23 replies to this topic

[jehochman]

Funny. I didn't notice any changes. All mine are still #1 (using keywords of my choice).

[Srvwiz]

I saw some PR ups and down -

[amabaie]

Funny. I didn't notice any changes. All mine are still #1 (using keywords of my choice).

Mine, too. I was hoping they would jump, but I guess we'll both have to settle for #1.

[webkid_san]

Mine has been fluctuating but seems to be back for the last few days ... but the best part is my competitor lost its ranking so it pushed it one notch up

[Michael Martinez]

Toolbar PR is irrelevant, especially during an update process.

I subscribe to a lot of comprehensive Google alerts. I haven't seen hardly any new content show up for the main index since early last week, which would have reflected their last weekend data push.

The news and blog alerts produce content every day.

Since Google continues to crawl the Web, my feeling is that they either shut down the automatic weekly data push for the holiday weekend (and thus we'll see new data show up on Monday as usual) or else they may be tweaking something in this latest apparently algorithmic change.

But until the update or whatever it is finishes, there is no point in doing any analysis, as the rankings will readjust themselves once Google flips the switches back on that have been temporarily flipped off.

I'm waiting to see about 40 sites show up in the main index. They have been out there, linked to, and crawled. Google is just experiencing some data constipation.

Folks, y'all need to be patient. I cannot guarantee that it will start moving again for real next week, but I am hoping it will. That is usually what happens.

I rarely see any new data come out over the 4th of July (if it's on a weekend), Labor Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas, or New Years. Other people may see tons of data come out over those weekend. Your milage may vary.

But I think this is all normal, and we just need to give them a little more time.

[Michael Martinez]

Long-time posters will recall that I tend to make guesses on these updates, so for those of you lurkers who have not seen me comment on an update before, please understand that my network often shows indications of changes ahead of other people's sites. That is just because my network is large (10s of thousands of pages across multiple domains) and old (established in 1997) with lots of inbound links (100,000+).

That said, over the past two days I have begun to see new sites showing up. They are coming through at a trickle, but I take that as a good sign given that I saw virtually nothing in the main index except respidered existing pages for over a week.

Normally, Google pushes out a lot of data from crawls and indexing on the weekends. It's still early Sunday evening where I now live (Seattle -- moved here a couple of months ago, for those of you who missed that). I'm not going to look for serious indications of an end to the update until Monday morning my time.

But even if the update process is about to end and we're about to get back to business as usual, it can take several weeks for people to see improvement in lost rankings. There are various reasons for why that is so. Most sites being much smaller and less well-linked than my own, for example, just have to wait for the next crawl (and sometimes all the crawling that went on during an update process is never released).

Anyway, I'm seeing glimmers of hope. It may be that whatever Google did is starting to propagate across their data centers. Since neither Matt Cutts nor any other visible Googlers have said anything I am guessing this was not a major update. If it were, it might take up to 2 months for the changes to roll out across all data centers.

I think whatever they did this time took two weeks only because they launched the update the weekend before Thanksgiving. Historically, I don't see Google releasing updates on holiday weekends. They all want to go home and be with their families, so risking their off-time on possibly snarky updates is not a good conservative strategy.

What I am saying is that I expect the crawl-to-index time to slow down over the Christmas-New Years week. If people are still being affected by the update in 3 more weeks, it may be January before they see their sites emerge from the whole process.

It's all a matter of timing, and Google has done this every year for several years in a row. Some SEOs call it the "Christmas Crush" because they crush traffic for a lot of sites that depend on holiday traffic and sales. But this year's crush has been, in my opinion, very mild compared to the last three.

Anyway, here is hoping that it's done and we can all get back to business as usual.

[Michael Martinez]

Matt Cutts dropped by SE Roundtable to confirm that a data refresh is under way on December 8. I'm not sure of why Barry has posted about this update three times and not made the connections to his own posts, but then he's just gone through two conferences and done a lot of great posting from the road so I'm willing to cut him a little slack on his memory.

One possible outcome of this latest update may be enhancements to the site: query operator, but it's not clear to me if that is a reported interface test or an actual permanent feature.

Anyway, much as I would like to say the whole process has ended, I think we'll collectively be able to determine more come Monday or Tuesday, as people report the results of the latest data refresh.

[hk995]

I was wondering, has any one noticed any thing different in the last few days!?

[Michael Martinez]

I was wondering, has any one noticed any thing different in the last few days!?

As best I can determine, the update has run its course. I explained my analysis in detail in my blog (see my signature) if you'd like a long-winded, rambling post that links out everywhere (including back to this discussion).

Google seems to be back to doing business as usual. There will most likely be a normal data push this weekend (most people see it happen around Sunday evening U.S. time, or Monday morning).