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I was curious when I noticed I could not see ODP or Yahoo in my backward links on most of my sites, so I went and checked it out. Surprisingly, this is what I found:
In ODP the categories were GONE, for all my subject areas, and so were my listings.
On Yahoo, the categories seem to have a "PageRank penalty". One Yahoo category now has pagerank 3 where it used to be 5 or 6. The other has 4 where it used to be 6.
Since most people use ODP and Yahoo to get started, it would make sense that being dropped would have a big effect on PageRank.
Sure this is the AdWords algo.
And I agree that maybe this is the beginning of the end.
Only Google-SEO's end, or also Google's end?
cminblues
For a few minutes just now, I managed to have my toolbar reflect the updated PR. Several pages on my site (will) now exceed my homepage in PR where last month they were two below the homepage in PR and didn't even show up as a page when you did the "www.mydomain.com/page.asp?ID=1" search.
Now they are showing up and a good number of them are reflecting a "real" page rank. (Many do not, though - even some that are indexed - maybe it'll take a month or two of balancing out?).
And so, my theory is that there are a whole crapload of new pages that now have a real PR that didn't have one in the past. Your medium sized sites are taking the big hit because google managed to crawl all of the pages and give appropriate "real PR" ratings to all the pages on the sites. The bigger sites are not being hit as badly as the bot didn't hit the whole site, so proper PR hasn't balanced out the way it should (or hopefully will in the future).
There's also the long lived theory that new pages get a little bonus in the SERPS (not FRESH, but NEW). Therefore, it's possible that since there are gobs of pages that didn't have a PR last month, but do have one now that all of those pages are now getting the NEW bonus and will stabilize next month when they aren't new anymore.
Zat make sense?
G.
As I was checking my links just a few minutes ago ... first the Yahoo links weren't there and then they were back 5 minutes later. My PR also went from 5 to 6 and I moved up a rung in the directory from 5th to 4th while I was checking the second time.
Give it some time to see if there is as much of a disaster as you think.
Does anyone believe that Google would have introduced such a radical change when it was still trying to build its reputation for pure search? I think not.
Stacks of top notch highest quality sites have dropped out of sight. That would never have happened 2 years ago. Never. I agree with john316 that they could be speculating that their income may increase through Adwords.
History is always worth studying. If you look at the engines whose time has been and gone, their downfalls were almost always precluded by stunts to grab quick cash. The temptation is obvious, as are the risks... in Google's case even more so, because its reputation was strongly based upon recommendation and referral.
If this is indeed the scenario GoogleGuy and his pals should take a look at how quickly AltaVista sank.
The only other rational (business) explanation I can think of is related to the Yahoo deal. If this is lost and Yahoo is threatening to block Googlebot (for example) Google needs pretty quickly to establish a different weighting and crawling pattern. Could the current chaos in terms of lost quality could be possibly related to that? Perhaps.
The next few days will tell.
In a debate going back several months here, someone expressed the view that when Google falls off its lofty perch, it will not be because of the actions of someone else, but because Google itself blew it and created an opportunity for someone else.
The wolves are circling. Google really needs to bear constantly in mind how it got to where it is, and what it needs to do to stay there. If money is the issue, the money will come. Google, just don't do anything monumentally stupid. ;)
Does anyone believe that Google would have introduced such a radical change
The only other rational (business) explanation I can think of is related to the Yahoo deal.
This can VERY easily be explained by a very minor technical change. Not business, but physics and higher math.
You are welcome to your theories, and it is *possible* you are right, but I doubt it. I have done several searches that are similar to searches that I regularly do, and almost all the results are about what I would expect. I guess it just might be that I know how to search, or that I care about the results as search results, not as my livelyhood.
Google is still getting me relevant results.
The radical nature of the changes this time are not accidental. They are not unforseen. Technically Google knows what it is doing and will have known well before yesterday what the repercussions of the "minor technical change" will have been.
There is not doubt that this change is different. There is equally no doubt that very many leading sites (some of the best) have fallen. The question in my mind is why?
The only potential answers I currently have are:
a) Money (Adwords)
b) Yahoo
It is fine if you have no doubt, and you want to look at it from a business perspective. And I will even grant you that business decisions are in play here. And that decision is . . .
Not a single one of the sites operated by the SEOs on this site is important enough for google to worry about where they are in the rankings.
When they test the algo, they just want to make sure that "ford motor co." is at the top of the list when you search on "ford".
In the last half hour I have typed in dozens of search terms that are popping into my mind, and I only came up with one that seems to have irrelevant pages showing up.
All that said, I think there might be something to the Yahoo connection is Yahoo drops Google. If they take away any extra bonus for being in yahoo and just go by the PageRank, then that might drastically affect many results.
The decision to change and how to change is bottom line.
This is just silly. They change every month!
Their decision on "how to change" could very easily been to just stop the "go to hell" google bombing, and this is the unexpected result. I explained how this could easily happen in another thread.
ernie
Sasquatch, I can;t claim to have done exhaustive searches in all areas, but I do know my category. Last month 9 of the top 10 sites were valid (one was dying and had not been updated for ages). You could argue that 8 should be 3 or 7, 10 but all were similar sites with national coverage (I am talking "country adjective subject" as the keyphrase).
This month there are 4 links farms, 3 of which have a SINGLE page for the country being searched for, 2 tiny regionasl sites and 1 dead link. 7 solid sites have dropped from top 10 to 60 -150 and these represent probably 6 of the 8 largest sites in the category.
This is not "relevant results" I don;t think you can know what relevant results are unless you are familiar with the area. I can tell you that 500 page sites with tons of quality content in my category are off the map and single relevant pages on link farms and tiny sites have taken their place but if you don't knowe the usual top 10 how can you know that?
The Grumpus explanation could account for it, although the number of pretty large sites that dropped off the map - not just lost 5 or 10 places - might argue against it.
Google IS a business, and I think that one of their main goals this month with changes to the algo were based on a business decision. They were getting dumped on with bad press over "go to hell". They HAD to fix it, they did fix it, and there ARE casualties.
The change I mentioned in the other thread, would easily account for the changes to sites that go a good portion of their boost from lower PR site's anchor text.
Before this update I was reading here about all the terrible spam sites in the top 10 in different areas. And now I'm reading the same thing, but I suppose it is in different areas.
All I am saying is that from my search engine USER perspective, everything looks fine. google is in no danger of being supplanted.
The problems are from the webmaster and SEO perspective. Which is not of primary concern to google as long as they have they eyes to sell. There goal is to keep those eye's happy.
This is the reason why I'm scared with these Google new directions.
Ah, IMO, the AdWord issue HAS to do with webmasters/seo..
I mean that, IF the seo perspective become:
"I'll go buy AdWords 'cause I'm tired of these not-predictable changes/penalties",
THEN the webmaster/seo perspective IS relevant for Google.
cminblues
