April 2008 Google SERP Changes - part 3

[Hissingsid]

< continued from [webmasterworld.com...] >

I have a UK site and its been hit hard. 90 percent of my top listing pages have been thrown back by 6 or 7 pages.

FWIW I think that what we are seeing is a new update cycle. Things settled down last week, then I saw one DC change then that started to spread, eventually hitting all DCs.

Then this morning <using an online tool> there was a new set of relatively minor changes but a few much bigger changes on .co.uk. There are clearly two different sets of data being served to .co.uk or they are split testing a new geo filter.

I would sit tight for a while, it might well be that you come back as things settle. Is your traffic suffering? Maybe other folks are seeing your old positions.

Cheers

Sid

[edited by: tedster at 3:54 pm (utc) on April 22, 2008]

[kinboshi]

We're jumping around on .co.uk. We're seeing our site rank #2 for a one word search [manufacturer's name], and then it'll drop down to somewhere in the 20s or 30s. Then later in the day, back to #2, then down again.

It's been doing this for more than a week now.

Quite a few other phrases are doing the same, whereas others are staying put. 'Tis all very strange.

[Hissingsid]

Hi kinboshi,

If you check the DCs for the terms I watch now they are all fairly consistent. At least the ones I can check with a DC checking tool.

But .co.uk seems to have major swings. I guess they must be testing a new geo filter.

Cheers

Sid

[lfgoal]

" Dewey's been over for two weeks.

Google continues to update every day. "

Why do you think its over when several data centers are displaying such dramatically different results?

[circusboy]

Well, TG that two weeks of hell is over....

All positions that we lost on April 4th / 5th are now back to normal, or a little stronger as of last night - traffic is back as well. Also, all the MFA crap sites are gone from the SERPS (at least for our industry).

We didn't make any changes this time... just waited for the dust to settle.

Site details: 100K+ unique (localized) pages indexed, lots of decent links (good contest linkbait), slightly over-optimized, tons of original content, some borrowed content.

[tshirtdeal]

My trafficv has not really been hit so far...it remains steady....but my drops occured just on Sat.

I am keeping my eye on overall traffic for the week and see if it remains on average...

[CainIV]

Update, or whatever you would like to call it, seems done, but I sure lots of instability either way, during the daily update.

Still substantial movements in some of the keys I watch.

[benallos]

This Dewey update as they called it hit my sites hard that 90% of my rankings is lost in the SERPS. This is the worst thing that happened to my sites. It started last weekend. I hope that it will go back to normal and the traffic of my sites will also return to normal.

[tedster]

I just noticed one very bizarre change. I have a client who is well enough known that there is a bogus MySpace page claiming to be his. (We are taking action on that, by the way.)

The MySpace page has been there for 3 years, but never even got into the top 100 until this week, when it jumped to #4. Really strange. No new backlinks or alerts have come to my attention about it, either, and it displaced legitimate pages that have been around for 6-7 years.

[edd1]

Tedster

That gives 3 options. The page you mention is accidentally doing something Google love. Or, G is raising the muck to the top so they can rake it off (I'm hoping that's what recent developments are all about) or they're tweaking about with strange new algorithms and everything will revert back whilst they scratch their heads on it and try again.

[reseller]

Tedster,

As you might recall. Udi Manber said:

We did live experiments, which means we launched the algorithm to a very small percentage of users and then see how that compares to the result without the algorithm.

May be you are one of that small percentage of users :-)

[GF_Diablos]

My sites have took a bashing too, dropping out for both competitive and locally competitive terms on both .com and .co.uk now, some even look like the -10 penalty but im not sure.
Definitely seeing them dance around within days, usually in 3 hour blocks. Not done much data centre watching yet though.

Some of my sites are in an affiliate network anyone else seeing new negative results from being promoted by affiliates?

[reseller]

GF_Diablos,

Would you call your site "Thin Affiliate" site? or is there some genuine contents too?

[GF_Diablos]

My site itself is not an affiliate site, it is the product. I have affiliates promoting it :)
I would say some of them are thin because at the end of the day some affiliates suck, but I also have quality affiliates promoting me.

[steveb]

"Why do you think its over when several data centers are displaying such dramatically different results?"

Datacenters haven't meant anything for nearly a year. And besides, as I said, google updates every day. Differences in datacenters is the norm.

[Lenchen]

I have 10+ sites of different topics. Most of them have appeared on page one for their respective key words. On April 1, ALL of them dropped to page 4-5. I got the feeling they are banned, but I don't understand why. No bought links, no tricks. The sites have been up for 1-3 years, inmproving their search results month by month. On the most popular site, the search results have been like a ping pong cirkus the last month. Always different results, just a big tornado among the search results.
I have removed all links between my sites, removed some of the affiliate links, rewritten descriptions... Nothing helps.
Anyone who has experienced the same and got back in position?

[dudibob]

something rather strange, ranking between #1 and #2 on a competitive term and today our competitor has sitelinks for the term! Google playing with authority filters?

