Checked today on Google for my company's name. Back on Google and actually ranking higher than before at #3 vs. #6 for our company name.

Checked it for several of our clients; good to go. Checked Aaron Wall's seobook.com - back up to #1. So much for my cynical anti-SEO filter (which, I think, I posted in webproworld).

But some of our clients still don't show up for their website name. To me, clearly, Google's update is somewhat resuffling back again...somewhat. But has anyone else noticed this? Anyone have more speculation?

Checked today on Google for my company's name. Back on Google and actually ranking higher than before at #3 vs. #6 for our company name.

Checked it for several of our clients; good to go. Checked Aaron Wall's seobook.com - back up to #1. So much for my cynical anti-SEO filter (which, I think, I posted in webproworld).

But some of our clients still don't show up for their website name. To me, clearly, Google's update is somewhat resuffling back again...somewhat. But has anyone else noticed this? Anyone have more speculation?
From what I have seen the biggest hits came to sites that were heavily weighted for one set of anchor text links... especially if the pages of the site did the same in their internal linking structure.

Sites with hundreds or even thousands of inbound links lost out if they had not varied the text link copy. It is supposed to reflect random search and thus if 75% were all one set of keywords then they were impacted... also if there were site wide links of the same text from outside sites it hurt - and doubly if they appeared as reciprocated links.

From what I have seen the biggest hits came to sites that were heavily weighted for one set of anchor text links... especially if the pages of the site did the same in their internal linking structure.

Sites with hundreds or even thousands of inbound links lost out if they had not varied the text link copy. It is supposed to reflect random search and thus if 75% were all one set of keywords then they were impacted... also if there were site wide links of the same text from outside sites it hurt - and doubly if they appeared as reciprocated links.

You would think that - except some of sites in question hardly used the name as the anchor text. In fact, our company name, which is attached to our clients' sites in reference to our work, doesnt have text-based anchors back to our site. Yet, we were affected by the Google update for our name.

So, I just dont see how that that is related. Certainly for our company name, we didnt use anchor text. We used graphics text - a little one, out of the way of the content for our clients.

I can understand varying the other anchor text to be more natural like "philadelphia pizza"... vary to "best pizza in philadelphia".. that type of thing.

But again - names? or links to a website without use of anchor text? I'm still confused.

Ah, great - I saw these results before and rushed an e-mail to Aaron to tell him his index page was ranking again for his name - then the IPs migrated and they went screwy again.

The current results...well, they're not great, as I'm seeing some rankings look pretty much the same as when they were previously sandboxed.

But, overall, there is a move in the right direction.

The repeated domain name as anchor text could be part of the problem also.

Seobook http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&q=seobook is NOT on top right now for seobook.

How do your other keywords do? Are the rankings bad for all keywords, or just the domain part?


Checked today on Google for my company's name. Back on Google and actually ranking higher than before at #3 vs. #6 for our company name.

Checked it for several of our clients; good to go. Checked Aaron Wall's seobook.com - back up to #1. So much for my cynical anti-SEO filter (which, I think, I posted in webproworld).

But some of our clients still don't show up for their website name. To me, clearly, Google's update is somewhat resuffling back again...somewhat. But has anyone else noticed this? Anyone have more speculation?

Seobook http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&q=seobook is NOT on top right now for seobook.

That's strange. In both my work and home computer, I get seobook and seo book at #1 in Google.


How do your other keywords do? Are the rankings bad for all keywords, or just the domain part?

That's the thing. The site was not doing well for the keywords. A quick check on the backlinks showed: 0 for Google. Absolutely 0... I'm lying.. it shows 2 for Google. The site does well with Yahoo! and MSN, but not Google. But we understood that. However, the problem was, like seobook and our own company name - a search by the company name turned up nothing.

Granted, if the company name was the anchor text and was excessively linked, then this speculative theory may work. But neither our company name nor this site had excessive use of such anchor text.

Yet, our company name ranks now.. but this site does not. Befuddles me. Seems inconsistent.

They always seem to finish on Sunday. I am seeing radical changes on datacenters throughout the day. Let's hope they don't take away the relevancy that seemed to be back for most of this week.
[SideNote]
I was talking to someone in my office complex this week and explaining what I do. Out of the blue they said. "I have not been able to find anything on Google lately. I need to go about 5 pages in to find what I am looking for" - No Lie.

I think Google knows there was an issue with their update earlier this month and are working to correct it...at least I can hope. At least fix the name thing Google!

- Done with Rant and I am not checking again until Sunday Night...Liar:)

The interesting thing about this is that there are 1800+ backwards link counted by Google for SEOBook.com yet it is not listed at the top of the SERPs.
Given that it was briefly back on top and is again lost in the shuffle it would suggest things are being played with in the algorithm... and I agree the weekend should settle it down.
I have gone from one to two and back again over the last 3 days.

Aaron has a lot of people promoting his book, that is obvious and justifiable!

with SeoBook, I can't think of good reason not to rank. Looks like either G missed them (and thousands more) by mistake, or Google penalized them because they have a high % of keywords with "seobook".
Try explaining to a machine that that's the site's name.


