Recent changes in Google Algorithm impacting Japanese more?

Big variation in traffic on Japanese language

[whats up skip]

I know there has been a bit of noise about the recent changes to Google and the impact on some sites. We have found that there has been a major impact on some of our Japanese language sites, but not much on the English language ones.

Our most popular site had been fairly steady in the traffic for four or five months at 85,000 +/- 5,000. Then in January it jumped right upto 120,000. This month it looks like it around 85,000 again. There seems to be no reason for any change, other than the Google results.

On another site we had been in the top five positions for six or more popular phrases for the last four months, then this month we are not even in the top 100!

These all seem to be very dramatic changes. Any thoughts?

[David_M]

Hi Skip,

Yep, I've noticed some definite changes in the results- some good some bad.

I have a site that got indexed improperly a few months ago, that seems to be slowly getting weeded out of the serps altogher, while another site I put up a few weeks ago is in the serps properly already.

The only thing I can think of to remedy this is to get more incoming links, and pray to the google buddha.

[globalseo]

I would take a look at the quality of the links. In both English and Japanese we noticed that links from pages with less than a PR5 seemed have even less value than before.

Also, the context of those links was another factor. When looking at current #1 and previous #1 we immediately saw the link quality difference as well as an "authoritative relevance" difference between the two. What I mean is, links that previously seemed to add value, no longer added value since they were not topically related to our pages.

Another factor that seems be taking hold in Japan is a decrease in value of links coming from the same Class C block of IP's. This has been in place in the US for a while but we are just now seeing it take hold in other markets.

If the positions did not change drastically but the traffic decreased it might be due to how Google was building its SERP descriptions. We noticed a flopping from compiled results back to Meta description back to compiled. If your compiled description had a strong cal to action it would get clicked. By defaulting to the Meta description it may have been a weaker call to action.

We found that by adding a "." to isolate specific sentences (that did not have it before) we could get a specific phrase as our results description. Again, nothing new but it demonstrated the importance of proper sentence structure.