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..