Crazy Old Google
 

Hi All,

This week, Tuesday and Wednesday specifically, traffic tripled (actually it was close to being quadrupled) to one of our sites. The search terms that we were getting traffic for went from about 15,000 per day to over 81,000 per day from google...I'm talking search terms that we actually get traffic for here, not unique visitors (some of them we get over 5,000 unique visitors per day per term, some we only get 1 visitor per day on).

Then on Thursday, it all went right back down to what the site's been getting for months. Understand the site does well, just not as well as it has done over the last 4 years.

I'm just wondering if anyone else had this happen to them this week. Or did you have the opposite happen Tuesday and Wednesday, 8/28 & 29, of this week?

Does anyone have any thoughts as to why this happened?

I haven't noticed anything this week, but recently my main site tripleXworld has seen some very good jumps in google traffic for a few days and then poof.. it's gone. I thought I was about to get back some of my lost traffic from a few months ago, but it was just a tease. :D

It's all over the place from what I can tell. Up and down constantly for me except for a few solid terms that tend to hold for a while.

You ever see a spark as you're pulling a plug out of an outlet? That's what that spike is?

I kid. :D

The link list that I shut down earlier this week, which was due to the continuous complete lack of traffic, just saw a spike of uniques from Google yesterday, and it's still receiving much more Google traffic today than it ever had before. |huh When I say 'spike', I mean 13X what it has ever received from Google on any single day during it's entire history. It's still not shit compared to a successful list, but I don't like to compare my sites to successful ones anyway.

I have a theory as to why the big G has suddenly decided show a small amount of praise towards Earl, but I'm not going to say it out loud because I don't want to make an ass of myself.

Since when?

|couch|

You might as well re-open. You never know what the se gods will do for your site, but it's your choice. Seems like a lot of work to waste to me. |boobies|

Useless Warrior, care to share your theory in a PM? I'll keep what you say to myself. I have some theories too, but didn't want to overwhelm this thread with my own theories. I was hoping some other folks might offer a fresh/different perspective.

I've heard talk about the big bump, but nobody I know has a theory yet.

My theory is the standard - they are messing with algo changes, snapping various filters in and out of place, so for a short period there was the equivalent of one of the older filter settings.

The question is, if this is experimentation and filter testing, what will the new default state be after this testing phase.

That is one of my theories as well, Bill. One of the reasons that I made this post was to see if anyone else had this happen to them.

Want to see something (that I find) interesting? Look at Alexa's traffic details for your favorite link lists and tgp's. I looked at a bunch of them and most showed a drop off on their graph for the last few days (of course these stats are a few days behind because of the way that Alexa works). Normally, I'd discount this as a problem with Alexa but Debauchery's numbers showed an (accurate) increase over that same time frame.

Seperate topic, but have you gotten a response to your reinclusion test yet?

Referring to your alexa thoughts - it's been my opinion for a while that since tgps have tended not to suffer as much as linklists in this new google, that looking at tgps might give us useful clues.

So it confirms that line of thought to hear that alexa drops tgps at the same time that a noticable bump happens for lls.

However, you say that major lls also suffered a drop.

Im waiting out for the other shoe to drop - Ive basically been out of Google on one LL for exactly one year - and came back 2 days ago - I have two theories on what is happening but I will only talk about one right now
DMOZ has reorganized their index and setup on their servers over the last few months - for as long as I can remember they have been set up with really bad mirrors and canonical problems - and have fixed that recently so that everything comes from the www.dmoz.org site now - and since we know that google has always given a special meaning to dmoz links and they also automatically give you a link from google as well - and given that google has been reindexing dmoz into their directory like a buzzing bee for the last week or so - maybe this is partly a fallout of that

The other theory starts with they have removed some filters from last years big daddy update - but I cant prove that one yet - we'll have to wait and see what happens at the end of the summer when they normally put all filters back on

A third and less appealing theory has to do with individual sites - and not worth discussing as I dont have any proof - yet

Yep Bill, both link lists and tgp's show a drop over the last few days at Alexa, at least most of the ones that I looked at. One of the things that I did was a search at google for "free sex pics" and looked at all of the tgp's (all of the top 10 were tgp's) and all but #10 showed a drop. Then I looked at some of the bigger link lists like penisbot, hoes, etc. Everyone showed that drop.

