something with the ALGO
well guys sorry for all this but at least is good to share all this scared me a lot i am even dreaming with google penaltys!
thanks for all please share your thoughts any clue will be appreciated
Claudio
ps. do you think google when it thinks i am a bot searching my keywords and ask for validating CAPTCHA well could it associate my webmaster cookie and give me a penalty for instance thinking i am using web position gold or something? i do everything typing manually my searches!
There are many possibilities here, but since you mentioned that the domain is quite old, has its backlink profile gone stagnant?
It really hasn´t had strong backlinks ever.
You did yourself a major favor by paying attention to titles. There is nothing more important in your source code.
Reciprocal links tend to get ignored, but they don't usually generate penalties unless you link to a site that is breaking the guidelines in a big way.
And no, dont worry about the "you look like an automated program" message from Google if you are manually doing searches.
first of all thanks for your kind answer
i wondered as i received the "you look like an automated program" and google has a cookie that know i am the verified webmaster through the webmaster tools so it could punish me but off corse this is not happening as it is nuts! so let's forget this hipotheses
well so i am left with other possibilities :
1) as WhiteKnight said many times it is just a matter of getting new good back links (site is kind of old and has it back links stagneted i mean poor and old links most of then on cache or archived
2) there is something really going on since the begining of this year and it surelly has something related with the so called "yo yo phenomenon" i by myself got catch on this "yo yo" many times ever month
my keyword (composed by two different words) appears at #4 position at SERP
usually it appears with one supplemental result bellow it
then after a short period of time it goes to page 3 then page 10 where it f*** me for 3 weeks
this could be poor back links, over optimization (many keywork density in all pages) or other thing
i have a competitor that has a non friendly to google web site it has just one relevant link from DMOZ to his site and another small web sites linking to then, very poor content and inner pages all made in asp.net and ajax menus even then his is the whole year on the top of SERP without aparently suffering the "yo yo"
so may be reducing the keywords and getting new back links can do the trick
3) amazing the fact that my site was 1 week on top and then as 200 new pages were crawled and my NOT YET ASSIGNED page rank have grown instantly my site was again in the "yo yo" cutted from the first page results
please comment the item 3 it is bodering me a lot!
4)huge are the differences between regional google.com.br and google.com nowadays
the other google's servers "folding" some results theory is very acceptable in this situation
when my site appears good it is good in both and when it is on "yo yo" then it completly disappear from google.com
5) some competitors and customers web sites are pretty good at google but tracking with Alexa.com they also show a good decrease in terms of unique pages visited i am still wondering if ADSense and ADwords are influencing this situation as a way from G make more money but i still believe it seems more in the edge of a new filters threshold then a conspirancy from G money make schemes
well thanks again and lets keep togheter we will discover in the end it can be only a simple Algo Bug!
Claudio
< continued here: [webmasterworld.com...] >
[edited by: tedster at 3:20 am (utc) on Nov. 1, 2008]
