Google Update

This won't come as a surprise to those who follow the wheelings and dealings at Google closely, however, those who don't may have a little trepidation at the news.

Google is having some problems indexing web sites. A lot of web sites. A client of mine has been caught in this and there is seemingly nothing I can do except wait it out. There is a ton of speculation out there as to the reason behind it, but the one that keeps popping up is many of the web pages indexed during the Big Daddy update of last year have been deleted temporarily. If your web site was new to the world around November/December of 2005, you may be feeling the effects of this.

At first I was shocked, as I consider myself to follow search engine guidelines exactly as they should. Trying to go through every possible reason for why this was happening, I thought, "Ok, let's start at the beginning." And by beginning, that meant going to Google like a rookie and viewing their Webmaster Guidelines.

As I read through them, I noticed how some of Google's suggestions were not being used by many web sites I came across. I thought this would be a good idea for an article, and thus, Google Webmaster Guidelines You May Be Overlooking, was born.

It was only a matter of days after I wrote it that SEO-News.com picked it up and featured it on their home page as well as included it in their newsletter.

Anyway, moving back to the issue at Google... Another problem is that the Supplemental Index keeps flip-flopping with its data. Some days pages show up, other days its gone. This is not a big deal for most, as the Supplemental Index rarely returns results relevant to the popular search terms (excessive alliteration not intended).

And yet another bug is the site: operator. It hasn't been working since around May 19th for certain domains that contain punctuation (such as hyphens) and if you leave a / after your domain.

It has been said by a member on WebmasterWorld.com that Google had been holding onto old data for 3 years and may now be only keeping it for 9 - 12. The old content was surely useless for the most part, so I suspect it was too much of a drain on their resources.

And to top it all off, there seems to be a significant shift in rankings from datacenter to datacenter. A lot of activity like this makes you think Google is going to roll out an update on the live rankings soon. In fact, in mid May the live rankings did shift for a very short time, and many site owners that had great positions for months found their site nowhere to be found. That was corrected after about 24 hours to reflect the old data.

I'm keeping my eye on you, Google...