Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
We recently placed 50 or so new pages live with specific keywords being targetted.
After checking Google this morning I was happy to see they had indexed them, and when checking their ranking against the keywords, we were indeed seeing very good ranking.
I have since re-checked these rankings and the pages are no longer in the index, or, can be found using the site: operator but are not ranked as they were before.
Can anyone explain what is happening?
Regards,
Wesiwyg
G has multiple data centres and it takes time for them all to update. Your two searches may well have been at different data centres.
Rankings will bounce about for a few weeks and will then settle down.
Sometimes (most of the time) the new pages become stable in the index. But sometimes Google decides they are "not worthy" - so you need to convince them that the new pages ARE worthy - backlinks, internal linking upgrades and the like.
Hi - so you have seen your pages rank within 24 hours then disappear in less than 2 hours before? Are they likely to come back - (they haven't done as yet)
I have seen this a lot of times. Generally they might come back to same position as initially within a week or 2 with some linking done. At other times, they would slowly and gradually climb the ranking ladder to come to the position where you first saw them.
would they rank so highly them initially as they did before they disappeared if they are not worthy?
Depending on the query terms, really fresh results can get a huge ranking boost and then vanish just as fast.
Hi - so you have seen your pages rank within 24 hours then disappear in less than 2 hours before? Are they likely to come back - (they haven't done as yet)
I usually think of this type of situation as a bit of a 'hot news' check...
If you've got 1 Mil+ pages for a result set, get a new 'quality content' page and want to know if it's 'news' or not, you could insert it in some results (maybe only after an initial similar search and only one set of data-centers to keep the 'click fakers' from skewing the determination too much?) and see how the clicks compare to surrounding results.
If people start skipping over the 'usual answers' and clicking on the new result at 'high' rate, it could be an indication you've got something 'fresh and new' people are really looking for, so you could 'increase the visibility' and if not, then page could be returned to its 'natural position' to 'work' it's way in to the top results like all the rest.
Think of it like split testing... New page, on-topic, etc, etc, passes all the 'sniff tests', could be important... Page gets inserted to a small portion of the searches and visitor behavior aids in the determination of 'hot story' or 'regular result', and it's very difficult to 'fake a click' because it only shows 'intermittently' on Google.Com and where it shows could even be GEO Targeted and the targeting expanded / contracted based on behavior. (Just as one example of how you could do it.)
IMO, regardless of some member's views regarding clicks, there's quite a bit of information you can get from the data, especially before you make the resultset available to everyone... Once it's on Google.Com consistently it's much easier to fake clicks, but you can't fake a click on what you can't find in the results, so by limiting the availability, delaying the page from showing in the site: search and moving it in and out of results, you can 'gauge responses' on a smaller 'random' (for lack of a better word) scale, which gives you a much more reliable comparative pattern of behavior prior to making it easy for anything to be faked.
Personally, when I put new pages up I'm usually happiest when I can initially find them on Page 3 at a few specific datacenters... That's where (how) most of the long-term, stable, well ranking results I have started.
The disappearance you're experiencing could easily just be the datacenter you are hitting too. I know one site I recently made additions to has pages I added about a week ago showing in the SERPs on certain DCs, but the only way you can find them using the site command is with site:example.com/directory/ and they do not show on Google.com for me, yet...
I've been watching almost the exact same repetition for years... Page 3 on some DCs. If they follow the 'usual pattern' I've seen around the time they move up to Page 2 on those DCs they'll start to show on Google.Com (Page 3) and there will be more pages indexed on certain data-centers, depending on the propagation of information to individual DCs by Google.
