Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
- Tedster #:3699468 [webmasterworld.com...] - the most perplexing new SERP observations are those that report cycling, sine waves, yo-yo, rollercoaster, or pick your favorite synonym. sometimes these cycles happen down in the deep results pages after a url has dropped from page 1 - an apparent penalty. and sometimes the cycling appears on page one - from 3 to 10 to 3 to 10, day after day or week after week.I don't have a site under my auspices that is showing this effect, but I've been asked to look at few that are - and so far, I can say that the phenomenon is real, but am mystified by it. I felt this way when the -950 first appeared back in 2006 or so, and slowly some understanding of that has emerged. Sure hope we can get some understanding about the yo-yo phenomenon, too.
Are we seeing something new in how it's applied?
Is it a Google Glitch or intentional ?
Does it effect only site's in penalty situations?
Does it form part of new penalty handling procedures ?
Any more questions and suggestions ?
Tedster #:3708527 This is something that quite a few sites are reporting - and it often (always?) involves position #4 during the periods when the url is on the first page of the SERPs.This seems like it must be some kind of statistical testing to me. but if that's the case, how does a url get picked to be tested - and even more, how can it "pass" the test? Some urls have been on this Google yo-yo for weeks and weeks.
The yo-yo has afflicted sites that were regular fixtures on page #1. Maybe it is unusual fluctuations in backlinks that triggers the test - that's worth watching!
I'm watching a site that was penalised on May 31 & has been flying around on a key term from position 39 down to anywhere on page 7. None of the sites URL's for any previously ranked term appear above position 41.
Tedster had a theory about "let's see" and "test" , but I'm not sure that i understand what you think they may be testing.
I think it's a HUGE mistake to look at this issue as a MY SITE being tested/tweaked instead of A GENERAL RANGE/PROFILE OF SITES that the algo is affecting.
We all got that whitenight and trust me, we have all thought about getting the links to rank #1. But sometimes it's a little more complicated than just getting a bunch of links. I, for example, have about 100,000 more links to our website than the currently ranked #1 :)
In my case, it seems like an automated check-up process. They've penalized your site, but they're checking up on you. Are searchers clicking on your pages? Do they seem to be getting what they're looking for (clickstream analysis, time on site, whether they search more, etc)?
If the site seems to satisfy users, according to some algo, it might get another shot. Possibly a manual review. Just a guess.
edit - clarification
[edited by: Sharpseo at 2:12 am (utc) on Aug. 1, 2008]
more complicated than just getting a bunch of links
a bunch?
That's the problem. I didn't say "a bunch".
I said a FEW TRULY AUTHORITATIVE links.
"a bunch" just keeps you in the same link profile as before...
[edited by: whitenight at 2:11 am (utc) on Aug. 1, 2008]
Remember the old days when the 'dance' was an infrequent occurrence? Remember the changes? They were obvious because when the old became the new the new stayed put for a fair while. But even then not everyone changed, some even most, stayed locked in place.
With the 'dance' now several times a day the relationships should be more stable. Sort of like the difference between multiple small earthquakes daily to relieve stress or much larger ones semi-annually or whatever.
Thus it makes sense that the less stable pages for any given term, relatively speaking, will be seen in motion rather than the stop motion of old. And better anchoring, i.e. adding authoritive backlinks, would seem a logical solution.
More specifically, it has alot to do with how they recalculate the supplemental index and the results of that several times a day... (there's a reason they wanted it out of sight and out of mind)
I am more inclined to believe that we are tripping some kind of filter. We get linked to daily and this could be the reason, as well.
I am more inclined to believe that we are tripping some kind of filter. We get linked to daily and this could be the reason, as well.
I'll also note that I do see an effect where if I make a search I get one set of results, and if I immediately do that search again I get a very different set of results. If I search again, I never see the initial SERP again, unless I don't make the search again until an hour or more later. If I see it again later, then again it will only be in the first search of that session for that keyword.
This is still what I am experiencing...It's like it didn't happen for like two days before the TBPR update and then it's back again...Yo, Yo! Today you're #4, next your #14. Try another query, your sitting at #6...Then a refresh and your #8 and you will never see the #6 result again until some time passes...like half an hour or so.
Anyone have any thoughts on what normal "turn around time" is lately, between the time changes or tweaks are made on pages and how long it takes for those changes to be reflected in the rankings?
Before the cache update happened it was like two weeks...now it's seeming like 2-4 days or that is at least the case with my TBPR4+ sites.
[edited by: MLHmptn at 3:18 am (utc) on Aug. 1, 2008]
The #1 spot was a site with PR 0 and 25 backlinks (per Yahoo). The site also hasn't been updated since 2005.
