Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I want to echo Outland88's comments on the previous page:
...Google is rotating results, changing the positioning daily, and showing sites on a day/night schedule with many keywords. You can’t tell what you’re going to get whenever you do a search. It can explain traffic drops. Google probably has the rankings tied to weather conditions and the price of oil to name a zillion things.
Just finished putting together a spreadsheet that draws from a sampling of ranking positions for eight keyword phrases (3 words) that normally drive substantial traffic for a specific site. The "normal position" for each phrase is between 1 and 15, and I've seen occasional jumps of as much as 10 positions in a single day.
Taking about 15 samples each month for the past year, averaging those results and putting it into a fancy graph, it seems that each phrase has generally kept a particular trend (up/down/equal) for a period of 3 months, followed by a "bump" and then either maintaining the previous trend or establishing a new one. The phrases consist of 2 sets of closely related, nearly interchangeable keywords.
I don't think anything can predicted from a single SERP drop unless the site itself has undergone considerable changes or the webmaster is engaging in aggressive and possibly greyhat marketing/SEO tactics.
If you worry too much about a sudden drop, maybe it's time to take a step back from it all...
[edited by: tedster at 5:47 pm (utc) on June 1, 2009]
No matter what rankings you are seeing when you check, it sounds like some rankings are not being served to as wide an audience as they were in the past. It might be geo-targeting, or time-of-day changes, something along those lines.
Noticing tonight a few sites that were seemingly gone for the last 6 months are now back for keywords they rightfully ranked for before. Anybody else noticing this?
Not sure if "rightfully ranked for" is the right term but I'm seeing sites that previously cheated the system to get top spots return to nearly top spots having been gone for 6 months.
In our market the real offline companies have their hands tied up their backs and the arbitrage sites can do stuff suppliers sites wouldn't dare. Its some of those arbitrage sites that are comming back.
Cheers
Sid
If there trying to make me like Bing more, there doing a great job of it.......
However there are still 4 of the top 10 (and 2 of the top 3) that are "comparison" sites "made" for affiliate out links. These sites are being funded by payments, mainly, from the four sites that should really be there who are paying them for clicks or conversions. The links to the affiliate sites are all hard coded real links to real forms and just have a query string in them. I'm wondering if these outlinks to spot-on theme pages coupled with a few hundred purchased links from (mainly) blogs, using the target term as anchor text, is a winning formula. This leads to a situation where because the site owners who are paying affiliate payments are not too sophisticated in either their SEO or affiliate tracking technology they are guaranteeing that they will never get into the top 10 by their own actions.
This may just be happening in my own little UK niche but if it were to be repeated in bigger consumer markets it would IMHO be a very bad thing for Google. Didn't something like this happen after Florida where directories took over from real sites. So instead of giving you a site with the answer Google told you about a site that might tell you of a site that might tell you the answer.
As an aside I guess that a well written organic arbitrage site as described above would have a very low bounce rate because many folks would immediately click a link to a real site.
Cheers
Sid
I'm wondering if these outlinks to spot-on theme pages coupled with a few hundred purchased links from (mainly) blogs, using the target term as anchor text, is a winning formula.
Working for the household names in my arena!
TEDSTER - you may be right about links in the nav bar although I have some sites that seem unaffected by them where others were hit.
There is no way to explain this update for sure, I have been in this game a long time and am extremely cautious with seo and custom link building. Never seen this before and for so long!
What is up with you and your sites?
Later
I think this is all due to Bing. Google was never so reactive in my opinion. What a waste of time Matt!
The 'link:' command shows a decrease in the number seen as 'worthy' and it's been a while since I went out and sought quality (as opposed to article dir.) links, for example.
One thing is clear. It seemed like something happened in the Google index that affected a bunch of sites around the same time...June 7th, 8th, or so.
What seems like consensus - the root cause may have something to do with the way google handles, rates, or filters backlinks. It may have to do with domain name level scoring from incoming links, and may be bug similar to something that happened in the past.
What's not clear...the recovery. Some sites seem like they are recovering, but it may not be a coordinated event since the recorvery is not generating a lot of discussion in a short amount of time, like the "being hit" event seemed to generate.
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Did I miss critial information, or give to much weight to some posts?
I personally know of two sites that seem to have been affected by this.
If you were hit at this specific "event", have you now recovered?
Do you have any information that may help identify root cause of the issue?
