Is Google updating? I've noticed some flux in my listings the past couple of days. Is anything major going on with the algo changewise?
I've gotten some pages added to Google with top ten position in the SERPS. Then they disappeared. I imagine that it's just flux but I wanted to check here.
yup they seem to be changing. I checked earning blog yesterday and today it looked different. Some of my other websites aren't updating somehow. weird
My biggest issue is with the SERPS. My sitemap checks out ok in Google Webmaster Central. The number of pages in the index keeps going up and down from a high of 851 pages of 831 in the sitemap down to around 150 today. Why is this happening?
I noticed my Kaka site moved up to the 11th page yesterday for the term Kaka, its still there and was previoulsy not ranked at all
I'm also finding pages listed as existing in the Google index but which are not appearing in SERPS for even the most exact search terms.
one of my site got the exact issue. i did not do any naughty things, so i don't know why. did you do something to make Google unhappy?
I don't think that it is a happiness issue. I used to use html sitemaps. Since Webmaster Central started I've been using XML sitemaps. At first everything was fine. Too fine. Out of 831 pages in the sitemap Google reported 851 pages indexed. Later it dropped a few hundred pages from the reported number of pages indexed. Then it started going up again. As it got to around 750 pages it dropped to around 500 or so. Then the number of pages dropped to around 450 a couple of weeks ago. I checked today and it was down to around 150 pages in the index. I just want to know why this is happening. My site is strongly geographic in nature. The pages are designed to be found by location. If they're not in the index I'm losing around 85% of my potential traffic/sales at this level.
Without knowing your url, it's impossible to speculate as to why. But since you say that your site is "strongly geographic" is it possible that your pages are very similar except for the specific geography? /*tom*/
id have said the same as longcal... if theres too much similarity its possible that they all got picked up initially and now google is dropping some of the pages because of too much similarity in content.
I work in the satellite tv business and have built a site to sell satellite tv services. It targets each county and town in my state so that potential customers can find what they want by entering something like "town st SatelliteBrand". Google seems to keep losing urls from the index of 836 pages. The high was 851 urls and was down to 160 yesterday. It fluctuates up and down and has been doing so for the past 6 months or so.
If that's the case then why does the number of urls keep going up and down over time? Since yesterday 16 more of the urls have come back into the index.
I've been noticing this with some of the classified ads that I've been placing on the web. They appear in the SERPS in the top ten and then disappear totally from the index the next day or the day after.....This seems more like flux though.
Yes, there seems to be a major change in the index coming. We have been seeing this for about a week with a significant change in SERP's and a drop in traffic. Whats strange is that all the data center checkers seem to be showing the old results but we are seeing the new results from one particular server and these same results on AOL. We are seeing A LOT of spammy results in this new index with many legitimate sites being hit - does not look good so far!
One way around this is to put rotating banners in your pages. This seems to decrease the similarity of the pages and is also a good way to build traffic with banner exchange programs that rotate the content.