Interesting post from GG on the latest update (found via ThreadWatch). webmasterworld.com/forum30/29621-29-15.htm
Thanks for the heads up Dominic. I am quite happy that the update is not over yet. It could of course mean that the remaining aspects of the update may not be so nice but then again maybe they will be.
whatever is going on, I rank top 10, 20 for some very very competitive keywords, and I'm pretty happy about it I hope it will get better.
The results are definately very sporadic. A site which I thought just broke out of the G sandbox has returned to the bottom of the heap.
Excuse my denseness, but i'm really out of the loop, and just curious about all this, pretty new to SEO and all that. Is there any official statement out? Who is GoogleGuy? And why is this named "Bourbon"? And does anyone know what is really happening? There seems to be vastly different results across datacenters, it's confusing. The link was good though, thanks!
GoogleGuy is a staff member from google who posts at the forum listed from time to time, so imo pretty 'official.' That forum tend to call google updates after a huricane or something, this one being Bourbon. One a while ago was called 'Dominic' so I don't think it's stupid to call them after huricanes or whatever it was as I get a Google update named after me!
I believe it is WMW (Webmaster World) that has dubbed this "update" Bourbon...for an upcoming conference in New Orleans. You will see GoogleGuy referred to as GG many times.
Cool, thanks a lot, good to know. =) Too bad he didn't elaborate on what all was involved in the update, or did he? Just that it's only fractionally finished.
Gotta wonder what the 0.5 is? Must be 'part B' of an earlier improvement or 'part A' of one to be completed later.
So this is more than just a little SERP adjustment and PR update, we are going to be seeing a new G algorithm. My site has been in the sandbox, so any changes are welcome! Maybe others will not be so pleased....
Thus far, the new SERPS resulting from this update have been so awful as to give Bourbon a bad name. They should have called this update Schlitz Malt Liquor.
This kind of thing is the whole reason that original content is important. There will always be ways to game the system, but with this kind of thing keeping everything unstable it's all about making the most of the time you spend on top. With good content those (tens or hundreds of )thousands of users will keep coming back after you've fallen to the wayside in the serps. This also explains my adsense earnings today. Double a normal day with no discernable change in the serps. I bet I had a high ranking for something briefly
Some of the 302 redirect bug got fixed in February, my hope that .5 is the rest of it. Current serps across datacenters kind of remind me of that... they were showing similar but different results, and propogated slowly.