Of special interest is if this is permanent issue with a cause worth paying close attention to, or a temporary problem that should be ignored on the grand scheme of things.
It seems to me that most, if not all, of the sites that recovered from the May made changes and then submitted a reconsideration request with all the details. In some cases, past paid links from a couple years ago were still live, although no longer being paid for. Explaining this (with the linking urls) in the formal request may have helped. It's hard to know for sure, since other kinds of "clean-up" were also made and reported.
We've seen unusual issues with crawling and ranking....but as always, correlation does not indicate causation, and one data point does not equal a trend.
One thought I've had, is it's almost as if all link data from the past 1-2 years has been thrown out, and may be flowing back into the index. Thoughts on that? If your site was hit, would that fit your link profile?
Could what we are seeing be an in-progress pagerank recalculation on the entire deep index due to the "new" nofollow rules? Side affect being pagerank is sloshing around the deep index with younger sites with strong, but less established PR getting kicked around. Even if you don't do internal yourself, pages that link to you, or pages that link to them, could be affected. Google had said this was already factored in...but may not have been entirely truthful.
Of course, all these ideas could be wrong since I'm grasping at straws with very little data to go by.
Post June update 'blue widget countyname' dropped to 2nd and 'professional blue widget' disappeared to 75th.
I've now jumped back to almost the same ranking for 'professional blue widget'.
Google shows an even mixture of old and very new links in webmaster tools and through a link:example.com search.
Most of my links are on sites I have developed and hosted on the same ip with the same whois info and similar anchor text.
I can find no example on my site of links that could appear to be paid for. I don't have paid links on my site and am not paying for any links.
I have made no changes to the site in the last couple of months and changes previous to that were minor content updates.
All I can deduce from my experience is that Google had trouble with the legitimacy of my links. Which it now seems to have reconsidered.
Would be interested to hear others experience.
The site in google.ie has recovered it's rankings.
The site in google.co.uk is better than it was last week, but not back to previous placement. It's almost as if PR got screwed up and it's taking a while for the value from links to be recalculated and factored in...a little at a time.
Reminds me of a good old fashion google dance, where you can practically watch the rankings change as the monthly index data is deployed. Remember those days?
In many ways, the UK site has been acting like it's not in the deep index, but rather a quirky fresh index. Rankings are jumping around. For a while one of two pages (homepage or most relevant product page) were being returned, with whichever one was most recently crawled being the one that ranked and the other one not being found at all...very odd behavior. Doesn't act like deep index, but doesn't act like the fresh index I am used to. Both url's have been around for years.
Post June update 'blue widget countyname' dropped to 2nd and 'professional blue widget' disappeared to 75th.I've now jumped back to almost the same ranking for 'professional blue widget'.
...
Would be interested to hear others experience.
Iv'e not noticed a pr drop on any pages of the site and there have been big gainers on the terms I watch that are still there.
I just got dropped down, and my PR jumped from PR3 to PR4 Weird
Most of my links are on sites I have developed and hosted on the same ip with the same whois info and similar anchor text.
That doesn't sound like a very diverse or balanced backlink profile. If you can attract more links that are truly independent, that could go a long way toward stabilizing your rankings - at the higher end.
That doesn't sound like a very diverse or balanced backlink profile. If you can attract more links that are truly independent, that could go a long way toward stabilizing your rankings - at the higher end.
You're absolutely right tedster, that's why I mentioned it. ;-)
The same ip and very similar whois is at least open and honest about the origins of the links and as I mentioned Google shows a good mix of old and new links from my portfolio.
It's these links that I suspect involved my site in this latest juggle of Google's.
I do have other quality and naturally occurring links.
Other than this blip that seems to be shared by others (with presumably different link profiles to mine) my site has consistently ranked well for the terms I target.
My case does seem to support other peoples hunches that this is a re-evaluation of inbound link scoring.
Effectively, the rankings/traffic for our competitive key phrases took a large hit on or around June 7th ot 8th. Especially for “blue widget” and “widget” and even “<brand name>”!
It came back fast for “widget” and “<brand name>” but not yet for “blue widget”. For “blue widget”, we were on 2nd and 8th pages, now on 3rd and 4th.
The rankings have not changed in the past two days.
< continued here: [webmasterworld.com...] >
[edited by: tedster at 9:57 am (utc) on July 1, 2009]
