Has anyone else noticed a big change in Google and where your site might be placed in specific search results?

For the last 12 months or so I've been on page 1 for a search for 'blog hosting'. Now I don't even appear in the top 20 pages. I got a lot of business this way, and now I'm going to miss out a bit.

It might be worth checking your own sites for similar probs.

Is there even anything you can do about it if the search doesn't work out?

Forgive me, as I am not familiar with how Google works, but are people paying to be on the first results page (not the sponsor matches) and then it not working? I could understand a problem there but if there is no payment involved I doubt there is anything that can be done.

hi andrew
google is currently going through a change in there search engine algorithm and how they are ranking websites.
search quality has dropped in the past 3 weeks or so, but is gradually getting better.
i guess all every one can do is wait it out & see what happens.

I'm suprised that nobody has offered the great conspiracy theory that google is really just trying to make adwords more relevant by skewing results for deserving listings. That seems to be a theme lately.

There is no doubt that google has fallen a little behind the search engine spammers in terms of yielding consistently good results. While any change affects those that need to optimize for a legit catergory, it help everyone in the long run to weed out "Paris Hilton Nude!" results when searching for "Salt Lake City Dedicated Server" (just a fictional example).

i still find http://www.hotbot.com much better then google

You might want to study up on Google's secret technology at this hidden page:

Google Secret Technologies (http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html)

Somehow my main website is at the top of all the search engines for my preferred search term, even though I never did much to make it so. Gotta love that Googlebot.

I think one of the more disconcerning things is that some have overtaken MANY sites placements by maybe setting up systems around the world to search for a specific term and only selecting their webpage.

One adult photographer I have in mind had his own name 'search-hijacked', and when you search for his site, you get a bunch of fake sites that fill your screens with pop ups. He said there isn't much he can do about it, but is waiting for Google to figure out how to weed out these folks, because they have 1000s of pages that are all the same, false.

I had a site suddenly drop from top-ten (first Google page), to not even in the top 300.

Guess I'm the opposite. I had a #8 listing on the first page move up to #4, all without the usage of meta tags or physically submitting the site to Google. Luckyness, I suppose.

Ahh that explains why I was ranked #11 for a 2 word phrase w/ 6,000,000 results and now I can't even find my site on that search.

:(

Google is also not generating as much traffic since yahoo dropped them.

I could understand a small drop in the rankings, but not to appear anywhere within the top 20 is a bit much, especially when you see the irrelevant crap that is served up when you go down that far.

Even though my site has 'blog hosting' in the title, it's not showing up but some sites with the words 'blog' and 'hosting' in different paragraphs are.

This is an almighty pain in the arse.

I've been seeing tons of traffic from google from all kinds of search results that deal with the content of my site.

I have finally taken the #1 spot for the search "2 The Xtreme". I havent done anything with metatags, content changes or anything.

However, I've noticed that my site is getting a bit more traffic.

I did notice some of the search results have been skewered lately, but they are getting a little better, but slower. :(

Hmmm, Google sure is stupid. I searched for "value webhosting" to see if my site was in there. It was, sortof. A domain thats parked on my nameservers that automatically redirects to my main site, is on the 7th position (as of last week). How stupid! Its not really my site but It has my site on it, in the top 10 :(

I just checked Hotbot, Lycos, Ask Jeeves and Altavista.

Top 5 in the first 3, second page on Altavista.

Now that 'to google' is a verb, perhaps we can make a phrasal verb 'to google up' or 'to google about', meaning to screw up something without even trying ;)

Hey would it be off topic if I posted how little they pay me per click I get them on Google Adsence?


Well I got 5,000 something hits in 1 day, and 17 clicks that day (got so many because I hosted the Unreal Tournament 2004 demo) and they only paid me $2.01. and it is like this everyday. I get around 5-6 clicks usually and get like $1 something. Today I have only gotten 1 click so far and I am getting a total of $0.39. Would this also be because of them changing stuff around?

Originally posted by z280 Hosting
Hmmm, Google sure is stupid. I searched for "value webhosting" to see if my site was in there. It was, sortof. A domain thats parked on my nameservers that automatically redirects to my main site, is on the 7th position (as of last week). How stupid! Its not really my site but It has my site on it, in the top 10 :(

Who cares you should still be getting hits off it so I wouldn't be pointing out errors on there site making me money.

Originally posted by TRN Douglas
Guess I'm the opposite. I had a #8 listing on the first page move up to #4, all without the usage of meta tags or physically submitting the site to Google. Luckyness, I suppose. Not too surprising that it happened without those things, since Google ignores meta tags in its ranking algorithms and adds sites through spidering from other linking sites without submission being necessary.

