What is it with Google these days!!!!???

One minute they give your site a high ranking, then a couple of days later your site is nowhere to be seen. There appears to be no stability on the Google search engine at all!

Now that Yahoo's going solo, I for one hope they blow Google away.

    I've never had any problems with Google. All it took for me to get fairly high up on google is to swap links with friends. I remember once being top of the list for a mis-spelling of "Hamburg" (I spelt it Hamberg) and it came out with something 10,000 other pages (seems that mis-spelling Hamburg is not all that uncommon...)

    oh, and you'll notice that both my websites and my blog are in my sig. Thats always a good way...

      David, as much as this pains me so, I'm inclined to agree with Piers (ha, j/k P). I've not had any problems with Google, either for searching or for having my site(s) listed. Can you give us a specific example?

        Sure, I'll be happy to give an example...

        Two days ago my online shop demo at www.parkerandhobbes.co.uk/shopfront.php came first on Google.com (out of 1.9 million results) when you did a search for "online shop demo".

        Today, the same site is nowhere to be seen on Google.com.

        I have made no changes at all to the site and yet it has gone from first to literally nowhere.

          It looks to me like google is just indexing your "competition" more than you. Personally, I wouldn't count on being the first result (or on the first page even) for search terms as vague as those.

            Hmm... you're right, David!

            Don't know if you've checked this out with Google themselves, but they do offer this explanation for when web sites "disappear" from listing:

            1. Changes from one index to the next.

            Each time we update our database of web page (about once a month), our index shifts: we find new sites, we lose some sites, and site rankings change. If your site was dropped from Google and you have not made major changes to it in the last month, we will likely pick it up again in our next index. It's possible your site was simply inaccessible when our robots tried to crawl it.

            You may want to check and see if the number of other sites linking to your URL has decreased. This is the single biggest factor in determining what sites are indexed by Google, as we find most pages when our robots crawl the web and jump from page to page via hyperlinks. To find out who links to your site, use Google's link: tool.

            It's also possible your rank decreased because other sites were found and assigned a higher rank. You can be assured that no one at Google has hand adjusted the results to boost the ranking of a site. Google's order of results is automatically determined by several factors, including our PageRank algorithm. Please check out our "Why Use Google" page for more information on how this works.

            1. Multiple indices

            We update our index about every four weeks. If you happen to enter the same query repeatedly while we are in the process of posting the index at our various data centers around the country, it might seem like you are seeing inconsistent results from Google. What is actually happening is that you are seeing a result from an 'old' version of our index one time and a result from a 'new' version the next. Due to the size of our index, we can not simultaneously post a new index at all of our data centers, which may result in this behavior for a short period of time.

            1. Other reasons

            If your page does not appear at all, here are some other possible explanations.
            Your site may not have been reachable when we tried to crawl it because of network or hosting problems. When this happens, we retry multiple times, but if the site cannot be crawled, it will not be listed in our current index. If it was a transient problem, your site will likely show up in the next index, which will be completed in a few weeks.

            A technical glitch on our side may have caused us to 'miss' your site. In crawling more than 3 billion pages every few weeks, our system experiences hiccups from time to time. Again, this is a transient problem, and your site will likely show up in the next index. Please be patient with us during this period, as we are not able to modify our index by hand to add sites missed in this way.

            The contents of your page or the links pointing to your page changed significantly and you no longer have a sufficiently high PageRank, or your page had low PageRank to begin with and a small change caused you to be dropped from the Google index.

            Your page was manually removed from our index, because it did not conform with the quality standards necessary to assign accurate PageRank. We will not comment on the individual reasons a page was removed and we do not offer an exhaustive list of practices that can cause removal. However, certain actions such as cloaking, writing text that can be seen by search engines but not by users, or setting up pages/links with the sole purpose of fooling search engines may result in permanent removal from our index. If you think your site may fall into this category, you might try 'cleaning up' the page and sending a re-inclusion request to help@google.com. We do not make any guarantees about if or when we will re-include your site.

            Not sure if any of the above apply to your case, but if you think you may have been wrongly deleted, I would suggest contacting them directly.

            Let us know how it goes!

              Originally posted by Elizabeth
              I'm inclined to agree with Piers

              Easy, you don't want to go making that a habit :p

                Well, your site has a page rank of 3 now... do you know what it was before?

                  Thanks for all the help.

                  I've had a careful read through the google quote and I suppose it's a fair enough explanation. The only thing that I would take issue with however, is this claim that Google is refreshed every four weeks or so.

                  Since the Florida Shake Up of November last year, I believe Google has gotten into the habbit of refreshing at least once every week. Indeed, in my opinion "refresh" is not a strong enough word for what's happening. What seems to be going on with Google right today is nothing short of complete chaos!

                  For example, within the past seven days, my site has gone from 4th to 1st then to nowhere at all for the search term "online shop demo"!

                  I've also noticed lots of other weird things happening.

                  I've noticed several crumby 2 or 3 page Angelfire sites coming top for a lot of good search phrases. I've noticed lots of well known, large and successful sites vanishing completely. I even know a couple of people who have almost been put out of business because of the Google chaos.

                  Yes, the explanation that you gave was good, but I fear it was out of date by a few months.

                  I hope Google sort themselves out soon and if they don't then I hope somebody else will come in and claim the title of "world's most popular search engine".

                    Originally posted by Davidc316
                    Since the Florida Shake Up of November last year, I believe Google has gotten into the habbit of refreshing at least once every week.

                    I suppose you could check your server logs to see how often googlebot is visiting.

                    Why should your site in particular score highly on the phrase "online shop demo"?

                      Originally posted by Weedpacket
                      Why should your site in particular score highly on the phrase "online shop demo"?

                      I dont think he's complaining that its not, I think he's complaining about the fact that one week he's high up and the next he's not.

                        Originally posted by piersk
                        I dont think he's complaining that its not, I think he's complaining about the fact that one week he's high up and the next he's not.

                        My suspicion is though that such a vague term is more likely to see fluctuations, since there is less precision to allow determining whether a given page is actually relevant or not. If there are a whole pile of pages that are (as near as can be determined) equally relevant, in which order should they be listed?

                          I personally am not a great fan of Google. The only reason I use it is that it's fast. I always use Kart00 when I have to do research and I sometimes use Metacrawler.
                          (You may flame me for not liking Google. 😉)

                            Originally posted by Merve
                            (You may flame me for not liking Google. 😉)

                            [flame=Merve]flame[/flame]

                              That's absolutely hilarious! 🙂

                                Google have been playing around with their PageRank algorithms recently.

                                I haven't really had time to keep up with all the major nuances of it, but I know that they're trying to skew the algorithms so that pages that have actual content on them are ranked higher than meta-loaded pages that are created by SEO-freaks.

                                There was one update (Florida) about 8 weeks ago, and another in the last 10 days, and it's probably these that have been affecting your rankings.

                                  2 months later

                                  Imagine this....

                                  Today almost every geek can create and website.... And even more people want his/her website to be found instantly!

                                  What do people do when they want a popular site? they start an pr0n site or something with naked on it or they add so much damn searchphrases and keywords that even the dumbest website will be found on the words 'biochemic waste facility' or something like it :mad:

                                  So what happens really:

                                  There are (for example) 1.000.000 good websites and 1.000.000.000.000.000.000 crappy ones. All the crappy sites just push the good sites away. And boom noone finds the website that he/she want on google or any other search engine...

                                  Conclusion:

                                  Lets clean up internet !😃

                                    I agree. The web is full of crap. I hate it when a Google search takes you to other search result pages...pisses me off bigtime.