Google Updates and SERP Changes - August 2010

[anand84]

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

One more month gone..Do we have to create one more thread for August or just assume this is going to be the scheme of things for future?

[edited by: tedster at 6:56 pm (utc) on Aug 1, 2010]

[tedster]

@steerpikegg

Anyone seeing a change in UK serps this morning? [Aug 3]

Our traffic has been steadily increasing, getting closer to pre-mayday levels every day for the last month or so, but today at pretty much 9.00am our site has disappeared for many keywords in the UK

I haven't come across any other reports of a big UK shuffle on Aug 3. So unless some show up soon, you should probably assume this is specific to your website.

[fabulousyarn]

Ummm... can someone please enlighten me - it appears that some are seeing OTHER peoples -950 OOP

How do you see this?
How do you see others?

J

[tedster]

You need to be tracking the top URLs on the SERP (a good thing to do) and then go digging when one seems to disappear.

[Victor1]

There is tracking software that is usefull for this. One of the popular keyword tools has a good rank tracker built in.

[petehall]

I'd say no drastic movement in the UK on all the terms I watch (quite a lot!).

[Jez123]

I am seeing my UK results jumping more than I have ever seen them. Virtually every refresh see my site in a diffrent place as well as the rest of the 5 sites at the top.

Anyone else noticing this?

[pontifex]

Jez123: yep, I am seeing a big shuffle out of Germany!

--------
<moved from another location>

I am seeing a significant shuffle for some search terms which goes beyond the usual flux. It looks like an index update to me? I also see different backlinks now. Is that just my site or do you see that, too?

[edited by: tedster at 4:00 pm (utc) on Aug 6, 2010]

[mromero]

We've noticed several of our original, copyrighted images appear in Google images when doing a search for Widget Females Nude. All our images and content are G rated.

When you hover the cursor over the thumbnail it zooms up a little larger, and beneath, the url is for the deviant website.

Clicking on the zoomed thumbnail then takes me to the full image, on the browser bar the address is very long - a snippet below:

<snip>

And grayed out below is the deviant website. On the right hand side Google states: Google Images, Website For This Image with a link. Clicking on the link or the photo takes you to the deviant website.

I see dozens of other other images from other legitimate websites many not even remotely related to the content of the spam websites Google is listing as the link for the lifted images. Some are images of an island for example that takes you to a p#o*r$n website.

It appears the scrapper websites have some clever script where they hotlink thousands of images from their owners and get it listed on Google Images as their property for free traffic.

[edited by: engine at 9:42 am (utc) on Aug 11, 2010]
[edit reason] removed the URL snippet [/edit]

[epmaniac]

this is the worst monday that we have witnessed, and probably the worst day ever also in terms of traffic... monday is always about peak traffic but this monday we witnessed a big slump... anyone else seeing that?

[petehall]

I am noticing some movement now. My own website is number1 for it's target phrase after a good 5+ years!

Normally sits around 2-4.

But also noticing quite a large amount of crud on long-tails, so think something is not quite right. In fact they look HORRIBLE the more I look.

I can see sites I have created but not spent any time gathering links on outranking authority sites. Again this makes me think something is not quite right.

[fabulousyarn]

I saw a huge slump sunday/picked up late monday...not sure whats up...but yes, weirdness.

[mhansen]

Somewhere around mid-day on Monday, I started seeing more long tail traffic hitting on a site that was suffering a June 2nd drop.

Today, its been VERY noticeable, and although I am not seeing an overall increase from Google in whole, the longtails are MUCH longer! (I lost roughly 60% of google referrals on June 2nd, to date, the reclaim has been minimal)

Almost like they switched me off the shorter 2-3 word queries, and moved me to the 4-8 word (or more) queries! I counted a few 10 word queries!

Will be interesting to see how the rest of the month fares.

MH

[internetheaven]

This really has turned in to a thread simply documenting the changes. There can be no advice or assistance given in this monthly thread anymore can there?

... other than "turn your attention to Bing" ;)

The whole SERP layout seems to be geared toward keeping people away from organic results and the organic results seem arbitrary. A "that'll do, let's get back to competing with Microsoft's products" kind of mentality.

I see the biggest example of irony about to hit the WWW over the next year.

[mhansen]

Just wanted to follow up on the increased long tail traffic mentioned in a previous post.

On another unrelated site that was not affected by the June 02nd Google traffic loss, the amount of longtail traffic has increased there as well.

At this point, It does not look like the shorter nuggets are suffering, but the longtail has increased considerably!

Looks like the change occurred on or around August 9-10th on my end.

MH

[Shaddows]

This really has turned in to a thread simply documenting the changes

Sadly, I agree. And worse, it's usually "My site..."

The deterioration in commentary started with the Caffiene peekaboo event, and seems to have become ingrained after the Mayday event, in the belief that all information is equally useful. It's not.

Can we try a bit more specificity with comments? Or, observe for a day or two, and see if you can spot TRENDS, then report those.