On our re-inclusion request, nothing. We haven't seen traffic go up or down and haven't heard a peep from google. Don't even know if they've read it. It's been a bit over a month now, I believe.

That's interesting Linkster. Mine began to trend down not quite a year ago. As I mentioned in the beginning of this thread, it came back earlier this week, stayed that way for two days, and now it appears that it's heading back down to where it's been for a while now. Certainly not dead, matter of fact we still do well with it. It's just not a "home run" like it had been for the previous 3 or 4 years.

So your LL went back up this week and is still up?

I'm wondering if over this weekend (remember google used to like dancing on holiday weekends) if google will re-adjust those filters and my site will bounce back up.

Interesting point Linkster, though I don't see canonicial fixes, even on a site as large as DMOZ (and granted, they had some serious canonical problems), having a big impact on LL's listed there. Canonical fixes mainly impact PageRank calculation, and PageRank has never been DMOZ's selling point.

Halfdeck - thats actually the overall point - since they are no longer dividing it between all of their mirrors (.com etc) and not splitting between the non-www and www (which they were) - this will have the effect of raising the PR calc quite substantially - of course its going to be a slow process with a recalc of half a million URLs they have - but should be beneficial in the long run

Right. My point is you can get PageRank from virtually anywhere. DMOZ's influence over search results has more to do with it being a great candidate as a seed site when running various algorithms. For example, Hub/authority based algo where DMOZ is used as a seed for generating a set of good authorities and hubs. Or a TrustRank-type algo where DMOZ is used as a seed to generate a list of sites that link out to high quality sites (I'm not claiming those algos are actually in place). Add to that the fact that a listing in DMOZ or Yahoo! Directory are positive quality signals that tell Google my site isn't a 2-week-wonder spam. Fluctuations in PageRank will have an effect, but my bet is the effect would be minor. One way to check is to look at the number of urls you have in Google's main index by running a "site:domain.com/*" command. If number of results hasn't changed dramatically, I'd assume your site's link pop hasn't changed all that much either.

I wasnt gonna post cause in the past I've jinked my se listings and they went away|shocking|

but what the hell, I picked up some nice terms between pages 1 and 3 of the serps...


as far as theories go I agree with linkster

I also think that these serps are gonna stick for awhile, have a gut feeling

For quite a while now when I've searched for the name of one of my sites it's been pinned near the 950-1000 rank. Today it appears on page 1.

I just noticed that some of my long running links are starting to show up in the top 5 SERPs. So since Yahoo has some of my links showing up, maybe Google will be nice and pickup my Yahoo links.

This has been happening with google for a couple weeks at least now... I have had several sites do the same thing.. They jump way up in the SERPS for a day or 2, doubling, tripling and in one case 4x the traffic and then drop right back down to the same level they were before. And it's happened more than once on a couple sites... None of these sites are in DMOZ... I don't know what it is but I suspect some sort of algo change.

Viper, we've had 4 different sites spike way up, once each, since June. Each time it stays up for a few days then goes back to normal. Kinda weird, I'm wondering if it's an algo change why it wouldn't happen to more sites, or even those 4 sites, all at the same time.

Starting this thread, I was wondering if anyone else's sites spiked way up Tuesday and Wednesday this week and then went back to normal. Had it happened to alot of folks at the same time, it would be more indicative of an algo change or filter adjustment.

Tues one of my sites jumped way up.. it's been slipping but it's remained significantly higher than it was prior to tues. This one is probably not related to this...

An "old" established site went up 2.5x Sun, Mon then dropped back down.. Jumped back up again on Thurs and so far has stayed there... Have another site that's not that old but also followed that pattern.

