Several people pointed out that WebmasterWorld can be reached at http://www.searchengineworld.com/ until Westhost brings back the main WMW domain. If you want to say “this update sux0rs!” or “this update rulez!” without specifics, that’s the best place to discuss. If you want to give Google specific feedback, use the methods to contact Google that I mentioned earlier.
Also, if you’re a PageRank junkie, new externally-visible PageRanks are starting to be visible at places like
216.239.57.99
216.239.59.104
216.239.37.104
If you don’t know how to hardwire your hosts file to point to specific IP addresses or hunt down PageRank at multiple data centers, I’d just wait a day or so for the values to become visible more widely. We update external PageRanks every 3-4 months or so.
And again, these PageRanks and backlinks have already been incorporated into scoring a while back (Google updates PageRank continually and continuously), but some people just love to look at PageRanks. Looks like this update may yield my first green pixels. I’m hoping for a PR12. 😉
Finally, GoogleGuy posted yesterday or so that a new binary is also wending its way from data centers like 66.102.7.x. And I wouldn’t be surprised if a second stage of the index rolls out around this time next week. I also wouldn’t be surprised if a third stage of the index rolls out the week after that. I just wanted to let people know that there’s still flux to come.
Matt,
I’m glad to hear you have an update! I have great news for my site. I only started 1 1/2 months ago and my PR got boosted from 0 to 5! Now I really have no complaints about the jagger update =P
I now also have some backlinks listed at google’s website which I will be working on furiously as well as more whitehat SEO work. Why? Because Google is my teacher and I’m just it’s pet bringing a nice big red apple =)
Firefox is giving you a PageRank of seven. That’s way better than me. 🙂
A great site to check your page rank or even better future page rank
since it being updated is
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/future-pagerank/
and matt your a TAD shy of your PR 12.. 🙂
BUT its looks like your going from a PR 0 to PR7
nice work
http://www.seochat.com/?go=1&option=com_seotools&tool=9&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mattcutts.com%2Fblog%2F&submit=Check
Matt –
I have a question. I am seeing a fluxuation of pageranks and back links at the moment… Your page rank was 0 and jumped to 7 and is now 0 again… My site did the same and is now back at 0 with no backlinks! I am hoping this is due to the updates and hopefully will go back to the way it was? Haha, sorry I’m just a little confused by this behavior. Your thoughts on this would be greatly appreciated.
Matt –
Appologies for the 3 comments in a row as it may seem spammy. It appears that I found the problem – google’s servers are simply updating and the fluxuation is due to all the servers not being updated. I got the checksum of my website and tried it on one of the IP addresses you provided and my PR is indeed 5. Yours turns out to be a whopping 7! Though it seems the PRs are still fluxuating, I am glad to have some assurance on my side. Anyhow feel free to delete my past comments if you feel the need to.
Matt – Saw a little earlier today your blog homepage had a little more green than before! – I saw a PR=7 on your main page – Wow PR=0 all the way to a 7 that quick is good. Many viewers and links to your blog in the last few months!!
I see it’s all kicking off with the PR, do you know why there is a delay in PR posting for all the different day centres – is it because of their locations around the world/time settings?
My guess is you get 7 of those green pixels across 🙂
Will there be some sandbox releases? I’ve cleaned up my act strictly white-hat now without much luck. I’ll admit I was a bit overly aggressive in the way I was acquiring links. My site is almost a year old.
Wow – Pagerank 7 for Matt Cutts!… not bad… 😉
Well done on your PR7 done in very short time!
Want to trade links? 🙂
Not a PR12, but a PR7 doesn’t hurt 🙂 congrats on your “first green pixels”!
Thanks for these updates Matt. I just found your blog and am appreciative of your insight.
I have a pageRank of 6 yet my site does not appear in SERPs for basic baseball keywords whereas before Jagger1 it was very high on all baseball-related searches.
Can I expect to return to where I was once this update is over?
I am agreed with you.
Looks like you’ll get a toolbar PR5 Matt.
