Google seems to be dancing

It *could* be related to Google not processing 301's properly.

I think that's what happened to me in the Bourbon debacle.

 

Not sure I follow that, Will. How would that account for what people are seeing and what other people are not seeing?

 

One theory as to what happened in Bourbon was that Google broke the way they had been handling 301 redirects.

If I have a page called sam.html and it has ten inbound links and I rename it to dave.html with a 301 redirect, do the links still help dave.html?

Usually, they do. One theory is that during the Bourbon debacle, they didn't -- at least for some sites.

 

I remember. But how would that apply to the current situation?

 

I am experiencing wild differences with keywords on different data centers on a site that I have owned for 7 years. Some show the normal top five rankings and other don't find it in the first 1,000 results (including the keyword tracker api)... and I have never used any 301's on the site.

I haven't made any recent changes to the site so if this is a permanent change in rankings, it is a big shift in the google algorithm. I guess time will tell.

 

d'oh! Another theory down the drain.

 

Rut roh... I thought only one of my sites was hit.

Then I checked my AWStats for another one of my sites.

A week ago Saturday: 5,142 unique visitors
Yesterday: 3,702 unique visitors

And the "update" was only partially rolled out yesterday...

 

have you looked at the whois info for the sites that are doing good?

for one of my terms the youngest site in the top 10 was created in 99

google has finally found something you can't manipulate , the age of your site, if you want a site to rank good you have to go back in time and register it

 

My site is 3 months old and I am amazed at the rankings I received in the last few days. My traffic has tripled as a result. If there are changes being made, I sure like them.

 

The site of mine that was hit was registered in 1998- and has been up since then with no change in the registrar ownership information. Another similar aged site has not seen any change in rankings. Both are DMOZ listed, PR5, and have google reported backlinks in the 150 to 300 range (I have other sites with less and more backlinks that were not affected). No paid links or link programs on the affected site.

 

I don't think it says a lot if one site thats old lost rankings, I think it says more if ALL sites that are ranking now are old.

 

So far, it's DP theories 0, Google 100

 

I looked through all of my sites to see if any benefitted from this "update".

The only one that seems to have benefitted is The Java FAQ.

That site received 52 unique visitors yesterday, which is over 100% growth.

It was registered on February 11, 2005.

 

it the traffic from a specific term? or variety of small drive by content based ones?

part of the reason I like to make datafeed sites, is that usually updates other then the amount of pages they have indexed, don't effect them that much

 

My site that lost ranking massively was registered in 1997, hardly a young one.

 

If you are asking me, then both. I have a couple of keyphrases that are polular and bring in traffic as well as a lot of obscure phrases now showing up in my logs.

 

yeah asking everyone

I guess a better question is does anyone see any sites younger then 2000 that rank in the top 10? I found one thats from 2002

 

I'm seeing a lot of up and down movement as well right now. Terms going in and out of the top 20 all over the place. A lot more movement than I'm used to, so something may be up. No real point in panicking though, as its most likely not done yet.

 

If you look at the data center stats I posted on page 12, I'm #1 on some DCs and getting good traffic. The phrase has 17 million results in Google.

 

Yeah lots of jumping around across the board right now as well.