Google seems to be dancing

I don't think Google is sophisticated enough to attempt this yet, nor pull it off. (If that is what is happening then they are clearly not pulling it off). Relevant links is all about degrees and shades.. Something that would be extremely difficult to implement in an algorithim. You can't just declare exact duplicate fields are the only acceptable links. And links that make perfectly natural sense would be discounted because they didn't get covered in the computations. I would seriously doubt they are there.

I guess they could do black and white comparisons. Ie if you have a link from you sewing club to a porn site, they might discount it.. but again I find that doubtful....

I know everyone wants to figure out what is going on, but all these theories seem to be fairly short on support or evidence.

 

#5 on a main keyword of mine is a slashdot.org member's profile page. Eh? No text, just a url. Wait, its #4 now. Talk about relevance Star wars site is #10. LOL

 

They could just make the default value of a link very low (assume an unthemed link), and slowly update on an incremental basis so the processing hit isn't immense. Some sites (based on age? dmoz inclusion?) would have their subjects evaluated at the start and the recipients of these links would maintain their rankings. The ones who didn't would initially see a huge drop in rankings as the importance of their inbound links is in the default state. Then as Google crawls and evaluates those links their value might increase and rankings would start to re-appear.

 

They already do this degrees and shades thing in an automated way -- Google News!

 

I agree with Will, I'm seeing the same thing. A long running domain that never depending on directories and does not realy do link exchanges has dropped like a rock. If I remember correctly I had google do about the same thing to this site last year about this time, it was temporary that time but did take awhile to dig out of the hole.

 

It could just be possible that google hasn't fully applied backlinks yet. I still think sitting and waiting is the best plan ATM.

 

Yes it is, but applying an update to show googlebot some fresh content doesn't hurt

 

I like this part

 

UPDATE: (edited 5:26PM) My site is now showing up at position #12 on 10 datacenters. So, now we'll see if it keeps going in that direction or revert.

216.239.37.99
216.239.37.104
216.239.37.105
216.239.37.147

216.239.57.98
216.239.57.99
216.239.57.104
216.239.57.105
216.239.57.147

216.239.63.104

Caryl

 

I didn't believe you at first.. but I'm back to 10 DCs as well. Cheers to the 'hiccup'

 

That is interesting. Maybe one-way links are now being counted as unnatural, since most of them probably are unnatural. What we are seeing would be the fallout from discrediting sponsored / paid links or what google deems as sponsored or paid.

The directory style link exchanges may just be a coincidence, but there does seem to be a large number of these type of sites that have become banned over the past few days. About 15% of my link exchange partners have been banned, covering many different topics, over the weekend. The other observation that I made, is that every site that I was linking to that got banned, had some form of paid advertisement (Adsense, etc.) in the body content of the site. Possibly google has been taking a harder look at sites with lots of paid links on them, and ensuring that the site is worthy of being in the google index.

I have seen people in other forums talking about removing links from signatures. I still don't think this could have a positive effect. Google still isn't going to penalize for link, they are just not going to credit them in ranking a site.

 

Some observations:

I have 40+ sites that are in a wide range of sectors. While I don't claim to know the reason for the latest rankings shifts, I have been looking at my sites for the last day and have made a couple of conclusions which are still preliminary, but perhaps others can confirm or discount my findings so far.

It has nothing to do with directory submissions as has been suggested- that I am positive of.

I'm seeing sites WITHOUT a large number of google backlinks ranking for some VERY competitive keywords. Some sites have as few as 15 reported backlinks - PR2-PR4 sites which while not new, would never have ranked before the last couple of days. Most of these sites are sites that were registered years ago- however I have sites that are over 7 years old that were negatively affected so I do not think this is a sole determining factor- but could be a bigger part of a new algorithm.

While checking whois information, I noticed a lot of these now high ranking sites have registered for more than one year i.e. domain is paid through 2012 etc. Domain registration length was mentioned in the google patent but I personally didn't give it much weight at the time. I've never paid any attention to how long other sites have registered for, so perhaps renewing for 5 years or more is common and there isn't anything related to this latest development. I use autorenew on my sites so I don't know if there is anything to it - but it was mentioned in the patent so it "may" be relevant.