Can you post some info about the traffic to your blog – top 50 referrers would be interesting and top 50 search engine queries.
Matt,
update is still continuing, as you said, but recently, people is arguing new website or domain name registered after Mar 2004 will be “sandboxed”. It means the site no matter how good it is, how many inbound links it has, cannot get any top ranking and need to wait for 6-months to 18 months before they can see any result. Is this true?
If it is true, will the current update release those new sites? I think many of them can be a good site.
I noticed a https:// page rank on a top keyword – first time I have seen this – would G find this interesting – I certainly do as its first for me – what method should I use to let G know this information or are they nly interested in spam reports?
Thanks for the info.. 🙂
The cool thing is my PR increased, but the positions are dramatically down!
What is the purpose of PR these days… as only a webmaster ego-booster?
Did you jumped to PR 7 in just a few months?
Congrats, you got a PR 7.
That’s currently 5 higher than Msn.com …
I wouldn’t have spotted all the new green pixels without the announcement, thanks anyway;)
Although you didn’t make it to a 12/10, from nil to 7 is not that bad! Green tranquilizes:
http://www.smart-it-consulting.com/article.htm?node=148&page=71
Cheers
Sebastian
Can you give any comments on why so many good “white hat” seo sites have been tanked with these updates? Can you predict the return of most of these and ideally 100% of the truly white hat sites to near their original positions?
Thanks for the heads up Matt.
Matt – Canonical urls going to be fixed mate ?
I couldnt believe MSN.com had PR=2!! I had to double take and triple take that one for a second. What are peoples thoughts, especially you Matt, on why MSN dropped in PR so much before and during Jagger?
Has anyone seen more than 20 links added to their backlink count with the link: command?
It seems that some explicit backlink queries (i.e. link:http://www.example.com) are showing the only backlinks being a ROS from a single site.
What’s odd is that these sites don’t even link to the site in question, the cache shows no link, and the sites aren’t even themed, so doubt even some other odd internal link would be showing.
I’ve seen a few examples of this. However, a search of link:!example.com shows (which not always backlinks) a more accurate picture of the actual backlinks for the site.
Seems very odd that this is happening, and it’s happening to several sites at the moment.
A PR 7 for a first PR…favrotism. What happened you borrowed 7 off MSN and reduced theirs to a 2 instead thats worse than spam I reckon…
After nine months of no longer receving any traffic from Google, I’ve come to the conclusion that it would be best to block your company’s bot.
SEOEd,
I have seen around 1000 extra backlinks added to all our sections. Modest PR gains across site…5-6 mostly. New sections went from 0-5. Main site still 6.
Though having said all that traffic continues at same low level since Sept22. Be interesting to see what happens over next few weeks. Though this seems a very long rollout…circa 5 weeks, for us anyway.
> Matt – Canonical urls going to be fixed mate ?
http://mattcutts.com/blog/
Someone else may have a problem themselves unless a 301 is added 😉
Is Google really doing the right thing? I understand the reasons behind the sandbox and as frustrating as it has been for me it has forced me to step up my game and think about what I was doing. I now have a site that I’m very satisfied with and I do make money from the leads that my site does generate.
What kind of erks me is that even for non-competitive term I do not rank well or at all. For example if I search for internet data center columbus, ohio in Google; I feel the relevance of the results are mixed. Some of the sites in the top 10 are hotels and real estate. What does it take to get Google’s trust? Shouldn’t on-topic relevance count for something? is it all just about links? I do not understand why a hotel would rank ahead of me since I sell internet data center services in columbus ohio. Unfortunately I’m no where to be found. Is this best for the search user and me? I’ve really worked hard at providing relevant content and feel it is all for nothing. Hard-work does not equal much reward with Google. I’m also finding that I have to use all 3 major search engines to get relevant results, Google is filtering a lot of good content. I know they are fighting spam but there has to be a happy medium.
