Google Updates and SERP Changes - March 2010

[drall]

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

I have been watching all of my competitors which pretty much live off of large amounts of longtail traffic loose overall traffic the past 4-6 weeks and that includes us.

I dont know whats going on but for big sites in my section of the web site page count has been dropping at a constant decay and new content is coming in very very slowly and not nearly enough to counter the drops.

Overall traffic seems down about 8-10% for all of us and those drops are graphing perfectly to the drops in page counts since mid January.

At the same time the crawl graph in WMT and my local stats package show a flatline since mid Jan with no deep crawls and about a tenth of usual crawl activity.

All of this for us and our competitors started mid January
1. dropoff of the googlebot deepcrawl with a flatline stable crawl at a much lower rate.
2. daily reductions in pagecount across a dozen sites by exact same percentages
3. similar gradual traffic declines matching page count falls
4. uber slow new page caching and ranking

When I see this happening to not only us but many pr6-8 sites in my sector it gives me comfort to see that it isnt only us but also concern because it isnt only us.

Just going to keep chugging along, not much you can do but sit back and watch this stuff unfold.

[edited by: tedster at 5:49 pm (utc) on Mar 1, 2010]
[edit reason] split from earlier thread [/edit]

[trakkerguy]

Caffeine is not showing for me again here in Calif on google.com, on the same IP, 74.125.19.105. It was live for less than 24 hours yesterday (and for some hours Friday).

[dusky]

My Vbulletin forum traffic has dropped to a crawl overnight since 3 days ago. This forum has over 100k pages under site:mysite.com. I lost rankings for all keywords overnight. Adsense dropped from $20/day to 0. No, I haven't upgraded vbulletin to 4.0 nor done any updates for months now. Still have 3.8.4

Yes, it seems G* is moving their data in chunks to new infrastructure, many of the sites I manage lost 90% of traffic for no reason and almost 99% of keywords ranked for couldn't be found by them for the third day now. Some of the sites are authority industrial sites, respected by the industry. Well, the reason may be the proper caf switch which is now happening, why, because those sites have now (last hour) started ranking again as usual and traffic is returning slowly.

The only explanation I can come up with is when you search for the ranked keywords and you come up blank, but pagerank and the site: and inurl: total is normal, is that info is held in different database clusters and probably even different infrastructure altogether, whereas the returned search is in different DCs (probably the old DCs and now moved slowly to the new ones). I had a clue in WMT yesterday when the keyword link did not have any keywords, only the Why link, I was for THREE days with a sunken heart wondering what's happening as nothing was changed on those sites, and yes some of the sites had forums (almost unique software) and literally forced myself to wait and did not send a recon request. I'll know for sure in the next 24 hours.

[whitenight]

Yes, it seems G* is moving their data in chunks to new infrastructure

I can confirm from what I've seen this appears to be what they are doing. :)

In the wee hours of the morning last night, Caff datasets were on various IPs.
About hour or more later, those DC/iPs were taken off-line for a few hours.

I wondered how exactly they were going to make the INFRASTRUCTURE switch as it's been obvious, and also noted by others, that they wouldn't be able to seemlessly "overlay" the datasets and infrastructure into the current Big Daddy 2.0v.

Hopefully, Gorg has worked out all the kinks this time and we can get back to reverse-engine..err..umm... analyzing the new Gorg soon.

[1script]

@dusky:

Dusky, you may be onto something here! I'm looking at the fresh stats and I am seeing some of the top keywords (not all, bummer) starting to appear in usual places on page 1. However, at the same time I have one more site that got nixed today, so it may be far from settling down just as yet. Let's watch it play out, fingers crossed...

[Pass the Dutchie]

they do it while we sleep ;)

[1script]

@dusky:

I had a clue in WMT yesterday when the keyword link did not have any keywords, only the Why link, I was for THREE days with a sunken heart wondering what's happening as nothing was changed on those sites

I hate to say that but this clue might have been misleading. I never lost any data in WMT, all the keywords were listed there except of course the reported SERP positions were wrong. Pretty much none of those I checked had ANY position - gone. I am starting to find them now but I'm discovering to my dismay that most keywords are NOT returning to their original position - they are in most cases only show up on Pages 2 and 3. Still better than nothing but nowhere near to be "fixed", so to speak.

Could it be because the data about the URLs (snippet, title, URL) is kept in a DB separately from the ranking factors and is yet to be synchronized?

[tedster]

It certainly could be. As I understand it, Google shards their data into smithereens and then re-assembles it from data tags for search results. That's one reason that they can only give us "about" numbers for total pages.

[brinked]

AOL's servers are located in cali, so it makes sense that it would have the caff results the same time caff was seen in cali.

comcast servers are in mass. Hopefully last night was a good sign that caffeine is being finally ready to be rolled out in the very near future (how many times have we all said that before?)

