Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
As our intrepid heros left Oct. and entered Nov. they had just weathered a seige of Chinese domains into the rankings, Google's PageRank Massacre and the first signs of the annual Pre-holiday Sales Algorithm Change (a festive Google tradition)...
Chapter 11 - Holiday Hell or Heaven Sent?
Hee hee. Obviously I am having some fun starting the November thread. But seriously, this SEO is seeing some long-ranking web pages erode in the rankings. They're acting like icebergs. After a long time in good positions they have broken off of the glacier and are slowly drifting south. These are not stagnant websites sitting on their laurels either. The big concern is that doing the 'correct' relevant things do not seem to help.
Many of the replacements are soaking in a bath of external paid link-equity. One website I am watching appeared on the first page for a major two-word phrase and rose to #2 last month. The website has a reciprical footer link with a directory that has site-wide footer links to the ranking website using only the two-word keyword as anchor text. The directory has site-wide footers with 3 other directories. All three directories have site-wide footers to the ranking website. Oh, and the cream of the crop...one well known directory has a hidden link to this website. The link is in the markup with no anchor text. Other websites seem to enjoy link equity from lots of TV and radio websites (I wonder why? ;) ). For all of Google's bluster, Mountain View continues to have only sporadic combat success.
Boring business websites, the ones that have a hard time crafting compelling creative linkbait, seem to be the vulnerable to ranking shifts. I still see many verticles where reciprocal links still seem to be the deciding factor for which pages rank where.
Size does matter. The slow encroachment of big box retailers and Amazonian wannabees (you know who you are) continues to creep into the SERPs. Many domains that have spent the last year or two in the 20-40 positions have cracked the first page and are quietly moving up. These sites have lots of original content. Perhaps Brett needs to update the 26 steps to say, "Add 100 pages a day."
Does camouflage work? This makes no sense at all, but I have noticed in some keyword markets that domain names that contain popular domain names as a part of them are ranking. For example the popular well-known domain might be called THISDOMAIN.COM. The lookalike domain name might be THISDOMAINPRODUCTCATEGORY.COM.
Those are my observations. What are you seeing?
[edited by: tedster at 5:14 pm (utc) on Nov. 1, 2007]
One of our 3 week old #1 pages is now #19. I think something has happened because the pages haven't changed and their only about 3 weeks old.
Anyone else see this?
Did google have an update last night?
[edited by: tedster at 10:46 pm (utc) on Nov. 13, 2007]
[edit reason] moved from another location [/edit]
My guess right now is that this was a local effect for your pages. New urls sometimes go through a "honeymoon" period of good initial rankings and then a drop, based on whatever Google learns during the honeymoon. Such pages then can climb back up to a more stable position over time.
[edited by: tedster at 1:11 am (utc) on Nov. 14, 2007]
although as we get into holiday shopping a lot of us are kind of expecting something like this.
I am with you on this, Ted.
Would you like to take a guess on when?
I was afraid of that. Looking back at last year, it looks like it happened on Oct 20th.
Last year, it was the wednesday after black monday. I had a lot of pages thrown into the supplemental index. Didn't really hurt my "major" pages that I rank for, but Christmas wasn't nearly as good as it could have been.
This year, I'm looking at a crappy christmas.
The second set is newer, but is starting to look more and more like the first set of data where sites I have that dropped show improved and closer positions to the first set of data.
Anyone noticing this?
I thought it was only related to my site, as the serps other than when they include my new pages, have not changed much.
WW_Watcher
[edited by: WW_Watcher at 5:35 pm (utc) on Nov. 14, 2007]
Last year, it was the wednesday after black monday
What is black Monday?
Last year, it was my busiest shipping day of the season.
Ok, thanks - so your serps changed on Nov 29 in 06.
I had made a change to my website to reduce the clicks to get someone to add an item to the cart. It had the unintended side effect of making all my item duplicate content to their section pages (product descriptions appeared on both section pages and item pages). So item pages that used to rank for "pretty red widget" disappeared and I'd only rank for "red widgets" instead of both terms. While "red widgets" obviously got the bulk of the searches, I did lose out on those "pretty red widget" searches. I fixed that in january (after realizing the problem) and things were steady up until now.
It's strange, the homepage still ranks well for the other terms we're targeting though.
Anyone else experiencing anything similar? Hopefully *fingers crossed& it'll shoot back up.
I see new pages in both sets, so it seems as though it might be some kind of testing?
I've have a website that's been #2 for a very popular 1 word keyphrase for about 1 year disappear to position #14 overnight. Quite a few sub pages have went to position #14 too.
That is what has been so confusing and frustrating/depressing. A normal "penalty" would be across the board. Not this.
I'm really starting to think (with the increased influence domain names seem to have on SERPs) that google is just trying to push those stupid sitelinks. And since they, apparently, can only happen to index pages, not subpages, they increased the influence of domain names into the algorithm and it threw chaos into everything.
[edited by: kamikaze_Optimizer at 7:33 am (utc) on Nov. 16, 2007]
There are also all those domain that got wacked for no abvious reasons. Instead, there is an increasing number of scrappers that seem to gain trust.
At the same time all link buyers I know of keep having a happy life, and what they do is more than obvious at least to a human being.
So many legitimate pages went down to the toilet for the past 2 months that it gave push up to those using strategies that used to raise a red flag big time. sad.
Not sure how Google got there and what it actually improves, can't see it.
Now I also see a problem with Google increasing domain name factors. If you try to do a bit of branding with an exotic name, it could totally disassociate your site from it's main theme. At least that's how I explain some of the difficulties a few websites have.
Anyway, also great time for Google bowling by the way, seems to work great.
Fortunately it's not across the board but still, sad. Looks like MSN.
SERP's are still flipping back and forth between two very obvious sets of data
CainIV
Do you have an idea of what the difference between these two sets of data is?
Has anyone noticed difference in their traffic by continents/countries...?
Other observation is that most of the sites with higher SERPs seem to be "news/periodicals" sites and of course a smattering of "junk" sites...
Has anyone made similar observations?
Still waiting ...
SERP on "main-keyword" down from 2nd to 260th position = earnings down by 75%. Interestingly, SERP on "main-keyword category-keyword"
KVeil: To answer your question, I have not seen this. In fact, one tool I use shows little movement for the past three days.
When did this first occur to you? Today?
[edited by: tedster at 8:16 am (utc) on Nov. 24, 2007]
K
Sites that didn't get hit all have the same commonalities - link spamming (paid blogs, hit counter spam, sitewides on non-related sites, link gathering through link exchanges). Not sure what google think they did here. Some site
