Google December 2002 Update!

[ihadtoregister]

STARTED!

[Zapatista]

I am hoping you are right. I seem to remember it was kinda like that last update. But when people here declare this data center or that data center complete, and I go check there and see this happening...not good.

[aspdesigner]

Zapatista, I have seen this happen the last few updates myself. Wait a few days for it to stabilize, and you may see some of those top listings drop-off. It almost seems like some of the spam filters don't kick in till the end of an update.

On a related issue, at the end of the last update, I noticed that I was not doing as well as I had hoped on highly competitive searches. I also noticed that freshbot listings were not active (i.e. - every listing just said "Cached" with no date.) But then when the freshbot listings came back, my ranking went back to where it was before! This seemed to confirm something I had long suspected - that a freshbot listing might give a slight boost in rankings. Has anyone else seen this apparent boost?

[Made In Sheffield]

wruk999

hosts.sam is no good, you'll have to change it to just hosts.

Just waiting on www-dc now, all others done.

troels_nybo_nielsen, I believe www-zu is not a live data center, so searches get redirected to the other data centers, which is why the results will still fluctuate. (same goes for www-sj)

[nutsandbolts]

I see what you are saying about the final positions aspdesigner with every update. There is no point worrying/getting excited/jumping off a small building until the darn thing is settled. As GG says, take a few days off to rest (or, even better, add more content and quality links to your sites!) and wait till The Fonz is finished jigging.

[xlcus]

Looks like the new deep crawl is underway, or at least it's getting started. I had a few hists from the deep-crawl bot at 04:17 GMT this morning.

[troels nybo nielsen]

[webmasterworld.com...]

[sparrow]

Has anybody noticed anything strange about this update?

A competitor of one of clients site now comes up as being translated from chinese, when searching for "widgets" but when searched for "widget" the old cached version of their site shows.

I've seen the chinese translation throughout the update in all of the directories, www, www2 and www3.

Anybody have any ideas?

[spinoza]

I see the same results accross the board. Can anybody confirm this (or not)?

[troels nybo nielsen]

So do I. And I don't see fluctuations in my pageranks any more.

[kiddo]

This update is weird.
For my website, there is no change at PR but dramatically
decreasing in visitor. From 5k to below 2k.

I wonder when will this end? anybody know?

[Jakpot]

"anybody know?"
The Phantom knows.

[Made In Sheffield]

Looks like it's over, www-dc is on the new index so that's all data centers over.

[Stefan]

Yes, it looks the same across the board now. I'm not seeing fresh tags anywhere yet. I wonder when they'll be back.

[Made In Sheffield]

Not seeing Fresh tags but my fresh pages from 31st December are in.

[freejung]

aspdesigner,

Fresh listings clearly get an assumed PR of some kind, related presumably to the PR of the page freshbot found the fresh page from, I guess. Anyway, all last month my new site was PR0, but whenever I got crawled by freshbot, my SERPs showed up as if I was about PR3, at a rough guess. Fresh rankings are definitely better, though I don't know if you have to have fresh links to get the bonus or not.

[freejung]

The new results have showed up on Yahoo, I think that's another indication that it's over.

Made In Sheffield, I see the same thing, fresh crawled pages from Dec. 31 but no fresh tags. We'll have to see what happens when freshbot comes back.

[freejung]

Also, this brings up an interesting point about the Yahoo listings. I've noticed that the fresh rankings do not show up in Yahoo. So this gives you a way to tell the difference between your fresh and (non-fresh? stale?) rankings The real rankings are what shows up in Yahoo, the fresh only in Google, as far as I can tell.

[troels nybo nielsen]

On one of my main keywords I see strange differences between www-dc and www-va. Www-dc shows twice as many pages and the #6 page moves forward to #3 and pushes me down to #5.

Something seems still to be going on.

[Made In Sheffield]

I'm seeing identical results on both dc and va. Don't know what's causing the discrepancy you are getting, unless it's to do with Fresh listing, perhaps because DC is still in the process of being updated (the second half of the servers is still being done but the first half is done which is why we now see the new index) it is not including Fresh listings?

I'm still getting cache links to other data centers when searching on www-dc which usually indicates the Search is getting redirected.

[aspdesigner]

Freejung, what I have seen is where there is a noticable jump in rankings from the time a new update stabilizes, and when Freshbot listings appear again a few days later. It does not seem to be based on "new" or changed pages, just an apparent ranking boost for pages that have been freshboted. This seems independent of the PR, appears to be a special freshbot "boost" in the ranking algo. Has anyone else noticed this effect?

[EquityMind]

efactory is proclaiming that the dance is now over as all of the datacenters have been updated.

[rfgdxm1]

Yeah, looks finished to me. Time for someone to start a thread for analyzing what has changed in the new algo. I'm still scratching my head on this one. I can't figure out how my main site has fallen to page 2 for a critical single word search term, while someone who put up a Usenet post of mine from years ago on an abandoned, old Angelfire site with low PR is *beating* me and on page 1?!

[sem4u]

That's the Google Gods for you!

[Jakpot]

Really tired of being jerked around by the Dances. Thinking
'bout hanging it up.

[Markus]

efactory is proclaiming that the dance is now over as all of the datacenters have been updated.

Well, that was me. Actually, Made_In_Sheffield (BTW, Nigel, nice to see that you enjoy the dance stuff, too) has it right, but since none of the URLs resolves to the old index anymore, I thought who cares...

Some of you guys spend way too much time watching the dance. I'm out for a drink... :)

[Hollywood]

It seems right when the Google.com dance finished I had a slur of hits from AOL? I think. I know google supplies results to AOL but any idea what this is below, it all happened at once?

Confused, I may need a drink soon to.
----------------------------------------

04 Jan, Sat, 17:18:41 cache-rl02.proxy.aol.com MSIE 6 Windows XP
04 Jan, Sat, 17:20:44 cache-rl07.proxy.aol.com MSIE 6 Windows XP
04 Jan, Sat, 17:21:44 cache-rr06.proxy.aol.com MSIE 6 Windows XP
04 Jan, Sat, 17:25:10 cache-mtc-ac03.proxy.aol.com MSIE 6 Windows 98
04 Jan, Sat, 17:25:39 cache-rh06.proxy.aol.com MSIE 6 Windows XP
04 Jan, Sat, 17:26:05 cache-rg01.proxy.aol.com MSIE 6 Windows XP
04 Jan, Sat, 17:26:48 cache-mtc-al06.proxy.aol.com MSIE 6 Windows 98
04 Jan, Sat, 17:27:58 cache-rp05.proxy.aol.com MSIE 6 Windows XP

[Tomcat]

Beeing kicked out here once without own postings, just my 2 cents:

I reached #1 again after 3 months of feeling a little sick!

:)

my boss really will like to see that, coming home to the office from Sanibel Isle

[aspdesigner]

Hollywood, accesses from AOL users go through their cacheing / proxy servers. It is not unusual to see a different IP address for every page request from an AOL user!

[rfgdxm1]

Right aspdesigner. AOL isn't a true ISP, but an online service provider.

[EquityMind]

I did really good on this crawl, appears very relevant and predictable - all of my new clients got very good rankings for some very competative keywords and they are mostly brand new sites. All of my ongoing clients maintained their exact same positions (or higher) on page 1 while their competitors bounced all around.

Happy times here :)