4 replies to this topic

[OysterWings]

Four months ago I redid an existing web site. It took Google 3 months to index the new site. Over the next month it climbed to #1 in Google, AOL. and Dogpile , #2 in Netscape, and top 10 in WebCrawler and Excite for its most important keyword phrase.

After staying there a couple of weeks I decided to email the owner and tell them the "good news" (yesterday afternoon). A couple of hours later I got an email back saying they could not find the sites. Well, it has completely disappeared from the rankings in all the above listed sites in a matter of hours, or minutes.

1) I am wondering what excuse to tell the owner of the site (I've seen various theories in other threads)

2) Are all of those sites dependant on Google for their ranking and if one changes do they all normally change immediately?

3) Is there a (current) summary available on the relationships between results as shared among search engines?

Thanks.

[qwerty]

Google drives AOL and Netscape directly -- if there's a change at Google, they change too. The other three you mentioned are meta search engines -- they grab information from numerous SEs.

It's possible your rankings vanished because you were querying two different Google data centers.

As far as which SEs feed what sites goes, there are numerous charts out there that show what's going on. I like this one, because I'm pretty sure it's up to date.

[Jill]

If you check out Bruce Clay's Search Engine Relationship Chart you can see exactly who powers whom.

Jill

[wozza]

I have found that every client I promote on Google is on msn, Yahoo, dogpile, looksmart and many other search engines
within two weeks of the initial promotion. Despite the fact that Yahoo and Msn claim to have no relation to Google at
all they still somehow follow the Google index

[qwerty]

I don't believe sites get into Yahoo by getting into Google. It's much more likely that they get into both Yahoo and Google the same way: both slurp and googlebot find links pointing to them, and crawl over.