I'm going to miss these kinds of speculations when caffeine actually is finally rolled out. Can't say this all hasn't been fun

[helpnow]

I am seeing a revert back to data from a few days ago on some IPs...

[Tallon]

Anyone else starting to think it will be Easter weekend before things are all said and done? If we're lucky.

[textex]

Or maybe this is it. Two different sets of results.

[louieramos]

I see 2 different sets of results too..

30+ DC are showing caff result
70+ DC are showing old result

What are you guys seeing?

[helpnow]

I am seeing at least 3 sets. Maybe 4... But... it's not even that simple. I am seeing flux, more than I am seeing distinct sets. I am seeing flux everywhere I look. For me, right now, things are fluid and in high-speed motion.

My brain is insisting on phrases/words like "flux", "screwed up, "mess", "in transition", "#*$!?!", "big change going on right now", "gorg is chasing its tail", and not "dataset 1 vs. dataset 2".

-shrugging- that's what is going on in my neck of the woods...

[potentialgeek]

I added several links to related products on another site (Amazon affiliate program) and lost ranking by about eight places. Then I removed them all. Ranking came back. Weeks later I added one link to one related book on Amazon. Rankings dropped again. So I took the link off, and now my rankings are back.

Google doesn't like books?!

p/g

P.S. I haven't tested this on other sites. The one site with the problem isn't new. It has had good rankings since 2003.

[onepointone]

Well I won't have to worry about that particular problem. Got banned by amazon affiliate prog. a couple of weeks ago!

[SEOPTI]

It's a difficult situation for long tail sites where thousands of URLs are removed from the index daily.

[mirrornl]

cafeïne here in the Netherlands/Europa atm

[JoeSinkwitz]

Irrelevant .gov and .edu sites ranking for competitive phrases makes me LOL. It looks to be a rehash of an old 301 fix to take care of XSS issues -- yep, still more folding to occur.

[brinked]

I think caffeine is going live today. Saw it on westcoast and now for the first time ever I see it on my iPhone (mobile google)

[nrep]

Sorry if this is an ignorant question - but how are you able to tell if you are actually seeing caffeine?

[textex]

Gotta love the predictions...

[Kelowna]

I see the new new caffeine results are back up again on aol search and also the California proxy I have been watching. The rest of the proxies across the States are still hit and miss with maybe 50% or so showing the new caffeine.

[trakkerguy]

Yup, been seeing caffeine on google.com here in Calif this morning...

[Kelowna]

Actually I have to correct the last post, I just ran another report and on the proxies that I monitor the actual percentage that are showing the new caffeine results is up to 65% this morning, not 50%. Hopefully not too long before this is done.

[rjwmotor]

seeing it in ohio

[internetheaven]

Sorry if this is an ignorant question - but how are you able to tell if you are actually seeing caffeine?

I think that's the best question asked so far.

I would imagine that some people saying they see "Caffeine" results are simply seeing "different" results due to normal flux and updates.

One of my sites jumped 4 places this morning ... I put that down to a good, ongoing link building campaign, not Caffeine.

[edited by: internetheaven at 4:35 pm (utc) on Mar 18, 2010]

[brinked]

As of 12:30 pm est caffeine is now present on more than half my monitored proxies. Feels like a full rollout will be less than a week possibley 24 hours

[curioustoddler]

I hope you are correct brinkred.
All this wait has been more stressful than wait for your child's birth.

[arizonadude]

I was seeing it this morning in AZ but it is now gone.

I wish they would just do it! My traffic really skyrockets while it's live!

[whitenight]

but how are you able to tell if you are actually seeing caffeine?

I think that's the best question asked so far.

I would imagine that some people saying they see "Caffeine" results are simply seeing "different" results due to normal flux and updates.

No offense, (don't want anyone "scared" by my response) but i've answered this question in THIS thread and EVERY monthly thread since Jan.

And before the standard "rebuttal" arguments start again...

the Philosophy 101 concept of "how can ANYONE know ANYTHING" is absolutely absurd in this instance.
(there'd be NO reason for this forum otherwise)

Yes, there is also no ABSOLUTE CERTAINTY that the sun will rise tomorrow in the East as:
- The earth could have a pole shift
- A nuclear war could destroy everything on the planet therefore no one would be here to OBSERVE the sun.
- The sun could go supernova today
- <insert your fav philosophy 101 explanation here>

In reality, Gorg is a relatively CLOSED system [en.wikipedia.org], unlike growing tomatoes, or the weather, or the millions of OTHER things in life
that are OPEN systems [en.wikipedia.org] with millions of variables instead of a measly 200+
that humans have been "miraculously" predicting with a high degree of accuracy for decades, if not, centuries.

And at this point in SEO's evolution,
i find people who claim "Gorg can't be figured out unless you work there"
either highly uninformed (and too lazy to do the necessary work to reverse-engineer the algo)
or purposely misleading others for personal gain.