I have a new theory I'd like to share with you all for your opinons etc. If I were working at Google and I was faced with the "problem" of SEO's clogging up results and fighting against my algos, what would I do? I'd put results on rotation, shuffling them around pretty drmatically every week or so. I think that this is happening. Comments?
I've been considering something similar and called it "chaos" on google. What benefit is it for google to show the same results every day of the year? It needs shaking up. Shuffling/chaos/whatever seems like a perfectly reasonable result - not fun for those who are shuffled, but in google's eyes, it'd make sense.
They do shuffle them but probably base it on fluctuations in incoming links and actual click data rather than it being random.
I totally agree. This would keep SEOs in work though, as you'd still need to be in the running to be shuffled, lol.
I noticed this happening too a bit. It makes sense that putting the odd site at the top to see how many people stay on the site or bookmark is a good way to test the content of the site without actually looking at it. But there are some sites that seem to be locked in 1st position without inbound links or original content. That's what I'd really like to figure out.
Agreed. It looks like Google shuffles the results around the datacenters. Using the shuffeling to find what sites people stay at, is also a viable theory.
I don't think that G sees SEOs as the enemy. Spammers, yes. That said, I believe that G has stated through a couple of different people that shuffling the deck is routine and that doing so is their attempt to bring spam to the surface where it can be identified and eliminated. Certainly, since Big Daddy, I have almost never seen fewer than 3 sets of results across DCs for the KWs I follow. /tom/
i have a few Kw that been locked for 6 months + at 1st pos but do not bring any traffic wereas some go from 3rd to being inexsistent who knows what happens to them... these are traffic generators... two days i seen my traffic double from google then go back to normal why ? Probly dancing....
For un-targeted, long tail terms, that dont have lots of competition it makes complete sense that google has a part of its algorithm called "randomness". Keeps us on our toes and always thinking
Very Very good post. This has started happening since August where Google delists many pages of a site. Then in October they come back. It is scary though for some people that count on it. What I have done now is I have 4 servers on 4 different continents. 10 sites on each server and all sites registered differently. or another way of putting it "not all eggs in one basket"
this has been happening for quite a while, Google has lots of datacentres, some using one algo, some using another and a few 'playground' datacentre's too. Next time you do a Google search, mouse over the cache and look at the bottom left of the browser, you should see an IP address. Remember that because that is a direct access to that Datacentre and check from time to time and it will change. Bloody annoying when your trying to show clients a result and there in another country on another DC!
Yeah, I've had the same sort of thing happen on one of my sites.... it's a mini-adsense site .... no traffic at all as I haven't really had the time to advertise it, but some days you get about 10-20 people going to it ... just one day, then they are gone again for another couple of weeks. I really need to put some monitoring on the site so I can see where this traffic is coming from, but I suspect it's coming from Google and this theory of shuffling seems to fit my situation..
I think it is stupid theory. Probably some algorithms update data frequently and that is why we see everfreshness.