Two posts ago we sorta predicted we think there may be some fairly significant changes to Google’s algo on the way, and currently under testing in public on their weekend index.
The alternative (2nd) index stayed in play on certain datacenters until early Thursday am, and was basically giving another radically different set of data results from the “norm”
Not just the usual flux by any means, but wildly differing results, and different pages within the site suddenly ranking for the usual terms, to the ones that normally (and are designed to)
As always it’s difficult to draw any solid conclusions past the fact that the new or “test”? index is looking at and ranking sites (ours and others we looked at) differently.
The term SEO Services for example was showing two different sets of data, one showing a stable 12,100,000 results, and the other 12.3 – 12.5 million. Over the 3 days from Sunday to Wednesday these seemed to “merge” with each other index (now showing a steady 12.3 million) and some of the newer wierd results stuck, while some of them disappeared with the test index by Thurs lunchtime.
Here’s an example of wierdness noticed this morning though, our main site page superior seo has been an unflinching, unassailable Google #1 for that term for the last 5 months or so since 2 weeks after launch.
However since Sunday it has dropped out of search results for that completely, leaving other newer blog pages to show up instead.
However, it’s now showing up here, at #39 (a new highest ever) for just “SEO”, where it’s always been the main domain that ranks for this.
This is fairly indicative of the odd behaviour we’ve been watching, it’s like they’ve suddenly factored in something new that is calculating things differently and has thrown our usually reasonably predictable readings all askew.
People will say “oh it could be anything, losing links from the link matrix, other sites overtaking you etc etc ..the list is endless”, and well, yes the list of unknowns is endless, but those kind of things don’t usually also give you massive boosts in other areas do they?
like this: Top 20 (& very briefly top 10) for SEO services on Sunday.
We’ve been googlewatching long enough and closely enough now to know when something’s radically different to the normal shenannigins, and this one is. It is a little odd that the forums aren’t all lighting up with the usual “Oh no! what’s happened to my rankings?!!” posts yet, but we still think once other people see this behaviour, they will start to.
Otherwise the alternative is that our site is suddenly “broken” in it’s intended structure but just as suddenly, strangely & randomly over-performing wildly in other areas, ..whilst having not made any major changes to it that could affect things for nearly 3 months.. ?
hmm.
ps. edit: forgot to say, the other reason we dont think it’s our site is that the weekend index also dropped one of our clients from their rock solid number 1 position for their main trophy and buying keywords to the second page - #12.
This would be pretty bad for them, and thankfully isn’t yet one of the weekend results that made it over to the big index upon merging.
of course we’re hoping it stays that way, but forewarned is fore-armed..
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Ive been seeing a lot of movement in a lot of sites since the last page rank update, i feel Google are making big changes.
Ive seen some sites crash from good positions but ive also seen websites gain quite well in competative areas.
Hi Gary. really? interesting.
haven’t seen too much in the way of changes until last weekend, but since then some of our client sites have made some major gains this week.
definitely think there’s something biggish coming.
this kind of stuff gives me heart palpitations. So glad I’m not the client that almost lost their top spot!!
@ Trinity I don’t think they can be happy with the differing results, they were pretty wild in places.
but unfortunately it can happen to us all at anytime.
“The Lord moves in mysterious ways..” was a good enough excuse to the people for thousands of years, ..don’t see any reason for the new God to behave any differently?
Hi Guys thought id come back with an update of what ive been seeing today, Halloween must have took hold of Google cause ive never seen so much movement and yes its scary!!!
Today i have seen a site drop out of the top 100 from the second page while i was on the phone to the client! The movement has been very drastic and ive seen websites moving position every 5 minutes. luckily they went back to their original place!
Ive also just been asked to explain how two people in the same room (on different PC’s) can see their website 40 places apart for the same keyword!
Monday should be interesting!!!!
really? yea it’s pretty radical movement isn’t it?
like shuffling the top 100. did you have a look and see which DCs were doing it?
i didn’t im afraid, however Aron Pratt has just confirmed the same thing after i comented in a google groups thread
here’s the link to Aaron’s comments
Definitely something big happening here in the uk and it looks like sites that have bought links from
textlinkads
backlinks.com
from what i can tell…
@ James, Hi.
can’t agree that’s all it is as we have never bought a single link for ourselves or our clients, and have seen many affected sites, some hosted in the UK and some not. cant think its just a paid links hit.
maybe were talking about a different thing to Aaron’s comments?
sorry, didnt say that you were, ibiza
i mean some sites that a friend runs have been affected but only for the deep link terms she bought from TLA and backlinks.com
for example – she had links to “blue widgets” manually and “red widgets” were bought from backlinks.com – “blue widgets” is fine…
it could be anything at this stage – we wont know for a while – but that was a common denominator in her sites, thats all.
just trying to give some examples of things i had seen.
The dollar and sterling in crisis, property prices plummeting, the beginning of a global recession and to put the icing on the cake Google tweak their algo to put hundreds if not thousands of webmasters into more financial ruin.
Great Christmas this is going to be.