Anybody else noticed some very different readings on the SERP across their site’s KW’s this weekend?

These datacenters below have all been displaying a fairly radically different index since friday afternoon, and it almost looks like the site (our test site)  is working differently.

• 216.239.59.99
• 216.239.59.147
• 216.239.59.104
• 216.239.59.103

We have a lot of “experimental” pages of various different types on our site, the sort of things we experiment on are things like, exactly how far the “content is king” statement applies, or rather can be pushed.

We have content heavy pages, medium content pages, and light content pages, super-optimized pages, and pages written more naturally without every optimisation technique applied.

Then we have various levels of keyword emphasis applied via various strategic internal linking tactics, and well, yes “PR Sculpting” to a certain extent, although to be fair the efficacy of this is still not proven, but lets say it doesn’t seem to be doing any harm.

We also have pages with differing url and folder structures to compare against each other, and pages written to see how much keyword strength can be built into just how little content and still rank.

We really have all sorts of things going on that have obviously once crossed our minds at some point, with regards to how Google looks for pages as “relevant”, and that we could be bothered to devise some kind of test for.

They’re not scientific tests by a long way but they give a seat of the pants idea of how it works which is more how we tend to work anyway.

So, when right across the board, a site built like that suddenly leaps through the roof in some areas, and drops through the floor in others, that looks like the big G testing something radical rather than the by now, fairly normal weekend index

In effect what we have, on the “SEO” searches is 2 different indexes showing across different datacenters. Some hypothosise that this is raw Google data search before it goes through the usual filter, to become our usual results, but how would “raw” data be “leaking” out?

edit. 03.11.08 ... er whoops. turns out that is exactly what it is being reported as..

some data went into the index without all our quality signals being applied..

..lol, we were too quick to rule it out, hindsight’s a wonderful thing isn’t it? 

But something bigger than that is happening, from the results we can see, Google seems to be looking at the site differently now, in certain searches, older long established (and heavily linked to externally) pages are being overlooked for newer pages on the blog with no external links at all.

The point is, nobody really knows what’s happening except Goog themselves,  but even though we’ve been used to two different indexes at the weekend for a while now, if we were the betting types we’d probably throw a few scheckels on a bet that they’ll all be talking about the next big update in a few weeks time..

..update Ibiza it should be called..

Watch this space.