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]

[brinked]

nice catch whitenight.

I see caffeine on comcast as well. Do you often check comcast so you know it wasnt there before?

I usually check aol, no caffeine on there. Caffeine has been steady on all the caffeinated proxies I have been tracking though...still do not see it on my home or office locations.

Could be a good sign, hopefully it will be released sooner rather than later

[Seattle_SEM]

hrmm....so what does it mean that my site has like 50 pages indexed on the comcast site, but like 800 on google.com?

[whitenight]

nice catch whitenight.

I see caffeine on comcast as well. Do you often check comcast so you know it wasnt there before?

I usually check aol, no caffeine on there. Caffeine has been steady on all the caffeinated proxies I have been tracking though...still do not see it on my home or office locations.

Could be a good sign, hopefully it will be released sooner rather than later

Not so much "checking"... i have "alerts" within the databases which spot anomalies where ever they are
As referenced before, when i see a black cat twice, there's usually a Smith around the corner. :)

But yes, AOL is also an indicator, among other Gorg "enhanced" SEs.

The results being on comcast is a HUGE sign...
of what? ::giggles::
i'm not saying.

hrmm....so what does it mean that my site has like 50 pages indexed on the comcast site, but like 800 on google.com?

Absolutely nothing. Don't focus on that.

Seems those serps on comcast also seem to be missing datasets.

Please read the earlier referenced thread from '08 for further clarity.

[brinked]

whitenight, I agree this is a positive sign.

I do believe that caffeine would go live sooner than being months as was reported by someone at google, I think they said this to be on the safe side. We could see caffeine live as soon as next week.

[crobb305]

Well, crud. My site hit with -40 to -60 January 11 becomes even further suppressed on that dataset. I guess I was fooling myself that it could be data issues with Gorg, but I suppose it's the site itself. Maybe there is still hope? It seems clear that existing penalties/filters are certainly carrying over to the new infrastructure.

[whitenight]

crobb305,

i haven't been keeping up with your issues specifically, or who's giving you advice,
but if you've been hit with an obvious penalty, you need to change your link profile IMMEDIATELY and as quickly as possible.

Check out my comments in the Yo-Yo thread pinned to the FAQs (and any threads i reference from that thread).
The same advice applies to your situation.

[crobb305]

yeah whitenight it was a domain-level penalty. example.com is listed with 8 sitelinks, but removing the TDL suppresses the domain name (and all key phrases) 40 to 60 spots, depending on data center. The site is 5 years old, so I can't imagine having to sift through thousands of backlinks, many of which I have never requested, appearing on crappy domains, scraper sites, sitewides, blogrolls, etc. I had hoped my filtering was related to significant canonical issues (that I mentioned on the previous page of this thread under steveb's comment). All technical issues were resolved, and a reconsideration request was made via WMT (9 days ago), but I haven't heard anything yet. I guess my next step, as you suggested, is to tackle the link profile, but that could take months. I wish WMT had an option to select and ignore certain backlinks.

[helpnow]

Seattle_SEO - no worries, I have the same huge discrepancy between comcast and regular google site:. site: is FUD anyway, regardless of where you see it and what numbers you get. As whiteight says, Ignore it - always!

[helpnow]

crobb305 - I'm pretty sure in the past whitenight has alluded to 2 ways to look at any problem - like, is the mail box half empty, or half full.

[crobb305]

helpnow, I am not sure what you mean.

Whitenight, I am reading through the yo-yo thread as we speak. I never followed the yo-yo discussions, but I have observed the phenomenon in my logs for over a year, especially since last May. You mention being "on the edge of a filter", and I must have been. The odd thing is, even after the -40 to -60 hit in January, I have still seen Google traffic trickle in a yo-yo effect (but within the -40 to -60 range) as if G wasn't sure which filter to apply. Since making on-site changes to improve quality, usability, and reduce keyword density, the rankings have fallen further. If the backlink profile has anything to do with it, I still think it will be a daunting task to "change" it as you suggested.

I could definitely try getting some new links, but I until I read the entire yo-yo thread, I will probably hold off. It's hard to know if the yo-yo and filter are related to on-site factors or backlinks, but I will press on. I guess what I am trying to say is that at this point I am not sure anything I do will help without human intervention. Do you believe these filters can get lifted algorithmically after 60+ days? I am disappointed to see things get worse (in my case) on the new caff index.

Edit: Sorry, I just realized I probably threw the thread off topic with my rambling. Thank you very much for your insights Whitenight.

[brinked]

now caffeine cant be seen on my caffeine proxies or comcast.

[bobothecat]

now caffeine cant be seen on my caffeine proxies or comcast.

I don't know if I'm seeing Caffeine or not, but I noticed an odd change two days ago, and then another overnight. Traffic for some sites have increased over 200%... others have remained about the same.

Serps look about the same to me though, so I haven't a clue as to what I'm seeing. The Comcast searches where giving the exact same results as what Google.com would give me - and it's still that way.

Something's up.

[whitenight]

but I noticed an odd change two days ago, and then another overnight. Traffic for some sites have increased over 200%

I'm still on hiatus from giving up to the minute Caff reports, but yes,
Caff was live on Gorg.com for about 1 and half hours ~2am PST last night

now caffeine cant be seen on my caffeine proxies or comcast.

Ive got an interesting theory about why it pops on and off, but i'd need more time and motivation to prove it.

And it would only be for entertainment purposes. :)
No distinct SEO value, if proven correct.