BUt yeah, with every update or algo change you hear usually from the people who dropped in their favorite listings -- of course an equal number of people got improved listings, but they're less likely to post about it. :)
Originally posted by Thane
Google is also not generating as much traffic since yahoo dropped them. That hasn't actually (or completely) happened. Over the past couple of months there've been sporadic tests during which Yahoo's been returning their own algorithmic results using Inktomi's index, but generally in most of the world as of today it's still Google.

Do a search at Yahoo... if it says "Search Technology provided by Google" at the bottom of the page, you're getting Google results.

The tests are becoming more frequent. Yink will be upon us any day now for good, I can feel it.

Good bye Yahoogle! Nice knowin ya! :D

Originally posted by TRN Douglas
I had a #8 listing on the first page move up to #4, all without the usage of meta tags or physically submitting the site to Google. Luckyness, I suppose. luck? ideally, it really depends on the quality, relevance, and interestingness of your page. good job, you have valuable resource in the eyes of Google :)

Originally posted by JayC
That hasn't actually (or completely) happened. Over the past couple of months there've been sporadic tests during which Yahoo's been returning their own algorithmic results using Inktomi's index, but generally in most of the world as of today it's still Google.

Good, I want this to happen. The quality of links Google has been presenting the last 6 months have steadily degraded. Instead of trying to remove the spammers that are causing the problem, they keep inventing new algorithms making the webmasters job 100x more difficult. From Inktomi, I get 1/3 of my website traffic. From google, I get $.3%. On Inktomi, I am number 4 in my area. On Google, I am not even in the top 160 (stopped looking after that).

The worst problem I have ever had with google was that google UnIndexed my site for a month.... it was pretty scary. My pagerank dropped to 3/10 V_v

Originally posted by Sizzly
you have valuable resource in the eyes of Google :)

Well, that's the problem isn't it? I suspect Google needs glasses...

I fail to understand why this passage of text below is considered a more valuable result for 'blog hosting' than my site.

Find out how to contact your state coordinator and see if your state has a custom
state blog for local news. ... Poll: What kind of party are you hosting? ...

That's from around page 10 of the results for that particular search.

I went down as far as page 40 last night, just out of curiosity and I couldn't find my site.

This new algo rocks! Finally Google is concentrating more on content when before it was all link popularity (in our serps anyway). We've been languishing on page 3 for some lucrative terms for months on now we are at the top of page 2 and with a bit of tweaking, I'm sure we can get on page 1 again.

Disagree on Yahoo - I'm seeing very different results to Google now. Looks like they are factoring in Inktomi results already.

Also, long live the 3 word search terms!

Thankfully i'm not the only one. My site which used to come up second for a keyword is nowhere near top 100 any longer - i'm not even sure if it's still listed. It has a PR of 3. The site is completely content based and isn't commercial in any nature.

Originally posted by NexDog
This new algo rocks! Finally Google is concentrating more on content when before it was all link popularity (in our serps anyway). We've been languishing on page 3 for some lucrative terms for months on now we are at the top of page 2 and with a bit of tweaking, I'm sure we can get on page 1 again.


I don't agree Google is concentrating on content. My site is disappeared in Dec and I haven't changed/ added many content. Now, my site is in page 1 or 2 for many keywords. Even better than before.

Nuclear Arca, posting Adsense results is a clear violation of the contract you signed (electronically of course) with Google AFAIK.

Now, getting $0.39 is not that bad. It could be much worse. While that depends heavily on the content of each page, which I doubt you're willing to change, clickthrough ratio could be easier to improve. It's all about the location of the ads on the page. Experiment with that and you might get more clicks.

It's not very unusual to get 2-3 clicks/100 impressions (page views).

Also Google claims that there is no relationship of anykind between its search results and Adwords/Adsense. They say they are completely different beasts.

Google SERPS changes are a bit odd, and I find it unsatisfying when pages that were clearly "on the subjet" are not listed anymore in the top, being replaced by more general sites. Even with 3 keywords phrases Google tends to give general results.

And spam is still there... Who knows, maybe we'll all go back to Yahoo now that it changed it's search algo, which by the way, is not Inktomi, but a new algo.

Nuclear Arca,
Remove this posting or you might end up getting your account from Google cancelled..

Is it possible that while google tried to index your pages, your server was down or it didnt respondend..so your pages were left out??
I not know anything about that.. I am just asking..

could someone delete it??? it doesn't let me.

Nuclear Arca, just push the Edit button and you can then edit that post.

not if it is over 15 min old.... for me....

Sorry, I did not knew that... contact the moderators then. They could help you. There's an email address at the bottom of every page. be sure to include the link to the thread/post you want to modify. Cheers!

See if you can find your site using this...
http://www.mcdar.net/dance/index.php

Did no one like the Google Technology page, or is it too old for comment?

I wanted to add something, I did a while ago join up with the Google Free Search, which means they will definitely send the spiders to your site. I wonder if this might in turn help out with your ranking by increasing the amount Google 'knows' about your site?