Users still angry at the last Google update

May 5, 2008 18:58 GMT  ·  By

What was supposed to represent just another Google dance, a new update in Google's ranking algorithms, causes serious headaches for lots of users who are still waiting for the Googlebot to come visit their website. The trouble started almost one month or so when webmasters spotted a new Google update and experts predicted a major in Google's search results. Just like usual, users expected different rankings in the datacenter but it seems like "expect the unexpected" should replace Google's "don't be evil" motto.

After two weeks "of hell", as named by some users, webmasters are tearfully analyzing their rankings, saying that the so-called "Dewey update" is the worst thing that could happen to their websites.

"This Dewey update as they called it hit my sites hard that 90% of my rankings is lost in the SERPS. This is the worst thing that happened to my sites. It started last weekend. I hope that it will go back to normal and the traffic of my sites will also return to normal," benallos, a WebmasterWorld user, explains.

"A content site I have on the side that has been getting ~3K/day google searches since January lost 99% of traffic at 2 PM. No changes done recently to trigger this. Ironically, the site's PR went up 1 point yesterday and gained nice PR on the inside pages," jdancing, another WebmasterWorld member, described his case.

Some other people complain that Google is not crawling their websites for weeks claiming that bots sent by other search engines, including here Yahoo, have already indexed their websites. Moreover, some webmasters encounter even more serious problems as the Googlebot crawls their websites but, nothing of the content which should appear in the search results actually appears when typing the specific queries.

Google's officials didn't provide too much information on this topic. However, Matt Cutts of Google, who said back in April that he couldn't see "large differences in rankings between these datacenters" following the Dewey update, demanded users' feedback and asked them to access the Spam Report form in order to contact the company. According to Search Engine Land, webmasters who want to contact Google using the method are asked "to place the word 'dewey' in the 'Additional details' text area on that form".