Google Updates and SERP Changes - August 2009

US site now showing in a major UK search term in top ten.

I don't think so that PR is that much important as I always believe it was as Google always shouted that PR is just one of the 100 possibilities for the page ranks and its very much clear when they launched the Google Chrome where you can see there is even no option included for the PR measurements or parameter so say Good By to PR.

PR is the blood in the veins of the machine, still the most important factor.

What about the other 99 possibilities to live with ?

We started to see some pretty big changes this morning.This appears to be a return to our pre-summer positions.

>What about the other 99 possibilities

Some factors carry more weight than others.

I just came across another anomolous result, just as I was thinkging things were settling down.

Results 1 - 10 of about 4,490,000 for widget

Only 9 results appear on page 1. We see

"Image results for widget - Report images"

Nine listings, with the ever present wikipedia as #1. (No indented results)

"News results for widget" (One totally unrelated listing)

"Video results for widget"

"Searches related to: widget"

First time I can remember seeing Google count to 9 and call it 10.

Hi willybfriendly,

You have seen 9, but actually there were 10 results.

Move over your mouse pointer to cache of each search result. You will fine a variable cd=Xvalue. This cd=Xvalue will change for all list. What Google is doing is giving two YouTube results in a single line but it is depicting them as a 2 separate search results. Thus when you count links you will find 9 but when you actually count all including the video results for YouTube you will notice the difference

Regards
Vineet

[edited by: tedster at 1:17 pm (utc) on Aug. 25, 2009]

We started to see some pretty big changes this morning.This appears to be a return to our pre-summer positions.

my site is back to normal as of this morning.

im just hoping it lasts more than 2 or 3 days this time.

Same here, seeing some big changes this morning. We jumped back to page 2......

I have too noticed a lot of shifting since this morning and what looks like less power to keywords in domain name too, compared to last week.

Im still seeing loads of sites sprinkled into the google UK results that are from outside the UK.

Google now for some reason thinks users including "Birmingham" UKs second city, in their search string want Birmingham Alabama, or "Stafford" they want Stafford Texas etc, etc - G geo targeting has gone to pot!.

I would say as much as 3 out of 10 results on many popular search requests are to sites outside UK that are not relevent to UK users of google.

Its been this way now for a week or so without any sign of improvement, i dont knoiw what this recent change did but it now brings in duff results that are no good for anyone using google UK.

Is this the same stateside or Australia - are you seeing .co.uk results or sites from the UK on local search requests that are of no use to you?

Its Google New Caffeine Update?

If you search on www2 sandbox.google com you can get a preview of how the search results change the update is primarily under the hood and a normal searcher won’t notice much of a difference at all .

Im still seeing loads of sites sprinkled into the google UK results that are from outside the UK.
Google now for some reason thinks users including "Birmingham" UKs second city, in their search string want Birmingham Alabama, or "Stafford" they want Stafford Texas etc, etc - G geo targeting has gone to pot!.

Hi Rich,

Those are the more obvious examples but there's also loads of more subtle ones and I think it has been going on for a few weeks. It went right for a few days from 17th of this month and then went bad again about 5 days ago.

I have terms that I've been (with a few notable exceptions like post Florida) at #1 for ever on .co.uk. Now on Google.co.uk I'm at #5 but if I add uk to the end of the terms I go back to #1 and in some cases get mini site links and/or indented secondary listings. These terms are very country market specific and mean different things in different English speaking countries. I think they have cocked up the semantics "tome" they are applying to our geo filter and the examples you give lend weight to what I've been thinking for some time.

Also I've noticed that some of those that are in the top 5 that were not there before are sites that have had some cheapo link builder buy them links most of which are from US sites. I sometimes wonder what those highly paid intellects at Googleplex actually did their PhDs in.

Cheers

Sid

"We started to see some pretty big changes this morning.This appears to be a return to our pre-summer positions. "

Bingo. Fall SERP's are upon us :)

Judging from our other threads, there also seems to be a small batch of rather harsh penalties doled out along with these SERPs. We've got some reports of falling from years on page one to position 200 or so. If the webmasters truly have no idea what guideline the site may be violating, this sounds ugly. Maybe it's a new batch of the OOP (formerly called -950).

Also of note, the sitelinks algo seems to have updated. Some #1 sites have gone from full sitelinks to mini, inline sitelinks and there's a lot of refinement in the chosen anchor text, too. It seems like the algo is getting more fine-tuned and in some cases at least is picking up more on popular internal pages that are not on the site's main menu.

Sid,

Looks like its getting worse to me.

Popular UK search. Results were as follows:-
1. UK site
2. UK Site
3. US Site X
4. Indented US Site X
5. UK Site
6. US Site X
7. Canada Site X
8. UK Site
9. US Site X
10. Singapore Site X

40% Relevancy of first page results - Joke, this is the worst ive seen google in years

Rich

Hi Rich,

In my niche there is nothing so obvious as that. Sites that have bought links mainly from .com sites are doing better than those who did the more difficult buying of links from .co.uk sites (sound a bit cynical). Previously even if a site had loads more links from .coms they were still trumped by on topic .co.uk links.

Adding uk to the end of search terms is still moving my site up one or two places and giving me an indented result of mini site links. The same thing happens on Google.com so I don't think this is a .co.uk filter problem it looks more like the main algorithm has lost its geo-location filter.

Lets hope they turn it back on or I'm going to have to change my strategy.

Cheers

Sid

There may be some hints in this recent video from Matt Cutts: More about generic TLDs in (say) UK results [mattcutts.com]

my site is gone again for the 4th time since june!

its also gone on caffeine.

any ideas why my site would be in the index for 2-5 days, then out for 2-3 weeks?

its never totally gone, it always shows for domain.tld and for the very occasional low ranking query.

when are the caffeine results going live?

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

[edited by: tedster at 4:45 am (utc) on Sep. 2, 2009]