The Drop Pool - a new Google game!

[ADAM Web Design]

As WPWers may or may not be aware (some are, some aren't), Google is working away on a new test DC at

http://64.233.179.104

This doesn't appear to be as major an update as past shakeups, but there are some pretty strong differences among the SERPs.

With that in mind, I've invented a new game. It's called The Drop Pool. And it's a very simple game to play. All you need to do is guess the date that people will start to panic and complain because Google launched an update and now their site is no longer found!

Fun game, right, kids?

I'll go first, and pick the perfect day for a major shakeup: January 3rd. This will be when people come back to work from their New Year's holiday and see a different landscape.

So...Jan 3 for me.

Who else wants to play?

[crankydave]

I'm going out on a limb here and say Monday the 26th. Really too soon for an update to populate but a good day for all the folks who got gift cards for Christmas and those looking for super duper bargains to be out in force. No rankings no extra post Christmas dollars.

Dave

BTW... I like what I see in that data center.

[ADAM Web Design]

You and me both, crankydave.

I'm seeing less spam and across-the-board increases for my clients (and a slight decrease for me, but then right about now that's a mixed blessing.)

Good thought on the 26th. It does have a twisted anti-economic logic (I like that. :) )

The only reason I'd disagree is because when Matt Cutts revealed the new DC yesterday, he mentioned that it would be about a week before he asked for feedback. That could mean a quick live launch (which makes the 26th a possibility), but more than likely means that it'll be in test mode for a while longer, based on the past updates and how they were rolled out (especially Jagger3, which took forever and a day.)

[Mel]

I do see some major differences in that DC, for example some of keyphrases I track produce 77 million results in that DC compared with 25 million in the regular search and some very big players are no longer seen on the first page.

You guys can play Drop Pool all you like, because for every site that goes down one somewhere goes up to take its place and that is the aspect I prefer to concentrate on.

[Faglork]

Holy sh*t!! Are they after me or what?

Can someone tell me why the GOOG continues to bust
http://www.goldner-stern.de

??

On this DC it ranks even worse than on the normal DCs. It seems to be falling continuously - pre-Jagger it was #1 - #5 on most keywords.

Why, by the mighty universe, why??

I am pretty much at my wit's end on this one. Maybe I am blind and do not see something obvious?

faglork

[ADAM Web Design]

Well, I guess Faglork prematurely ended The Drop Pool. That probably means you win since you were closer, crankydave. :)

Guess I should define a new rule: the update has to be live across the major, if not all, DCs.

Faglork: it's still VERY early and there is still a lot of duplicate content in the SERPs themselves.

I do see some commented code on your site. That may be it.

The hyphenated domain names (and this is purely speculative) might be a factor. I've noticed that Google seems to "punish" these sites slightly due to the spam implications (look-at-my-crappy-site-with-my-keyword-stuffed-domain-name.com and all that.)

Some of your answer may also come here:

http://www.seotoolset.com/cgi-bin/kd...hEngine=Google

(Sorry about the long link.)

It's not all that much, but it's all I can see on the surface since I know absolutely no German.

[neosite]

Thanks for the info...

I ran a few searches and found that results display between 2 and 3 times as many results as on the normal google. (does this reflect the new amount of info that they acquired form AOL?)

My personal experiences reflect an overall movement up in keyword searches. However, there are some drops :(

As for the guess as to when it launches, i'm going to say Jan 5....

[ADAM Web Design]

neosite: my personal suspicion is that they're testing spam and duplicate content filters by opening up everything in their database. The count has gone down on most keywords on at least a semi-daily basis since they launched this.

I've watched one keyphrase in particular drop from 55,000,000 to 52,800,000 since Wednesday, and another go from 8,900,000 to 7,600,000. So it's still somewhat premature to judge anything at this point.

[google junky]

Drop Pool Entry #3

Jan 4th

I wanted the 5th , but ill pick something that hasn't been picked yet.

Good luck to all in the New Year,
Google Junky

[nerdbyte]

I say June 8th, 2010. Because by that time you'd either forget I said that or be dead. So, yeah, June 8th, 2010.

[pemburung]

Wow! Christmas! My site is back at #1 on this dc for my main search term, where it was pre-jagger. I was about to say, "but still nowhere to be found on the others", but thought I should check. Bingo! Back at #1 on two others I checked as well.


