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Google’s March 2008 Update Upshmate

Posted by Michael Martinez on March 14, 2008 in Search Engine Optimization

It may be time for Matt Cutts to update his what is an update post from September 2005 and I don’t mean his October 2005 post more info on updates.

His December 2006 explaining algorithm updates and data refreshes is also getting stale.

So, some of my Web pages vanished from Google’s index. That happens from time to time. Usually when it happens it doesn’t last for long but I’m going on a week now with no substantial improvement and this morning about three thousand pages (across several sites) dropped out of the index. I have seen this happen before.

It’s annoying when Google dumps pages en masse. One always wonders, “Did this trip a filter? Did I miss something and get penalized?” Blah, blah, blah.

The easiest way to check what is going on is to look around the SEO forum discussions and see how much screaming and yelling there is. Normally, there isn’t much screaming and yelling and that usually tells me that page indexing drops should right themselves quickly.

When I looked at Search Engine Roundtable I saw nothing out of the ordinary and thought, “Well, maybe it’s just a quick bounce in the index….”

But my heart misgave me, and so I did something I haven’t done in a while: I looked at 6 popular SEO forums to see what people are saying about Google.

1 of them has no discussion about pages being indexed.

1 of them has an ongoing discussion of PR fluctuations (I still wonder why people visit that forum but it’s got a long track record).

4 had recent and ongoing discussions about people losing pages in Google’s index.

As usual various hypotheses are being put forth to explain why suddenly old Web sites should lose a lot of search visibility. Invariably someone suggested that “Google is out to get me” (not quite in that language), someone else said “I think it has to do with outbound links to affiliate sites”, and someone else suggested backlinks (in fact, backlinks were mentioned in all the forums).

I, personally, don’t believe it has anything to do with any of these ideas. Or maybe it has something to do with them all.

Did I trip a Google filter? I have no idea. I’m always experimenting so I’m always taking some risks. But I also have non-experimental content that has dropped out of the index. Long-established, old, well-linked content.

I have seen this happen before.

In any event, we’re coming up on the weekend and I have long noticed (since December 2004) that Google likes to change things over weekends. I suppose they feel everyone is out doing the other kind of surfing on Saturday and therefore that is the best time to start rolling out stuff.

The only real significant points of information I have are that A) about 3,000 pages I control across multiple Web sites have mysteriously dropped out of Google’s index and B) other people are complaining about losing large sections or whole sites (nearly all said to be more than 1 year old) from the Google index.

I wouldn’t trust the opinion of any SEO who talks about Google PR changes as a sign of an “update”. But when site: queries are reporting no indexing on multiple forums (and blogs, if that happens), I sit up and take notice — especially if it’s also happening to me.

I’m pretty confident my content will come back. I have no idea of when. The longest timeframe for when Google dumped content was in early 2005, with that horrific February-to-May thing where they were even showing 2-year-old cache data for many listings (and a lot of pages were showing as URL-only listings). That Spring 2005 Google SERP Cleaning was painful even for me; I’d rather not go through anything like it again.

Still, it’s only Friday and though I had private confirmation on Tuesday that something might be happening (and that is when I first noticed significant changes in the Google SERPs) it could be that everything will “right” itself by Monday morning. That would be nice. It would be convenient. It would not really be comment worthy.

But as I don’t often discuss the search engine update process and how it affects the SEO community (or me) I thought now would be a good time to say something.

If you held a gun to my head and demanded I make my best guess about what is going on, I’d be inclined to guess that some sort of data refresh/index rebuild is probably happening. It would be nice if Matt Cutts or one of the other Googlers said something. It would be really nice if Google showed us the same courtesy that Yahoo! and Microsoft (sometimes) do and tell us that, “Hey! We made some changes that may temporarily affect your search results! Don’t panic!”

My advice to anyone who is feeling adversely affected by this index fluctuation is the same as always: Don’t panic. Wait it out. You probably did nothing wrong but if you did do something wrong now is not the time to fess up because, frankly, Google may not really have figured out that you did anything wrong. Don’t start making assumptions because you don’t know what is happening any better than I do (and I admit to not really knowing — but I have seen this before).

And to anyone who is currently enjoying a huge boost in traffic: Now is the time to get those links you want to ask your visitors for. You probably won’t be enjoying this windfall traffic surge for very long. At least, that seems to be the way it goes.

Good luck to all of us.