3: Google Updates and SERP Changes - May 2010

[tyler756]

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

I have been attempting to follow this thread to the best of my ability but must admit there is information in here that is a little out of my league.

Has anyone been able to do anything to help increase rankings? I lost rankings for 3 my keywords (I am not ranking for a ton of them yet) and these 3 drive a lot of my traffic. I dropped down from the 1 spot to position 5 and 6 for two of the keywords, and from the 3rd spot to the third page for the other major keyword. I am not sure what to do and we are about to enter the "slow months" for my industry and my traffic is dropping every day.

Just thought I would post to see if anyone is having any luck

[edited by: tedster at 7:41 pm (utc) on May 22, 2010]

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

jojy you said...

Since May 17 we lost up to 65% search engine traffic from Google, this is major hit by Google :(

Since EXACTLY may 17 one of my sites has done exactly that. It's not the same on my blog or on my technical guide site, it only happened to my affiliate site. I also noticed that product descriptions show up in Google ONCE for ONE affiliate but all others with that product are supplemental. Google has tightened up the affiliate reigns so to speak, probably in advance of their big announcement entrance into e-commerce next month.

What to do? reduce the number of offers and increase the number of offer free pages.

edit: a side note, many of my affiliate pages on that site have an additional link to the same site which brings visitors to a how to page. The pages without the extra link are all untouched in rank and traffic. Perhaps number of different offers is the key?

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

I spent a few hours earlier listening to recent Matt Cutts videos and two messages stands out between the lines, his message to webmasters.

#1 - Build great content.
#2 - Tell the world.

We know our content is being evaluated, it always will be, but that "tell the world" may be more important than ever because the worlds response provides Google with more insight on the quality of our content BESIDES on page signals.

Is this update evaluating how locked into social media sites are and measuring the response too? I should have added to my previous post that with my more affiliate pages downgraded my bounce rate has fallen 6% in the same period and you KNOW that's the kind of thing Google wants to see.

[steerpikegg]

probably in advance of their big announcement entrance into e-commerce next month

What announcement is that ?

[anand84]

Google SERPS are looking more and more like an MFA webpage...Quite a few keyword stuffed serps not withstanding, now the ads are all on boldened text..Such an eyesore..

[sGroup]

We manage an ecommerce site (not affiliate site) that is 3rd largest in its vertical.

80%+ of our links to this ecommerce site are from medium quality sites in terms of home page PR(PR0-PR4).

My guess is our links are on pages that have either lost live PR, not currently in the G index. Basically either have lost PR or filtered out by this current update.

We used to be in position #2/3 and now we are at #10/11.

We continue to acquire links and do not plan to stop what had worked for 9+ years on G.

[rafaelmontilla]

My old client is stil ranking # 1 and 2 for < one keyword > but his traffic has drop 15%.

And my new client is going good with the term < a similar keyword >and trafffic, I hope nothing change.

I let you know if anything change.

[edited by: tedster at 4:24 pm (utc) on May 30, 2010]
[edit reason] sorry, no specific search words [/edit]

[amythepoet]

I lost rankings too, what happened here?

[tedster]

Amy, what's the date that you lost rankings? And were they long-tail rankings or short keywords?

[amythepoet]

It happened 2 days ago, I think we lost everyting! what happened here?

[amythepoet]

I'm ih shock! what do I do? It might have happend 3 -4 days ago, it was long tail, short tail, everything is missing,

what do I do?: help, help, help! Oh this is sooo sad!

change anything or wait? ? HELP!

[Reno]

Amy, you gotta' at least speed read this thread -- your situation is not unique -- there's MANY of us that have dropped like stones and for some here, there are salaries on the line. This is an ugly situation and we're trying to figure it out, but that's hard to do when the silence from Google is deafening.

..........................

[amythepoet]

yup, I am reading the thread, thanks

[amythepoet]

I personally think that things will work themselves out, it just doesn't seem right that many many pages of mine are not t here now, must be a screw up at G, I say pray!

[helpnow]

Amy: First, breathe. And again. Breathe deep. Every problem has a solution. Breathe. Go get a tea, or a coffee, or a soda, or whatever, and relax. Stretch. Breathe. The sun will come up tomorrow.

You need to begin by assessing your situation. You need to think clearly. Forget the emotions of this. You need to think analytically now. Emotions will get in your way.

Now, you say you lost everything. Start with the basics. Does a search for your domain as example.com show your site as first? Is your domain name unique to you, and if so, what do you get when you search for you domain name without the '.com' (assuming your domain TLD is a .com)... What do you get when you search for site:example.com?