Time for that rum and egg nog. Cheers all.

[ADAM Web Design]

heh nerdbyte, good call. :)

pemburung: cool beans! Here's hoping it stays that way for you.

[greeneagle]

Let's talk about what Matt said there:

"Let’s see, where are we? Jagger wrapped up by about November 18th. I tried to impress on folks at Google that to the extent possible, you don’t want to make major shake-ups to the index during the holiday shopping season, so people should either launch their changes relatively early (e.g. like Jagger), or try to hold off until after the holiday season is winding down. Sometimes you don’t really have a choice because something is ready to go, but post-Jagger I think things were pretty quiet in the index this past month.

We’re getting closer to calling for feedback on 64.233.179.104, but I probably won’t ask for reactions for another week or two. Right now that datacenter isn’t serving traffic 100% of the time as people pull it out of the rotation from time to time to tune things up under the hood. That data center has some infrastructure that I think in time will work better for canonicalization and redirects. We also recently improved site: to show slightly more logical urls as well."

1. They may not hold to scheduled quarterly updates, on the quarter in the future either. Jagger started late, running about 4 or 5 weeks.

2. GOOGLE has received a great deal of "bad press" for being heavy handed and seem to be becoming more sensitive to those issues on several fronts.

3. GOOGLE is extremely internally motivated by effecting changes on a timely basis. Every day relevancy changes are delayed, revenue is lost.

4. The expressed timeframe for asking opinions is December 28th thru January 4th.

5. C14N & Redirect issues have been problems for some time. I believe they are looking at the eventuality of a more XML based Internet and aligning algs to some extent with W3C XML-C14N recommendations.

6. "Slightly improved" doesn't sound major. I believe it's just a little post-Jagger cleanup.

There will be some pssn and moaning, but nothing near the Jagger Scale... not even close to Bourbon, making it harder to call and adding perceived delay.
I really think that GOOGLE is trying to become more communicative with the webmaster community. Maybe they are checking their own alg change release mechanisms internally. A sort-of "business alg shift" on their own operations. I hope they are going to ask for opinions from the webmaster community before launching bombs from an assumed omnipotent position in the future, as has been in the past.

Having said my spill, I vote for January 10th.

Ken

[williamc]

Originally Posted by pemburung

Wow! Christmas! My site is back at #1 on this dc for my main search term, where it was pre-jagger. I was about to say, "but still nowhere to be found on the others", but thought I should check. Bingo! Back at #1 on two others I checked as well.


Time for that rum and egg nog. Cheers all.

Nice Pem. Not that it will have helped you at all during the busiest part of the season eh?.

[google junky]

The Drop Pool - a new Google game!

That made me think how interesting it would be to see a board game.

Google Game - The Webmasters SEM version

Kind of like Chutes and Ladders heh

[williamc]

Originally Posted by google junky

That made me think how interesting it would be to see a board game.

Google Game - The Webmasters SEM version

Kind of like Chutes and Ladders heh

LOL!!

[ADAM Web Design]

Originally Posted by greeneagle

1. They may not hold to scheduled quarterly updates, on the quarter in the future either. Jagger started late, running about 4 or 5 weeks.

Agreed. I personally see it being more random and semi-unexpected, so that SEO will be more "read and react" (thus making long-term optimization more difficult and organic, to a certain extent) than "when is the next update coming so that I can start preparing 1 month ahead?"

Originally Posted by greeneagle

2. GOOGLE has received a great deal of "bad press" for being heavy handed and seem to be becoming more sensitive to those issues on several fronts.

Agreed, but I don't think all the activity we see in this regard is of Google's own doing. In the case of Matt's blog, he has posted (and I tend to believe it) that they're his thoughts, opinions, and news stories, and Google isn't responsible for the content on his site.

Originally Posted by greeneagle

3. GOOGLE is extremely internally motivated by effecting changes on a timely basis. Every day relevancy changes are delayed, revenue is lost.

Yes and no. If the other engines start improving their relevancy (and to date, only MSN has really done much in this regard), then Google's got to act more quickly. Right now, they can take their time a bit. Yahoo! has done next to nothing of significance in a while now, and MSN is only just starting to make noise.

6 months from now, probably a different story. But right now, they're okay.

Originally Posted by greeneagle

4. The expressed timeframe for asking opinions is December 28th thru January 4th.

Yessir, it is.

