McDar Experiment

LOL Me too.....

The Tool looks great, I've just discovered this thread being a newbie, apologies in advance for refreshing it as such but I thought the tool looked too good not to be brought to the fore again...



Great Thread by the Way!




Eodcoin

 

It's time to refresh this great thread again because it's one of the most useful tools i know.

 

Damn right .... this tread is still very relevant, just wish McDar, Compar, Foxy and co would come back to it.

 

Are they still around these days?

Yeah, I sure do miss this thread...

 

Hi Guys!

I'm still 'around'. Albeit, not much posting these days.

I lost track of this experiment due to an illness but when I finally got back on my feet again - BIG DADDY had come down the pike...

BIG DADDY changed the game completely. (IMHO)

Another site of mine was hit hard at that time and I focused all my attention on documenting THAT site in an attempt to evaluate 'the NEW Google'.

Have any of you 'suffered' due to Big Daddy?

Caryl

 

Caryl .. You're waaaaaay back with stuff.

I'm sorry about the illness. A lot of us here were so worried back then when no one could give you a call or couldn't find anything new about you.

I'm glad you're bak though, and I hope you're alive and kicking!

 

Hello Cristian,

Are you inferring that 'Big Daddy' is OLD NEWS?

If so - I do not agree.

Every month I read of lots of websites getting bounced in and out of the serps.

I read of sites that are - just now - being effected by: Duplicate Content Penalties, www/NON-www penalties, -31 penalties, -950 penalties, on and on adnausium!

Some recover, others DON'T?

IMHO...

Big Daddy is not just an algo change, per se, it is a whole new system of organizing (dis-organizing ) data.

- Freshbot and Deepbot were replaced by 'Lazybot'
- The Google index seems to be divided into a primary, a secondary, and a SUPPLIMENTAL index.
-Links are counted/weighed much differently now.
- Page Rank (PR) seems to have taken on a new and IMPORTANT role

Nine of my sites were 'hit' on April 27, 2006 [traffic went from 1000s to 100s]. Then again on July 27th [traffic went from 100s to 1s]. I had 2 sites that escaped the July 27th 'attack' until Sept 15th. I believe this happened due to the fact that the 2 sites were NOT spidered as extensively as the other 9 sites.

That is where they languished [traffic levels] - UNTIL Jan 8th.

What happened? - In November I noticed that almost all (all but two) of my sites dropped from a reported PR5 to PR4 in spite of the fact that ALL had INCREASED the number of inbound links!

What did I do? - In mid Nov. I started a 'link campaign' to acquire a few "High Powered" inbound links.

Results? - On Jan 8th I have experienced traffic levels back into the 100s - on ALL BUT one site (which remains in the 1s - again - low spider activity).

..................

Here is my take on "How It Works" now (since BD)...

"Content is King!" - Yes, content is what makes your site a Cadillac as opposed to a Yugo !

BUT - Links are now and have been for many years - the GAS that gets that Caddy to where you want to go.

The difference, IMHO, since Big Daddy is that now your gas (Links) requires octane (PR) like never before.

Use to be that the road had only one hill (index) to navigate. If your keywords were non-competitive - hardly any 'incline' at all and a little gas would get you there. If your keywords were competitive - you would require more gas (links).

BIG DADDY introduced two additional hills in the road - Supplimental Hill (supplimental index) and Secondary Pass (secondary index). Now if you need to get to the top of Primary Peak (the Primary index - listed top 10 in the serps for competitve keywords), You NEED a lot of High Octane Gas (high PR/ relevant links).

Many sites, with few links that allowed them decent placement in the past, found they could not even make it up Supplimental Hill (they found their sites pages going supplimental). Lots of low octane links may get you up Secondary Pass (get all your pages listed in Google index is site:search) BUT most likely will not get you far, if at all, up Primary Peak (good placement in the serps).

CONCLUSION:

This new system has made us all vulnerable in a NEW way and I Believe has set into motion a chain reaction that may be very long lasting.

ALL of our sites are dependent on inbound links - to some degree (some more dependent than others). Over the past year, many good solid sites have gone through 'bouts' with pages being dropped from the index and pages being dropped into being listed only in the supplimental index. How do you think that effects the sites down the line that are 'dependent' on links from those dropped or supplimental pages? The next month may find those 'dependent' sites with de-indexed or supplimental pages. On and on, month after month...

