Google truely is a mind-bogglingly powerful machine, it is the closest thing we have to The Wachowski Brothers Matrix at this point in time, and we’re betting that if or when a machine goes “sentient” it will be based not on Skynet Corporation, but a Google based device. Supposedly they are now rebuilding the www link matrix once a day now, an estimated 30 billion+ pages, at maybe 50 links average per page, and scoring, classifying and regrading an amount of links into the trillions every single day.
It’s no wonder really then that with all the immense amounts of variations with links coming in and out of the grid, of not only your site, but sites that link to you, and sites that link to sites, that link to you, and, the same with your competitors, every single site they are linked from too, that things move daily these days. The old days of stable Google rankings have long past, with the notable exception of strong #1 positions, almost every other keyword position varies pretty much daily. There are traditionally a lot of different reasons given for this including datacenter differences, personalized search, local search, inclusion of Video results in the index,Google’s almost constant dropping and reinclusion of pages (until they are at least 3 months old at least) but this is something more than that, today’s Google index is something more fluid still, and its only really this constant reassessing of the link matrix that makes sense to us, and seems to fit the patterns observed.
A stable site (ie without lots of SEO improvements coming online) generally has a “base” position for any specific keyword, and then oscillates around there with a + / – bounce factor going on, so if the base position is say #6 we can generally expect to find it at anywhere between #2 and #10 on any given search.
We’ve written before about how we go about ranking higher in Google, and about our Google watching habits and it would appear to us that there has been another fairly significant shift in something Google’s end, as noted by Jeffrey over in Chicago a week or so ago SEO as seen by search engines.
It’s of course impossible to know what it is that’s shifted, but we have definitely observed a subtle shifting of positions over a lot of sites in the last couple of weeks, possibly as speculated by Jeffrey, a changing in how Google scores anchor text in IBLs. Watching this across multiple sites, multiple indexes and multiple keywords simultaneously shows up definite patterns in the Matrix, and to us it looks as though there may well have been a reduction or change in the way anchor text is graded on inbound links.
The older and authority domains we look after have been virtually unaffected by this, and it so happens that most of the IBLs to these sites are old style, domain / web address links. Sites where we know we have certain rankings based primarily on certain links with anchor text seem to have mostly assumed new positions, often not very much different, but a definite shift to a new base position.
One more thing, to us the “weekend index” phenomena also (maybe?) seems to have calmed a little since the changes, leading us into ever more speculation about Google using it as the testing grounds for new results, or perhaps new algo tweaks to come, which possibly now been rolled out?
We would be interested to hear thoughts from anyone else who watches a lot of sites to see what you make out of the changing patterns and “ever-flux” these days, so genuine commenters please do feel free to avail yourself of our dofollow linklove, lame spammers will be dealt with as always.
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Why oh why oh why does it have to bounce around so much? Surely something as powerful as the matrix should be able to make it’s mind up definitively and stick to it!
See my Boutique hotels New York page for example. It bounces around on rankings almost as much as my Boutique hotels London page. Do you think there are a set number of bounces before the engine finally settles on a spot? and is there a direct correlation between the first bounce and the final position?
Hello Trinity, Neo here, but you knew that
no there’s no set number of bounces but there’s a reducing pattern in the intensity of bounce until it settles in semi-stable flux. depending on the type of changes made, there is a definite relationship between high entry point, first low bounce and eventual “resting” place, but the precise behaviour depends on the type of changes it’s responding to.
new strong links have a different behaviour profile to say page title changes, which are different again to other types of onpage adjustments.
plain title changes are the easiest to predict as links have an unknown weighting and aging and delay filters which we can only guess at.
for more detail head on over to Morpheus’ blog post on link behaviour or for advice on building links visit the Oracle.