Google.com SERP Changes - May 2009

[Pass the Dutchie]

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

Something is up. We monitor google.de very closely and the SERP's have remained very static for a couple of weeks now. No jumping around of sites as we have seen over the past months with the exception of a few sites that should not be ranked as highly as they are. Last time I saw this there was a big shake up. Lets hope for the best results ; )

[edited by: tedster at 5:39 am (utc) on May 1, 2009]

[pelizden]

no worry, will inform you guys if penalty ends. This will also be an interesting test because couple of my sites were penalized, and I have only worked on one to get more quality backlinks, others were left intact, so we'll see if this really helps or not.

[Praveen Kumar]

Rankings are going down & down every day nothing improvement.

[Martin Ice Web]

praveen,

same in our niche.
Sites with only text-listings and no content outrank our site.

[internetheaven]

Everyone reacts to words differently. If you said the word "fast" to a group of people one might think of Concorde, one might think of Ferrari whilst another will think of that brisk walk they took that morning.

Far too many people are ringing alarm bells because their "authorative" site has dropped in ranking meaning that something awful must be happening. Your definition of authorative may be seriously over-estimated or (rarely) under-estimated. It may be advisable for us to introduce a display system to describe the site we are talking about -- because right now the only way I can make this monthly Google SERP thread work for me is to simply skip any poster that has less than 300 posts!

How about when you are describing what has happened to your site, you list your site's:

Age: 13 months
TLD: .co.uk
TBPR: 4
WMT backlinks: 3299
SERPS used: Google.co.uk

as a minimum requirement for people to be able to decide how to use the information you have posted? The above site is one of mine and I do not consider it authorative yet. How many of you are calling this:

Age: 6 years
TLD: .org
TBPR: 2
WMT backlinks: 23
SERPS used: Google.com

"authorative" simply because it was No.3 for some curious phrase for the past few years but now is not?

Sorry to winge about newbies, I used to be one myself and considered my sites to be the greatest thing ever and posted every ranking movement on these boards just like you are doing. But Google movements are far more subtle these days and scraping an overall picture out of this monthly thread is getting harder and harder for me.

[talismon]

We just came back from the May 14 drop today, looks like they are starting to release sites.

[Praveen Kumar]

Thanks,

Here my website info

Age: 6 year 7 months
TLD: .co.uk
TBPR: 4
WMT backlinks: past(early april)- 1968 present - 756 (today)
SERPS used: Google.co.uk

Keywords which are dropped we are in 10 positions.

Please advice..

[jgold454]

talismon, did you do anything to get your site out of the penalty or did you just wait and do nothing?

[JnJ22]

We had another site come out of the May 14 penalty, and some link removal and a reconsideration request was done just a few days ago. Other sites have not come back yet that also did reconsid requests.

Anyone see any sites that came back without making changes or without reconsid request?

[maximus12]

Mine is still lingering and we have not filed for reconsid, still giving it another week or so.

[jgold454]

My sites are still lingering as well. Haven't done anything, just waiting a little longer to see what happens..

[outland88]

In my areas right now Google is rotating results, changing the positioning daily, and showing sites on a day/night schedule with many keywords. You can’t tell what you’re going to get whenever you do a search. It can explain traffic drops. Google probably has the rankings tied to weather conditions and the price of oil to name a zillion things. Highly profitable to Google.

Personally I’ve felt for a year that these gyrations and bumpings lead to recalculations of the algo or the flat vanishing or down positioning of many pages more than any filters. Plus Google seems to be firing up the supplemental results once again after a lull.

[walkman]

Today my traffic is a little higher than yesterday's judging by the log file size. I wasn't penalized or anything though.

[SEOPTI]

With the PR update today you can see "-50 domains" dropping to PR3-4.

At the moment -50 penalty domains will not cross PR4.

[johnnie]

My -50 domain actually dropped to 0, with greybar disease running rampant.

[cooldar]

the toolbar PR just got updated.
but my site is downgraded from 3 to 2 :-(
which is odd cuz I've been building link and just got added to dmoz few weeks ago

[carpediem]

All this can teach you one thing:

Work as much as you can to be NOT dependent from Google traffic.

[cooldar]

i don't have evidence to support this but the pr drop seem to have more to do with change in WMT. My friend's PR4 site also dropped to PR3.

My site dropped from PR3 to 2 but no change in SERP.

[Garya]

My site went from PR4 to PR6 it went from 1st page to 3rd page go figure.

[talismon]

After recovering today from the -50(or so) penalty we saw a toolbar PR increase from 6 to 7, there is no method to this madness!

[pelizden]

one my site grew from pr4 to pr5, other remain the same but still no change in serp, down in 50s...

[pelizden]

the site that went to pr5 is by the way hit with -50, what the hell is happening?

[Praveen Kumar]

No change in PageRank to my website, it seems no changes in rankings also..

[Shaddows]

FWIW, you will not see any ranking changes just because of a new TBPR datapush.

You already HAD that real PR. Your ranking was based on that PR. Now that PR, with some obfuscation, has been published. It being published does nothing to the underlying data.

Consider this.
What was the highest mountain on earth before Everest was discovered?

It was Everest. Its just no one knew about it.

[maximus12]

My PR did not change, only inner pages, and my /blog as well went from 3 to 2 other than that homepage PR5 stayed the same and I am hit by the -50 as well

[Nvisian]

Is anyone else seeing huge changes in the number of search results from day to day? Before all this upheaval started there was a steady number of around 9,000,000 results for my main keyword. Since this started there has been anywhere from 6,000,000 to 11,000,000, and then yesterday it jumped to 78,000,000 and today it's 14,000,000. What's going on?

[jinxed]

Some of my main internal pages (plenty of links, good content etc) have been completely removed from my main site.

Overall traffic though has not decreased too much as it seems I have had other internal pages boosted higher in the results.

Has anyone else seen this? None of the pages have the -50 penalty.

[walkman]

The PR is an afterthought, it shows on the toolbar long after G has calculated them in the results.

[Nvisian]

jinxed-I lost some of my deep pages that haven't been updated in ages. The inner "working" pages only slipped down the results page they were on and now are coming back better than before. My home page is slowly starting to come back up, but the crazy numbers in the results are jumping worse than ever. I had never heard of the -50 penalty before this last Google dance or whatever it is.

[jinxed]

I think I will just sit this one out and hopefully the pages that have gone will at some point return.

[jinxed]

Update.

I think I have just found the problem. I checked the Google Webmaster Tools for this site and under 'Web Crawl > HTTP errors' there seems to be quite a few pages that have a '4xx error'.

I am not sure why it happened but all the pages with these errors have been removed from the index. I assume they will return when crawled again.