October dance Options

It was later than expected, and only just made it into October, but it's underway.

As expected, webworkshop.net is down slightly

Phil.

It will be interesting to see what happens. Particularly after last months dramatic goings on.

It was a bad turn for my hobby site - almost out of the top 30 for 'internet marketing consultant' for the first time since launch, and as for 'web marketing', where I was in the top ten a few months ago, I have dropped and dropped. It seems that inbound link text is a lot less important than it was.

Ah well, so long as my clients are still doing well (in fact, many are doing better) I have nothing to complain about.

Putting aside searches made as part of SEO and work, has Google generally improved or weakened its results do you think? I find that for my searching, Google has become just a little less relevant, but still ahead of FAST.

It doesn't look like they've improved the relevancy since last month's slump. I pointed out, after last month's slump, that 5 of the top 10 did for "uk holiday accommodation" (a term I often check) did not fit the search term. Before last month, all the top 10 were relevant. After this update, the top 10 will contain 3 bad results, including the 2 worst ones from last month - a France specific site and a world-wide site. One is up 4 places; the other is down 2 places.

It doesn't look like they accept that they screwed up the relevancy last month or, if they do, they haven't managed to fix it.

Phil.

My interest is the description Google gives now. The only part of mine that makes any sense is the one from their Directory. The rest is gobblety gook taken from the middle of my left navbar.

The first bit of text on my page is at the very top, and Google continues to ignore it. Will switch it to a header tag I think and experiment. If that sentence is still ignored, the old suggestion of putting in headings and subheadings in header tags is no longer valid.

Anyone know how come some sites have a date stamp on them and others don't? (Mine does).

Kim

What search term are you using, Kim? You can reword the text around snippets to make them read better, but it only applies a particular search term, of course.

Those dates come and go. It's the date when the page was last crawled. I hadn't noticed it until recently so I don't know why they display it. It may be that they only put dates on pages that had changed since they were last crawled. If so, it may be to do with their new Fresh listings; i.e. they want to show how up to date they are.

Phil.

Was using the highly competitive and totally out of my league "search engine optimization" for which I now come in at 26 - so that was a drop.

But I redesigned the entire front page (to make Peter and Sophie happy, tee hee) and that was picked up almost as soon as I FTP'd it for heaven's sake.

I'm going to play with my text. It's a carryover from when I could challenge Alta Vista and stroke my ego with jumps in rank on a whim. ha ha

For "seo and usability" Cre8pc.com always comes up #1 but who in their right mind would search on those words at the same time? :shock:

Kimala

I see your site at #32 right now, without the date and with the DMOZ description. Better to wait until the dust settles.

I shouldn't worry too much about the phrase "search engine optimization". It's a trade phrase - not one that people would normally dream up if they are wanting to know how to get their websites higher in the rankings.

Phil.

For \"seo and usability\" Cre8pc.com always comes up #1 but who in their right mind would search on those words at the same time? 

Well...

I did that search and saw you perched up there at number one. :!:

But, I might not have been in my right mind at the time.

Hi,

This is the first time I have actively watched the dance. It seems every few hours some of my keywords pages go from 1 or 2 to 10-20.

What I don't understand is the landing page that they are using. They use my homepage in almost all my keywords. Though this is nice for me it is not so nice for my visitors I would suspect. Now it is even changing my landing pages that were highly relevant and 1 to my homepage which is not as relevant.

When do you think it will settle down? What is "everflux"?

Best to all,

This is the first time I have actively watched the dance. It seems every few hours some of my keywords pages go from  1 or 2 to 10-20.

If you are looking at www, you'll occassionally see the new rankings, but they won't stay there for long. Do your searches on www2 and www3 to see what your new rankings will be like when the update is finished. They won't change much, if at all, between now and when it's finished. You can view the results from all 3 servers here.

What I don't understand is the landing page that they are using. They use my homepage in almost all my keywords. Though this is nice for me it is not so nice for my visitors I would suspect.  Now it is even changing my landing pages that were  highly relevant and 1 to my homepage which is not as relevant. 

They are listing the page(s) that they calculate to be the most relevant to the search terms. Perhaps your internal link structure is passing some relevancy for the terms to your home page.

When do you think it will settle down? What is \"everflux\"?

The dance should settle down in a day or two or three. Everflux is the constantly changing search results at Google. Read the first post in this thread to see it explained by a Google employee.

Phil.

