Oddities From the Latest Google Update
Posted on December 22nd, 2006by Michael Gray in Google, SEO
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Man the latest update on Google is clearly showing some odd stuff. For example on one domain I own it says the site isn’t in google at all. If I do a site: search on the domain I get 300+ pages but everything except one is in supplemental. If I look back at the page with the highest pagerank for November it’s listed perfectly fine in Google with a cache date of 3 days ago (not tagged as supplemental). Traffic took a downward turn on the 17th. This site was also recently approved in the human reviewed yahoo directory in the beginning of December, so it’s not spam central.
I know all you googly people are off drinking eggnog but man this is the kind of stuff that just makes you pull your hair out and wonder what they heck did they do and why am I getting all this conflicting data.
Update: go see Matt Cutts Explaining algorithm updates and data refreshes
PS: How can there be three pages of people saying stuff is moving at WMW and Matt say “everything is normal“? Reminds me of the Monthy Python coconut exchange
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December 22nd, 2006 at 11:45 pm
Second time in a few weeks we’ve heard the same thing. I’m fairly confident that Matt believes what he is saying, but either some flunky is lying to him, or the flunkies haven’t realized that Hal has taken over their computers and is running amok with faulty updates/refreshes/whatever. There’s no doubt in my own mind that what I see is not some figment of my imagination. Normal operation? That’s sad, if so.
December 23rd, 2006 at 12:22 am
December 23rd, 2006 at 5:51 am
I posted about this.
December 23rd, 2006 at 8:20 am
I’m not sure if its part of the same problem, but since the 20th December I’ve been seeing a massive shift in some of the terms I kept a cursory eye on.
The problem with what I’m seeing is some sort of boost for authority domains - so much so that a load of relevant robotic comment spam on irrelevant authority site domains is pushing legitimate sites down the ranks. As they’re spambot comments they’re on an industrial level - there’s lots of these results pushing all the legitimate results out the window.
Please excuse the self link - I have posted examples of what I’m seeing and my less than expert opinion on why its happening. You’ll want to skip the couple introductory headers, the screen grabs are towards the end. Take a look.
December 23rd, 2006 at 2:22 pm
SEOmoz moved up to page 1 for “SEO” and of the few hundred rankings or so that we monitor, several dozen changed at least somewhat, though it wasn’t as dramatic as some others have described.
December 23rd, 2006 at 6:22 pm
We see exactly the same problems in Denmark these days. I see sites where a site. search returns 18 pages all in supplemental index. But the site has more than 200 pages, and around 100 of these rank in top 3 in Google.
Also I see pages, that are “unknown†to Google when trying to see the cached version with the toolbar – but the exact same page is ranking No. 1 for a very competitive search term. Probably Matt is telling exactly what he knows – but something IS different.
December 24th, 2006 at 7:47 pm
It’s not just google.com that is seeing results change, its all the other international SERPs as well. Id’ say this is pretty much a wide-spread change.
December 25th, 2006 at 1:06 am
I’m glad I’m not the only one seeing bogus results. The summary of my observations is that many authority sites are taking over good quality positions. However, there appears to be a lot of old information in the SERPs now (web sites we thought GOogle had taken care of…..) Pretty discouraging if you ask me.
December 26th, 2006 at 1:10 pm
Aaahh - thanks for this, and the discussion on Matt’s blog…
as I already posted 2 weeks ago about the “crippled site: operator” I’m happy to read from Matt/Michael/Michael’s discussion that the site: command DID change for others as well, as well as returns stuff in a weirdo-sort-mode … well - shortest url first is something I didn’t come up with…
what I still don’t get is that weird, non-relating numbers for the number of sites indexed and the cache date of that index page I saw
(see http://www.marketingfan.com/a/search-engines/google-cache-crazy-or-site-command-broken-by-intention.php for detail numbers )
cheers, christoph
December 26th, 2006 at 11:11 pm
Michael… I am not positive but I would guess that the problem you are seeing could be related to having too many inbound links from pages that are in supplemental hell.
I am having a similar problem with one of my sites but it is much worse because all of my rankings went to the crapper. I am manually going through and trying my best to remove inbound links from pages that are in the supplemental index that I can control. Anyway… not sure if this is the problem but it is a gut feeling.
December 28th, 2006 at 11:44 am
I love Monty Python.
December 29th, 2006 at 12:35 am
i had some problems over the last month, goo serps traffic was down about 80% of normal for old sites. but made a few changes and now traffic has doubled over the last week.