Last night I have been researching something and came across some weird stuff in Google. A lot has been said already about Google updating the SERPs more often for the more competitive markets (e.g. “buy viagra” and such) but I saw the proof of the opposite: the less popular a query is (=the less competitive a market is) the less Google will care about spending their resources on keeping its SERPs up to date.
I was searching for something quite obscure which I am not going to mention here directly but suffice to say it only returned about 500 results. The query contained a bit of text in quotes, inurl: , -site: and such shit. Not something you would normally compete to rank for consciously. Well approximately the first 25 results were ok but then the interesting bit started coming up. Almost every result I would click would take me to a parked page with nothing but your regular parked ads on it and no hint why it could be even coming up for that search query. It was late and I was tired and it just pissed me off so I said feck it and went to sleep but didn’t forget it. I decided to research it deeper today as my perverse blackhat mind suspected things like cloaking and the like.
Well, armed with my tools I checked that query again today and in Google cache of the SERPs in question there was the bit getting them to rank for the query. But Google cache was anywhere from a week to a month old for each one of those sites. Each one of these sites was not expired but parked – and by checking the domains in Domaintools I found out that these domains had their nameservers changed and got parked in the last couple days – i.e., after Google has last cached them.
As a result, a site may not be relevant to a query for a while but still ranking for it. The reverse Viagra law of Google! 🙂
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