Methinks Matt may be wrong on this one. I know, I know, who am I to say such a thing? But, I really think he was at least misinformed.

It's certainly possible, DazzlinDonna, but I cast the net pretty widely. I think it's normal flux.

I have looked at a lot of discussions over the past few weeks, as well as followed the performance of many sites, and I see absolutely no evidence to back up the conclusion that something went out on December 7 other than the data refresh that Matt referred to.

There are changes in some query operator behaviors that have just become apparent to people (allinanhor: and inanchor: appear to be working again, and site: got a minor enhancement).

I think the SEO community is one once again limping along on half the facts because they're not looking at the big picture.

It looks like a normal flux to me, my sample size is 50M pages.

I had many pages move up and many move down, this type of change seems to happen twice a month.

The update definitely happened for us. We've recently moved our Website to Yahoo Stores and were waiting over a month for the new store pages to get indexed. For example every few days we've Googled using this syntax "site:OurWebsite.com" and today noticed that the new pages are finally indexed. I think that this is the proof (?)

James, that is not proof. That happens daily.

Something definitely happened on Nov 28th and since then it is shaping up to be a bad Xmas. I feel really dejected by the extent that my work and effort to maintain a clean site full of quality unique content has been cast away in SERPs. I thought the whole point was to be rewarded for your efforts, not the other way around.

Bah humbug :(

well, I'm really hoping that this is just "normal flux", because my site's index went from 1.38 million 1 day, then dropping to 490k the next, only to return back to 1.38 today, all in the last couple of days.

Strangely though, some of the Google data centers still showing the 490k range today, and that is really a scary prospect -- that makes folks like me scratching my head, shaking in a daze wondering what on earth is happening. Nothing for the worse, we hope.

Matt, would you be able to say what could be causing this?

Thanks

I am seeing some wild variations in serps compared to the end of Novebmer. Looks like a normal shake up though and usually settles back down when the balls all drop or the google engineers get off the eggnogg.