Maybe in order to rank people one should create a site like this and bow down to the Google God! Hee hee.
http://www.digg.com/links/I_can_t_believe_Google_doesn_t_own_this_domain_
Nothing strange
SEO’s websites about G link to Matt’s blog them, PR 7.
Congratulation Matt.
I am assuming that the update is still going on – if not, the quality of results has gone down significantly. Please don’t become as bad as Yahoo.
I’ll reserve judgement until this is actually over, but in a lot of SERPs it looks like giant leap backwards. Looking for “cheap flights,” I see that 17 of the first 20 results are UK based, and of utterly no use to me. Plenty of other examples, but I assume Google has someone in charge of search quality so it’ll get cleaned up. Right, Matt?
Dear Matt,
As a well established mainstream business with 3 strong ecommerce websites, I have found it difficult to find time read or write to message boards like this in the past, however, with this “Jagger” update which took one of my most successful and high profile websites off the charts, so I felt obligated to read and write to you to find out what is happening?????? I notice that many webmasters and websites are experiencing the same issues, and this is why I am keeping the faith hoping that this is temporary. We have been working hard over the past 15 months following Google guidelines when optimizing our websites, offering great information and product to our customers. We now feel broadsided by Google with this most recent update. For over 9 months now we have respectfully earned our ranking positions on the first page 1-5 for big keywords such as Hair Products, Hair Care, Black Hair Care and others. Our inner pages with thousands of products have earned the first page 1-5 position for somewhat specific searches, and now we are probably 5 pages back if lucky. We still remain strong with strong keywords at MSN in the number 1 position and Yahoo top 5 positions. Please tell us this won’t last long and things will go back to normal for all of our sakes. These crazy moves Google makes are clearly adversely affecting legitimate website owners and their staff which in turn can affect Google’s bottom line. You guys also decided to do this before the holidays which made things worse. My question to you is will this ultimately last long and can we expect anything positive to come out of this in the next days to come?
Dear Matt,
Just a foot note to my earlier post, I didn’t mention the sites that come up for the Hair Product related search terms. It wouldn’t be so bad if we got knocked a few spots back and quality sites replaced us, but in simple terms most of the sites which were positioned under search terms such as Hair Products, Hair Care, were just HORRIBLE! with very little or no relevance to the key words, not to mention others with spam related material and straight up violation of Google guidelines.
Since people are seeing “worse” or non-relevant sites pop-up from this Google update, has it occured to anyone that maybe Google is trying a new strategy?? Change the algorythm to find spamming, non-relevant sites, etc so that they can better pinpoint them. THEN maybe they will rank these sites lower and adjust the algorythms “back” to bring back the appropriate sites….just a thought.
Dear Matt,
I also have a mainstream hair products website that for 2 years I have been working hard at establishing and following google’s guidelines earned top rankings. I adjusted our company accordingly over the last year to compensate for the increased business.
Quoting Eddie: “For over 9 months now we have respectfully earned our ranking positions on the first page 1-5 for big keywords such as Hair Products, Hair Care, Black Hair Care and others. Our inner pages with thousands of products have earned the first page 1-5 position for somewhat specific searches, and now we are probably 5 pages back if lucky.”
I have also earned my rankings on the first page for salon hair products and am still there for now. My inner pages with 1000’s of products had earned the 1-5 position also for product specific keywords and now they are buried. The sad thing is, when one of my pages does show up, the cached page is old with my old prices and causing confusion inside the order processing dept. The sites that do come up for the product specific keywords are either very SPAMMY or sites that no longer have the product – bad URL’s, or sites that have no content and their coding is a train wreck. Sheerly junk results and also sad for me because we have what the searchers are looking for but you have to dig through pages and pages to find us anymore in most cases.
I feel as if I got punished for some reason. I hand optimizing my pages for the searchers, search engines and shoppers. I made my site easy to navigate, built every page by hand with html and follow all the guidelines I know. I even W3C validated all my pages if that matters.
We also still remain strong with strong keywords in msn in the #1 position and Yahoo #1 position.
