Google.com SERP Changes - November 2008 (part 3)

[matWright]

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

Is anyone, experiencing a significant drop in pages indexed ?
Or is this discussion purely about serps and not quantity of index pages.

[edited by: tedster at 8:06 pm (utc) on Nov. 26, 2008]

[ZydoSEO]

You guys are freakin' me out. lol I have spent the last 8 months planning and implementing a migration from an IIS/ASP site (PR 7, household brand name that 85%+ consumers recognize, 1.2MM+ backlinks) to a CMS and giving the entire site a complete cosmetic makeover. In doing so every URL on the site (3000+) had to change from .asp/.htm to having no extension so every old URL will eventually require a 301. Since every URL had to change I took advantage of the opportunity to make a lot of changes to things that were wrong with the old site from an SEO perspect like the internal linking structure of the site, went to keyword rich URLs, every new URL served out of the CMS is extensionless and ends in '/', added breadcrumbing, eliminated all use query string parameters previously used for tracking (*sigh*) and other stuff, eliminated all stacked 301s, found 3 old versions of the site that still existed on the web servers (never redirected) and 301'd those to equivalent pages on the new site (hoping to regain some old free links), etc.

Initially I'm 301 redirecting only a subset of the site's URLs, and implementing URL rewrites for the rest so that when someone requests the old URL the content of the new page is displayed but the URL in the browser is the old URL. Over time I will switch the rewrites to 301s folder by folder by changing all occurences of [L] to [R=301,L] on the RewriteRules in the .htaccess files.

Now I read all of this. LOL Getting a little nervous although I'm not sure I would have done much differently. I'll let you know in a few months how it went.

[gouri]

I am seeing changes in number of competitive sites for certain categories from under a million to several million. I know Ted said that there is a dance going on all the time, but are things more active at the end of the month?

That is a big change in number of competitive sites.

[Lame_Wolf]

There seems to be a PR update in progress. I went from 5 to 3. :(

[gouri]

Maybe there is some kind of connection between differences in number of competitive sites that come up for a search and a PR update?

[tedster]

I don't think so - no strong connection between the number of sites for a search result and these strange PR changes that have been trickling out during this month.

But there is one connection I feel pretty sure of. The number of sites is an estitmated number, not a true count. Even more, it's a rather difficult estimate for Google to make accurately, because of the way that they "shard" or break up their data into many, many bits stored in many many places.

When Google makes significant changes in their infrastructure, as they are apparently doing this month, then the established methods for estimating can be interfered with and need to be revised, but that is a lower priority than first bringing the new infrastructure changes into production. Only then can the "estmated number" functions be tweaked to come back in line - that also includes the site: operator numbers, especially for larger sites.

[SEOPTI]

Ted, this sounds as if you work at the Plex ;) Very interesting thinking.

[g1smd]

Zydo. Those redirects should work fine in the end.

I don't like the sound of the rewrite if that means that content can be accessed at both the old and the new URL, with both returning "200 OK" for all requests.

The purpose of the 301 redirect is to make sure Google finds the new URL. They will drop the old URL in their own time once they see that it redirects.

If you have gone extensionless, then the URLs should not end in a trailing slash, as that breaks the HTTP specification. URLs ending in a slash are "reserved" to be URLs that point to real folders.

[tedster]

Ted, this sounds as if you work at the Plex

Funny! I clearly don't work there, but I do watch the big G rather closely and over the years I've read a lot of patents (see the bottom of our Hot Topics area [webmasterworld.com]) and other technical documents, such as the Google File System [labs.google.com] paper.

With that very modest and partial information as a base, I then think I see certain hints in what goes on visibly with Google, just as you can look at certain websites and be pretty sure that they use Wordpress, for instance.

I think we can put the 301 issue away now. Executed in a technically correct manner, a 301 redirect has purpose and value, and it really can help Google do a better job for your website. Just don't get casual about it. This is serious server technology we're talking about here, not a highly fault tolerant mark-up language such as HTML.

[edited by: tedster at 5:13 am (utc) on Nov. 27, 2008]

[workingNOMAD]

I see no PR update across my empire.

[matWright]

ZydoSEO, make sure you've got a hard 404 and DONT use a catch-all 301 to try and salvage everything. Look at which uri's on the old systems actually still get hits, try to found out where from too. Add a 301 to those that deserve it, the rest should be 404.

The 404 page will have a sitemap or quick links anyway so the client isnt likely to lose any visits that do drift in by way of the old links.

Plus,even if they get a 404 the visitor will be coming to a fab new; modern site and not some old 1990's design that sends them heading straight to the back button.

[edited by: matWright at 7:06 am (utc) on Nov. 27, 2008]

[Shaddows]

motwguy, glad you are fine!

Are we on a record for posts on a monthly SERPS changes?

[gusp]

Using the site: command tonight I noticed unusual. Google changed the title tag for one of my pages. Instead of using the actual title tag Google replaced it with a portion of the Meta description. Has anyone else ever seen this before?

[db01]

I see some PR changes on some pages

[tedster]

Using the site: command... Instead of using the actual title tag Google replaced it with a portion of the Meta description. Has anyone else ever seen this before?

No, I've never seen that. Have you checked the mark-up for the page to be sure no accidental error has crept in?

[gusp]

The mark up is perfect. But on Monday I got a note in WMT that said the page had a non-informative title tag. The title tag was for my contact page and it was simply "Contact" so Google took it upon themselves to change the title that appeared in the search results to a snippet of 58 characters from my Meta description.

[Robert Charlton]

...non-informative title tag. The title tag was for my contact page and it was simply "Contact" so Google took it upon themselves to change the title that appeared in the search results to a snippet of 58 characters from my Meta description.

Google has often changed titles or descriptions to include vocabulary contained in a query, but I've never heard of them doing it for a plain vanilla site:domain query.

A couple of reports of Google title changes that I found with site search...

Google dynamically changing my title, Wow!
[webmasterworld.com...]

Google changing Title in SERPs for certain keyword phrases
[webmasterworld.com...]

< continued here: [webmasterworld.com...] >

[edited by: tedster at 3:25 am (utc) on Dec. 3, 2008]