I keep seeing it and I've just seen it again in the current dance. Google finishes the main updates when the calculations are incomplete. It's as though it takes 2 updates for new pages to have their full effect.

In this case, I added 1630 new pages to one of my sites in an attempt to move the home page from PR4 to PR5. They are all dynamically produced pages that visitors can see but spiders couldn't get access to. They were all spidered during September and they've been producing a lot of traffic since then. The September dance came and went but the home page's PR didn't change, and I deduced that it must take a helluva lot of new pages to move from 4 to 5.

No more new pages have been spidered since then and yet the home page's PR will be PR5 when the current dance is done. It took 2 updates for the 1630 new page to have their full effect in the calculations.

So it's worth remembering that Google often takes 2 updates for the results of some changes to be seen.

Phil.

I am trying not to freak out. Somehow my site, http://netpaths.net seems to have been labled as a spammer and *most* pages show a 0/10 PR in google. Im not sure what I did to get lumped here.

Im not sure who I am associated with, but its not good. I made no changes to the site, have no hidden info on it, and made no attempts to do anything subversive. The site has had a PR 6 for a year, and all of a sudden it is nearly blacklisted. The homepage has a PR 4, but many pages register 0. it reminds me of what happened to searchking, and i was a participator on their boards. could this have been the connection that canned me?

I could have had the homepage hijacked, but dont have a clue who would have done it. Is there an email address I can appeal to?

Hi cvos, you have my sympathies. It must always be so hard for an SEO to worry that they've gotten banned or penalised by a search engine. However, sometimes we worry too soon, so first, be sure this is a real penalty, and not simply a glitch.

Search for your backlinks in Google. If there suddenly seem to be none, or far too few, then it does look like you have a penalty.

If that is so, the next thing is to assess how you may have incurred it, and then fix the cause first. You don't have to share whatever may have gotten you into trouble, but do look for any of the following:
[list]

[*]A Zeus or automatically generated links directory. Regardless of what people with vested interests in Zeus may tell you, about half of all sites that add a zeus directory get the PR penalty by being insufficiently exclusive about who they list.

[*]Links to sites that have been penalised for artificially inflating their link popularity. Google regards links to penalised sites as suspect at best.
[list]

Nine times in ten, a PR penalty is caused by your out-bound links. Check every single one of your links and see if any lead to a penalised site. Your link to them cannot cause a penalty, but it can spread their penalty to you. If you find such a link, either remove it, or place it in JavaScript so that it is not functional to spiders and thus cannot be party to inflating the link popularity.

Once your site is clean, absolutely clean of any errors, you can simply wait it out and hope Google will revisit and notice. This generally takes a while, but it can happen (rarely). Next up the list is to email Google, and ask them, explaining that you have checked everything and that if there is a reason for penalty, that you cannot find it. That doesn't always work, but it's worth a shot, right?

If all else fails, and updates pass without your PR returning, consider banning Googlebot from your site for at least a month by robots.txt to ensure it gets dropped. Once you're sure its gone, you can remove the robots.txt ban, and resubmit or wait for Google to crawl a link to your site. That last one is obviously the last resort, but it seems to work when all else fails, unless the ban has been made very specific and lasting (implying a hand-edit at google).

Is the dance over?

There sure are some strange results. It seems like it is DMOZ, one description fits all.

Black Knight may have explained my PR loss. Some link directory put me in there database. I asked to be removed when they told me. They didn't. I asked again. They finally removed me after 1 month, yesterday. That is so sad, because I had gained many new links from excellent sites (including today The Washington Post!).

Maybe December...

Best to all!

Hi Caissa,

No, anyone linking to you (which could happen without your consent) can't harm you in any way, or so Google claim, but who your site links to can. They don't penalize you for the bit you can't control (links to you), but can come down on you like a ton of bricks for the bits you do control (your outbound links).

I am trying not to freak out. Somehow my site, http://netpaths.net seems to have been labled as a spammer and *most* pages show a 0/10 PR in google. Im not sure what I did to get lumped here.

I wonder if it's because you load the Google site into your frame. I'm sure that I've read on Google that they don't like that at all. Some interfering busybody could have told them about it.

Phil.

thats an interesting point. i'll veer on the safe side and remove it!

 
I wonder if it's because you load the Google site into your frame. I'm sure that I've read on Google that they don't like that at all. Some interfering busybody could have told them about it.
Phil.