SEO/SEM News

PR changes ever expected this month and was reported as early as January 2, 2007 for some sites. I only noticed changes on some of my sites on January 8, 2007 but on some other sites, there are still no changes as I still believe changes are still propagating. Although the changes I have been seeing are not really favorable. Here are a few observed changes from me and some of my friends.

• SEO Contest Entry, missing in SERPs and zero PR homepage: Was number 1 on Google. This SEO contest is over already and my site was number 1. During the end of December to 1st week of January. Today it is not in the first 10 pages of Google, but is still in the SERPs checking with a site command. PR was zero, and the homepage still has PR0. But inside pages of the site have PR4. Something I do not understand if PR is still propagating or I am getting penalized for some reason I am not aware of.
• Personal blog with PR4 back to PR0: A friend of mine with his personal blog had a PR4 homepage. He has a multi-topic blog well categorized into topics in subdomains using the subdomain plugin. Some of his category pages have increased PR and retained PR, but homepage had PR4 to PR0. Mysterious.
• Game site back in the SERPs for brand name: A friend of mine was lost in the SERPs for his own brand name of his flash game site. He suddenly disappeared in December in the SERPs for his own brand name. But his RSS feed was number 1, but his homepage disappeared. He was thinking he got penalized but just this week, he was back to number 1.
• Celebrity site gone from 1st page: My celebrity site was on the first page for her name on Google. Today it is gone from the first 5 pages. I did not even bother to check beyond that. A site command shows it is still in the SERPs, but disappeared. I am not sure what the reason is. But majority of the traffic of the site is from strategic linking with partner sites, so I am not really that 100% worried about it missing in the SERPs.
• Entertainment industry blog on blogger missing in SERPs: This is even worse, even the site command is showing no results for his blog and his blog is even on Google’s Blogger.

But since I have experienced missing pages before, that are like dead and rose back from the dead and even become stronger in the SERPs, I am not that worried unless my high ranking pages are lost for more than a month. There are several people chatting with me via IM’s worried. Funny thing is the Entertainment industry blog I mentioned, the owner of the site even did a reinclusion request. *LOL* And I think he is not even banned.

As I was not in panic mode and just waited what will happen, Mike Lopez did his research already, and pointed out Matt’s post not to panic. So if you have missing SERP pages, or PR0’s, just wait a bit and see what happens.

Matt Cutts has mentioned already shared his thoughts blog about hidden content using CSS and pointed out several sites in the past, and CSS hiding of text to increasing ranking should not be done. With various techniques of doing that, it looks like Googlebot has been recently reported to be reading CSS files as first reported by Pierre Far, could it be searching for hidden text using display:none? negative letter spacing? negative absolute page positioning? overflow:hidden? We really don’t know. I looked further into the story just to have a closer inspection. I had some questions and has a few answers found from his site. Here is the line in the raw access log he had:

66.249.72.52 - - [24/Oct/2006:17:17:35 -0500] “GET /global/x.css HTTP/1.1″ 200 8382 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)”

• Is his css file excluded by robots.txt?
  Pierre answered no. And many mention not to, since it might just serve as a flag you are hiding something.
• Is the IP address from Google and not someone trying to pose as Googlebot?
  Yes the IP is from Google. Thinking of all the possibilities this can happen, this can be a person posing as Googlebot but is located inside Googleplex? *LOL* Just thinking of all possibilities, hey you never know. It can be any employee using a fake user agent, but I find that funny, but can still be true unless already proven false.
• Could it be Google Cache displaying the page?
  Two people suggested that on Pierre’s blog. But still no proof of that unless someone from Google will explain.
• Could it be Google Code Search?
  Maybe, we don’t know either. But that is possible too.
• Maybe he has a site or someone has a site with an anchor tag linked to it?
  Maybe not, I tried all methods of backlink checking on the css file. I could not find any.
• Maybe he’s lying?
  Well there is a possibility he is unless proven not. But this guy does not seem to be that type of person. This site gets crawled pretty often, so i checked my raw logs files and didn’t find any. But also reported before, I remember reading on SERoundtable, where Googlebot was seen filling up a form and submitted it. But it never occurred to me also. At least from what I have only monitored and I do not look at my raw access logs everyday. But I think Pierre is a smart guy and I think he is not faking this.

Now true or not, I guess the bottom line is still not hide text. But in my personal opinion, if Google is doing this, there should be some manual intervention. Sometimes dHTML scripts, Scriptaculous stuff, some CMS and other effects can have text really hidden and come out when needed but were made with no intentions of hiding text for SEO purposes.