SpiderServe Web Design

There have been some major changes to Google over the last few months.
Firstly, there was the so-called Mayday update (funnily enough at the beginning of May!) which has totally changed long tail search – and not for the better. Secondly, at the beginning of June, the Caffeine rollout was finally completed.
Now, if we take Matt Cutts at his word then the caffeine update was a change in the infrastructure so shouldn’t have any impact on SERPS.

However, a personal site of mine was getting a lot of traffic through long tail search, and the Mayday update didn’t affect the site in the slightest. In fact, I saw a steady increase in traffic. On June 4th my traffic took a massive hit.

I use the website php.net to refresh my knowledge of various php functions from time to time, and I have noticed that when searching for a phrase such as “php strstr function”, the php.net site is not showing up within the first 50 results of the SERPS. There is a subdomain of pear.php.net showing up in the 2nd and 3rd spots but the standard site is not.

The www.php.net version of the site still has over 80,000 pages indexed so it’s not a case that someone’s accidentally blocked Googlebot from visiting the site.
This leads me to believe that whether this has been caused by Mayday or Caffeine, Google has an error in their algorithm. For a site as well respected as php.net to be nowhere in the SERPs is clearly wrong.

I will therefore be holding off making any changes to my own site in the hope that Google fix this very quickly.

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