November 2002 Google Update

Official

[dvduval]

Did I announce it first?

[MeditationMan]

Visit Thailand,

At first I thought your post was quite informative yet after having read it more closely I think it is arrogant and conceited to an extreme.

I thought it was meant to be amusing, myself.

[DotBum]

I liked what you had to say radiosky - in case my comment "conversation stopper" is taken as snide

And the amount of comments on it prove it was worth saying - albeit in a different thread ;)

I'd love a thread on this topic - especially interested in what steveb said about an association...

I'll shut up about non related stuff now

[bluecorr]

Hey there,

I redesigned, re-wrote all the site just in time for the Google dance. However I see now that only the home page has changed in google. When I click "more pages from www.domain.com" I still get pages that no longer exist. There are clear links from the home page to different parts of the site which shouldn't be a problem for googlebot. What can I expect now?

I am confused, how can the home page have changed if googlebot didn't drop by? I don't see it in the logs.

Thanks and congrats to everyone :)

[bobmark]

Related to the Radio Sky sub-thread, I agree with a lot of what he said (although I can see why Visit Thailand objected to the porn site tangent, which I presume was example, not meant as a personal afront).
In my case my principal site has benefitted from Webmasterworld advice and also, just because it is, by its nature, a large, content heavy site that Google has, to date (fingers crossed, spit in the ocean), liked. Having a ton of unique, content rich pages is very good insurance against Google disasters as, in my case, when my entry page serp plummeted for one major key phrase in the Sept algo change, the sub pages held or improved position.
Optimization is a lot more crucial for sites that are highly focused; if, by the very nature of your product/service you can provide everything customers need in 20 pages or less, you live and die by optimization (and by others' spamming if they bump you off page 1). I see a lot of good, honest sites that just don't get decent serps because there is not enough grist for the Google mill.
I think there's a tendency on posts here for people like me who have sites that tend to naturally fit Google's "preferences" to think good serps are due to our inherent genius, rather than just a happy co-incidence of decent design and Google's deep crawling that loves all our content rich pages.

p.s. Halloween, Thanksgiving...any bets on December 25th.?

[Radan]

Hi guys,

this is my first post in this forum , and I am no SEO at all, so please be a little patinet with me.
I have a website (available in my profile) which is in the dmoz Regional Category since last month. Now I have heard of Google and Pagerank and things like that so I downloaded the Toolbar to look which Pagerank my site has. I was shocked to see that it has a white bar. Shouldn't it have a higher PR because it is listed in the dmoz?
Or maybe there is something on the site that Google does not like?

Radan

[vitaplease]

Any first observations on general algo changes?

Looks to me as being one of the quietest updates in months,

with the Webmaster page on Google collecting all attention.

[Brett_Tabke]

It's turkey day here in the us and everyone is getting their game face/feedbag strapped on.

[lazyz]

I've got my links back!

[vmaster]

The PR for one of our sites seems to fluctuate between 5 and 6 during refreshes. Since the site was PR 5 before the updates, is this the sign of an upward jump in the PR after the update is complete ...?

[drew22]

Finally hit the elusive PR7. Thanks Webmasterworld!

[rfgdxm1]

Nobody has brought this up yet, so I will. Does anyone think that from what they see in www2 and www3 the algo has changed much? From what I can see looking at some non-commercial SERPs I regularly watch, results are very close to last months. Sites tend to have roughly the same ranking they did before.

[ciml]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld, Radan. If your site has only recently been given links from other pages that are in Google then there should be no need to worry. It takes up to two updates for links to show.

I agree with vitaplease; this seems a very quiet update. Must be the turkey as Brett suggests.

[Tropical Island]

First let me say thank you Google for returning our site to it's previous locations after being out for a month due to a server change.

I am still surprised that one site with a blank page consisting of a link to itself and another to the password protected reporting page continues to be in posistion 1 for one of our main keywords and posistion 4 for another.. The Google algos have still not picked this up. This is a completely blank page with no hidden html. Here is the listing without the url.

Index of /
Index of /. Name Last modified Size Description Parent Directory
25-Nov-2002 20:14 - stats/ 26-Nov-2002 03:58 -
www.xxxx.com/ - 1k - 26 Nov 2002 - Cached - Similar pages

This has now been in the index for more than 5 months.
Does anybody have any comment?

[jady]

Results look good - just wondering how the PR is going to be this time around.. :)

[radiosky]

Hmm, what a response.

To Visit Thailand, arrogant? I wasn't attacking porn sites. In my half-hearted attempt at humor - I was trying to say that if you can't write content or pay someone else to write it, build a site not relevant on heavy amounts of content. ie, lots of pictures.

