Google SERPs updates february 2008
Thursday, February 21st, 2008I would like to talk about the recent changes in the biggest Search Engine in the World. I am not sure if this happens for Internation websites or other regional websites ( UK based or Canada based ) but I do know for sure that it is happening in Romania, for www.google.ro
Recently there are a lot of changes in the result pages generated by google Romania. I can see SERP updates even once at 5 ( five ) minutes and that is not what I would call normal. The natural way of updating the SERPs for Google Romania was once or twice a week. So this makes me ask my self: What is happening ?
I decided to do some test on the romanian market and it is quite simple, you can also test this your self. Just pick 4-5 word you would like to play with and search the romanian Google ( google dot ro ) as often as your time allows . Pick a site to play with and see its positioning when you search. Also, do not forget to check the number of generated results. You will see sites moving arround like crazy, 5th position, after an hour check again and you will see it on the 9th position, after check again and you will see it first. That is not natural, indeed.
I first though this is another dance for a big update or something similar. After it crossed by mind that maybe Google is trying to implement a new algo. Now I have got to the conclusion that I do not know exactly what is happening, I can only have oppinions and I must test further to get to a conclusion. One other possibility would be that Google is returning on the same computer, at 5 minutes time between a search and another one, for the same keyword, results from different Data Centers. I have seen the case, one DC for Timisoara and another one for Iasi, but I have never though of it like this.
Now to go further, let us play a bit with the results from a romanian keyword.I have searched for tipografie ( it means print house ) on google dot ro and first I get over one million results and at the second search five minutes later I get under a million.
Rezultatele 1 – 10 din aproximativ 997.000 pentru tipografie. (0,08 secunde)
Another case was that for a keyword that used to generate arround 60.000 results, I got now over 400.000 results. One hour later I got arround 87.000 results. That, again, is not normal. And all these things cause problems. There is no way you can offer a client a good aproximation of what their website will be in 3 months time if Google keeps on playing with the results like that.
For some of the sites I am working on I get really bad results, the number of visitors coming from Google dropping quite much, while for other websites I got a higher number of visitors, but this only in certain days.
And now, the question is : why does google generates the result pages different for each browser ? A client noticed this while searching using IE. I ran the test in that moment and he was right. Now I can not get a similar result, but if the case will repeat, I will sure take a screenshot.


