For our site the Art of Love some of the main Serp places have been replaced with product pages of amazon and things like the Yahoo directory. No link buys, or other stuff, some recip's but that are really only a few. I also noticed that the real 'aged' pages, did not take a hit at all. Sites that look nearly death. Bus as some of the more experienced SEO's advice, I dont try to panic lost about 5000 uniques a day though.
I manage 38 Travel related sites The sites I buy links for remained in their top positions. The sites we most actively do reciprocal linking for remained at the top. The few smaller sites that lost rankings (a few places, eg. down from 1 to 2 or 3) have been replaced by good sites. I shouldn't complain, the sites that replaced the few I dropped for are good sites. (not seeing any spammy sites replacing ours). The smaller sites that lost rankings have been a bit neglected in the last 3 months in terms of adding/trading good links. These observations seem to go against everything I'm reading but those are my facts.
Heh, I kind of agree with this. I've seen a ton of spam in the serps. I think google might have tried something that didn't work out as good as they thought.
Over at SearchEngineWorld GoogleGuy had this to say: Seems like there will indeed be three stages to Jagger.
I still maintain that most of what we see is because Google is having "ISSUES"! I made an interesting observation this morning - quite by accident!!!! As I was recording the allins for my one experiemnt page I just happened to notice this return for allinurl:sleeping bags: Please note: the url (www.mcdar.com/camping1/Sleeping-Bags.htmand the cache date of Oct 23, 2005 when you click on the Cached link you get... That is because I changed the url of the page to the lowercase sleeping-bags.htm back in April 2004!!!!! There is no page named Sleeping-Bags.htm on my server I tell you - Google has got things screwed up. Caryl
I think whatever they're doing it's obviously to make their SE less easy to SPAM. Problem is they are totally screwing up their results in the process. I use Google less and less especially when I'm looking for something "new" like the latest celebrity incident. Google's tendency to play favorites IMO will be their undoing. Their apparent love affair with blogs and "old" sites causes (in my eyes) their results to be less up to date. Rendering them useless when searching for current happenings unless you use their news feature. Thing is their news feature has become a necessity due to their inability to keep their results relevant and that's a bad thing... The average new blogger takes forever to get in but once they get in they become automatic authorities because Google needs their entries to keep it current. Because my blog is "old" I blogged about PHP a few days ago and instantly shot to the #1 and #2 slots on Google for the following terms: php_self filename str_replace _ php includes title tag wtf?
I agree, at the moment Google's SERPs are well screwed. I'm seeing many many things that point you towards pages that no longer exist - or sites other that they should. a simple search xxxxxxxxx.com brings up the normal array of things, links to site: link: related: etc. Often all these more advanced search links point to information for various other domains. I'm seeing this for a lot of sites, not just my own.
Personally, I'm subscribing more and more to the "lost data" theory. I almost feel like going back thru every URL where i lost rankings for and trying to figure out when the page was created and seeing if there is a pattern for it or not. Didn't GG say they implemented a new binary or something? Could be, that if they did, that the new binary doesn't get all the info it needs from the old one, so they are sorting out the data from the most recent crawls.
Johann, When I first started recording cache dates, I saw some curious results (as shown in previous post). Usually, these things are NOT that easy to spot! So, well over a year ago, I started including a line like this in my meta tags... <meta name="Date" content="10/18/05"> (The date would reflect the last time I modified the page) This way, I can always tell the true version of the page Google is using for the cache page. BELIEVE ME - if you start following this on a daily basis, you'll be surprised at what you'll find. Caryl
The only real information we have to go by is what is found in the patents by Google. And judging from everything I've seen so far, I would narrow the changes down to: 1 - Stale Links. My site that dropped from PR5 to 2 had no new links since the last PR update. My pharma site that gained ranking power only gained a few links, but I think the people that were above me didn't get any links so they were penalized and dropped from the first page. 2 - Stale Content. My blog site only gets about 1 post/month right now (I really gotta fix that lol). My pharma site had 50 pages added over the past 3 months though. The other sites I worked on have about 500 pages added to them an they maintained their rankings. 3 - Quality/Relevancy of Links. I see alot of people buying text links from high PR sites to avoid the Sandbox Effect. So they'll setup a site about viagra and buy text links from an astrology website that has really good PR. It gets spidered fast, but thato 200,000 links you just bought are not relevant and greatly outweigh the related links that you got. All link buys/sells that I do now are strictly relevant links only and I have never been penalized for that. Does anybody have sites that were penalized and didn't violate any of those concepts?
The page I monitor extensively, on a daily basis is named sleeping-bags.htm. It was created, brand new, on April 7, 2004. The original name WAS Sleeping-Bags.htm BUT I changed it to all lower case within the first few weeks of it's existance. SO, the page Sleeping-Bags.htm has NOT existed since sometime in April 2004! Caryl
Its the server doing it. mcdar's server does not know the difference between: Sleeping-Bags.htm and sleeping-bags.htm so that's why they both come up (it works for every page on that site). My yahoo store will cough out a 404 error if I change from lower to uppercase on my page names. That is very interesting! Are any of the inbound links to that page going to the upper case version, or only to the lower case?
iirc, a Windows server isn't case sensitive when it comes to file names in url's - I believe Caryl uses windows. Take a look, you'll find you can change the case of any letter and it will show fine. http://www.mcdar.com/camping1/SleEping-BaGs.htm
NO it is NOT my server! Google is trying to say that is a cached page! Even Googles checksum for that page is different Sleeping-Bags.htm cache:LNEgNZQhi50J sleeping-bags.htm cache:ZmuFn7M2RqMJ This is a very controled experimant page. ALL of the links pointing to that page are exactly the same... <a href="http://www.mcdar.com/camping1/sleeping-bags.htm">sleeping bags</a> Caryl edited to add: Indeed it is a Windows server. Where Google came up with the Sleeping-Bags.htm, after all this time, is a mystery!
That is very curious indeed Do you lend any credence to the idea that google is filtering out "overly optimized" anchor text as suggested the other day on the forum? Too many inbounds "exactly" like you'd want them to be makes them mean less to the site and this causes an allinanchor drop?
NO - A very similar thing happened with allinanchor during Googles February/March Event. The page results both for position and allinanchor returned to normal once that event concluded. Here is the position and allinanchor for this same page recorded at 4 different times during the same day.
Thanks. I'm getting it now. I never paid attention to your constantly updated thread much before, now I do. It is some good analysis. Wish we'd see more of it with this update to try and figure it out. 9 Days in; its getting very hard to watch the site sit with low rankings, being the 4th quarter and supposed to be the busiest time of the year.