I was doing some routine research this morning, when I noticed a disturbing trend:
Less search results for any given KW that I typed in.
My search terms generally return results of 500k or more. Today, they return results of ~93k.
I did a search in the larger category. My search for “tires” turned up 5M results. Last week that number returned 22M results. “Music” only returns 129M results. My memory may be a little faded, but last week it was in the 6-800M range. The way I see it, Google is basically reducing the pages indexed by ~80%. The Google Blog was consulted, but there was no mention of a rollout there, or anywhere else.
I am on the east coast, so they may just be doing some server testing in my area. If this is true though, and Google has rolled this algo out to all their data centers, then it has really huge implications for us as SEOs.
If Google is taking away, does this mean that they are more focused on in-depth search? What are they adding? Kimber had stated that she had seen PR3 sites that included site links. Could Google be implementing the Ask strategy as a way to improve search? We’ve already seen YouTube thumbs and pics start to appear in the SERPs. What next?
The newest PageRank update is conspicuous in all of this. Maybe this is just Google clearing out old pages in the index, or without a certain PR. While I welcome Google clearing out the junk, I have to wonder what new challenges this will bring for all of us.
At any rate, SEOmoz will be here to help us weather any changes. Maybe Rand could get a little time with Mr. Cutts and ask him a kind question ’bout all this.
