Anyone experiencing weird fluctuations? My site was #7 for a popular query and I searched today and it's not even on page 7 (I didn't go any further). How does something go from page one to page-who-knows-where. However, it is still #6 for the query if it has quotes on it, so I'm not banned. I don't understand...
Same thing here. I had a site which was #4 for a term on Dec 22 and today is nowhere in the top 500 for no apparent reason. I hope it is a glitch, otherwise I am clueless what caused this.
Try doing a site:www.domain.com command ... I had similar thing happen ...from 4th to 780th .... In the site: command , My indexed pages are below my Supplement pages which are non existant pages long deleted. Seems the latest Google supposed NON-change ..... Funny how Matt Cutts can say there has been no change this month, when the number and scale of complaints have scaled to heights not seen since Big Daddy.
data refresh became more frequent (roughly daily instead of every 3-4 weeks or so) So he is saying that 10 year old sites with top rankings for 2-3 years will start jumping 500 places every day cos its normal?
Nope. however the way I am seeing it is.. In reply to authentic aged content sites dropping over 500 pages due to a 'data refresh' MC answers ... We have had no algo updates, 'data refresh became more frequent (roughly daily instead of every 3-4 weeks or so) well over a month ago. My best guess is that any changes people are seeing are because that particular data is being refreshed more frequently.' So, these drops are to be expected .... Turfsniffer, if you take a look around various webmaster forums, you can see the amount of confusion these data refreshes are causing. This didnt happen in November or October ... so I am presuming that something is happening in December. Either that, or a large number of sites had major changes during December which has severely affected their SERPs.
As reseller posted over at WMW it was a bad data push and also the effect of recovering the data push that occured. If your site has gone south over christmas keep checking on http://64.233.189.104/
Turfsniffer, Whilst I commend your love for Google (I use them for Search too), sometimes, we just need to admit that they have made a mistake. Let me quote an example .. if you do a search for Cars on Google. 1st place is cars.com ... which to me is good. 2nd place ... check for yourself For me its a disney page for the Cars Cartoon. 3rd place.... a movie review site for the cars cartoon. It might be me but if that is normal for Google ..... I might consider changing my search engine of choice.
Actually, it maybe just me as 5 out of the 10 results for cars is about this Cartoon. Now suppose that as good as the cartoon may be but I was actually out of touch with the REL world and wanted to find an authority site about automobiles. I can try to type car into Google and go the the second placed ranking and buy myself some property in California.
My site was ranking for its domain name on page 1-2 a week or 2 ago now its on page 11! A lot of sites above me are sites linking to me. All my MySpace resource sites have dropped big time in Google SERPs. Come on google... sort it out!
Hang in there, folks. One of my client's website was down for months by about 50% and yesterday it came back stronger than ever. Google seems to be in the midst of a year-end cleanup.
You're right about that "stronger than ever" thing. I checked this morning, and my site came back as #6! Good stuff.
Well saying that I "love" Google is a bit strong but it is my preference to use for Search. We already know they made a mistake which is exactly what a bad data push is. Now looking at your example of the search terms for car this brings up the expected results for car. At least the disney url is relevant to cars even if it is a cartoon but more importantly at least it isnt a result relevant to buses, ringtones or something off topic. Also, search for cars on Yahoo and you will see the same result at number 2. Actually you will see a redirect url for disney at number 2.
Exactly Kabbi. When most of us bitch & moan about Google we seem to forget they bring us the most traffic and for FREE! So what if a company has a glitch in tweaking their system that we benefit from? Name one company that is flawless in using technology.
None, that is why businesses have tons of networking engineers (which is what I want to be when I "grow up"), because things are constantly going wrong that need to be fixed. Most of the time, the problems don't get big enough to reach the public, but we're all human, and sometimes it does.