Google Updates and SERP Changes - February 2010

[mikeclover]

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

I have noticed a big increase in my Blog Traffic, but my keyword traffic is down. I am going to assume that Caffeine has not hit all data servers yet ? I would assume this because my contacts in Chicago, Iowa all say my keyword rankings are -30. My assoicates on the west coast say I am on the first page. Here in Texas I am on the first page. The wierd thing is my traffic is not really down. hmmmmmm

[edited by: tedster at 5:47 pm (utc) on Feb. 1, 2010]

[dertyfern]

I published a ton of content on one site that Google loves to crawl daily. The new stuff is indeed showing, but super buried in the serps. Normally anything this site shows on its home page ranks top 20 worst case.

[Tallon]

"I published a ton of content on one site that Google loves to crawl daily. The new stuff is indeed showing, but super buried in the serps. Normally anything this site shows on its home page ranks top 20 worst case."

Exactly my experience (on one site)...but I've been seeing this since SEPTEMBER. Content published before is ranking as usual (with normal fluctuations), but new stuff is AWOL. Wordpress is the CMS I use, before September I noticed a 3 to 4 week lag and then new content would pop up in the serps, now...months later...still nada.

[arizonadude]

According to RishiRich based on his personal observations and extensive research caffiene is going live on the 20th which is today.

I assume tomorrow he will want to adjust those obsverations.

[bears5122]

Not really following updates but did notice a lot of different sites showing in some of the results I look at. Looks like they are taking a big swipe at sites that buy text links in it as well as the other stuff. Makes it real easy to knock out competitors. Should be interesting.

[mikeclover]

I moved the discussion about link buying and selling into its own thread: [webmasterworld.com...]

-Ted

[edited by: tedster at 9:15 pm (utc) on Feb 21, 2010]

[johnnie]

Google has been rather volatile here. I'm seeing pictures, rankings, video thumbs and most of everything bounce around on a daily basis!

[jekkoi]

WhiteNight 1 RishRash 0 (lol)

Whitnight your observations and comments regarding google serps have always been spot on.

one thing I don't understand, although I agree we are seeing decaffeinated serps the results are still being returned much faster than a couple of months ago. if the serps are truly caffeine free where does the speed increase come from

[walkman]

if the serps are truly caffeine free where does the speed increase come from

Good point, but is it that much faster?


If it's caffeine fast, maybe they have to bring the new data in ? Or maybe the speed part is separate from algo?


Rishirish, I spent 10 days spell checking my site as you said. Where is the update? Remember the "Trust me," I did , now what?

[jekkoi]

if the serps are truly caffeine free where does the speed increase come from

or was it a hardware upgrade!

[BillyS]

Rishirish, I spent 10 days spell checking my site as you said. Where is the update? Remember the "Trust me," I did , now what?

walkman, we get your point about credibility, but you lose a bit too when you say you spent 10 days spell checking.

RishiRish went out on a limb making a prediction that involved a date. That's something I don't think anyone here could have done. I just finished managing a 22 month, $160M IT project, and with all the testing that's needed it's tough to predict a Go Live date for anything this sigificant - especially for an outsider. As a member of the Project Management Office, I voted to push our Go Live date back twice because the coding on some enhancements were not completed on time and that delayed functional testing.

I realize that many folks here are SEO experts - I don't claim to be. My site is a hobby and we get around 1 million visitors a month in an extremely competitive area, but it's been a lot of work in my "spare" time.

In my full time job, I'm the business lead on very large ($100M plus) IT projects, so I do think I'm an expert on what it takes to make a big system change.

I also think that people are kidding themselves when they think they can observe a specific change that Caffeine might bring. The best infrastructure change is one that's barely noticeable to end users, but provides a big benefit to results – faster results, freshness when it counts, semantics…

I also know that testing can be deceiving too unless you know what Google is testing. I realize a preview was publically available, but outsiders don’t’ know what feedback Google was looking for in that test. I’m sure they were looking for specific feedback based on the change they were making, of course if an unexpected result appeared too, they’d react to that observation.

I always read Tedster’s posts because he does an excellent job of putting pieces together. I don’t have to read 30 posts because Tedster will eventually summarize the group's findings. :) He doesn’t claim to know the answer, but is able to assemble and summarize what might be happening. That's a valuable contribution to this forum.

[Alby]

It seems Google are having some problems dealing with duplicate content on pages that don't really exist. I see a lot of websites being hit with penalties (or filtered down 20-30 results) due to Google believing that there are pages with adult content on their sites, although there is none.

For example, a search for ?ref=example.com where example is some adult website (there are loads of similar examples) you will find 1,5 million results of pages that Google has indexed as being part of websites that would never be associated with these type of pages. I see similar problems where Google are indexing non-existing pages as duplicates of the home page because of an affiliate link pointing to the site.

In general the results appears to be turning towards delivering more informational results, even for commercial keywords, presumably to increase Adwords revenues. I think this is a slippery slope for Google, trading short term profits by reducing relevancy, and I bet Microsoft are rubbing their hands in joy at the moment.

[edited by: tedster at 11:57 pm (utc) on Feb 21, 2010]
[edit reason] make the example generic [/edit]

[crobb305]

It seems Google are having some problems dealing with duplicate content on pages that don't really exist. I see a lot of websites being hit with penalties (or filtered down 20-30 results) due to Google believing that there are pages with adult content on their sites, although there is none.

