Google Spaz
Google is spazzing.
That’s a technical term. It means that one day, you see your site just fine in the index — ranking in the top 5 or 10 for your target terms, the next day -POOF!- gone completely.
So, of course you panic. You start obsessing over your source code, you start yelling at your IT guys… you spend the remainder of your day poring over SEO forums and blogs - maybe you take up smoking. You don’t find any good answers though, so you go home and check some more forums and blogs, yell at your dog and finally go to bed in a vain attempt to get some sleep.
The next day, you go back to work and find that your site is back. Pfft… it’s right where it’s supposed to be. Everything is cool. ‘Must’ve been some glitch or hiccup in the index’ you tell the IT guys as you apologize for - you know… some of that stuff you said yesterday… Water under the bridge and all that, right right? At least your dog still loves you - probably.
It’s all cool though, cause you’re back in the index, high in the SERPs and high on life.
Except the day after that you’re gone again. Just like before. Vanished, like you had never been.
Sounds like bad Twilight Zone or some spooky campfire story SEOs tell their kids doesn’t it? Let me tell you my friend: it’s all too real. It is happening as we speak. To me and others like me.
Google Spaz.
Submitted for your approval; one German webmaster named Thomas. Thomas has a website plagued by the Spaz as well. I found Thomas posting a cry for help on Google Webmaster Central. Where he had come to discuss and hopefully find some answers to the Spaz. He even provided a graph charting the phenomenon - notice how the interval has increased of late.
At this writing, Thomas had received no official response. However I did reply to his thread, if for no other reason, to let him know he wasn’t alone.
I’ve talked to others as well. All reporting the same symptoms. In then out… then back in again… Not everybody and not every day. Not just old sites or new sites… I have yet to find a pattern.
It’s not a datacenter thing I checked them.
Here’s another interesting tidbit - which may or may not be related. If I do a ’site:’ query I see my pages just fine - including the index page, which has the latest ‘google date’ listed as June 26, 2007. However, in webmaster central it was telling me Google last successfully crawled my site on May 17, 2007. That is, right up to this morning… now Webmaster central tells me it has no crawl data for my site at all.
I suppose, as is usually the case with Google, we’re just going to have to wait it out. I just hope it passes sooner. I don’t know about Thomas or the other guys going through it, but it’s made for a long and anxious few weeks for me.
I’ve suffered from this once or twice… thanks for the article. Dugg
I’ve seen this zig zag, freaky spaz out at a couple of Google Properties. It seems cyclical for now, but the problem isn’t as simple as missing SERPs.
With banler.com, which is an e-commerce site, loosing SERP for a day can mean a loss of 80 to 100 orders. And if your market is cyclical or just plain fussy, not being on a search result for one day, can change the way your customers or potential customers view you.
Here’s a bit more spaz to completely drive you Googlenuts. As you mentioned about the differences between the site command and webmaster central, during those spazation periods, you’ll get different site: webmaster central and cache: dates for the last crawl.
I think someone pushed “THE BIG RED SHINY BUTTON” that no one should have pushed, and all hell is breaking loose.
[…] Google Spazzing Google is on my nerves. I’m working on a site (another forum to be specific) and I’ve been able to manage several top 5 results for my target terms/phrases that I track on pretty much a daily basis. Everything was going along fine til - one day - I just dropped out completely. The day after that, I was back. Then gone again a couple days later… then back again. Currently I’m gone again. I made a blog post about Google’s Spazzy behavior on WebProNews blog when I discovered that I was not the only one suffering from this. I thought I was losing my mind there for a while. __________________ What’s new? The Wii blog The Mac Freeware site The Halo Forum […]
I posted my repsonse at the WPW thread:
http://www.webproworld.com/google-discussion-forum/61034-google-spazzing.html
I have see this too. I makes my customersa nuts and explaining it is impossible.
http://www.popguns.com is up and down. Some of their content is blocked by Google’s social planners. It seems they don;t like anything to do with guns, police equipmant, shooting sports. I believe it is their social engineering.
Same situation over here, ups and downs, now and then.
I am trying to be patient.
Incidentally, it’s back in the index as of last night. It even got a second (indented) listing - which is always nice… But I bet it falls out again before the weekend is over.
That’s true. But it will be because of other sites [competitors] are boosting their results by getting more and more backlinks and optimizing their sites effectively as you do for yours
[…] Now their is another possibility. Google rankings are simply going nuts. Mike McDonald (an Admin at WPW) has noticed more than average change in rankings on not only a daily basis, but from hour to hour. Since Mike has pointed this out I have been watching and have noticed the same thing for some queries I follow. I doubt this is the root of the John Chow issue, but I know something is weird about this to. Sure I know rankings are not stable for many different reasons like: […]
Yep, rankings are not stable. That’s the fact, as Google craws more and more sites, they get included in SERPs as per their rankings. This might give you different results on hourly, daily basis. These are not major changes though.
[…] Re: Google Algorithm Update Analysis This is a surprising article, really, because it’s coming from none other than Dave Davies. I can only critique here, because as everyone knows, I’m not a SEO expert, just an entrepreneur, who’s business relies on web searches. The one problem I have is that Dave didn’t have representative numbers and examples to quantify what he was postulating. I, as did Mike McDonald, and a few guys out there, did notice some algo goofiness a few weeks ago, but everything seems to be back to normal, and well SEO’d sites still feel the same benefit of good SEO practices. While I’m not an "SEO expert" professional, like yourself, or the other SEO rockstars out there, I don’t really agree with all of this article, because it makes some assertions that I think is very strange for Dave Davies to make. Worst part is, I’ll probably bump into him at SES, and be all bashful like. What surprises me is that Dave Davies is referring to only 5 days of Google weirdness, when as a professional, I think he should have waited a bit, and made appropriate assertions after really observing that a definitive change was taking place. So I’m gonna remark here on a section by section basis, and try not to sound too much like a big dummy head rumblepup. Quote: […]
Hi, i had read your post regarding google spaz. It is correct that the google will be changing our sites or vanishing in a day and coming on the next day. But you need to think practically that the google will update
the pages every day. So, it may take some time for our site to come in the SERP page.
I have observed that Google is updating pages very frequently, which causes up n downs in SERPs.
[…] And just few weeks ago, Google bandied out another Googlespaz event that made an whole bunch of people say it more than once. In fact, they probably said it consistently for about 6 hours straight. I had one SEO friend answer the phone that way. […]
5feecca42080
5feecca420807f053673