If the backlink profile has anything to do with it, I still think it will be a daunting task to "change" it as you suggested.

The sooner you get started, the sooner you'll see results and prolly less than waiting 60 days.
Re-read that thread 10-20 times so you catch the nuances of what i'm saying. please.

[g1smd]

Once you install a 301 redirect to fix canonicalisation problems or to redirect requests for URLs that no longer exist to a new URL for that content, your measure of success is in how many of the new URLs are indexed and how quickly.

The old URLs that now redirect are moved to a Supplemental Results database and may continue to appear in the SERPs for up to a year for certain search terms. This is NOT a problem. Do not be tempted to force removal of those old URLs from the SERPs. Where those old, now-redirected, URLs still appear in SERPs they will still bring you traffic, and your on-site redirect will get the visitor to the right content.

One change in recent weeks, or certainly one that I haven't noticed before, is where Page A ranked for Keyword X and Page B did not contain that word and never has. Page A had very old, stale content and was deleted. An external redirect was added such that requests for URL A are now redirected to URL B. Interestingly, URL B now ranks for Keyword X even though that word is nowhere on the page, nor in the anchor text of any link (internal or external) pointing at the page, nor has ever been on the page.

Another change I see in recent days is a COUNTRY name being mentioned in green text in Google SERPs. It appears after the URL, and before the link to the cache. It appears on only a very small number of URLs, and only for a very small number of searches.

[edited by: g1smd at 12:37 am (utc) on Mar 10, 2010]

[caribguy]

Interesting, will have to ponder how to spin yarn from this.

Two keyword niche phrase abc def (three letters each) with 78,000 results on G and 1,500 on C

Jumping from 1st to 10th page of results for this term shows 280K results on G but still 1,500 on C

Paradoxically: 1st page rankings similar but distinctly different :)

It'll all come out in the wash...

Edit: opening a 3rd browser and seeing 280K results off the bat. Infrequent searches cause realtime adjustments?

[AG4Life]

I had a penalized site come back for just under two weeks beginning the 8/9th of February (as described in this thread [webmasterworld.com]).

I had originally thought that my efforts to clean up the site had made the difference, but now I'm suspicious again.

Did something happen around that time, like some kind of rollback, that would better explain the penalty being lifted temporarily? I remember reading that about Caffeine results disappearing for a bit during that time.

[TheMadScientist]

One change in recent weeks, or certainly one that I haven't noticed before, is where Page A ranked for Keyword X and Page B did not contain that word and never has. Page A had very old, stale content and was deleted. An external redirect was added such that requests for URL A are now redirected to URL B. Interestingly, URL B now ranks for Keyword X even though that word is nowhere on the page, nor in the anchor text of any link (internal or external) pointing at the page, nor has ever been on the page.

Is the result semantically correct?

[textex]

How can we see caffeine? I've tried the most recent suggestions and I all I see is the updated index that changed mid-January. I think I saw caffeine as per the suggestions provided in early Feb but those results were ridiculously mixed with sites from the UK and AU which resulted in us and my US competitors being pushed way down. Is that the caffeine people are seeing?

The www2 version exposed by Google when caffeine first came out was a US index with shiftings. Is that the caffeine people are seeing?

[edited by: tedster at 4:23 pm (utc) on Mar 10, 2010]

[drall]

Still no changes here, gbot deep crawl went mia for us mid jan and pages/traffic has been slowly dropping since.

Have tried everything, page/traffic decay for longtail is now hitting everyone in my vert.

Only pr 8 plus sites seem exempt.

In the meantime Bing is crawling/indexing 100% and realtime. Traffic slowly growing with Bing, reminds me of Google back when it made some sense.

[SEOPTI]

drall, exactly what I'm seeing, the last deep crawl was mid january and since then deeper level URLs (3+ level deep) for long tail sites are not reindexed (2-3 months old cache dates) and drop from the index.

[crobb305]

drall & SEOPTI, my last deep crawl was January 9, filtered on January 11. LOL

[Kelowna]

I am seeing the caffeine results are back again this morning for me at least on comcast, seems to be hit and miss as to who is seeing them. My stats show that (some) people in the east must be seeing the caffeine data as the search phrases they are using only show up on the first page of google's caffeine results... hope it spreads as for me at least the results are great!

[cangoou]

Is it too early to figure out what the differences in ranking are between caff and de-caff?

[walkman]

whoever sees caffeine, please post an IP. Thanks

[crobb305]

Walkman,

They were/are reporting it here [search.comcast.net...]

<added> I just realized (and was reminded by another member) that you are looking for an IP. I was going to get that for you but the Comcast dataset that I saw earlier has reverted back. Sorry I bumped the thread with useless information. Hopefully I will see caff again soon.

[louieramos]

I can see caffeine here now: [74.125.95.132...]

[edited by: tedster at 3:41 am (utc) on Mar 11, 2010]

[Kelowna]

Not sure if 74.125.95.132 results are caffeine but they are very close to what I saw on comcast, just slightly different...

[MLHmptn]

74.125.95.132 (209.85.225.103 as well still) is indeed showing Caffeine from what I track, no doubt about it. Comcast is not showing Caffeine for me either.

On another note, there sure are a lot of DC's down at the moment...Hint of something bigger?!

[walkman]

Thanks. This, 74.125.95.132, is caffeine as far as can I tell.

[johnnie]

And here we go again... Yet more power to the domain name. My site is now outranked by a site that offers less content and an overall less satisfactory user experience. The only thing they have going for them is their domain. How frustrating.