Lot of websites have reported ranking problems. The problem started on December 7th, 2006. I had one website affected by this rank change. I think I have figured it out.
What if this winter, there has been growth in internet while no significant growth in capacity for Google?
What if people are shopping a lot this Christmas, and Google has to justify its 4th quarter earning?
Becuase of AdSense and increase in the number of people shopping or accesing the internet, Google must have been in demand for more servers. We know from Google CEO’s own words, they have a server capacity problem.
Now they could spend some money and take care of the problem. However, the increase in cost would not look great on 4th quarted earnings, specially so close to year end.
So what they did was shift data centers from Search to AdSense and Checkout.
Now, where’s my proof?
1) I just checked some of my large sites, and all of them report decrease in number of page indexed.
2) Also googlebot has significantly slowed down last few weeks.
3) Google shows 9 billion web pages indexed opposed to 25 billion pages earlier this year.
With the reduction of storage per site, Google has more servers. Which in turn can be used to serve AdSense and Checkout.