Originally Posted by greeneagle

5. C14N & Redirect issues have been problems for some time. I believe they are looking at the eventuality of a more XML based Internet and aligning algs to some extent with W3C XML-C14N recommendations.

I'm familiar with XML, and I know that C14N has something to do with canonical names, but I'm not overly familiar with the concept myself. I'm sure I'm not the only one.

Please sir, may we have some more? (Details, that is.)

Originally Posted by greeneagle

6. "Slightly improved" doesn't sound major. I believe it's just a little post-Jagger cleanup.

Agreed, for the most part. I don't see a great deal of flux for most keywords and phrases that I've checked.

But, there are quite a few instances (in particular, the client of mine that got nailed the worst by Jagger) where significant improvements, including a LOT of top 10 placement, is now showing. Something like this:

Current:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10

Becomes

Test DC:

51
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
10

Or something similar.

Mind you, I don't see anyone getting extremely penalized yet. The site so far that has been hit "hardest" by the new update has been my own, and to be perfectly honest it's not really something that bothers me right now.

Originally Posted by greeneagle

There will be some pssn and moaning, but nothing near the Jagger Scale... not even close to Bourbon, making it harder to call and adding perceived delay.
I really think that GOOGLE is trying to become more communicative with the webmaster community. Maybe they are checking their own alg change release mechanisms internally. A sort-of "business alg shift" on their own operations. I hope they are going to ask for opinions from the webmaster community before launching bombs from an assumed omnipotent position in the future, as has been in the past.

Dude, we're talking about the webmaster community. Pssn and moaning is all that we do most of the time. :)

I think it's Isaac Newton's Third Web Law: For every SERP action, there is an equal and opposite SERP reaction, coupled with unprecedented and unfounded levels of bitching.

Originally Posted by greeneagle

Having said my spill, I vote for January 10th.

Good pick. A little different than the others (which is cool), but a very good pick.

[ADAM Web Design]

Originally Posted by google junky

That made me think how interesting it would be to see a board game.

Google Game - The Webmasters SEM version

Kind of like Chutes and Ladders heh

heh I like this idea, as long as I get some of the royalties for spawning it. :)

The problem is that for every ladder, you need about 5000 chutes (at least if you go by webmaster comments.) :)

[neosite]

i think you meant:

Shoots!!!!!

&

headers!

[Ellio]

I have found that the results at http://64.233.179.104 are better for us but that the backlinks and PR on this data centre are strangly exactly pre-jagger (not current).

Could it be that the DC is using old data that may change when the DC goes live resulting in very different serps to those we are seeing on the test site?

[ADAM Web Design]

Ellio: it's certainly a possibility. The discrepancies among the number of results would indicate something like what you suggested will occur.

However, having noticed some crawling/indexing occurring in this DC since then (new content that is being indexed), I think it's going to be more a case of momentum: those sites that have gone up in ranking will continue to do so, and vice versa.

crankydave: today's your day, friend.

[greeneagle]

Anyone seen the "The Dead Pool", a 1988 Clint Eastwood Movie?

It's a hard game! If it weren't, most of us wouldn't be playing it most likely.

It's all about visitor relevant info NOW, NOW, NOW..

There is no time for any BS any more.

We need to recognize what has the potential to be abused and simply avoid it. If we are not secure in our own position it's really just a matter of logging on here and reading the threads here at WPW.

I don't know that it really needs to be any more complicated than that.

We need to set our mind frame where we work together to identify new technology loopholes that the spammer mentality will key on and shut them down before they get started.

I just don't see that as a difficult proposition, as long as we view them as; "nine eyed dogs in heat charging down the street on one leg" sniffing out any and every "loophole" in every new technology that comes along, as long as we work together to identify potential hazards as they position themselves on the map!

"Assisinate it right out of the chute"!

Ken

[Ellio]

In fact the results I mentioned were via McDar - when I tried a backlink search on the actual data centre http://64.233.179.104 it gave the same result as google.co.uk so I now believe this to be a very real index.

Another interesting point is that some of our pages on http://64.233.179.104 have different "Cached On" dates to the current index. This implies this is an entirely seperate/new index with seperately cached pages to the existing index.

Very interesting and quite exiting as the results look more relevant in our sector.

Any ideas when this may go live?

[neosite]

Ellio, Good observation on the cache dates!

I just checked my home page and the cache dates are differant as well.

