Google update died on the vine - except for victims of 6/27/2006 debacle

by Darren McLaughlin

Google has sucked for a long time, but now it’s getting even worse. On 6/27/2006 thousands of websites were dropped from Google’s rankings as part of a failed update that would eventually roll back. This is except for the websites which have been sent to hell for the past two weeks.

Matt Cutts, the famous Google engineer who answers late and offers little had this to say:

“I believe any changes on the 27th were refreshing data used by an existing algorithm”

Of course this mess of words (a sentence I guess?) doesn’t really say anything, so he offered this statement for clarification:

It will continue to be refreshed (just talked with someone about it few minutes ago), but not with data from the 26th. We keep iterating based on evaluation, the changes that we see, and the feedback that we get as well.

Purposefully obtuse. That’s how I’d describe these two statements. I can think of a better way to say this:

“Yeah, we f-ed up on the 26th. Somebody’s working on it right now”.

That would be too direct and honest, and those are two virtues that Google isn’t known for, especially with their propensity for giving meaningless soundbite answers. The bottom line is, live and learn.

If you get knocked out of Google, DO NOT expect a timely resolution. In fact, you need to wait a good long time to see resolution, if you ever do.

It’s been nearly two weeks of lost revenue so far. There’s no telling how long until it gets resolved.