Crazy Google Irish Results

[caminowebmaster]

At the start of Jan, about the 3rd, there was a large change in many of the Irish SERP, this changed back to the pre 3rd results on the 10th of Jan.

This has now happened again on or about 2nd Feb. So I have been sitting waiting it out hoping that it would be another change back on or about the 10th Feb - but so far nothing, the results are still a crazy mess that don't make sense in a local search.

I have seen this in many results with quite a few sites - however I can only talk about my site and not client sites.

I ranked at no 2 for SEO training - now it is 7 or 8 between me and where I was there is a spam blog at no 2 & 3 then a couple of aus web sites then this page schoolofseointernational.com/ which is showing as under construction.

I can give other examples from my site - like the page on link building which has been removed completely.

As said I have seen this same type change across many sites that I either work on or track because they are competition.

I have no idea what is going on - that is hard to say!

Anyone seeing similar or have any thoughts?

 

[Dara]

Just to clarify-are you talking Google Pages from Ireland or Google.ie? I noticed a huge amount of changes in early January right across the board for a variety of search terms, different niches etc.. but haven't noticed it to the same extent in Feb. I posted a bit about this at the time (early Jan)and Caffeine was the reply by and large which was totally wrong as Caffeine hadn't been rolled out even.

I do see MONSTEROUS cock ups in the Local Search results in some niches-some of which are quite funny actually.

My own theory for what its worth is that it is not in Googles interest to allow sites maintain certain positions (top 3 by and large) and that they therefore randomy throw a spanner in the works so to speak in the hope that you turn to PPC. Its just my own theory so no backup evidence but it can be very discouraging for those in the SEO game and this suits Google down to the ground.

 

[caminowebmaster]

Hi Dara,

talking about results from Google.ie -

yeah, this has me stumped. I like to think that changes have a logic behind them - no matter how twisted that may be.

But Aus results in the middle of the first page for goo.ie - odd

 

[Dara]

Hi Dara,

talking about results from Google.ie -

yeah, this has me stumped. I like to think that changes have a logic behind them - no matter how twisted that may be.

But Aus results in the middle of the first page for goo.ie - odd

There are results there from US and the UK also at a quick glance so thats no surprise really... if these showed in the Pages from Ireland then that would be a different. I dont see the Aus one-is it a .com or other as a matter of interest? As you probably well know a new post/page/site can rank artifically high for a few weeks and then drop-any way that would be a factor?

 

[caminowebmaster]

.com - there are aus domain in some other areas, but not as many as last month.

I am just doing my best not to react - too easy to run off changing or adding something, I will wait and see if this changes.

It doesn't affect me much - but there are some clients that have noticed a diference. Strange that little SEO business come from the net...

 

[jmcc]

Wasn't Google playing with its Caffeine index around this time? There's a strange effect with one of my sites showing 502K pages indexed in the ccTLD versions of Google but only about 1.4K in google.com. Not sure if it is related.

Regards...jmcc

 

[caminowebmaster]

The last time I saw a jump like that in one of my sites was because it was hacked, I would do a quick check.

 

[jmcc]

The last time I saw a jump like that in one of my sites was because it was hacked, I would do a quick check.

I've always been checking. But Google.com has been slow to pick up deeper pages. The main pages are there and Google is spidering at the rate of 30k to 60k pages a day. The site has about 300 million pages though. I have limited the number to about 10M in the sitemaps.

Regards...jmcc

 

[jmcc]

Just checked again. It seems to be something to do with the difference between the operation of site:sitename on google.com and google.cctld. It works without a search term on the ccTLD Googles but requires a search term on the .com.

Regards...jmcc