I have definitely observed a lot of filtering since January 10 or so, but I have not been able to identify why.

[brinked]

Billys, I agree,

Tedster is the coolest and wisest person on any message boards I have ever seen. Then again I dont think much of forum people so thats not saying much.

I'm still not seeing much movementin the serp's. It is the weekend though. For better or worse I just wish caffeine would be rolled out already so we can all move on. I think we should all stop talking about it so much, and just let it happen...who knows it might not come out for another 3 months or so.

[BaseballGuy]

Anyone who lives in Los Angeles, or can view that datacenter, notice any changes in the SERPS today?

As of 6:00pm Sunday, February 21st?

[sirkevon]

Anyone who lives in Los Angeles, or can view that datacenter, notice any changes in the SERPS today?

As of 6:00pm Sunday, February 21st?

Exactly two weeks ago was when I last saw the caffeinated results. There is a particular ranking for a site that I use to tell between the regular results and the caffeinated one. On the regular results, it's at the top of page 2, and on caffeinated results it's middle of page 1; and both shows different result numbers (caffeine shows fewer results while regular shows more). It's been doing that ever since caffeine was announced and rolled out to one data center like Matt Cutts said back around late November/early December.

I really don't know what else to tell my boss at this point. I think I've played the caffeine excuse card one too many times that he's starting to tell me I can't use that excuse anymore when he sees the site back on the 2nd page time and again these past few months. :)

[hmmburger]

First post. I'm not a n00b though, don't worry.

Just wondering what most people are still seeing with Google at the moment? Old, stale data?

I target long tail stuff, and my traffic is down at least 70% from what it was around a month ago.

Seems like this caffeine update isn't going very smoothly..

[SEOPTI]

Larger long tail sites rely on steady indexing therefore their traffic will be down at this time.

[BaseballGuy]

@sirkevon

I got a sneaky feeling that Caffeine is already in place right under all our noses.

Any major changes that are being seen are the result of a tweek or experiment then engineers are trying out.

[crobb305]

A few weeks ago, I saw a complete new look and feel of Google search. This change was posted in another thread [webmasterworld.com] that linked to snapshots. I observed the change for a few days about a month ago, then it disappeared. Where did it go? I had forgotten about it. Was/is this associated with Caffeine or completely unrelated?

[hmmburger]

@Seopti

These sites are indexed fine. Just not ranking very well now. I'm not sure what conclusions to make, as I promite in mass and don't follow the serps an awful lot.

It's almost as if thw tweaked algo with caffeine enforced some sort of penalty.

Usually I'd just take it on the chin and build more, but there seems to be conflicting opinions of what is going on with Google at the moment. Caffeine not live, old datasets, some think caffeine may be live, etc.

No idea what to make of it all! Just hoping for caffeine to be confirmed so I can get on with things and work out how to make the most of things sgain!

[member22]

When is google next update ? Does anyone have any clue ?

I know google is constantly updating and going to 100 of millions of websites everyday but for the last 3 weeks it has been bumping me back in the ranking ( normal according to google patent ) but I was wondering when it is going to rank me again !

I heard it is usually at the end of the month ?

By the way does your PR affect the time it takes to rank you ?

Thank you,

[edited by: tedster at 5:42 pm (utc) on Feb 24, 2010]
[edit reason] moved from another location [/edit]

[tedster]

I heard it is usually at the end of the month ?

Please ignore that kind of thing wherever you come across it. As a lot of this thread shows, there is no such pattern.

As for PR, higher PR can help your site to be crawled more often and more deeply. And it as one of the factors that can help you rank higher. But there's nothing about PR that affects the time it takes to calculate one site's ranking. Any algorithm change works across the whole web graph, not one site at a time.

[sirkevon]

I got a sneaky feeling that Caffeine is already in place right under all our noses.

@BaseballGuy

The longer this version of the SERPs stays, the more inclined I'm to think the same. It hasn't gone back to what I thought was the caffeinated results from a couple weeks ago from what I can tell, at least from the rankings I have been using to determine it. It's just a bit strange that originally my ranking actually went up in the caffeinated results rolled out in December. That's when I began to figure which was caffeine and which was not. But if caffeine has been rolled out to more data centers now without any announcements, then I guess I'm stuck with the poorer results.

[BaseballGuy]

Anyone notice 2 distinct set of serps in the Los Angeles area today?

Been flickering back and forth.

As of 5:45pm PST, the "weird" set of serps is being shown.

[eyeinthesky]

Been seeing previously penalized sites come back and then disappear, come back and then disappear in a spate of 1-2 months. Got another site dropped but will likely re-appear, I think.

Is this the effect of Caffeine? G, please don't tease ;)

[walkman]

AFAICT this is still caffeine [209.85.225.103...]

[tedster]

If it is Caffeine, then the rankings have been updated in parallel with other data centers. We just had a major client jump from #19 to #2 on an important keyword this evening. The new ranking is showing on all data centers, including 209.85.225.103 - as viewed from Boston on Firefox, Opera, Explorer and with web history disabled.

[levo]

Same here, caffeine-like rankings on google and 209.85.225.103

[member22]

I tried checking the 209.85.225.103 datacenter myself typing it in my web address and didn't see any change in the search result ? did you guys check exactly at the moment the google guys where testing or s there another way to check.

[SEOPTI]

I don't see any changes.