Google set blogs and webmasters ablaze in coverage last week with their changes in Toolbar PageRank, which was cast aside by some and taken quite seriously by others. It looks like this week, there may be an update of much more importance going on at Google, in their search result rankings.
According to threads at WebmasterWorld (identified by Barry) some sites are losing major Google search referral traffic, due to some kind of update which happened yesterday.
- Google has just cranked up the dial for domain name relevance, it seems.
I have a fairly new website (about a year old) in a very competitive area with millions of search results. The site has only about 100 pages. PR2. Hardly any backlinks. No link campaigns. No optimization. But it’s a single-word dn in .net, e.g., widgets.net. (I bought it in the aftermarket hoping search engines would dig it.)
- Once again there has been an update and as usual I lost another 30% of my traffic from Google. Soon it’ll be down to nothing and that is without me doing anything except adding more pages, fixing some typo’s and a few layout fixes.
- Yes, there definitely has been an update or algo movement yesterday. My first guess is that there has been some movement on dup content filtering measures.
Strong domains and duplicate content filtering being tweaked in the Google algorithm? Possibly.
One fear last week would be that since Google lowered the PageRank of some sites that it suspected as passing paid link juice, the target sites which were linked to from those sites would lose some kind of ranking.
Hopefully this will not be the case, but if it does happen the full effect of a PageRank (yeah, I know it’s only the toolbar) ‘penalty’ would be heard from the top on down to the bottom. Google does have a knack for keeping things exciting, don’t they?
Are you seeing changes in the Google rankings of your key terms? Please feel free to leave a comment.
