September 2002 Google Update

It's Official

[nell]

7:15 est I see different results on WWW, WW2, and WW3 in Florida

[quotations]

I am seeing several off-topics sites as well. This one in particular shoews up under several keywords and phrases where it does not belong.

Check out the category listing which it says it is in and you won't find it there on either DMOZ or dir.google.com

Yahoo! Small Business
Yahoo! Yahoo! - Yahoo! Enterprise Solutions - Help. Yahoo! Small Business,
Home > Marketplace > Buyer's Guides > Telecom Services. Buyer's Guides. ...
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[andreasfriedrich]

Although I have been reading and posting a lot here lately nothing seems to work for me :( Still only position 47 of only 97,200 results.

Andreas

[gopi]

Major Disaster...many of my sites went from firstpage to 3rd page for my KW's. :( . The interesting part is all this sites are PR 6 which is above average in my industry ...

I believe that PR will come to picture in the last phase of the update. If not... boy there is sure a major algo change after that widespread PR 0 panic...

[creative craig]

I am still seeing differences on www2 and www3... arrggghhh when will it stop! :(

[zeus]

Bradley it could be a PR0 situation, I was in the same situation last update I got a PR0 and when I made a link check the where 0 pages linking to me, but in this update I have alot of links pointing to me so it seems like my PR will be back this time.

I hope the best for you.

zeus

[CuriousWeb]

Does anyone know how the data migrates? Is it as simple as www3>www2>www?

[foy]

*lol*

first everybody is asking for the update to start, now everybody is asking for it to stop... this is kinda odd.

;)

ahh, I'll just sit back and relax, drink a cold, fresh beer and I'll check back in lets say one week ... that's what you should do too and you'll live longer :)

[egomaniac]

This update looks very unstable/incomplete.

Some of my rankings are fine. Some have dropped way down. My backlinks are down, which makes no sense at all. I checked and at least 3 PR5 pages that still have live links to me are not showing up in backlinks on W2 or W3.

Keywords in the title seems to be *less* important, and keywords on the page more so. But I could just be seeing some searches that are still in flux (I hope so).

[jurii]

hi there (first posting, tadaa),

Googlebot has crawled my site immensely during the last 2 weeks or so and now I see at www2 and www3 the 4 or 5 week old versions of my pages (at www there are the pages from yesterday).
Does anyone have an explanation for this?

I'd like to see my new pages again after this update, which can be found at www by now, but not at www2+3.

[Abrexa_UK]

Bradley,
I started a thread to dicsuss possible new PR0 penalties here [webmasterworld.com]. Have you changed anything on the site in the last couple of months? Can you think of anything that might be regarded as dubious on your site that could trigger a penalty?

[Helpmebe1]

hehee.. Slyguy... well its not as good as I initially thought.. but still a good boost... I dont think it picked up all the new products added but thats why then invented no-doz.. so you can work 18 hours a day and hope it picks it all up while spidering... I did see a nice boost in alot of products though... its all good... hopefully by next month with some more work we will totally rank awesome for all our stuff... back to work... geez... I think slaves had a less stressing job sometimes.. :)

[SlyOldDog]

Strange. Now WWW has updated with the data from www2.

Trouble is it's crap. The #1 site for my keyword does not even contain the keyword and it's in Australia for a keyword for Europe.

Worse still....Google's snippet is from my site!

What's going on google?

[creative craig]

Welcome to Webmaster World Jurii

...and the fun :)

[Helpmebe1]

Slydog.. I second that. www3 is good but the www from the www2 shows an ebay store ranking #2 for one of the hot new products.. whats that crap?

[egomaniac]

I am seeing junk as well.

I can find a training company that Google has swapped in the description of bratwursts/meat market store.

This same swap error I saw in the live database (www) last month as Google was alternating live indices on www (I believe that Google has been running two alternate indices for the last 2-3 months).

[gopi]

GoogleGuy... i beleive there is a major bug in this months update..my sites are showing cache from a month ago...and irrelevent sites coming in SERPS...

[creative craig]

oww the cache on all of my sites index pages are showing an update... have to check though for a few other pages for sure though :)

[Mr_Tickle]

For my keywords I'm seeing a lot of irrelevant results too.

There are sites on the first page results with good PR but with maybe just 1 of the keywords out of a keyphrase appearing just once at the end of a long title and just appearing once in the actual body of the site. The rest of the content is just images with no alt text at all.