An "old" established site started up late Wed.. Thurs & Fri 4x the traffic... looks like today it's going back to where it was before.

An "old" established site jumped 4x Thurs & Fri... looks like today it's going back to where it was before.

Almost all these sites are primarily SEO type sites so I can see changes a lot easier with them... I don't have the stats from the last couples week readily available to be able to check when some of the other ones went thru the same stuff..

Why wouldn't it happen to all of them at the same time etc? Different data centers I suspect. i.e. more like a rolling burp or test at this point. At this point, none of these "burps" have held.

I need to read this whole thread...lol

Same here, been scoring ok with my old keywords for a week now.

Jay, you got a pretty big site. Do you see Google sending traffic to any of your pages that used to be labeled supplemental?

As I stated earlier in this thread I didn't notice anything like this recently. But, In June and July(maybe earlier August too) I did experience these "spikes" which lasted a few days then vanished. My traffic was up about 4 times during the traffic spike what it is right now.

Last I checked Google stopped using supplementals:
http://searchengineland.com/070731-215828.php

Or at least stopped saying they did...lol.

Hopefully, what we are seeing is Google re-shuffling the deck. I remember before they changed indexes the last time I would see my pages bounce on and off the top of the SERPS almost hourly, then they would go back to "normal", they they would go back to "shit", then "shit" became "normal", and that's what we've been stuck with the last couple months.

If we are lucky, (and from what I've been noticing from watching SE patterns for the last 10 years) we are seeing google rolling on and off what will be the new index. Maybe that was just a taste of it.

All that being said, I would not expect Google to reward sites just doing reciprocal linking, so don't get lazy...think outside the box...I am trying some new ideas, some radical, some less radical to try and stay on the crest of the wave.

Interesting theory on DMOZ. Do you really think DMOZ is still relavant? I don't even submit to it anymore and I saw some of the biggest upward moves in the SERP of some of my smaller domains that were not listed.

Hit me on ICQ about that 3rd theory. I have a few ideas myself.

No Jay, Google just stopped showing the supplemental label. Instead of displaying the label, Google hinted that by the end of the summer they'll start sending more traffic to pages that used to be labeled supplemental.

ok, my traffic went back to "normal" :(

I wish they would... They totally wiped out my mainstream adsense income with that supplemental shit. :D

LOL...wasn't that pretty much what I just said?

No, you said "Google stopped using supplementals" which isn't true. The only thing Google stopped using is the supplemental label. Google still puts pages in the supplemental index. Google is just hiding the fact to keep webmasters from obsessing over supplemental results.

For example, your site, Jay's XXX Links, has ~1,070 pages in the main index. The rest of your site (~12,000 pages) is supplemental.

I'm just wondering if you see an increase in traffic from those 12,000+ pages.

Google is definately up to something. Seeing some wild swings in serps and hoes.com is typically steady. Hopefully it's a sign of better things to come. Too many TGPs in the top 10 these days!

marc

My google traffic went up big time for several choice search terms since about 8/30, but as of this morning, it is back to 'normal'. I've learned over the years not to count on Google for traffic...

Good way to see your pages that are NOT in supplemental is to use site:www.domain.com/*

Good tip AdultMasta...I didn't know that one.

An interesting occurrence for the SEO types to look at: It is almost cyclical, Debauchery keeps popping in and out for the term "Latina Hardcore." I am going to start keeping track of it, but so far, it seems about every 4 days or so my site is #1 for that term, then it goes completely away where it's not even in the top 1000, then about 4 days later I'm #1 again. This has been going on for a few months now.

Does anyone have any thoughts as to why this is happening?

Btw, as I type this I've been #1 for that term for about 36 hours now.

Captain, I'm seeing you on #1 while logged out of my Google account. I don't see you all when I log in. That has nada to do with my personalization info either, since I hardly ever use Google to surf porn. Interesting stuff.

EDIT: Actually, it looks like your site pops in an out almost every time I hit refresh, so it probably has nothing to do with me being logged into my G account.

According to mcdar, around half the DCs have you at #1.