Random Google?
-
In 2008 we performed an experiment which showed some seemingly random behaviour by Google (indexation, caching, pagerank distributiuon).
Today I put the results together and analysed the data we had and got some strange results which hint at a possibility that Google purposely throws in a normal behaviour deviation here and there.
Do you think Google randomises its algorithm to prevent reverse engineering and enable chance discoveries or is it all a big load balancing act which produces quasi-random behaviour?
-
There were no detectable inbound links to any of those pages before the pagerank update. What other signals could have affected it... content quality alone? By the way content was written using the same writer and same quality level.
-
I strictly monitored that there are no inbound links for example and the link profile was clean until public TBPR update at least. Once suspicion I have and was not able to confirm and include in my research was that there was a plain link added to that odd page which has PR3 and it shouldn't. That would basically prove the theory that any external link fortifies the importance of the page to the point of higher indexation/caching. Something like internal link + external link = match made in heaven.
-
I wonder if those PR5 "anomalies" and the PR3 one really are not "anomalies" due to other ranking factors as external backlinks to those pages.
-
I believe there are two many other factors that are possible that could have prevented that test from being accurate. How do you know 100% for sure that there are no variables you are overlooking?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Google Penalty Checker Tool
What is the best tool to check for the google penalty, What penalty hit the website. ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Michael.Leonard0 -
How to reverse declining Google rankings?
We have a long established business since 2004 and have been fortunate that having been one of the original companies in our industry, we have always enjoyed strong Google rankings. Unfortunately, these have been steadily declining over the past couple of years and a comparison of August to date against the equivalent period last year has seen a 20% drop in traffic from Google. We don't believe that it is being caused by a penalty and rather is the result of some strong players entering our market and tightening their focus which has caused us to take a dip in rankings. We are guilty of being complacent in our SEO - largely due to not knowing what to do and being scared to touch it when it was working in case we broke it! - but now it's time to fight back. We still have a strong site, good traffic levels and a strong product offering. We have knowledge of SEO and resources in house, but are not experts by any means. Our current plan is to: perform a technical site audit, fixing the issues highlighted by the Moz Pro Software put strong emphasis on our blog, writing daily about the latest news and events in our industry provide weekly content articles which are more in depth than the daily blog articles and which will be of interest to our community undertake surveys and publish infographics and statistics with the hope of being picked up in national newspapers Are there any key elements that we are missing out in this plan, or is that it in a nutshell? Any help and advice is greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | simonukss0 -
Google is indexing the wrong page
Hello, I have a site I am optimizing and I cant seem to get a particular listing onto the first page due to the fact google is indexing the wrong page. I have the following scenario. I have a client with multiple locations. To target the locations I set them up with URLs like this /<cityname>-wedding-planner.</cityname> The home page / is optimized for their port saint lucie location. the page /palm-city-wedding-planner is optimized for the palm city location. the page /stuart-wedding-planner is optimized for the stuart location. Google picks up the first two and indexes them properly, BUT the stuart location page doesnt get picked up at all, instead google lists / which is not optimized at all for stuart. How do I "let google know" to index the stuart landing page for the "stuart wedding planner" term? MOZ also shows the / page as being indexed for the stuart wedding planner term as well but I assume this is just a result of what its finding when it performs its searches.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mediagiant0 -
Google is indexing the wrong pages
I have been having problems with Google indexing my website since mid May. I haven't made any changes to my website which is wordpress. I have a page with the title 'Peterborough Cathedral wedding', I search Google for 'wedding Peteborough Cathedral', this is not a competitive search phrase and I'd expect to find my blog post on page one. Instead, half way down page 4 I find Google has indexed www.weddingphotojournalist.co.uk/blog with the title 'wedding photojournalist | Portfolio', what google has indexed is a link to the blog post and not the blog post itself. I repeated this for several other blog posts and keywords and found similar results, most of which don't make any sense at all - A search for 'Menorca wedding photography' used to bring up one of my posts at the top of page one. Now it brings up a post titled 'La Mare wedding photography Jersey" which happens to have a link to the Menorca post at the bottom of the page. A search for 'Broadoaks country house weddng photography' brings up 'weddingphotojournalist | portfolio' which has a link to the Broadoaks post. a search for 'Blake Hall wedding photography' does exactly the same. In this case Google is linking to www.weddingphotojournalist.blog again, this is a page of recent blog posts. Could this be a problem with my sitemap? Or the Yoast SEO plugin? or a problem with my wordpress theme? Or is Google just a bit confused?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | weddingphotojournalist0 -
Google Webmaster Remove URL Tool
Hi All, To keep this example simple.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mark_Ch
You have a home page. The home page links to 4 pages (P1, P2, P3, P4). ** Home page**
P1 P2 P3 P4 You now use Google Webmaster removal tool to remove P4 webpage and cache instance. 24 hours later you check and see P4 has completely disappeared. You now remove the link from the home page pointing to P4. My Question
Does Google now see only pages P1, P2 & P3 and therefore allocate link juice at a rate of 33.33% each. Regards Mark0 -
Site not indexed in Google UK
This site was moved to a new host by the client a month back and is still not indexed in Google UK if you search for the site directly. www.loftconversionswestsussex.com Webmaster tools shows that 55 pages have been crawled and no errors have been detected. The client also tried the "Fetch as Google Bot" tactic in GWT as well as running a PPC campaign and the site is still not appearing in Google. Any thoughts please? Cheers, SEO5..
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEO5Team0 -
Buying a domain banned by google
Hi , I came across a super domain for my business but found out that it was a great domain with 100s of link backs but is now banned by Google search engine meaning Google does not index content from that domain. Since the domains linkbacks are from my domin does it make sense to but that domain and redirect those link backs to another (301) and hope that the new domain gets some juice ... I know it is sounding crazy and may not be the best thing to do ethically but still wanted to check if its possible to get some juice.. Rgds Avinash
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Avinashmb0 -
Google Plus Authorship
Situation Description: I have a website called Website A. I wish to migrate alot of the content from Website A to Website B. Website B will be on a completely different domain name and environment. Authors of Website A will act as contributing authors for Website B. It is also possible that other contributing authors of other websites C and D commit to writing content on Website B. Questions (1) Does it make sense to create a google plus profile under UserA@websiteA.com and link from content on websiteB to their google plus profile under UserA@websiteA.com? (2) Does AuthorRank affect PageRank? If yes, if I take the above approach would websiteA be effected or websiteB since the content writers of websiteA are contributing to websiteB? (3) Is it ok for userA to have a corporate google plus profile assuming he might also have another google plus profile under a different address? I always think it make sense that there exists a google plus profile at an employee level and another google plus profile at a personal level. (4) If an employee leaves the company, do I leave his/hers Google Plus profile alive? The fact that no more content would be published under that particular profile, would that negatively effect author rank over time? (5) Another interesting observation is that UsaToday, CNN etc do not use authorship? No authors link to their twitter profile or google plus profile. Shouln't they be doing this in terms of author rank or is author rank not that important? Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seo12120