Today me and almost everyone I asked noticed changes in SERPs on a lot of keywords and the strange thing is that the positions have changed for almost all websites in the query and the quality, trusted ones went down with up to hundreds of positions, while new websites, with no inbound links jumped to the first positions.
I talked a lot about this today with a lot of people and we didn’t manage to get to a conclusion, because if the SERP remains like this, Google’s relevancy ends today. There are many querys where all quality websites went down and new, spam, and irrelevant websites took their place.
Considering the conditions and ways Google updated it’s SERPs today, I will have to call this the “Google Shaker”, because it seems like Google introduced the SERP in a shaker and shaked it.
“Google Shaker” seems to happen much more in local searches more than on Google.com. Until now I have seen many people complaining that Google.ro, Google.ru, and Google.co.uk is totally screwed up.
I thought all day at this and researched especially on Google.ro, being the country I live in and it might be a mistake, a Halloween joke or a test, because the SERPs definitely can’t remain this way. Other way, Google’s relevancy is gone, at least in those countries and a lot of CEOs will run mad, along with us, the SEOs, because our clients will be more than angry.
I would love to get your feedback on this and maybe we can find an explanation and a solution. Did Google really changed the algorithm in such a drastic way ?
We can see this happening in Sweden too. Index seems to loose power and sitelinks and also the searchwords that is heavily worked on for the index pages is loosing in serp´s. Other searchwords on subpages is remaining high in index (this meant on my page).
I meant that sitelinks under indexpage is gone.
Did a quick check yesterday and found that 4 of my sites lost sitelinks and some rankings too, glad its all back today!
So this is just a joke by Google?
No this is not a joke, it was true and now its reverted back!
It stinks that sites have to rely on keeping Google happy to have a place on the internet. Hopefully someday we won’t have to rely on their weird algorithms to rank high.
Perhaps Google just tweaked something in their system and I am glad that it’s back to normal now.
We had a brief period of this as well on the .com side, but in general it’s reverted back… generally the shaker happens when Google’s Algorythim and PR status updates are going around. Sometimes it settles back well and sometimes not.
So it has reverted back?
Google’s algorithm has always left us in wild wonder. You may even wonder how in the world that a spam site gets a top rank in the search engine result pages. Google is playing hard-to-get. Maybe one day Google will suffer from the medicine of its own making.
Yah Its true, I just find it for one of my site which is locally promoted but it should not be there. My site was ranking good but now it is not. Have it reverted back or not till now???
Hey
When google updated its index in October I loose my ranking for a week and after that gets good enough ranking. Now today I checked the ranking for 10 keywords fall from in 10 to 50 range. Can you suggest me something to come out from this change? did google is still updating things. bcoz in 2 days this ranking fall down.
I’ve seen this before as well, but it usually changes back in a few days. Like you said, has to be a glich or something that happens once in awhile.
Was this when google was testing geo-location specific searches? I had a friend who ranked number 3 for his first name for a couple days. We we pretty excited until we realized google had changed.
Its totally back now and we hope we dont see similar effect again, i lost around 100$ that day in adsense for lower traffic because of lost rankings.
@Amit Yeah that was a total mess, hopefully everything is back now
Ah.. so it wasn’t a joke. Just an error or something.
@Amit – Sorry to hear about that! Hope this thing dosen’t occur again in the near future!
yes that was a bad moment, i hope it dont resurface again. That was a very hurtful day.
No one has any knowledge about google fluctuation that when it comes and when it goes. But I think google updated within 3 months. When position changes then it effects a bad on our ranking… but have patience and see the changes. …
good to see that everything is back to normal.
at least everything picked back up.
probably just got rid of some weeds in the serps.
@Tcn Yeah it was REALLY bad. im confident that we wont see the same thing again…but something similar could come up you never know!.
I’m a bit late replying to this post but nevermind! I remember the Google dance when they did that October update. All the keywords that I languish at page 2 for were all of a sudden on page 1, top 3 and then several hours later back to page 2 again, went on for days. Was very disappointed when it all settled and not a great deal had changed
No one has any knowledge about google fluctuation that when it comes and when it goes. But I think google updated within 3 months. When position changes then it effects a bad on our ranking… but have patience and see the changes. …
We can see this happening in Sweden too. Index seems to loose power and site links and also the search words that is heavily worked on for the index pages is loosing in serp´s. Other search words on sub pages is remaining high in index.
I think it’s an error of google siteindex because thats happens too in google.com.eg but when I called the main center and went to them they solve the mistake.
I believe that all this proplems eill be solved in 3/2009 Rank
Oh i didn’t know about it but i guess everything has gone back to normal. Hope it won’t happen again. Thanks for the information.
Should be error, it Now should get back to normal
Great topic on Google advancement!