What evidence do I have for this? Other than month after month of reading threads in forums full of webmasters panicing, - there seems to have been no clearly defined Backlink/PR update since early fall. Backlink reporting and PR reporting have been fluctuating - to some degree almost without stop and I have yet to see any stabilization across datacenters.

Oh well... Sorry for being so long winded!

I hope that if this post has no educational value - that it was at least somewhat entertaining

Good to be back,
Caryl

 

I am WAY new to this forum and to looking into the technical aspects of Google and SERPs. I have been online since 1998 but just put stuff out there and that was it. I never added links, never added directories, almost never added content but I did all that icky stuff like keyword stuffing, white on white text, etc. I got rid of all of that a few years ago because I learned it was not nice and wasn't going to get me anywhere except in the toilet.

Since that time I have been actively building the site. I have added content, changed the site up a bit, added an affiliate store and am actively building links.

I have almost blown my brains out a few times in the last few months because of my ranking in Google. Last week I was getting 3,500 visitors per day to the site and the $$ was rolling in. On Tuesday of this week I had 369 visitors. WTFudge?!?

On June 26th, 2006 I had 3,500+ visitors, on June 27th, 2006 I had 200. On July 17th, 2006 daily visits went back up to 3,000+. August 15th, 2006 visits plummitted (sp) to 350 a day and stayed there until November 11, 2006. Then November, December and January have been the roller coaster of up and down. Up a few days, down a few days. Blowing the brain cells out kinds of stuff. What did I do, what haven't I done????

So I suspected this many server and "versions" of indexes on Tuesday night. There was a post on Matt Cutts blog about it and he gave the actual dates that my traffic stopped. I think on Webmaster World's forum someone mentioned their problems on the same dates too, including the ones in January. Last night I found mcdar.net and that incredible tool to tell me where I was ranking on each set of c-blocks. It was all over the board.

9-10 for a certain keyword on 13 of the c-blocks
340-354 for a certain keyword on 5 of the c-blocks

How do all of those get in sync? How does a website know when the servers are getting rotated and the Google Gods going to shut you down?

This morning all the datacenters are in sync showing position 9-10 for all the c-blocks. So here is my concern about Master Google:

My main competitor has 2 sites and they are heavily linked back and forth to each other. They are not in dmoz either. The only other inbound links are from link exchanges. I thought it was bad to have 2 or more sites that link to each other. Out of 547 registered links on Google's backlink checker 433 come from within the site or the "sister" site.

My site has ONE site with pages within the site that link around. I am in dmoz but Google doesn't have that listed as a backlink for me. Why? Doesn't Google say that is very important to them? Maybe it isn't.

So what kind of links do we need pointing to us so that the Google Gods in all the c-blocks will love us? And how do we know when Google is changing and moving to new c-blocks? Can we assume if the c-blocks are all in sync right this minute that we will be okay for a while or will it change and blow us out of the water again? And what about the google toolbar and backlink checker, it is all over the place.

Sorry to be so winded and so inquisitive, and a horrible speller!

Rhonda Morin

 

Hello Rhonda,

Welcome to DP!

There is really nothing we can do to make the Google datacenters sync up. That is a Google "thing". It really is an indication that Google is 'changing or testing some things'.

As far as linking goes - I believe the strongest links to acquire are those single links (not site wides) from sites that are 'relevent in some way to your own'. For instance - If I sell sleeping bags - a relevant site would be one having to do with the outdoors or such. A game site or one on SEO would not be relevant to my sites theme. Now to add even more 'power' to that link, it would be helpful to be on a PR5 page or greater from a relevant themed site.

Work on adding good content to your pages and adding at least a few good, strong, backlinks pointing to your site.

Caryl

 

more thoughts on 'Google's 3 tiered Index' -

As I have stated previously, My one site has eleven subdomains. All had been severely 'hit' by Big Daddy back in April 2006 and NONE saw any recovery until Jan 2007. On Jan. 14th ten of the eleven subdomains suddenly showed a return to traffic levels not seen since April.

New Development:

Sometime between Saturday and Sunday traffic returned to a trickle for ONE of the ten subdomains that experienced a recovery. It had been heavily spidered on Saturday - Sunday only 2 hits from Google search!

A site:search showed absolutely no change in pages indexed. HOWEVER a check of the sites PR now shows that it is now being reported as a PR4 across the datacenters. It recently had been reported as a PR5. (?)

