2: Google MAYDAY Update - SERP Changes May 2010

[cangoou]

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

Puh, this is really strange: I still see 2 resultsets - and after 7 days I can say that SERPs #1 are shown from right at 0am to about 5am local time and SERPs #2 the rest of the day. I thought this was some kind of dancing around again but it seems to be quite stable now for 1 week.

Funny thing is: SERPs #1 are better then before, SERPs #2 are worse (in rankings of main keywords).

Google is no longer following my robots.txt file. It has indexed hundreds of pages that I have disallowed.

Same here, got a complete set of new pages with robots=noindex in the index.

Generally it's best to make any changes when SERPs are stable, never within an update due to panic!

In general I would agree, but I haven't seen something like "stable SERPs" since January... This makes it quite hard not to panic ;-)

[edited by: tedster at 7:43 pm (utc) on May 13, 2010]

[londrum]

they must be crawling an old version of their index, or using cached pages from it, because a load of errors have just appeared in my webmaster tools.

there are hundreds of URLs saying '403 error' next to them... but they were scrapped from my site about six months ago. none of those URLs have ever appeared as errors until today, and they have a series of internal search query strings on the end, so they are not the type to garner backlinks. the only explanation is that they are crawling URLs from an old version of their index, or dumped a load of pages from their old index into the new one, and then tried to crawl it again.

[edited by: londrum at 3:31 pm (utc) on May 21, 2010]

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

While accurate meta descriptions can improve clickthrough, they won't impact your ranking within search results.

I agree with Google on this one as do most of us. Let's not be pedantic about it. ;)

[walrus]

a load of errors have just appeared in my webmaster tools.

Same here, errors taken care of long ago just appeared again sometime within the last couple of days.

[aparraga]

what I have is: 17 of may -> ~1,000 errors (DNS error) in gwt

[aristotle]

While accurate meta descriptions can improve clickthrough, they won't impact your ranking within search results.

That statement is mis-worded.

If clickthrough is incorporated into the algo, and if good meta-descriptions can improve clickthrough, then good meta-descriptions can indirectly improve rankings.

< continued here: [webmasterworld.com...] >

[edited by: tedster at 7:40 pm (utc) on May 22, 2010]