I posted a couple of months ago about a conversation I had with someone from "G" that I had run into at a function in San Francisco and while nothing specific was said, I understood that they were concerned with the selling of text links to increase rankings and that "something" was going to be done at some point. I have a feeling google has greatly reduced the reliance on text links- perhaps not across the board, but from certain types of sites.

I have noticed lately that "inanchor" are a much more accurate judge of ranking position vs. allinanchor. Perhaps google has gone in this direction - which makes sense if they want to limit the sale of links to increase relevance. While I ran co-op on only a couple of sites, I had weight pointing to a number of my sites and these seem to be the hardest hit. Perhaps a discounting of text links is partly responsible?

Finanally, a lot of the sites that I see ranking well are not what I would classify as "well optimized" - I think it is also possible that google has done something to sites they think are over optimized. I don't consider any of my sites over optimized, but I guess a change in keyword density could be partly responsible.

In looking at all my sites, including the ones that have seen an increase or no change, I can't see any one thing that is responsible. At this point I am going to guess that google has made a major change to its algorithm that has hit a large percentage of SEO'd sites that were optimized knowing what google ranking have liked in the past. I think they have gotten around to doing something about "text links". JMO, and it's not a statement of fact, just a guess at this point.

Also, I received a letter from google Friday regarding an issue I had with someone stealing my content. It was a personalized letter, not the normal auto or general reply. While it has nothing to do with this issue, in the letter it states "Please be assured that your site is not currently banned or penalized by Google." I mention this because this site has the most co-op weight pointed to it of all my sites (still not a whole lot). While I never saw any improvement in rankings from the co-op with google on this site (MSN yes) - it means there wasn't any negative affect from pointing weight to my site. I know that has been debated over and over again.

 

That's an interesting observation. We deal mainly with real estate and travel web sites and we are trying to convince link partners to submit mini-articles (2-3 short paragraphs) with 1-3 links in them to enhace the credibility of our categorized links pages (i.e. real estate agents by state). Our goal is to have 2-3 of these mini articles per page, then a limited amount traditional links below the articles. If there were too many links per state, we would then break the state pages down by region.

What I am seeing in the current real estate SERP's on Google are a lot of "catch-all" sites coming up near the top. For example, the site would contain various forms of information about a region, some of which is real estate related. And I'm also seeing cruddy, topical directories, and news or pseudo-news sites showing up in the top 30. For many locations you need to go outside the top 10 or 20 before you find an actual real estate agent.

Granted, I'm looking at a relatively small sample size. I still think that Google puked itself and we will see more big changes in the next 3-4 weeks.

 

Just a theory, I wonder if Google is simply trying to rebuild their database so this upcoming xmas the directory is as solid as they can make it. I did see something similiar to this last year about this same time with my current site that has been nocked down. If that's the case I realy think it's a temp problem, don't think it'll be permanent.

 

Didn't read the whole thread but just wanted to give the changes for me:

My site reached the #1 spot (from #6) which I am happy about (now it needs the same in google.se)

DMOZ descriptions no longer used - but was some days ago.

 

I'm not sure it's going to take 3-4 weeks. There's going to be a lot of changes on a daily basis until things settle down and this (whatever it is) filters through their database.

 

Are the results still changing for anyone. I think mine have been pretty steady since this morning.

Maybe this update is rolled out. Hopefully not, but maybe.

 

Just another observation:

Take a site like www.[b]xyz123[/b].com,
when I search for "xyz123" on
www.google.[com|com.au|co.nz|co.uk|ca] I'm number one as expected as nobody else writes about xyz123 in this world (20 results or something like that)

now I go to www.google.[dk|co.jp|com.br|fi|de|..] and I'm #14+ and above me are sites about: 123xyz and zy21x3 and stuff like that.

(And the xyz123-site is in English)

So to put another theory in: Language of site + language of google you are using must match or else you will not be found in the top of the results.

@edit: (I used to rank #1 in thos google.co.jp thingies too before this update)

 

Mind saying some actually stuff that means anything to anyone other then yourself?

Like how you optimized, whats differenet about, what level competitivness is the term you are targeting?

 

I don't think it is over, Jstep. Wishful thinking on my part but I think we have a roller coaster for the next few days. Hold on to your boxers, it's going to be bumpy.