Comments on: Oddities From the Latest Google Update

By: Hon Hon

Hon Hon — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 04:35:04 +0000

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.

By: Doug Karr

Doug Karr — Thu, 28 Dec 2006 15:44:03 +0000

I love Monty Python.

By: Brett

Brett — Wed, 27 Dec 2006 03:11:02 +0000

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.

By: Christoph C. Cemper

Christoph C. Cemper — Tue, 26 Dec 2006 17:10:44 +0000

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

By: Distinct Barry

Distinct Barry — Mon, 25 Dec 2006 05:06:28 +0000

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.

By: Scott Fish SEO

Scott Fish SEO — Sun, 24 Dec 2006 23:47:12 +0000

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.

By: Rosenstand

Rosenstand — Sat, 23 Dec 2006 22:22:50 +0000

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 â€œunknownâ€ to Google when trying to see the cached version with the toolbar â€“ but the exact same page is ranking No. 1 for a very competitive search term. Probably Matt is telling exactly what he knows â€“ but something IS different.

By: randfish

randfish — Sat, 23 Dec 2006 18:22:16 +0000

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.

By: Dio

Dio — Sat, 23 Dec 2006 12:20:10 +0000

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.

By: Matt Cutts

Matt Cutts — Sat, 23 Dec 2006 09:51:16 +0000

I posted about this.