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]

[trakkerguy]

I suspect some changes may have to do with changed rankings in other locations or countries.

Traffic on my biggest moneymaker site is up almost dramatically starting Friday, but I don't see any change in kw ranking myself.

For over a year now, I've been #1 for my biggest traffic keyphrase. Yet traffic for that keyphrase is up 50% or more since Friday.

Most other keyphrase ranking and traffic are relatively unchanged. I get traffic for 1,000's of keyphrases here, and don't know yet if longtail has increased.

[Hissingsid]

Anyone notice a small tick in the SERPS today (2pm PST?)

Yes unfortunately but perhaps we will get a tock pretty soon. I can't quite figure out what the change is. I'm looking at the hypothesis that back link quality from on topic sites have lost some of their weight. One competitor I watch closely got a boost and this is the only thing I can put my finger on.

Cheers

Sid

[edited by: tedster at 7:03 pm (utc) on Feb. 1, 2010]
[edit reason] moved from another location [/edit]

[srik79]

caffeine is served directly on google.com on 3 out of 10 proxies i tried yesterday...

[walkman]

It's off and on. I can confirm this by looking at my referrals.

[whitenight]

caffeine is served directly on google.com on 3 out of 10 proxies i tried yesterday...

Ok, this is more of a plea to Gorg than a prediction, but let's all cross our fingers and hope the engineers "formerly known as 'genuises'" can roll out Caff over Superbowl Sunday? Please.

For our sake and Gorg's almost non-existent reputation as somewhat "cutting edge"..

Can we PLEASE get this rolled out over Superbowl Sunday?!
_{and yea, that might mean you don't get to put your sneaky spyware in, until late 2010.
sry not shedding tears over that. -.-}

[Erku]

in which DC do you see caffeine now?

[uggur]

66.102.7.99
66.102.7.104

[LinkJuice]

Hi all,

My site ***.co.uk (three letters, that represent company name and core product)has dropped down to page 3 as of yesterday!

The site is relatively new, though the domain is a few years old, the content is new and the back links im buidling are new. Before january it was nowhere in the SERP's, then for 2 weeks it ranked 7-10 on the major search term "***", but now it has dropped to page 3 for that term as of yesterday.

Now my reckoning for this is that we had an instant boost for freshness and new content and now we have reached our natural position, are there are more options?

Thanks in advance

[seolearner]

in which DC do you see caffeine now?

It seems like all data centers return caffeine results if queried by IP address.

Also I am getting caffeine traffic from many countries other than US. So it might be possible that caffeine is live in other countries from the past few days.

[barretire]

I did see what appeared to be Caffeine data sets live on gooogle.com for a very short time yesterday, but nothing today as of yet.

[vordmeister]

I wish they would get on with it.

I launched some new pages about red widgets on an established site over 2 weeks ago, and there's no sign of them having been indexed. Google used to be quick at that sort of thing.

Is it better these days just to Tweet "Red widgets are gr8 lol" and be done with it.

[barretire]

I am fairly confident in assuming that what Whitenight had stated awhile back that things did not go as planned. I am noticing indexing like crazy still going on while monitoring webmaster tools but the indexing is not being relected in the serps.

[SEOPTI]

barretire: this is not indexing, this is crawling.

[mikeclover]

All rankings now are about -30, very strange. I hope its temporary....it looks as if big companies are winning the prize and small companies are getting the big queeze... I smell class action law suit....

[arizonadude]

All rankings now are about -30, very strange. I hope its temporary....it looks as if big companies are winning the prize and small companies are getting the big queeze... I smell class action law suit....

Give me a break... Everytime there is a change and peoples sites fall, there is always that type of post. Go back as many years as you want in this forum and you will find them.

What are going to sue them for? Nothing, you can't since they don't owe you a thing. If they wanted to, they could get rid of the free searches all together.

What you can do is stop using them, tell your friends clients, anybody who will listen to stop using them and then you can help break their stranglehold on search.