I am tired of webmasters slapping together rehashed content, free content and old content with a few word rewrites, putting it on a commercial site and competing with a 100 more just like them. That's lazy.

Dino - If adding original content, making my pages friendlier to the search engines, and gaining theme links is considered SEO, then don't tell my mother because she will be so disappointed in me. I would call that SEF tactics because they come nowhere near having done anything that would be covered in the controversial document released by Google the other day. If you want to call what I did SEO, go ahead. I don't care. I am just joe shmoe who took what he learned here and made it to the top 5 on some competitive kws. I didn't have to hire an SEO "expert."

[edited by: radiosky at 4:13 pm (utc) on Nov. 28, 2002]

[nancyb]

It will now be 18 months that my site has been penalized by google. The home page returned to a PR5 last month, but obviously this was a new kind of penalty because internal pages were still no where to be seen (all white or grey). Same thing this go round.

If I was some multi million company that should have know better but pushed the system anyway, I could understand this heavy handed policy, but I'm just one person and I cleaned up my act soon as I discovered what I was doing wrong. That's been months ago and still no reprieve.

[skirope]

PageRank calculation finished? :( Mine never moved and got 10 new links from PR4-6...

[Made In Sheffield]

Apologies if someone else has brought this up.

Does anyone think it has been intentional that Google have done the update on two celebration days, Halloween and Thanksgiving, or is it just a coincidence? Can we expect the next one on Christmas day?

Or if they're going for every 4 weeks on the dot then it will be boxing day.

Or it has nothing to do with either and I'm just rambling :)

[troels nybo nielsen]

GoogleGuy already answered that!

[rfgdxm1]

>It will now be 18 months that my site has been penalized by google. The home page returned to a PR5 last month, but obviously this was a new kind of penalty because internal pages were still no where to be seen (all white or grey). Same thing this go round.

Throw away the domain and start over if you have the Google Death Penalty.

[webguybri]

Googlguy,

Cj.com affiliate links are getting indexed...;(

Example: (not real url)
http://www.qksrv.net/click-5896586-854265
....would be a redirect to:
http://www.my-web-site.com/catalog.html

Both are getting indexed.
www.qksrv.net is cj.com tracking url.

Thousands of people use it. What are your thoughts.
Wouldnt this be considered dupe content?

I am sure i am not the only one with this problem.

[IanTurner]

I wouldn't trust any PageRank changes until the update goes live - there is often fluctuation in the unstable time.

[vik_c]

Iantuner, I'll vouch for that. My page had one rank and I refreshed it to see another :)

[ikbenhet1]

the good old update again.

still have no backlinks showing but the rank is pretty much te same as last month and all months before. I remember once i said in this forum somewhere i would like it if webmasters coudn't use the link: command to find my backlinks. Maybe this is what happend last month, i should be happy, and i think i am.

this month's update for now i't looks like good relevant results to me, wow.

[thunderpaste]

Happy Thanksgiving everyone. Thanks to my new SERPs I think it will be a Merry Christmas as well!

[Go_Madrid]

Anyone know of a guaranteeed method of showing the new PR during an update?

I've tried changing the GoogleHome registry key to point to www3.google.com and whilst it does show a different PR the first time you visit a page, it soon reverts back to the old values. At least that first time gives you an idea, though.

[instand1]

Enter "yahoo.com" in the new Google: The results are presented in a new (interactive) way. Or was this introduced before this update?

[echelon]

So far so good...

www2 is showing my over 300+ pages of content I had deep crawled.

My PR is going up from a low 4 to a solid 5.

I went from #27 to #13.

My competition went from #20 to #50.

If this holds, I will be a very happy camper :)

[europeforvisitors]

I think there's a tendency on posts here for people like me who have sites that tend to naturally fit Google's "preferences" to think good serps are due to our inherent genius, rather than just a happy co-incidence of decent design and Google's deep crawling that loves all our content rich pages.

I've done quite well in Google, and I attribute that entirely to Google's good taste and my good luck, not to any genius or SEO knowledge on my part. :-)

Indeed, I think that SEO is one of those areas where "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing." I try to provide helpful "spider food" in the form of descriptive titles, headlines, etc., but that's as far as I go. Today's killer SEO technique is likely to be tomorrow's death sentence, so I figure it's better to focus on content and let Google do the rest.

[rodpuga]

Is the directory PR shown on www2 and www3 the future PR after the update?

If it is, thank you goolgle! I am getting +1 PR on all my websites!