[c41lum]

Is anybody seeing any changes yet in the .co.uk sites? We got hit hard on Sat/Sun and as of yet we have not recovered.

[netmeg]

The MySpace page has been there for 3 years, but never even got into the top 100 until this week, when it jumped to #4. Really strange. No new backlinks or alerts have come to my attention about it, either, and it displaced legitimate pages that have been around for 6-7 years.

That sounds very like the behavior I'm seeing, where my own personal site has fallen to #2 behind all my various online profiles, depending on the search - searching for my domain minus the tld, my WebmasterWorld profile comes up first, my site second. Searching for my real name, my Yahoo profile comes up first, my site second. Various other searches turn up my Digg profile, my Sphinn profile, myspace, twitter, you name it. In every case, my site (which used to be #1) comes up second or third. It's really weird. And I'm not even famous.

[ByronM]

Seems price comparison sites have now taken the lead over the actual ecommerce sites :( I hope this won't be the norm!

[Hissingsid]

Seems price comparison sites have now taken the lead over the actual ecommerce sites :( I hope this won't be the norm!

I've seen that to a small extent. I wonder if it is because they have outlinks rather than being a dead end.

Cheers

Sid

[ByronM]

I've seen that to a small extent. I wonder if it is because they have outlinks rather than being a dead end.

Not sure.. may of the ecommerce sites i've watched in my market have tons of outlinks that are highly targeted to the products/manufacturer being sold.

doing some more sniffing around to get some better details.

[celerityfm]

For the folks seeing erratic serps, is it for your entire site, or just certain keywords (e.g., most competitive)? Is it absolute or like the 950 penalty?

For us it's just for certain keywords, and what's interesting is that for google.com at NIGHT we are on page 4 for those keywords and then during the DAY we are on page 7. This has been going on for weeks! I am so confused :( - any idea if this is normal? :)

[delmiha]

celerityfm: I saw that yesterday evening.

One of our sites went through all this in the beginning of the month - 2 April or something. Two weeks everything was fine till this weekend when we lost ranking for 2 of our most competative words.

And yesterday evening I saw it back and today is gone again.

[potentialgeek]

Tedster, could you help us out here and summarize what we've learned about this update/scenario so far 200 posts into this discussion?

I'm having difficulty seeing a pattern or common denominators, even after reading this thread and after weeks of the Dance...

What is it? What is it not? Any official Google input or explanations yet?

[tedster]

Well, I don't think we've got a summary or an understanding. And officially, Matt Cutts did not confirm this as a new algo at all - he took exception to us giving it a name. So we're probably seeing an ongoing shift of the total existing algo and noticing some "dials" that were not obvious before.

What are they? I don't think we've got it. We can describe the effect, but not why those particular odd urls get promoted when others don't. Andy Warhol said that in the future everyone would enjoy 15 minutes of fame - so this is the Warhol effect.

Whatever the SERP volatility is, it's been showing us very odd behavior -- unlikely pages fly into the top spots for a bit and then vanish. By the way, the MySpace page I mentioned seeing at #4 yesterday is ranking at #53 today.

And on that same SERP there's another odd new comer show showed up a few weeks ago. And it stuck around, usually at #6 with an occasional trip to #3 for a day. The person's name on this SERP has a shorter first and last name than even Yoko Ono - but I'll use her name as an example. I's as if "Mary Yokoono" suddeny appeared in the search for "Yoko Ono" - and then stuck. I guess that's more of Udi Manber's diversity.

In fact, one main thrust of Google's evolution in recent months, not just April, seems to be summed up in that word "diversity.'

[celerityfm]

delmiha - yeah it's the same story with us, we were first page forever and then dropped for months. We thought we were penalized [due to overaggressive linking from a partners site] and after smacking around the partners and getting their links fixed we submitted a re-inclusion request 7 weeks ago. We were hoping this bouncing around isn't their response :P Fortunately it seems like it isn't :)

(added since I doubled with tedster)-Maybe this, by the way, is a clue to the warhol effect? (nice one tedster)-- that pages that ranked highly but had some 'spam factor', either internal or external are now being penalized partially rather than wholly. "We'll let you have first page every other day" or "Half the day we'll give you first page" - knowwhatimean?

[tedster]

dudibob: Has anyone been testing the SERPs of being logged into a Google account Vs. not and I get different results. on 66.102.9.104 we're second for our one of our terms vs. 1st when I'm logged in, and yes both results are from the same DC

This brings up a good point - we should all make sure that we are not logged in to a Google account when we check the SERPs. If we are logged in, then we see personalized results that are tailored to our total behavior when we are logged in - what we click on in the past, post specifically. So the logged in results are not so useful for understanding any changes in the ranking algo.

[mibrahim]

If we check the datacenters using IPs in the URL, the browser shouldn't send the login cookies to google. So I think this should work as well.

[potentialgeek]

Okay, can't figure it out, so I'm getting a job at Google. I'll be back to report what's going on in a bit.

p/g