Webmasters Report December 2008 Google SERP Changes

It's December, the last year of 2008, and webmasters have started guessing what's up with Google this month once again.

New sites are fluctuating with their rankings; one webmaster reports that his new sites (2 months old or less) are showing up in the top 10 and then 12 hours later, they're not even in the top 1000. It seems that this is a cycle. Some say it's just a sandbox.

Another observation relates to sitelinks. It seems that there are questions regarding sites that have sitelinks in Google's results. Do those mean that those pages are refreshed more often? Crawled more often? Not necessarily; getting sitelinks means you're a more "popular" site (you have more attention), but having sitelinks isn't a factor. The former brought upon the latter, after all.

A third observation relates to a "disconnect" between index pages and inner pages of sites. These pages were never linked together in the SERPs. Tedster expounds upon this idea and says that he observed that the second results from a domain aren't always indented. Sometimes, though, they're indented too much.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

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posted Tamar Weinberg in Other Google Topics at December 4, 2008 9:36 AM Comments (6)

Comments

"the last month of 2008"

Posted by adleras at December 4, 2008 09:43

what is meant by sitelinks?

Posted by erika at December 4, 2008 13:57

yes, and recently page rank update is happened, one my PR 0 site moved to PR3.. but still i dont have much traffic

Posted by james at December 5, 2008 00:21

Hello my dear and near...
One of my website http://univfoam.com was ranking with the keyword "Styrofoam" in top 10 within Google search result. But after few days It has gone out to 400 or 500. I mastered my site care fully and found that same it is ranking very well with other important keywords, infect much better than before. But I didn't get what happened with "Styrofoam". I want my ranking again with this keyword...I did proper off-page and on-page optimization as well... but still not getting improvement. Can any gentleman guide me in this regard.

Regards,
Rahul Pathak

Posted by Rahul Pathak at December 5, 2008 02:22

Um... doesn't Google do this every year? They change things up, mostly so that the only way you can ensure that your site remains on top is through paid ads?

I've had one site listed for a while, drop right off of the SERPS for all but it's domain name, only to return even stronger a week later. I think the days of people gaming Google are over - Google now games us!

Posted by Robert at December 5, 2008 08:35

New sites always rock. They do not stay high in search results consistently. If a site is more than ten months or so old, Google will gradually solidify its position for most keywords (queries). Otherwise, I believe an authority link would help such a solidification. Without any of these conditions, new sites will always remain in a state of dance, known as Google dance. But I am sure most will report a very consistent average search engine visit, which signifies that when you lose ranking for one search query, you get automatically ranked for an entirely different one. This is particularly true with blogs, since they tend to have many pages targeting different keywords than normal websites.

Posted by Lenin Nair at December 5, 2008 12:04

Webmasters Report December 2008 Google SERP Changes

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