My guess is that it will be gone tomorrow, but I don't understand how it got to #1 in the first place.
What I'd really like to see is some additional feedback on penalty related movements, especially the so called "minus penalties" . Is anyone, who has convinced themselves they are under penalty seeing movement, but just within a lower threshold of pages, or am i seeing the only ones ?
I'm wondering if Google is setting results to ranges and rotating them within this, especially in competitive sectors where they may betempted to not permit dominance of a single site - just another one of my hunches [ not facts ].
In April/May I had a family crisis to the extent I didn't even touch my site for 6 weeks and still those words flucturated wildly. Then about a month ago I decided to try and get that phrase higher. It has been ranking in low 30s every since and fluctuating only by 1 position per day (unless I make a change to other content on the home page) and it then it drops about 10 points for about a week and pops back up.
My site is not new and I don't believe it was ever penalized. The traffic was not affected very much by the rank of this 2 word phrase but that's expected when it's on page 4. It doesn't appear that the success of this phrase has affected the rank of related phrases containing one or both words either, as they haven't changed much. My site hasn't gained any great links in last several months either.
What I did notice was that when it was ranking low it fluctuated wildly but now that it's ranking higher it fluctuates very little so I'm wondering if that has something to do with the Yo Yo effect maybe there is greater volatility down below (I've been watching the stock market :)
while checking some of my SERP's on google.com using a fire fox browser with a proxy switcher so i'm in the States i see in the top and corner a new statement from google "Customized based on recent search activity." the a link to "more details"
When possible, Google will customize your search results based on location and/or recent search activity. Additionally, when you're signed in to your Google Account, you may see even more relevant, useful results based on your web history.
there is then a link to [google.com...]
Recent searches: Previous searches performed during your current browsing session could be used to customize results for your current search query. For privacy reasons, only recent search activity from the same browsing session is used to customize subsequent searches.
are you guys seeing the huge swings in SERP's using the same browser if so they look to adjusting the serp's to your session and search terms.
Vimes.
I see the most radical shifts in results if I log on using remote desktop to a server with a Canadian IP. My site and my competitor sites rank quite differently, if we rank at all.
Anyone buy that one of the metrics to gauge the worthiness of a result is by CTR?
Here's the interesting thing though. Our MS Live rankings are moving with our google rankings with a 1 day lag. MS had us in the 70s yesterday when our google rank came back to 5. Today, MS has us at 1. This is the 3rd time this has happened, so I'm confident its not a fluke.
Anyone else seeing this? Is MS scraping Google's SERPs?
Anyone else seeing this? Is MS scraping Google's SERPs?
Not for any of my sites, I've not been experiencing any problems with either MS nor Yahoo! If anything I'm slightly embarrassed how I completely dominate MS search for my widgets:-)
In the next post in this series, I'll talk about some of the experiments we are running, and what we hope to learn from them.
Shortly after these, hmmm, "interactions", rankings jump up, then go down to the level before the changes, until it settles down, mostly somewhere between old and new. But, it's a quite competitive area with competitors that have arbitrarily many PR 7 and 8 pages to choose and link from internally and from within their network. So it's hard to tell which part of the yoyo-ing comes from quick competitors' reactions and what actually comes from Google.
Bottom line of my impressions: Yoyoing of my pages is caused by my own actions.
nerd.
There is another side, too - where a previously stable high ranking starts to yo-yo. It's not so clear to me yet what triggers that action, since a few of these reports include "we made no changes to the page."
stuff I see and experience - and which you'd believe - are mainly related to these:
day/night differences
weekday/weekend differences
diff. datacenters, running tests, being out of synch, etc.
and finally... your site emits lots of 'important signal A' ( a key ranking factor in Google )... but signals B and C aren't as strong. Whenever Google tries to move away from relying on Signal A, you go down. Reasons for them to do this and then revert back can be... ( see list above ).
...
an example case of 'Google testing something'
aka my latest yo-yo experience
user behavior/satisfaction
not CTR, neither bounce rates
one recent thing I noticed and which had me thinking for weeks came up during looking at some one hundred keywords ( yeah ) of a domain, and checking the traffic quality/conversions for organic search.
i mean I built a little 'quality index' by looking at different factors related to user satisfaction, and no, bounce rates were not examined. that thing is worthless. wherever at least 3 signals were critically low ( e.g. people spending like 20 secs on the site while the average is 4 minutes... etc. ) I declared the keyword a failure.
here comes the interesting part
see, this data was for the last 30 days
I looked at about 100 keywords
came up with my quality index, a neat little list
and when I checked the actual rankings +trends for the last week...