Other than that, the only differance on the 2 pages cached are a graphic. Yet the new DC has me up 3 places for 2 of the terms i track most frequently.

The waiting game continues..........

[Ellio]

It definately looks like a new and much larger index with 23m+ pages indexed.

They appear to be still working on it but in my opinion it looks like a stronger index with less canonical problems.

Countdown commences...

[ADAM Web Design]

Originally Posted by Ellio

Any ideas when this may go live?

If we had any ideas, then the whole idea of The Drop Pool wouldn't work, now would it? ;)

Seriously, the only thing that we know is what Ken pointed out: as of December 21, they were 1-2 weeks away from feedback according to Matt Cutts. That puts the date somewhere between Dec. 28-Jan. 4.

So make yourself a pick, sir. Join the fun! :)

[ADAM Web Design]

Originally Posted by greeneagle

Anyone seen the "The Dead Pool", a 1988 Clint Eastwood Movie?

It's a hard game! If it weren't, most of us wouldn't be playing it most likely.

And therein lies the inspiration for The Drop Pool (albeit more based on the Howard Stern radio adaptation than the original movie itself.)

I've seen parts of the movie but never the whole thing.

Good catch!

[Ellio]

ooops missed that.

May I suggest January 3?

[Ellio]

Yesterday I asked Matt Cutts to blog the likely date so we will have t see if he replies.

[ADAM Web Design]

Originally Posted by Ellio

ooops missed that.

May I suggest January 3?

Sure, why not? I did. :)

[Ellio]

Adam,

So we agree then that its Jan 3 for the "Big Daddy" update.....

Well I hope so anyway as its sorted our our canonical errors with the non www address.

[Ellio]

It would appear that Google have now introduced the new filters to the test data centre index.

The number of pages for any given search are now much the same as the current index.

They appear to have included some or all of the Jagger filters as we have just been bounced again after a great pre- Xmas recovery.

First from the current index a few days ago and yesterday following the changes to the test index!

[jackson992]

The results are still shifting a lot. I went through my latest visitors just now and when I clicked on the google referral my site wasn't listed on the same page they found it on.

[Ellio]

Yes its back to the bigger index again!

[Ellio]

The brewing update (big daddy) seems to have moved from 64.233.179.104 and is now available at www.google.co.uk - on 66.249.93.104 but .co.uk is alternating with 66.102.9.104.

No idea why....

[web-content-king]

Sorry to be popping in at the middle of this, but are you talking about the toolbar PR update?

Is one underway? I noticed that http://nytimes.com is showing PR 8 when before it was PR 7 (the www version is still 10 as always--tsk, tsk, nytimes, you need to take care of your htaccess rules or no one will think your site is legitimate with a PR 8...).

[Ellio]

No this a possible SERPs update that was highlighted by Matt Cutts as an improvement in the index with many of the canonical problems fixed.

Was brewing at 64.233.179.104 but seems to have moved. Google will be calling for feedback soon.

[pagetta]

could the testing of this new data centre possibly be the reason why for just 2 hours this morning we regained our page 1 (UK) positions that we held before jagger, but are now back languishing on page 5?

On this new data centre we are back up there for most keywords, which is great!

[Ellio]

Google.co.uk is currently alternating between the current and the test datacentre. If you click refresh a few times you will see the test results.

Put your curser over a cache link on a result to see the actual data centre your viewing.

66.249.93.104 is a current test data centre and is being used by google.co.uk in rotation with 66.102.9.104.

Its been that way for three days and in my opinion the test data centre has much better results - including ours!

Lets hope they choose to go with the new index which is bigger and seems much more relevant with less canonical errors and other fixes.

The post Jagger index was really quite unstatisfactory IMHO.

[pagetta]

couldn't aggree more ellio - this new data centre is much nicer for us too

Have refreshed and refreshed google and am still getting this data centre: 66.102.9.104

this data centre has less than half the results that the new one shows, and says our page was cached on 9th december, whereas the new dc has a cache from 23rd december!

[almer]

This update will take place the 14th of februari 2006 and Google will declare to love us all.

It will be a better world.

[Ellio]

Pagetta,

It would appear to be an entirely new index with different cached dates, different number of sites and a new algorythm.

It is still on google.co.uk rotation.

Matt Cutts has indicated that Google will be looking for feedback from Webmasters on this new index any day now.