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Anyone else noticing any major changes?
There is a change, but I cant seem to figure out what it is.
Only thing I can think of is some retroactive sandboxing of link value.
1) My number of pages in Google has not dropped
2) The number of backlinks being show is consistent with what I'd expect
3) My traffic has dropped to May levels
4) My day on day traffic dropped 40% on Monday with whatever tweak they implemented
I have a feeling this may be a tweak on dupe content filters thats causing it, or a slight degradation of PR.
Another theory that I have is that they're algorithmically catching similar links and using those as dup filters. i.e If 500 unrelated sites have links that are either inbound or outbound with the anchor "My Life by Bill Clinton" there may be some filter that trips to remove Amazon and other datafeed type affiliates.
There was easily the biggest shakeup in months in my areas. The results are still basically good, but lots of sites moved around, with several clean-but-mediocre sites advancing while some equally clean but more authoritative ones dropping a bit. If I didn't know better, it would seem to be easily attributable to a devaluing of the much better linking of the more authoritative sites. The more lightweight sites show a gain in links from trivial sources like their own message boards, while the more solid sites don't show top of line links. An alternative idea would be that we had a knob turn back toward "a link is a link" from last year. I doubt the backlink display actually reveals anything useful, but it does appear that sites with well-crawled message boards benefited, which could mean raw number of links became more important while quality linking became less so.
Your niche mileage may vary.
All I see that's different is what they're allowing webmasters & SEOs to see.So this would be 'Update Seopatra', if it existed. Keep in mind WW has not attached an official name, which should say something. For my part, I saw nothing significant in the serps I follow. I haven't given any credence to the special searches (link:, allinurl, allintitle, allintext) since since back in July '03 when index pages dropped out and allinanchor rankings were apparently high for a lot of those pages. This was something brought to a head during Florida. These rankings (special searches) seem to have become different things for G to target and/or manipulate since then. The less I know about them the better.
There was a lot of shuffling in my SERPs last week, but in the end everything settled exactly the way it had been before the shuffling began. Then this new backlink stuff.
Full of sound and fury signifying nothing this time around it seems from my perspective.
If we can't tell the PR of a site accurately or we don't know who links to what and who's linking to us maybe webmasters will just start linking to sites that they want to (or that are even relevant).
A strange phenomenon im seeing is that for example, although my site ranks #1 for "widgets forums", the cached version of the page is from yesterday at 6 am, when usually it is around 12:45 am, however the description associated with the listing in on google page is from 3 weeks ago.
Any idea why this would be happening? seems to me lik the update is far from over.
Is this the same for everyone?
The searches below are without quotation marks, and the number is the ranking of Google's corporate page for that search. I invite all of you to verify these searches, because it's a bigger embarrassment to Google than the initial Google bomb they were trying to fix. It would not surprise me if something changed rather rapidly.
touch executives google = 379
touch google executives = 1
google touch executives = 379
touch larry executives = 1
touch executives = not in top 1000
executives touch = not in top 1000
These experiments show that Google put the fix in so that all links to Google's page, if they contain anchor text that includes the word "touch" adjacent to the word "executives," are discounted in whatever formula is used to credit a page with anchor text from links.
It was a Googleplex bomb implemented to wipe out my specific Google bomb. Google did it to protect their page at www.google.com/corporate/execs.html from cheap shots by amused journalists. They probably put this fix in before the out-of-touch management issue came up in the New York Times on June 22, and that's why they neglected to include the collateral forms of the bomb in their fix. The NYT piece probably appeared too late for the current update cycle.
Using the old filter tool that some of you may remember from last November, the tool shows no evidence that this is done on the fly. Instead, I believe that this Googleplex fix was precomputed. That's why it kicked in about the same time that we're seeing all these backlink changes.
If asked by the press, I will say that Google is fully prepared to change their algorithmic results when it is done to protect their own pages, but they are on record as refusing to do the exact same thing to prevent an anti-Semitic page from appearing at the number one spot.
I'm confident that the results of the searches shown above mean that Google will have a hard time denying what they've done.