This will tell us if "everything is gone", or if your rankings are simply affected...

[edited by: tedster at 6:41 pm (utc) on May 30, 2010]
[edit reason] switch to example.com - it cannot be owned [/edit]

[amythepoet]

Ok, I'm b reahting and I just did a search for site: example.com, with my domain

I get 197 results

now what?

they used to be on the first page, gonzo today

[rustybrick]

Matt Cutts posted a video on it at [youtube.com...]

[helpnow]

Amy - OK, so your site is still indexed. That's good!

What do you mean, "they used to be on the first page, gonzo today". You would do specific keyword searches, and you "knew" where your site positons were, and now, those positions of your site are now gone?

Have you changed ANYTHING on your site in the past 2 weeks. It may be something as long ago as 2 weeks ago that you did that is now affecting your rankings...

[amythepoet]

ok, il take a look, thank you, I think I need change content again, so I'm doing it slowly but I will look at the video, thanks so much

enough of a day for me already

lateh

[amythepoet]

I mean the urls were on the first page and today I don't see them, it wasa bout 10 of them

no, I didn't do anything different, except change the right hand side of some of the pages, but I always do that

[outland88]

Anybody thinking things are over is wrong. We just got 50% of our pages zapped Saturday. As I have always said Google doesn't do anything in one fell swoop anymore they do it piecemeal. It keeps webmasters bickering among one another thinking some do things all the right ways. There are no right ways, just what Google decides to purge next for money.

[amythepoet]

well that makes sense

[walkman]

outland88, what's 'zapped' ?

[amythepoet]

Wait a sec, I do have a lot of 301 redirects, could that be messing things up?

can I remove them entirely?

[Andylew]

An interesting video from Matt, doesnt really give us any more clues than what we already knew - its an algorhythm change.

Im sure we all have 101 questions that he didnt answer! My main one would be does the new algorhythm require a complete reindex of the long tail - ie are they re-crawling sites in the long tail because of a new ranking factor which was not previously measured in earlier crawls.

[jk3210]

Re: 301 re-directs

I 301'd an entire site to a new domain beginning on 5/8. New domain pages started showing-up in the serps for various searches by 5/13 and all 259 of the new domain's pages were listed in a site: search by 5/17.

Many of the new domain's pages are ranking in positions 1-6 now.

[outland88]

outland88, what's 'zapped' ?

Eliminated. Sent to the Outland.

[sGroup]

@rustybrick
Matt Cutts posted a video on it at [youtube.com...]
Interesting
- I wonder what the change in algorithm is that is effecting this change.
- We all need to figure out what is specific algorithm change is and how we can fix our sites for it.
- For us it is not a long tail KW that is effecting traffic.

We manage an ecommerce site (not affiliate site) that is 3rd largest in its vertical.

80%+ of our links to this ecommerce site are from medium quality sites in terms of home page PR (PR0-PR4).

My guess is that our back links are on pages that have either lost live PR or are no longer in the G index. Basically either have lost PR juice transfer or filtered out by this new algorithm update thus effecting our rank.

question if you are reading this thread

- We understand that some non-long tail KW's will get effected. Can you please advise what exactly is effecting the non-long tail KW's... What is at the core of the latest algorithm change? we are not seeing quality sites in the top 10 any longer... Most of the sites in our vertical are purchasing high PR links and are not effected... is that what we need to do to climb back up?

[edited by: sGroup at 9:09 pm (utc) on May 30, 2010]

[tedster]

The May 17 change appears to be different from the Mayday change - so we should not confuse the factors that are active in those two. Matt Cutts has released a video about Mayday, by the way - see [webmasterworld.com...]

[sean22]

What I got from MC video is that this(mayday) is pretty much permanent, and it's not something that Google has to iron out. Please correct me if I am wrong.

If Google is moving towards a true content is king approach instead of the link acquisition craze it created then that's cool. It's also nice to have some closure to this because if it dragged on to June, that would have be cruel.

[tedster]

moving towards a true content is king approach instead of the link acquisition craze

I tend to agree with you about the direction, but... Any ideas on how Google might now be measuring quality content? I'm coming up empty on that right now.

Also what is the character of the May 17 change that several here have mentioned? We can continue the Mayday discussion in this thread [webmasterworld.com] for as long as we need, but probably should keep pace with new changes here, because Google isn;t standing still, that's for sure.