Did anybody notice changes last night?

For some reason last night google moved my site from 1 to 3 and I see nothing to indicate why, During the last dance it stayed at one on all three servers, any thoughts.

search term is collection agency

My site is www.wcgcollects.com #3 and the other two ahead of me were 2 and 3 respectively.

Give me some feed back here please, Is it possible that it is only cause dmoz hasnt added me to collection service yet. I have been waiting there since dec 16th and this catagory doesnt have an editor?

More than likely FreshBot caused it.

Yes, Blake has it here...

What happens is this...once your site is in the Google index and ranking in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) and is stable over time....this typically means that Google has verified your inbound links (and currently you show 190 inbounds...HOWEVER...there may be a problem with some of these as they show guestbook entries and these can devalue your listings and in some cases get you banned...I would go out to any of the sites where you have entered your url into any guestbook and remove it immediately....just work for real business-to-business link relationships)....

So, back to my thread...once you are listed and stable and Google knows your site then the next phase is what we call "freshbot" (as Blake pointed out) .... what is freshbot...? it is simply another googlebot with a different set of directives and these include to find any updated content on sites that are established sites in the SERPs....So one reason why your site may have dropped some is that you haven't recently updated any content on your site while the others folks now above you have...You should have some sort of CMS (Content Management System) in place that allows you to easily and quickly add some fresh content daily and of course make sure it is posting properly...I am not talking about some minor coding changes to alter the time/date stamp on the file...but real, helpful content for your users to view and use....Googlebot will love you for this..

Although I agree that the freshbot is the general source of temporary movements in the serps, I am seeing a particularly increased level of movement for some queries. I am seeing jumps between page 1, page 4 and back again with no apparent pattern.

Darrin,


Are the jumps you are referring to relating to very competitive (large sets of data returned for certain) search phrases...?
Undoubtely, google is looking at these patterns carefully and looking for different ways to possibly monetize these high volume areas of their (keyword "their") index....

decaff

decaff,

Yes and no...

The main phrase I have in mind returns 4.5 million results, which is relatively competitive, however I can also think of some less competitive queries that produce significantly fluctuating serps - as can most of us I'm sure!!

Darrin,

So with that in mind, and returning to wcgcollects's original post...it looks like "collection agency" returns approx. 2,360,000 results (which definitely places it in the "competitive" category) and that the folks who are in the top ten understand that to remain there takes constant vigilance...even if they are using freshbot to keep their listings high..and then working in the background to increase the depth, weight and link relationship strength of their site to increase PR, thus inviting freshbot to crawl daily, thus allowing one to tweak pages daily...
I believe that Google may be experimenting with some sort of daily rotational process for the serps because of the huge amount of pages they are now indexing (actually the amount that they index really only scratches the surface...3 bil + pages and the web as a whole has something to the order of 900 bil+ pages...mostly locked down in massively deep databases)...
Just my humble opinion...

decaff

decaff,

Sounds reasonable. I have been thinking for some time that they may choose to go down a route of daily rotations or some such idea in order to create serps that look more "dynamic" and "fresh" on a daily basis.

Well I saw somthing strange happening since yesterday,
Normally Aol, Yahoo change their serps acording to the Serps in google after the dance. and it stays that way until the next dance.

Am I wrong?
If not yesterday I noticed one of my top keywords went up into second position after being at third position for quite a while when checking Aol and yahoo it went up to second place in both

Is that normal?

Darrin,

I think the other possible reason why Google may move to a more dynamically driven SERP is to combat the huge amount of spam that is occurring....they are receiving large amounts of spam reports and instead of trying to go after each one manually (they will go after the worst manually) they incorporate some of the more flagrant violations in their next algo update and remove the offending sites that way....but...ultimately...by forcing a more regular (possibly daily) SERP landscape...they can combat the problem that way as well as level the playing field some...

Asher02,

It's possible that what you caught was the update of the the AOL and Yahoo indices and that there have been some minor changes in both of those....I would bet that if Google is going after a more dynamic SERP than other's will follow the lead...(I miss the good old days of HotBot/Inktomi where you could stay in say, the #2 spot for your best keyword phrase for 2 months at a time because of how slowly they updated...)

Also,
Has anyone noticed the tremendous activity of Slurp (this is without any PPI)...I believe that Yahoo has unleashed Slurp to build up it's index (this would be a database that may be pulled from partially until Yahoo figures out it's next move...but a database that has to be growing in leaps and bounds)...we have been hit hard by slurp recently and we have never done the PPI thing there....

An interesting point is that the site that is now #1 for "collection agency" has been "freshed" for the last couple of days (the only days I've checked) - possibly they are updating on a regular basis and Google is giving preference to an updated page.

Gringo.

I was just wondering if freshbot has the power to boot sites? The update hasn't happened yet but one of my sites has jumped a position, 10 to 9? If this was freshbot wouldn't this drop a position due to an extra listing?

Gringo,

I think you are right on this...Google has probably sat down with itself, had several long discussions on the topic of SERP quality and freshness and figured out that if the respective website owners could be put to work on keeping thier content fresh (preferrably daily) AND by incorporated a more active and involved freshbot in the process (and still let the deepbot crawl do what is does best..validate relationships) than Google might be able to get a better SERPs overall for it's users....just a though on my end...
We have already initiated a daily update process some time back and, I mean, actual valuable content updates, not just going for a time-stamp update...we like to dialogue with our customers and we're way into creating audiences for our web properties....better conversion rates...

jungleimp,

I am not sure if Google is incorporating the kind of power in freshbot that the deep crawl bot has to eliminate problematical sites/pages (sites/pages that are flagrantly violating Google's TOS)....certainly from a programming point of view it is possible to incorporate some of the same filters into freshbot...this is something that will have to be tracked, over time, to quantify...



decaff

Quick followup...

Of course, on the topic of daily updates....some sites naturally have an advantage because of the nature of their content....say news sites and the like with daily feeds and all...it's a bit more challenging if you are running a straight, static html type site...takes a bit more planning when designing to incorporate a system....naturally, SSI is great for this and so is CSS .... but, nontheless, there will be some additional labor if Google is moving in this direction....

decaff

I'm seeing similar movement for a site that was #10, page 1 before the last update, but dropped to page 3, as a result of a server change and new site launch.

That site is now back on page 1, in #8, for a term of 772,000 results, but we lost positioning for a bunch of lesser terms.

I notice that the most recent index shows a directory link, and it didn't before -- is this something to do with google updating it's DMOZ database?