Update Trashcan!! Googles Latest Update Trashes Millions of Pages!!!!!! As the title says Google threw away millions of pages which I believe were all of the supplemental results pages as mentioned here. http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=610515#post5710565 I think we should call this Update Trashcan!! I am monitoring positions on Google top 2 pages for one of my clients sites. In the past two weeks many posted here at DP how their PageRank has gone to zero. In the current update I found Googles index has been reduced by millions of pages Here is an example. November 29 2007 video download 943,000,000 video downloads 545,000,000 December 19, 2007 video download 123,000,000 video downloads 80,200,000 ============================== The keyword term, video download - lost 820,000,000 pages and as such all of the PageRank that was exported from these pages was lost by websites across the spectrum. video downloads lost 425,000,000 pages..... Positions actually improved for the terms I am targeting...which I found odd considering all the links thrashed... but if the links Google sent in the trash with the pages were crap to begin with I guess it would only help... So as noted in Minstrel's thread Google combines the indexes into one by throwing away webpages......from my view point it seems they simply tossed all the supplemental pages in the trash..... and smiled as they walked off to go have a brew and laugh how easy of a job it was......
Those "lost" pages could still be in their index, but no longer score high enough for relevancy to those particular search terms to be included in those particular results. Also, if they rank so far down, below thousands of other pages, what practical difference does it make if they're included in those particular results or not?
lower number of returned results doesn't mean a smaller index. remember that number is only an estimation. could be they are estimating better. banning a couple of sites won't drop that number by hundreds of millions.
I do not put a lot of validity in the 1 - 10 of about 112,000,000 for keywordXYZ of Google. This number tends to fluctuate a lot from what I observe.
My sites also have lost a lots of indexed pages (from 1/2 to 2/3), but their traffic have doubled from that time... so... go clean more!
Right but its not the ranking we are speaking of... I think in some instances and as others noted the index grows and shrinks....but not 100s of millions of pages. I just find it odd Google says it now includes the supplemental pages but at the same time millions of pages disappeared... Seems like a conflicting statement as compared to the reality....
Huh, many of my sites that had few hundreds indexed pages and had lot of google traffic failed to 10-15 indexed pages, and almost none of traffic
Read Google's Offical Webmaster Blog. It may give some info, including the elimination of the supplemental index. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/