February 7, 2005 Archives

I have been following a good variety of threads lately on several of the search engine forums, detailing some of the aftermath of the latest Google update. Most of you are familiar with some of the latest changes. I wanted to highlight some of the most active threads across the forum space. This morning the moderators on SEOchat were having a discussion on the impact of this past update and what we were experiencing first hand. If you are one of the lucky ones, some have reported that their traffic has doubled within the last week and remained consistent since that time or before that.

If you are on the opposite side of the situation, your site has suffered completely either by dropping out completely or by being pushed back to the oblivion where no one is going to find your site. So what is going on?? One particular thread on SEOchat started off by a member asking how to get their site back in Google. The thread quickly turned into a testimonial page of all the people that had their site dropped from the index. While some of this behavior is nothing new to SEO's, the gap between those sites that are experiencing increased traffic levels and those dropping out is getting more wide spread. Many are left without any indication why their site has been dropped. Initial observations of these sites do not tell much as to why they are dropping specifically. Many people are asking about on-page factors initially as reasons why, but its looking to be other reasons.

Some threads on the topic this week:

Out of the Sandbox - Cre8asite Forums
Google Update? - Cre8asite Forums
Possible Theories Regarding Google's Change In Serps - SEOchat
Too All Dropped Sites... - SEOchat
Google Update Allegra - WMW
Google Links Drop Big Time - Digitalpoint
Seeing Strange Serps - Digitalpoint
Site Disappeared From Google Index! - V7N

After reading those you might take a look at the post Barry posted last week on Latent Semantic Indexing as a possible factor that may be influencing this past current update. It's definately worth a closer look to understand the possibly why sites are dropping and others are doing so much better.

I got to run to a meeting, so I won't be able to update this site for a few hours. Found this post at Cre8asite that seems interesting, it is named A small speed test for the three major SE's.

Speak to you all later.

We knew MSN would spend big to advertise the new engine, they even had a TV spot in the SuperBowl (I really wanted the Eagles to win). It also looks like MSN dressed up their search page for the big day.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch and some others listed in the entry linked to above.