For most of my key phrases except one or two, I have dropped about 30-40 positions at least. :(

I sincerely hope this isn't the final ranking.

[nancyb]

Hey guys, hold on for a bit. Don't get too ecstatic about good results just yet or worry if your ranks have dropped either. The dance has just started and there will probably be major shifts in things for the next few days. Just watch to see what happens over the next few days 'cause no one (probably not even GoogleGuy) can actually give you answers at this time - its the dance ;)

[lavapies]

nancyb... i hope you're right :-) I'm getting a lot of garbage results and weird placings. Please be right :-)

[onebaldguy]

I have noticed that sites with higher PR are ranking high, regardless of relevancy. I have seen several examples of sites ranking top 10 in competitive keywords. But they have very few or even NONE of the keywords in the page. I did a backward link check on one page that was ranking 6th for a very competitive keyword to see if the keyword was in the link text, but they had NO incoming links. The only explanation was that they got a huge number of links in just the past month (and they aren't reflected on the backlinks yet), which I do not see being case. Because no one would link to them with this keyword since it isn't relevant.

Congrats to those of you who did well. I can't say the same for us. We had consistent top 3 across the board for a lot of keywords. We did a campaign to get more links these past two months (not cross linking - they were good links) but we have droppped out - not even top 50. (Is McDonald's hiring?)

[MagicManiac]

Hi everybody,

First post in this group...

About this dance:
- I've put a new site online 11 sept 2002 (hope it's not bad luck ;-)
- Since then, it has been spider by Googlebot 3 times (always 1 level deep only - 41 pages)
- To my surprise, 41 pages have showed up in WWW the 20, 22, 23 of september and only those days. Got visitors of keywords searches from thoses pages. (From Google, Netscape and AOL)
- Today, only the homepage show up on WWW. But nothing on WWW2 and WWW3.

My question is:
Is is normal to have those 41 pages appeared this month for a few day and not even be in this monthn update? Do i have to wait for next month update?

Thank you all. Love this website. It's just Great.

[George]

YES YES YES!

Thanks Matt, thanks Jo, thanks everyone at Google and thanks to all of you at WebmasterWorld!

Yeee Haaa!
Paul's site is in www3, after nearly 12 months of being banned. His pain has been tremendous, after being misguided by a duff SEO company. He has even offered me a beer! :)

The sun is shining,
The sky is blue,
My Pal's in the google index,
...Are You?

Phew, and I though it could not get better! Thank you thank you thank you. (should I have charged more than a beer?)

George

[bobmark]

if the www3/www2 results hold I will have dropped from #5 on my most relevant keyphrase to off the map (I gave up looking at 100). This in a month where I added links (which show on www3), pages, etc. made no fundamental changes and had a "minty fresh" result as late as Sep 23 that made it look like I was taking a huge jump in PR as I was climbing dramatically in niche search terms.
Most of the sites now at the top are small niche sites (it is minimal comfort to see the major players also dropped way down).
I am still in Google and, oddly, still perform well on some niche searches.
My experience is www3/www2 results never change much from when you first see them til when they find their way to www. Anyone got a different experience to give me a ray of hope?

[creative craig]

This is my first "Dance" :)

I am sitting on the edge of my chair at work, the only thing is that callers keep interupting me... dont they know the dance is on ;)

[AkanDian rain]

I'm not seeing any of the domains I submitted in the index. PLEASE let them be there soon.

[mykel]

onebaldguy:
Same here! a couple of my sites that used to occupy the top 3 spots for months, if not a year, have dropped to the third page or lower. Maybe it's some larger algo change...

[SlyOldDog]

I have reason to believe NEW pagerank has not yet been factored in.

Hold your pants people!

[lavapies]

Bobmark.. my experience is pretty much the same as yours.. have dropped out for a few keyphrases that I ranked very high for previously and am higher for other keyphrases (for the same site). Hopefully it will all rectify over the next few days

[stuntdubl]

I think the major consensus is that Page Rank is calculated once the dance settles down.

From those of you who have been through this madness several times before, have you noticed any other general patterns as to what is calculated when?

I.E....is link pop calculated first......then link text.....etc. etc.

My major selling point on my sites seemed to be the onsite linktext, but they have all fallen dramatically, and I'm wondering if either, the weight of them was reduced or (crossing hands) it has not been factored in yet.