I admit - I have NEVER seen PR updates effect serps in real time - until now...

BUT - I have also abserved that "PR Updates" have not bee 'normal' for months!!!!!!!!!! In fact, fluctuation has been so constant, I have not been able to identify an actual update.

I think Google has totally changed how it is rating and using PR!

Anyways - I record every day - the results of Google site:search for every subdomain (among other results) The site:search for the sub that was 'hit' on Sat/Sun have been stable all along. In fact - other than the PR change - nothing else had changed!

On the other hand - My 'main' subdomain has shown stable site:search results for months and Jan. 24th started returning some funky results!
example:
998 of about 1,540 stable for months
BUT now getting results like this -
338 of about 1,540
183 of about 1,540
177 of about 1,540
149 of about 1,490

Needless to say this has had me very concerned that this would result in my traffic being effected - BUT it has not been effect yet(?) cross fingers!

I suspect that the site:search results come from Googles Secondary Index - While the serps are returned (primarily) from pages in Googles Primary Index.

I suspect that my recently effected subdomain, inadvertantly has been dropped from Google's Primary index. Why - I don't know. It seems more like a 'random' lost data loss rather than anything else.

I am just publically speculating here -

Any comments or input welcome

Caryl

 

Has this settled down now on Feb. 6, 2007? My numbers were all over the place but they are finally consistent and the traffic has returned. I am petrified to touch anything, add anything, link from anything, do anything. Because what if I do and that changes the game from Google's point of view and they start moving me around again.

From the Google Datacenter Tool you have, I was able to watch my inbound links go from one number all the way down to almost nothing across all C-blocks to back up to one or 2 datacenters having low numbers to all being back up again to the same number. I did notice on a competitor that she got a PR promotion.

It has been scary but I check and keep track every single day of what my numbers are and where the datacenter tool has me listed for that day. I check about the same time each day too because that seems to fluctuate as well.

Keeping fingers crossed,
Rhonda Morin

 

There is definately several different 'phenomenon' happening at this time!

I'm gald to hear that your site has come back and has seemed to stablize. I totally understand your 'fear' about making any new changes.

I added 100 pages on Sept 6th and on Oct 6th Google started returning screwy site: search results.

On Dec 26th I added 50 new pages and within a month (Jan 24th) Google started returning screwy site:search results again!!!!!

Caryl

 

Hi everybody: Nice to see my DP fav thread back to life. All this chat about linking n stuff (thanks Caryl for your take). I wanted to add another spin on this. I think that Google and the other ses are looking for other ways to determine a site's true worthiness.
Perhaps human reviewing is more of a factor.
Trust (rank) is an issue now.

What about a semantic web
www.w3.org/2001/sw
www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web

I agree that the new Google (BD) is here to stay. With it is much uncertainty. It seems to me that a slow steady flow of unique, relevant content is working the best these days. On the last (current) update the sites that faired the best were ones that had very few links and very ancient SEO. The sites that have link campaigns and my version of good SEO got no loven from DB. 95% of the IBL's that MSN and Yahoo show do not display in Google. Makes me wonder if there is any credance to the "over optimization" theory.

Cheers,


H

 

Caryl,

Hi, I've never spoken to you before but I've seen you around

Welcome back.

Talking about your subdomains...

Another change to the algo is that excessive cross linking can cause penalties - and I think that G has tightened up on this. Do you think that this could be an issue for your subdomains? Do they have sufficiently different content ..... not trying to teach you how to suck eggs, but wanted to let you know my initial ideas.

 

Hi Guys

I'm sort of back.....will be able to write more in the future....once things settle down and the chaos sorted.

In the meantime

 

just checking to see if Caryl (McDar), Foxy and the gang are still here or have you all moved on?

did the experiment ever end? if so, what were the conclusions? anyone thinking of trying it again these days?

 

I use this tool quite often. It is rather useful!

 

I noticed yesterday that Caryl's tool site was down...mcdar.net. I noticed today that the camping site, mcdar.com is down. I kept searching and found a reference to a phone contact to the camping site and that has been disconnected.

Anybody have an idea what has happened to Caryl?

Dave

 

I fear the worst .... Caryl and this thread is what introduced me to DP, it seems so long ago ago now. Back when there was a nice group of like minded people who shared and cared for each other.

I hope Caryl is well and all is good but I have had a bad feeling since she disappeared so abrutly back in 2006.