Well Google is updating their algorithm again and it’s wreaking havoc for a number of entrepreneurs who rely on their web rankings to get business.
To “improve” their search engine, Google is taking the first set of results for a keyword and testing them against a number of different ranking measures. If your site is in the first set then you may see the yo-yo effect of the term being at the top of the page and then at the bottom only hours later. If your site is not in the first set then you probably are not seeing any difference… yet.
If after the re-ranking your site score better than before you will rise to the top and if it scores worse you will drop off. It will likely take a couple of weeks to settle down so expect the bouncing around to continue.
Google is also sending a lot more pages to their supplemental index. If your page gets put into supplemental you will lose all but all of your traffic to the page. I have 15,000 pages on my site to monitor so it’s hard to keep up on all of them but it also allows for tweaking and testing without damaging the whole site.
What I have found is that some of the pages that went to supplemental were very keyword rich. I used to rank on the first page for these pages and suddenly dropped off the index. By lowering the keyword density of the test pages they were back to page one within a couple of weeks. We are now applying this keyword density lowering strategy to the rest of my pages.
If you have noticed a drop in your rankings and traffic recently, try changing the keyword density around and submit a new sitemap to Google to let them know about the changes. If your rankings are jumping around from day to day, hang in there – the update will settle down in short order.
Evan Carmichael
Thanks for the info. I wasn’t aware of this change.
Do you think that supplemental pages are included in rankings? I saw a note in Matt’s blog about this. But this is not working for my webiste. What about your experience?
Pratheep
Pratheep, from my experience the supplemental results are included in the rankings – BUT they are buried. Instead of being on the first page you could be on page 30 depending on how competitive the keyword is. Being that far from the first page is almost like not being in the index at all. People rarely go that deep in their search efforts.
Hi.
My site is over a year old, and I got on 1st and 2nd page results on Google for all of my keywords (even without many back links).
Then I have created and submitted Google site-map, with top priority for main page (it vent like that 1, 0.9, 0.8, 0.7, 0.6, 0.6, 0.6, 0.5,) And then I was drooped to about 10th page results for 90% of my keywords.
Thinking that something is wrong with the site-map I have submitted another one, that vent like that (0.5, 0.5, 0.5, 0.5, 0.5, 0.5, for all pages) that didn’t help either.
So I deleted entirely site-map from my server, hoping that I can at least get back on 2nd page results, as I was before without sitemaps, especially now when I have about 50 good back links and PR-2, and that also didn’t help.
I opened Google Webmaster Tools account and Google Analytics along with submitting the Site-map, and I found a lot of posts from people that did the same thing and they also got dropped right after doing so?!
I’m really confused right now, please help me! Thank you.
http://www.AMRestoration.com
Just recent sandbox, i think..
Do you think they are updating before they release the next toolbar pagerank? This could take a long time and would put the PR update past its normal length for updating.
Christopher,
I would check to make sure you aren’t violating any of Google’s filters. For example, if you have too high a keyword density you could be dropped very far down the rankings – especially with this latest update. I’ve had a number of sites get ranked initially and then get dropped because I had too high a keyword density.
Mike,
I don’t think it has to do with the toolbar update. They usually don’t come out at the same time. I think Google’s been hit with too many spam pages recently and are trying to improve their ranking results – and they are hurting a lot of good pages in the process.
Evan Carmichael
Hi Evan,
First of all thanks for your useful information or i can say it comes at the right time.
We were also affecting hard by new Google algorithm. Our site has always at no 1 and in top 3 by our priority key words but now a day’s environment changes suddenly.
If you have any idea or information just tell me that how much time it takes, do you think this will affect Google’s popularity.
Evan, when did you notice about google’s dance? You wrote about it on 11th and said will settle down in couple of weeks but I’m bit confuse its almost 14 days to go and I’m sure that G’s hasn’t fixed its algorithms and I regularly monitoring my website result and it always jumping up/down in same page.
I am bit scare of Christopher’s experience because recently I also added three google’s site maps and they are scrolling approx 35,000 pages of my website.
I always in loop and keeping my finger cross and hope well for me and all googleterian.
Raj Kan
Hi Raj,
I’ve found that things are settling down nicely. Depending on the data center that you are using you can jump a few spots but I am no longer getting the wild range in positioning anymore. I found that by editing the keyword density of the articles and doing more internal linking I was able to get many of my pages out of supplemental and back where they should be. 35,000 pages is a huge amount if they are all quality content. You should really look at getting more internal linking to expose the pages to Google.
Thanks for the response Evan, I am using google.com (us data center) and indexing fluctuating still there, lets see how we are going to settle down and visit your home site first time and you are really managing in well way… all the best..
Hi Raj,
There are MANY different data centers in the US. To test a data center out you need to put in the IP address instead of the url. For example check out some of these:
64.233.167.18
64.233.179.93
64.233.185.104
64.233.167.107
64.233.171.104
64.233.161.101
64.233.187.81
64.233.167.84
64.233.171.84
64.233.161.99
64.233.179.80
64.233.187.99
64.233.187.80
64.233.187.115
64.233.171.19
66.102.7.99
66.102.7.184
66.249.89.19
66.249.83.44
66.102.1.115
66.249.81.102
66.249.83.184
66.102.9.100
66.102.1.83
66.102.1.80
66.249.81.147
66.249.89.80
66.249.83.19
66.249.91.133
66.102.1.104
72.14.207.184
72.14.219.147
72.14.211.101
72.14.219.101
72.14.235.107
72.14.209.101
72.14.209.107
72.14.223.107
72.14.253.107
72.14.223.104
216.239.63.99
216.239.51.84
216.239.63.101
216.239.51.81
216.239.51.107
216.239.39.184
216.239.63.189
216.239.59.184
216.239.63.93
216.239.53.184
Hi Even,
I was traveling with limited access of internet, I used to check result in same way and I ran my search on all provides data centers IP but they all say same for search.
Data Center IP which is at my end: 72.14.235.104
what its show at your end?
Thanks
Raj
Hello
Very interesting information! Thanks!
G’night
Thanks for this
It does effect my site though, the ranking wasn’t consistent. I’ll try the lowering keyword strategy, thanks!
This is a great forum to explore the possibility of what has happen with the new Google algorithms for rankings and SERP. I have noticed the “yo yo” rankings over the last month. It’s interesting to notice how time of day and time of week seems to play into this. We at http://www.IMChat.com track the keywords very close. The pattern we have determined is that Mondays are the highest placement with a degradation down the week with a bottom out on Sunday. Has anyone else seen this happen?