Google Update?

**nasal69** · 25-09-07

I've been checking some of our organics positioning with Google today and have seen a vast improvement from the last time I checked about a month ago with quite a few page ones on some key terms. Has Google had an update? Is anyone else seeing improvements?

We have recently undergone a lot of improvements in our affiliate sites including adding news / blog sections with improved in site linking and writing better content so hopefully all this hard work will continue to be rewarded!

(Hope I haven't spoken too soon!)

**tbp** · 25-09-07

I`m not sure whether its an update as such...

I monitor my sites daily, and lately they`ve been receiving a lot of google love, moving up the rankings, and new sites getting indexed at into position 2 in 24 (and previous ones this has happened to have stayed there). My search engine traffic has gone up considerably in the last week.

Not sure whether its an update, as it wasn't a snap thing, its happened gradually over the last couple of weeks. I think its tweaks to the algo they use rather than an update as such.

**nasal69** · 26-09-07

Nice one. thanks for your reply.

**cyates** · 26-09-07

google started a massive update to their algorithm in july and its starting to die down and starting to take effect

ive seen dramatic increases in rankings for extremely popular terms ( with over 300m results ) in the last 30 days

**gunneradt** · 26-09-07

I wish I thought google was as scientific as that

my sites spend one day in and one day out of google

seems to depend which way the wind is blowing

**Affi Liate** · 26-09-07

Hi Nasal69,

Something big has changed in my oppinion yes.

A significant number of my sites have had a massive positive hit on traffic from google organic. (A few have dipped though).

I'm sure you're right about your hard work paying off though and deserve the benefit.

My feeling is that a lot of sites have been shifted down though.

We all know that many sites that are well established in general terms often rank high (P1) simply by having just one keyword that matches a search result.

From what I'm seeing (at least in my main areas) less of these general sites appearing now - thus I have moved up significantly (again rightly so)

I may not be right in general - but something HAS changed in the last 2 weeks or so for sure. I don't think your post is coincidence.

Affi...

**gunneradt** · 26-09-07

Ive seen this shift move up and down aboput ten times this year all alone. One of my sites gets about 800 uniques on a good day from google, and on a bad day about 50. There doesn't appear to be any rationale behind it.

**tbp** · 26-09-07

All of my sites have been fairly stable, don't move up and down. Almost all have moved up in the last couple of weeks though.

Seems to me google is going back to the old way of doing things, and tricks that previously get you banned now work again. Could be no one tries then now because they still think they`ll get banned, so google thinks they`ll roll back quietly.

One thing I have notice though is that im getting a lot more search hits from non specific terms. Eg if someone searchs for wordA wordB, instead of having to have the two words next to each other eg "wordA wordB", it will take them from anywhere in the page.

So now Im getting lots of hits on queries that don't actually exist on my pages, google is making them up its self by combining random words on the pages.

Obviously this is in no way a scientifc analysis of whats going on, just from what i`ve seen based on my own sites.

**gunneradt** · 26-09-07

my traffic had shotr up again about 10 days and then dropped like a stone this morning. It'll be back again next week. Ive seen this happen countless times. I don't think there's that much methodology in it from Google. I think they attempt tweaks without knowing the effects. Then they tweak again and sites pile back and vice versa.

**tbp** · 26-09-07

Yes, unfortnately these things do happen.

Touch wood, my own sites have been pretty stable recently, moving up a bit and staying there. They aren't jumping up and down the rankings though at all.

My problem is with yahoo, which every month deindexes a site over the course of a week, and then reindexes the next week. So every month, I only get 2 weeks of traffic, as theres hardly any pages there for the other 2 weeks.

In the end though when it comes down to it, its their business and they can do what they want. Make too much of a mess of it though and people will stop using them!

**Elaine** · 27-09-07

don't know what's going on with Google - obviously - but I have noticed 2 sites that have risen dramatically in 2 of my sectors which simply flout the Google guidelines
one has a huge nav bar on every page - 75% duplicate content and the other is keyword stuffing their Title tags - go figure!

**gunneradt** · 27-09-07

exactly

they tinker and sites go up and down - bad ones included.

**Online Trader** · 27-09-07

We have noticed a huge leap forward over the past couple of weeks

**tbp** · 27-09-07

Yes, I`ve noted that keyword stuffing and the page and title can really help a page now! This is what I meant earlier when I said that old tricks where coming back.

I`ve been playing around with a site I just use for experimentation, and really stuffed the page with keywords. Before the last month, I would have expected the site to get penalised heavily by google, but this hasn't happened and its shot to the top of the rankings!

Another thing I noticed that is bringing in a lot of traffic for me is miss spellings. Getting a lot of mispelt words directing traffic to my site, when there aren't any instances of these miss spellings on the site.

**mcol** · 27-09-07

I don't think it's an update, more of an ongoing process. I've spent the last year doing an MSc project on search engine results - and what a mistake that was.

But after writing a whole suite of tools to capture and analyse the damn things, it looks to me like Google are actively penalising (yes I do mean penalising) sites linked to useless directories and link farms, so good old fashioned on screen factors like H1 and title tags are coming back into play. Relevant links and anchor text are still massively important.

I also think a lot of the penalising is being done manually, so if you report competitors who are doing bad things there's a very good chance it will be acted on. And yes, I'm aware of the potential black-hat implications of that.

I've also concluded that there are massive anomalies in the algorith that produce totally inexplicable results. But I think we all knew that anyway.

As the Google help has said for some time "stay away from bad neighbourhoods".

Just my two pennorth.