Well, it is the exact repeat of what happened last month, when Google rolled out its SERP changes for the month of July. Ironically, Google update was running parallel to the Yahoo! Weather Update. Webmasters all over the world were taken aback with this combined update methodology. To make matters worse, even Microsoft followed suite and began updating its ranking algorithms.
Now according to Webmaster World, Google has begun its SERP changes for August 2008. Webmasters have been reporting of numerous ranking changes and some Webmasters are even witnessing the resurrection of defunct 301 HTML pages from their old websites. The odd part being, that these pages haven't been indexed for the last two months and yet they are being displayed at the top of the search results.
Once again it seems that, Google and Yahoo! SERP updates are running parallel to each other and this will most certainly cause a lot of inconvenience to the Webmasters.
Here are some of the excerpts from the thread at Webmaster World:
“One thing I'm noticing is when I intentionally do a query that is one letter off and then click on the Google "did you mean" link, it returns one set of results, then when I click on the search button again the results are different even though the query is technically the same. The results after clicking on the search button are more in line with what I'd traditionally seen.
Perhaps Google is using different datacenters for query refinement results?â€
“It appears to me that Google has rolled back its index.
I am seeing thousands of old 301 HTML pages from back in April from our old site that have not been in the index for 2 months now, right back at the top of the SERPS.
We also in May refined a sub link structure on our new site that successfully re weighted our more important pages. The pages are weighted back to where they were prior to our changes.
This may be why some that were hit in June are back in business.“
“Still looking at other datacenters and the results don't match. Wonder why the DCs are out of sync. Maybe since they lifted penalties they are doing some MVT to see what the new results are like before they sync the Dcs?â€
“I just lost a #2 and a #6. There yesterday, gone today. The #2 still shows up in .ca .co.uk and other European data centers. Naturally these two were my top 2 traffic generators. Have a #4 that's still there, at least for the moment….â€
“rocco, I wonder if our site have any similarities? My site is a user submitted link list/search engine with dynamic pages. I also have reciprocal linking to my site. The content on may pages changes weekly but about half of the page content stays that same. Maybe we can figure this out.'
“Looks as if we've lost even more traffic now. We're down another 20-25%. Last month was our worse month in 1.5 years. So far this month we're continuing the downward spiral.â€
“This is very interesting to know. I own two sites that run this way and are both yo-yoing with these penalties every year. My oldest site was before google was king and is meant to be user friendly and not to play the seo game. Both site have thousands of outbound and inbound reciprocal links.
I know my biggest competitor don't seem to be effected much by these penalties and their site is run the same way. They even have double the amount of link exchanges. The only real thing I can see different from their site to mine it they have triple the amount of pages and new content added weekly, not just new submitted links. After this latest change I also noticed that links command shows a lower link count then before July 30th. Even my competitors are showing lower inbound links but it didn't seem to affect them like it did my sites.
One thing I was thinking was maybe it was caused by my page content not changing enough. One about 70% of my pages half of the page stays the same because of sponsor advertising and the bottom half shows newly added submitted link content. I was thinking the google bot was only scanning so deep on these pages and maybe thinking none of the page content changed.â€
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Navneet Kaushal, CEO PageTraffic is a trusted authority in the search engine marketing industry. He is a featured author at Web Pro News, Search Newz, Website Notes, DevWebPro, SEO Article and Web Help Now among many others.
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
It was and still is interesting to see some ups and downs of SERPs of many websites. Like one of mine went up to 2nd page and ranked 4 from PR2. So I m not worried for now but still there could be many issues later.
My Page Rank is going up from 3 to 4 by google. the Position is not changed stil on place 3 or 4 under webdesign Bremen in. By Yahoo my site is going up from the second site do the startsite position 8 if you search for webdesign Bremen. Thank you Yahoo. By other Sites example http://www.kaminholz.be or http://www.brennholz.es they are still not indext in Yahoo. They are listet in google but you cant find it in the results.
I dont think that googles PR has still the relevantes.
If you produce a good content website and leave it for 5 years, links will build up organically and your site will stay top. Problem with most sites is you all want a quick fix and try and kid google with ‘mickey mouse’ reciprocal links – to get fast top results. Google can spot this engineering of false links in its algo. our sites have been online since 1998 and we have never been involved with reciprocal linking, and guess what, we’ve stayed top on google for 10 years now. You can’t kid google algo. Like any tangible business, it takes years to build a reliable, constant business and it’s the same with the search engines.