I just can't get over how screwed up google has been the last couple months. They seem to be rotating new and old data into the mix constantly. BLs will get updated for a while but will then be reset back to values months old. Old caches appear. I don't frequent these forums as much as I should and I didn't see any other topics directly addressing google's broken state as of late. Anyone have any explanations of what is going on or why this is happening?
Go back and look at all of a members posts named COMPAR if you are interested in this and you will find these famous threads.
For about a week now I have a few sites oscillating between pr3 and pr6. It used to be pr6 around 4 mos. ago but has been pr3 all this year until last week. It seems about 1/3 of the datacenters show pr6 (the old value) and the rest show pr3. It may just be that with 8 billion pages it's bandwidth intensive to get the data centers in sync? In another instance, I have #4 for a term pretty solid, but every other day I have #4+5. More often lately it's just #4. That's annoying, I wish it would make up it's mind. Eric
I have a site that should be at least PR5, it has dropped to PR0-PR3 in the DC's, always shows PR0 in the toolbars and API. DC's that show low numbers of links are at PR3, DC that show a higher number of links are at PR0 Very frustrating as we have been concentrating SEO on that site.
The engineers have abandoned their posts and the algo is in full control of itself. It does what it wants, when it wants, with careless abandon. The engine is controlling the ship. The engineers have jumped overboard. (Or at least that is what it feels like).
I know the feeling, today G was showing the # of BLs for my site way down from what it usually is. Not sweating it, I know eventually they'll get everything straightened out. Frustrating, but what can we do?
Google is due an update fairly soon and strange things usually start happening around update time. I wouldn't underestimate Google though, I'm a firm believer that they do everything for a reason, rotating data, PR changes, SERP flux, update rollbacks, strange cached pages and dates, even if that reason is only to confuse webmasters! Don't underestimate them!
Noticed this as well today. My cache was from the 19th, yesteday is was from the 25th. Weird. ohhh. This is my 100th post!
definately some weird things going on. my backlinks dropped for my forums page from 375 down to 18. It was at 18 several months ago. it has done this 3-4 times in the past couple weeks. Really screws with my co-op numbers.
Well said, Matt. It's great fun to bash Google, and based on my rankings there, they hate me and my sites; but, it would be foolish to underestimate them or to begin discounting them.
One can always buy one's way to the top of the page in any keyword..... The program is called ADWORDS, give it a shake blokes
I don't think that G is screwed up. I believe that G is trying to improve its results by tweaking its algos in regards to inbound links. How, I'm not sure. Over time, I think that link relevance in regards to the content of each site will play a more important role with reciprocal links. Why not scrutinize one-way links to the same degree as reciprocal links? It might unfairly penalize sites that pay for advertising on non-related sites. Tons of SEO "experts" and webmasters have proven that Google-bombing can influence SERP's. This led to alot of garbage sites (irrelevant sites, Adsense driven sites, etc.) moving to the top of the SERP's. I believe that G is looking for the right balance between IBL's and site content. Duplicate content also appears to be a hot button with G (evidenced by the 301 problems reverberating throughout the internet). Google can't afford to stay still - Yahoo and MSN are slowly picking up market share.
They could completely devalue links and do better as far as providing relevant search results, but PR and the Toolbar (now the linking toolbar) are such a large part of their marketing and data mining efforts that they can not do this.
Or pick less competitive keywords. I do VERY well in my key phrases. Content is king and providing useful information in a form that people can use SHOULD get good rankings in a search engine with a minimum amount of SEO. I am still testing that theory on a couple of more competitive keywords and am so far seeing that "linkfarm > content" is still, unfortunately true. Hopefully the tools showing up at labs.google.com will let google properly rank sites based on content rather than linkfarming.
This is very true. In my experience with google, atlease the free part. They usually straighten things out and make em better than before. Atlease one of the 2, either 1.consumers or 2.webmasters.
G has recently been increasing its interest in that sitemap stuff. Also increased interest in BL relevancy. I just found that out today.