I don't use them anymore other than to check rankings and I've lost count of the people who I have converted over to Bing. Helped quit a few of them change their home pages.

[mikeclover]

I get traffic from bing, but not as much traffic as Google. I do however agree with you.

[helpnow]

What we really need is whitenight to help us all make sense of this again! I miss the daily op-eds! It's like Gotham City with the bat signal... whitenight, help us! We miss you! We need guidance!

[barretire]

SEOPTI You are correct I misworded my post. I did mean crawling.

[cangoou]

Whitenight: Spyware? What did I miss?

[gyppo]

I'm seeing less indexed pages on a number of sites in Google.com vs Google.co.uk or Google.com.au

Example site I manage:

80k Indexed Pages in AU & UK
3.6k in .com

Strange indeed.

[Erku]

I am seeing the same thing, less indexed in .com than in others. Don't know how to explain that.

[helpnow]

Don't worry about google's counts of indexed pages. site: is no good, and WMT sitemap counts are wrong. They are unreliable to say the least. I have one site for which site: sometimes reports back "99", or "110" pages, and sometimes it says, "74,500", all in the same day. Seriously. Real numbers. With the traffic I get from this site, clearly, the number is 74,500, not 100 +/-. site: has been like this for months.

The only true way to check to see if a page is indexed, is to literally search for the URL itself. That result never lies. I know with thousands of pages, this is no help though.

But forget about your 3.6K number. Don't sweat it, don't stress over it. Ignore it. It means nothing. If you keep refreshing your search, I bet you any amount of money, at some point in the next 12 hours, you will get a wildly different number, especially given your 80K numbers for AU & UK.

Cheers!

[gouri]

The SERP seem to have gone back to what they were in late December or early January.

[superclown2]

Yes I'll second that, they are fluctuating a little in my sector in the same way as they did in early January, too.

[whitenight]

Whitenight: Spyware? What did I miss?

See my earlier posts at the end of Jan thread [webmasterworld.com]

Figured I better write this before things get really shaken up.
One "subsection" of the population that seems to be getting the Caff results consistently is the Armed Forces!?

I kept trying to eliminate them for my analysis (ala scientific method) but I simply couldn't.

Take from that what you will...

[edited by: tedster at 4:16 pm (utc) on Feb 5, 2010]
[edit reason] fix link [/edit]

[mikeclover]

What a roller coaster, my ranking are higher today and sales are rocking. Martini anyone.....

[RishiRich]

Hello Members....This Is My First Day On Web Master World. First Of All "Greetings To Every One"

I Have Been Experiencing The Following Things These Since Mid Jan.

1. Google Is Quick To Crawl New Pages. By Quick We Mean Really Quick And By Crawl I Mean Only Crawl And Not Index.

2. Google Has Been Terribly Slow When It Comes To Crawling Pages That Have Already Been Indexed. The Crawl Rate Has Drastically Dropped. My Logs Are Filled With Numerous References By Yahoo-Bot but very little from GoogleBot.

3. Links On The Home Page Seems To Be Indexed Faster Than Pages Having Links On The Inner Pages.

Rishi

[crobb305]

The Crawl Rate Has Drastically Dropped.

I have seen this too. My last "deep" crawl was January 9. Since then, there has been a steady drop in visits by Gbot each day to a low in the single digits in recent days. I keep seeing request for robots.txt, and a few isolated pages on my site. I also KEEP getting Gbot visits through 301 redirects. Take a hint. It means "permanently moved". Stop requesting those hostnames.

[vordmeister]

I saw a low crawl rate in December, but it seems to be back to normal now. I don't really pay attention to it.

Like barretire I have noticed a disconnection between crawling and actual indexing over the last couple of weeks.

It could be they are crawling for a different index from the one we are seeing, and not bothering to update the current one. Though from my own stats I'm not convinced I am seeing referrals from anyone using this new index either.

Perhaps they aren't updating either?