It was a mirror image of my index.
All keywords that were seriously underperforming ( like 0 conversions / 1,000 uniques, critically low time on site, people clicking through pages and leaving like a storm... and such ) were sinking like a stone. And keywords that perform well have been rising much faster than I thought they would.
btw. Site uses Analytics. *heh*
So I've added user behavior to my list of 'ranking factors to watch out for'... knowing that this might have been nothing but a stupid coincidence or a test that comes and goes like that.
Some of the keywords I didn't care about losing. For those I DID want the site to rank for, additional links slowed down the descent, or even reversed the trend.
how this is related to the yo-yo effect:
for a query Google would either show the rankings that dropped some 20/30+ positions, OR the rankings that don't show ANY of the above.
...
Like many others in this thread I agree that some linking can certainly help rankings. I feel however there are some things we should be keeping independent when we discuss this.
I am focusing on specific pages whose rankings are moving up or down, as related to the rest of the index, and in an unstable manner. The addition of a link or two would be in my opinion independent of this testing, which appears to me to be more of a "worthiness test" combined with a Google testing of its SERP landscape. I am not saying that those links could not independently cause a movement in the rankings, but this behavior doesn’t appear to match up with what would likely be a permanent up move as a result of an added authority link.
Another thing is that when I mentioned CTR above, I want to be clear that I was meaning to reference CTR in relation to the slot in the SERP (#4), rather than the Title or Description or URL which could theoretically have better or worse CTR depending on its "pull." I am theorizing this as more as a test of the slot for News listings vs “regular” listings, and observing CTR as a whole on either choice, so the creative and the page listed would be independent. Of course, that could certainly influence the CTR, I admit.
I certainly feel that user behavior is a part of many tests that Google conducts, both through observance of bounce back on SERPs as well as through Analytics. I would think the way that factor would affect this test is possibly a high return-to-SERP rate, which would then render the test site a failure and cause them to move onto another site. This would tie in nicely with Tedster’s current theory of the “worthiness meter” test.
As was suggested above, I am trying to look at this as a whole…the question really remains though “why is it the page I am working with that is yo-yo-ing?” It may be cool to talk to other SEOs that are targeting this specific term to see what they are experiencing, and look for trends. Of course that would never happen, even in this open and sharing community.
It is one thing talking about this in generalities, but once you sit down with a direct competitor at a table you have the potential to stack the deck. I guess Google has that going for them that it is unlikely no large brands would ever meet and try as a group of 2 or 3 sites to dominate a specific genre of listings by studying this type of phenomena together. It is fair to say that plenty of groups or single owners corner competitive but less mainstream searches with multiple sites and spammy methods. Big brands tend to dominate the more mainstream terms already, but if a few were to band together…
Sorry back to the topic at hand. This morning I see a “plain” #4 and the News box down at #10. Our target sits lonely at 17… maybe it’s time to get some more links
All "exact match" domain searches are like this with the TLD left off:
1. Search .com for "1234site" = position 41 on universal site. Steady no Yo Yo . This is a .com site . Site has penalty
2. Search .co.uk for "1234site" = position 51 also on universal . This site Yo Yo's on keywords between page #4 and #6. This is a .co.uk site. Site has penalty introduced some 2 months ago and is undergoing remedial tidy up work .
3. A site which currently ranks well, has slipped to 21. Is this a warning shot ?
There are other various sites in the network and they vary from position no 1 , 21 , 41 and 51. Coincidence that they fall to specific page number Y / N ?
Only one of these is subject to the Yo Yo between pages. But the site in position 21 is seeing results Yo Yo 3 places from No 1 to No 3.
Just observations at this stage, but it may help others lock on to some further observations that can assist in better understanding penalty behaviours .
Perhaps one thing that i speculate from this is that not all penalty situations are treated equally, and this penalty by [ page ] degree thing may exist.
I'm seeing old time spam sites charge to the front of the pack with old time keyword stuffing nonense paragraphs and adsense all over the place.
Somebody at the plex turned the wrong knob and let the dogs out of the spam box.
[edited by: tedster at 6:12 pm (utc) on Aug. 9, 2008]
it's simply that you're on the edge of whatever threshold/filter that's being tested on and off that causes the yo-yo-ing
That's interesting and sounds plausible , but are you saying it's more than this ? If facts maybe you tell us more , sources etc ?
I like the idea that sites are moving between filter thresholds as an explanation.
[edited by: Whitey at 12:41 am (utc) on Aug. 10, 2008]
