Possible Change in Google's Ranking Algorithms Today?

there has been a noticeable change in Postions and Listings since Yesterday

[aaaaa]

There now seems to be Less emphasis on "exact keyword order"
in the Title Tag (which Google weighs heavily)

There seems to be more leniency with Keyword proximity in the Title as opposed to exact order.

Also, possible the Meta-Description tags are being weighed more heavily.

Aol unlike Yahoo is now defaulting to the "expanded" search results.

(This is good news for some Geocities sites, that were penalized for being "subdirectories" and coming up right next under another one - for a search term on the Expanded results, but Not on the Condenced results).

[hakre]

ahh, good to know. i also realized that they changed the weight of the title position. but i think it's the same with keywords ;-(.

[Robert Charlton]

I ran some quick searches on a site I'm currently monitoring heavily, plus some older sites where I thought I might observe these effects, and I haven't noticed any of the changes mentioned. Possibly different sites and word combinations, though, will bring different things to the surface.

Yahoo still seems to be clustering on sites where Google returns two pages.

[aaaaa]

We had noticed the changes on January 8th - comparing them with the usual monitoring that we do during the "Google Dance" (which started about on New Years)

Comparing WebSites from the 1st through the 7th - to their changes on the 8th.

The changes are more like the sporadic "tweaking" that Google does to constant calibrate it's search results validity.

Also,

Google has now been spidering a full pages of listings for keywords in their Directory results for given search queries - no longer is one limited to just the "Description" used by the Dmoz editors as the only possible keyword results.

Although Google lists the dmoz description - but uses the webmaster's WebPage title.

This makes the Google Directory much more usable.

[Jane_Doe]

I have seen some larger than normal mid-update shifts for keywords/pages that I track the last few days. Some pages went up a few places, some down a few, one top ten entry got kicked out to the back forty of the SERPs somewhere. But overall it all netted out and I have not seen much change in total Google referals.

[aaaaa]

One way that I have found to verify any "mid-dance" updates - is to check All of Google's database centers for certain keywords:

Instead of just using ...

[google.com...]
[www2.google.com...]
[www3.google.com...]

you can type in the URLs to all of Google's Databases:

[www-ex.google.com...]

[www-sj.google.com...]

[www-va.google.com...]

[www-dc.google.com...]

[www-ab.google.com...]

[www-in.google.com...]

[www-zu.google.com...]

This gives you much more information about ongoing tweaking - and you can find out the possibility of a WebSite being "dropped" for unexpectedly during an ongoing "dance".

Sometimes there are technical Flaws in Google's technology that have nothing to do with Spam. This has helped me in pro actively minimizing this problem.

Also, occassionally Google will change the WebSite address' link to one of it's backward's links (that has happened to me twice", when the website is re-cached - it will go back to the original link for one or two days - then return to the wrong link.

I will then, sometimes submit the correct links to All Seven Data Centers.

[aaaaa]

[www-in.google.com...] & [www-ab.google.com...]

are out of "syn" with the rest of Google's database centers on many keyword queries - possibly, Google is embarking on another ranking algorithm modification.

[Liane]

Hmmmm, I'm not seeing any changes at all.

[aaaaa]

Google is either:

--> beginning their Google dance today...

---> changing their ranking algoritms...

---> or having database/datacenter problems

We are seeing some different results on different subdomains

( one search for "george harrison" )

---------------------------------------------------------

It seems that some people are able to successfully spam Google

a search for "posters" turns up many domain-redirects on the first several pages that are part of the same company:

[google.com...]

also, look what has been coming up at #1 for the ternm
"beatles lyrics" for over a year

[google.com...]

this site has never had anything to do with that subject - even checking the archives from

web.archive.org

and even checking the links

The next several sites have not had lyrics for months now...
apparently Google's link populaty will hard-code a site for a search term postion

----------------------------------------------------------

There have been several posts on forums about Google changing the url credit that a site is directed to from a search result...

although the original site appears on the Google cache-
the redirection is different.

contacting Google will get you a response that it is your server admin's fault not their.

[edited by: aaaaa at 5:11 pm (utc) on Jan. 24, 2003]

[lazerzubb]

--> beginning their Google dance today...
Wouldn't hope on it (not from the previous things they've done when there is an update)

---> changing their ranking algoritms...
Might be, they probably do very small tweeks every now and then, i haven't seen any "change" which have caught my eyebrowse the last week.

---> or having database/datacenter problems
I'm not sure about this, they do show very different numbers for very popular phrases, but the ranking seems to be the same on them all.

[aaaaa]

Google appears to have been down for quite some time!
There may be problems after all.

(Is'nt it nice to just go on AOL, or Yahoo Search, HotBot, EarthLink etc... )

[aaaaa]

According to OneStat's (provider of real-time intelligence web analytics) measures of Global search usage :

The 7 largest search engines on the web are:

1. Google 54.7%
2. Yahoo 22.1%
3. MSN Search 9.5%
4. AOL Search 3.7%
5. Terra Lycos 2.8%
6. Altavista 2.5%
7. Askjeeves 1.5%

All numbers are an average of the last 2 months.

Yahoo has increased about 2%, while Google has remained about
the same.