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Welcome to the ineedhits Search Engine Marketing blog, where we share the latest search engine and online marketing news, releases, industry trends and great DIY tips and advice.

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Monday, December 10

Google & Yahoo! Updating Search Results - Simultaneously!

Both Google and Yahoo! have decided to provide website owners with a "holiday season treat" by updating their respective search results (SERPs) - simultaneously!

Both the major search engines have been executing some algorithm changes causing the usual ranking turmoil for webmasters and site owners over the last week.

While Google has made no formal announcement, the subtle mention of some tweaks associated to the new site links enhancement "twice the sitelinks" might have been the clue.

Site owners have been sharing mixed stories in the forums, with one reporting his listing dropped from being ranked 19th to outside 1000 - overnight. Others are suggesting their listings have been up and down in a matter of days. Here's a couple of the other comments at webmasterworld:

"...My biggest site has been jumping from SERP#1 to SERP#-16-20 and back several times..."

"...my ranking is fluctating and in whole there is loss in visitors..."

Yahoo! on the other hand announced the changes with the release of its X-Robots-Tag support. According to their post:

"...we'll be rolling out additional changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the next few days. We expect the update will be completed early next week, but you may see some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages in the index during this process."

At this critical time of year for most online businesses, these index and ranking updates will be an unwelcome surprise. Have you seen your rankings change over the last week? - if so, share your experiences.

5 Comments

At 4:21 PM, Health-eMark said...: I was thinking it was some linking effort that i have been doing of late that had moved some of my keywords to position five in google for my weight loss site, how disappointing. At least im having a sort of increase in traffic as well as an increase in quality of traffic. . . . and my linking campaign was not in vain
At 11:40 PM, Anonymous said...: I've been experiencing this up and down on Google for the past several years. I'm surprised I'm the only one who has complained about it all along. At times my site watercolorsbypatricia.com would come up in the first 10 sites under the keyword watercolors - at other times it would be nowhere in sight. During the latter times, my traffic would drop almost to zero! I have no understanding as to what it is Google is trying to do...I only wish they would stop doing it! :-(
At 7:13 PM, Robert Brady - Palmdale, CA said...: Ahh, the infamous google dance! After an update, its very common to see remarkably different results in SERPs because we/you will often be pulling from different database results centers. I have seen many times where I will search my keywords and refresh a page and see completely different results.

Over the last two weeks, I was finally able to pull my sauna suit webpage back into top ten, but droppped to 11 last night.

Using the same strategy on my portable horse corral pages, they are staying consistently in the top ten. But that site has stayed consistent throughout the reindexes.

My lesson learned--ALWAYS practice the basic foundations for Title, Description and Anchor text links within your pages, as well as utilizing anchor text in inbound links.

Then have patience, because it can take up to a year to get to the top ten and hold it. Its a never-ending task . . . .
At 2:51 PM, Kustom Kartoons said...: My site Personalized Cartoons website has been bouncing all around for the past few months....

Very disconcerting for this time of year :-(
At 2:53 PM, Rob said...: Traffic at my Personalized Cartoon website has been jumping all over the place!

Very disconcerting for this time of year :-(