This is really a shock and the thing I am asking is why? If I knew what I did wrong if anything I would feel better. But to not even know why?
Please tell us what is going on – is Google broken? It seems like it.
WMW is a horrible place to discuss, because of the extraordinarily heavy censorship which occurs there.
Contacting Google is useless, because no one at Google reads or responds to those messages.
If your domain is corrupted in the Google database, you have two choices:
1. Wait
2. Register a new domain
I think this whole bit of contacting G through the spam link is bogus. I’ve written, multiple times, about a site in our area that blatently uses hidden text on the front page. I’ve even contacted them twice using the “super special code” they recommend using after updates… including this one. What’s the outcome? The site remains at the top of SERPs and this weekend, took the #1 spot for virtually all the money SERPs in our area. There are other sites in the area with more content, more backlinks, etc, yet this site reaches #1 & #2 spots because of their spamming.
I’ve always played fair with Google. Our sites constantly maintain high rankings, and we do it wearing a white hat every day. Our sites mean too much money to go black, but when G consistantly supports black-hatters and buries good sites, something’s just not right.
Food for thought Said,
October 24, 2005 @ 12:49 pm
Since people are seeing “worse” or non-relevant sites pop-up from this Google update, has it occured to anyone that maybe Google is trying a new strategy?? Change the algorythm to find spamming, non-relevant sites, etc so that they can better pinpoint them. THEN maybe they will rank these sites lower and adjust the algorythms “back” to bring back the appropriate sites….just a thought.
Food for Thought, actually that was one of my first thoughts when I learned last Tuesday morning that Google search results did not seem right., though, I thought of about a billion other crazy possibilities, over the next several days, as well :).
Barb, I hear yah, keep the faith, so I hear there are a couple more “phases” to this update, maybe something positive will arise over the next couple weeks.
LOL! Same old posts after every major Google update. All those that have lost placings say the SERPs are spammy, while those who gained, or stayed static, say the SERPs are fine.
I think the PR junkies should stop seeing Toolbar PR as being real PR. Do we really think Google would supply a free tool to the World that can be used to determine true PR?
Eddie-:
One would think that with all of those billions of dollars, Google could afford a test environment…
RE: “One would think that with all of those billions of dollars, Google could afford a test environment…”
They can, it’s called Webmasters & SEO ……us 🙂
When/if a Webmaster/SEO complains that their targetted SERPs are no good, Google can be sure they have got it right for their searchers.
Only if the searchers in question are looking for completely irrelevant results…
I have no real life so the PR update(which is my first) is a big deal. My sites went from 0 to 4 which means nothing because I have no product or service to sell and even if I did I’m sure no one would buy iy. But it does occupy my time signing all these guest books. http://www.zombielogicpress.com My one website that remained 0… http://www.dontshopatwalmart.com
I actually want to ask a serious question because poke all the fun you want at it PR does matter. If this is my first PR and I went from 0 to 4 what do I have to do to go from 4 to maybe five or 6 on the next PR and is 6 the maximum PR a personal website can get?
Wi” extending my domain names from one year to like five years help and also do I need to continuosly update my sites to keep Google interested?
Thomas http://www.dirtytrickssquad.com zombielogic@insightbb.com
Amazing.
Michael Locker MD
Can anyone tell me what might help my site gain pr? I’ve been online for a year now, submitted to all the directories I could find that seemed to be good directories, and I have several relevant outgoing links on my site. I havent pursued a link exchange however because I wanted to make sure that I didn’t take a chance on not getting Pr at all. On the last update my site was finally awarded a Pr 1. Any ideas on what could cause this and what I might do that would rectify the situation? Thank you very much!
Sincerely,
Angie
thanks for info
I recently noticed a page rank change on my hotel site. I am wondering how accurate some of these older blog postings are or if I am better off looking at newer posts. Thanks for all your insights matt, but I am curious if there is an updated list. Only the middle IP above seems to resolve. Please reply with any additional lists or resources. Many thanks again.