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The past couple of days have turned out to be a rough ride for the Webmasters. There has been a chain reaction of ranking fluctuations throughout Google and Yahoo!. In the beginning of this week I had reported that Yahoo! was in the process of rolling out 'June 2008 Search Index Update'. Then yesterday, I had reported about the 'July 2008 Google SERP Changes'. With these two updates running simultaneously, Webmasters are facing a hard time with their website rankings. Now, adding to Webmasters' troubles, Webmaster World has reported that the google.co.uk domain is also undergoing SERP changes. The July 2008 Google.co.uk SERP Changes are causing extreme fluctuations in the rankings of websites in this domain.

Here are some of the interesting posts from the Webmaster World thread:

"I decided to perform an experiment last weekend and constructed a brand new 35 page promotional brochure site on a 14 year old .co.uk. This .co.uk has been pointing at our .com for a couple of years now and both have been hosted in the U.K. from inception.

Googlebot came in mid-week and performing a site:example.co.uk returns only 6 results, the index page and five product pages! So I decided to check to see if I could find those pages in the SERPs using the three word keyphrases for the five product pages.

All the pages are authoratative with plenty of text, images and relevant information and all five, I'm pleased to say, are in the top 10 results, we'll see how long that lasts.

I find it strange that Googlebot has taken the entire site and only showing six pages at present, it's not as though it's a huge site.

Meanwhile I am still having yo-yoing problems with the 10 year old retail brochure site and really cannot see any point in attempting anything whilst there is such an extreme flux occurring.

Meanwhile G has moved a load of my .coms hosted on a US server back into the Google.co.za resultsarghwhat are they doing?"

"For small sites:

You'll find Google is quickest to find a new site, but the number of indexed pages only goes up slowly.

Yahoo will take longer to find the site initially, and will get to 100% in just a few steps.

Live will take the longest to initially find the site, but once found, will get to 100% in only a couple of steps, in only a week or so.

That's been my experience with new sites in the last few months.

I also find, for Google, large variances in pages indexed in different datacentres. Additionally, if you have a "custom site search" that will be ahead of everything else."

"Has anyone seen a shift in the UK geolocation issues? I'm wondering if UK sites are still disappearing inappropriately, or if the situation is improving for at least some websites."

"there has been a massive shift.
in the .co.uk index i am seeing sites on page one. for the same phrase on the .com are dropped to page two.

the .com index is about 95% .com sites which is a bit crazy."

"A couple of things about the yo-yoing 10 year-old brochure site.

1. Searching Google.com for the most important 3 keyword phrase and nothing can be found, Google.co.uk and it's now back in 6th positionfor the moment.

2. I believe that Google has created and imposed its own duplicate penalty! This site has always been known as example-example.com with exampleexample.com parked on top since inception.

Recently several pages started appearing in the SERPs with exampleexample.com and doing site:exampleexample.com revealed many pages in the index.

I've now hardcoded all links as example-example.com so I'll await and see what happens however, interestingly, Yahoo! has the site #1 correctly with example-example.com yet Live has it #1 with exampleexample.com.

I am totally perplexed as to why, after 10 years, G & Live should suddenly "decide" that exampleexample.com is the correct site."

"Still a massive difference for my UK .com site although a slight improvement over the last week - a few places which puts me at the top of page 2 for UK searches (still top 5 for US searches).

I have made no changes which might effect the geo-targeting for a couple of weeks - so it is either the .co.uk links starting to take effect, or google tweaking their G-UK algo. "

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