The interesting thing about this is that there are 1800+ backwards link counted by Google for SEOBook.com yet it is not listed at the top of the SERPs.
Given that it was briefly back on top and is again lost in the shuffle it would suggest things are being played with in the algorithm... and I agree the weekend should settle it down.
I have gone from one to two and back again over the last 3 days.

Aaron has a lot of people promoting his book, that is obvious and justifiable!

IMO it is not purely an algo thing. It seems that there are at least 2 discrete indexes that are out of sync with each other, and results vary depending on what data center you hit. Not all of the data centers have the same index. Google distributes their load across what sometimes appears to be random selected data centers, so each time you search, depending on where geographically you search from and how busy the various data centers are at the time, you may hit a different DC and therefore get a different version of the index. If you track this over time, you will also see that some of the datacenters switch between versions of the index, my guess is that they are trying to get them all in sync. That's what I hope anyway, the alternative is that they are intentionally using multiple indexes which would be bad. Try your kws at each of these google data center IPs and see what it looks like.

216.239.39.104
216.239.53.104
64.233.185.104
64.233.187.104
64.233.189.104
216.239.63.104
64.233.161.99
64.233.167.104
64.233.171.104
64.233.179.104
64.233.183.104

There's a Google DC checker tool here:
http://www.wm-community.com/tools/google-dance/dancing.php

Covers the following DCs:

64.233.161.99
64.233.161.104
66.102.7.99
66.102.7.104
216.239.59.99
216.239.37.99
216.239.37.104
216.239.39.99
216.239.39.104
66.102.11.99
66.102.11.104
216.239.57.99
216.239.57.104
66.102.9.99
66.102.9.104
216.239.53.99
216.239.53.104


Looking at the SERPs I'm getting here in the UK on Google UK, it's the 66.102.11.x IP range that is defining the current results where companies can at least rank for their own names. Looking pretty stable so far, but there are still issues of some site index pages being trapped between indices.

What was that dated little saying from the 90's... "nucking futs"? Google is driving me "nucking futs" I tells ya!

Checked today for rankings on company name...nothing. Dropped out again. Stopped checking after 10 pages.

The thing is I dont understand it. Lots of folks say it's due to the anchor text. But we didnt excessively use our company name for anchor text. It doesn't seem to make any sense.

You'd figure that a site could rank for it's own name. And really, what else can you do? Some people will refer to your site by the site name! What do you expect? It's not like Google is called "That Search Engine known as G". I mean, come on now!

What interesting is that different people in the UK are reporting results from different datacenters at the same time - very different indices.

The same thing is happening in the U.S. Google has made a real mess of it this time, or, maybe this is what they intended to do. Somehow that does not sound right, my guess is that Google is broken again (still).

Using a tool that reports results from 45 Google datacenters and checking on three terms, it seems to me that there seems to be about a 50-50 split among the datacenters for first page results, but that the further down the results you go the greater the spread in the results seems to be.

Examples
Keyword one
20 DCs report ranking #8, 25 DCs report ranking #4

Keyword two
25 Dcs report #14, 20 DCs report #15 or #16

Keyword three
28 DCs report #26, 15 DCs report ranking #40, 3 DCs report ranking #28

What was that dated little saying from the 90's... "nucking futs"? Google is driving me "nucking futs" I tells ya!

Checked today for rankings on company name...nothing. Dropped out again. Stopped checking after 10 pages.

The thing is I dont understand it. Lots of folks say it's due to the anchor text. But we didnt excessively use our company name for anchor text. It doesn't seem to make any sense.

You'd figure that a site could rank for it's own name. And really, what else can you do? Some people will refer to your site by the site name! What do you expect? It's not like Google is called "That Search Engine known as G". I mean, come on now!
Again the Random Surfer Theory needs to be considered... even though there will be a larger degree of citations accreditted to the domain name... random theory suggests some people will misspell it, add other terms to it, even drop the .com or add the .com... when it is done in a uniform manner there is more likelihood that it is staged...

I've noticed this kind of pattern the past couple of days. In the morning, Google ranks sites by name. In the afternoon, it goes FUBAR again.

Anyone else get that? Or do I get siphoned to some extreme data centers?

Now that I have to see... I can't imagine the sensitivity of the DCs being that impacted... but will play around and see.

it's more random than that though, even within 5 minutes you'll see different results. I think the rank is just for the name, nothign else.

I've noticed this kind of pattern the past couple of days. In the morning, Google ranks sites by name. In the afternoon, it goes FUBAR again.

Anyone else get that? Or do I get siphoned to some extreme data centers?

I tells ya - within maybe an hour or two after the post, I did the name search again. Seobook dropped out of #1, my firm dropped out of #3, but curiously enough, one of our clients who was nowhere found by name and was up at #2 this morning (in a search by name), shot up to #1.

It's like that video game, pong. At this point, why do I bother? I thought I'd keep an eye on the rankings, see what's going on, but really just keep an eye out for a weekly average. But it seems like the rankings bounce around so much by the time of day that even THAT idea seems pointless.

This affects much more than just the name search. Primary keyword positions can go from #1 to #200 depending on which DC you hit. Like I said before, some the DCs seem to have revolving results between the "good" and "bad" index. Other DCs seem to be very stable.