Another great thing that's gone missing is DISAGREEMENT. Feel that someone is talking rubbish? Got DATA to the contrary? Say so. Debate, argue, above all, ENGAGE.

Please.

Just wanted to follow up on the increased long tail traffic mentioned in a previous post.

On another unrelated site that was not affected by the June 02nd Google traffic loss, the amount of longtail traffic has increased there as well.

At this point, It does not look like the shorter nuggets are suffering, but the longtail has increased considerably!

Looks like the change occurred on or around August 9-10th on my end.

Specificity, perfect!

[anand84]

At this point, It does not look like the shorter nuggets are suffering, but the longtail has increased considerably!

Looks like the change occurred on or around August 9-10th on my end.

Does this second site show a subsequent increase in traffic? My beautiful sites have remained just the way they were since March 14.. :-/

[mhansen]

Does this second site show a subsequent increase in traffic?

Traffic, overall, is up slightly, but nothing worth jumping and down for... so its too soon for me to really say anything solid on the existing traffic Anand.

[epmaniac]

hi all,

one question..

does submitting to yahoo directory and being accepted in it causes change in titles of few of your landing pages?

[anand84]

I'm not sure if this is relevant here. But just learned about this new patent application [pehub.com] that Google has filed which talks about "discovering" low-competition areas in order to get partners develop content in those areas.

Now low-competition can as well mean long-tail as well. I wonder if this could be a factor in this search algo change as well.

[suratmedia]

Okay, after 8 months and 7 days, today my site got release filter from long long long internal duplication penalty. I handled our canonical duplication with 404 rather than traditional 301.

It's now showing up in top 60 results for our keyword. but still recovering... as site:example.com is listing http://my-penalize-site.example.com around 45th position and It must be under top 5.

I am logging each and every Google SERP data related to my site since last 250 days in excel file.

Once my site get fully recovered, I'll share my experience & tell how Google exactly resolve internal duplication penalty in 8-9 months?

[edited by: tedster at 4:30 am (utc) on Aug 12, 2010]
[edit reason] made example url visible [/edit]

[anand84]

today my site got release filter from long long long internal duplication penalty.

Can you please elaborate a bit more on this?

[scottsonline]

Whatever Google was trying to do I'd love to know why they think when I search for a specific product in the year 2010 they should return thefind dot com or amazon as the top result 95% of the time?

Was this REALLY the intent of caffeine?

[scottsonline]

Just wanted to add the trash results are back again in the last x or xx days.

In our industry a major brand is also a city. If you search for the brand product name...if the product name has anything close to a geographic reference in it the results are trash. Yahoo and Bing are fine.

Very frustrating that after 3 months they're still clueless at Google.

[Robert Charlton]

...if the product name has anything close to a geographic reference in it the results are trash.

In directory style sites or in stand-alone sites?

Over the course of the Mayday et seq, I've seen some geo-based directory style sites fluctuating much more than previously... and I've come to attribute this either to a change in how Google is looking at inbound links in some niches, and/or the highly templated nature of some of these sites.

PS - I suspect you're talking about an entirely different kind of skewing.

[dvduval]

I think where some directory sites may suffer is in quantity of stub pages. I've seen a fair number of directories that have have content throughout also have pagerank throughout. My theory is that sites with lots of stub pages are bleeding pagerank and excessive stub pages sort of become a vacuum for pagerank, not allowing its spread.

[Spencer]

I think I'm seeing data from 3 months ago in the serps in the UK. I have one site completely not included, which is 2 months old and a couple of sites that I built around 3 - 4 months ago have reverted to their initial placings (i.e. when brand searched - Index page ranked lower than back pages)

Is this possible ?

[dvduval]

What I have observed is that google, despite all the announcements on their great new infrastructure, is slower than they have been in years in staying up to date. I don't know if this is some extra tweak they added to slow spam, or a weakness in their new platform they have yet to solve.

There are a lot of cases I see where fresher pages would be a lot more relevant, but there seems to be some extra "protection" turned on that rewards older results, even when they lack relevancy. This especially applies to long tail keywords.

And of course I won't stop complaining about sites that clearly bought or otherwised obfuscated their method for boosting pagerank, have been then selling to the highest bidder for the last 4-5 months (since last green bar update). Reports do no good, and millions of dollars change hands while nothing is being done. Meanwhile, may of these sites outrank businesses that built their site for the users.

Looking at the overall history of google, I am still a great fan, but I am not too pleased with the last several months. The best way I can characterize the last few months is laziness or avoidance of problems, favoring their fun new tools over tenacity and vigilance that require hard work and attention to detail.

[Spencer]

I'm seeing an update of sorts. I can see that projected PR is changing on a few sites that I monitor, and I'm seeing the down rating of newer sites.

[Spencer]

Update: My younger sites are back into the index again and ranking higher than before for local & regional keyphrases. These are html sites that are full of good honest text and corresponding title and desc tags, so I was shocked when they dropped.

One site has not returned as yet, but this might be a mix up with the sub directory getting listed and conficting with a domain name that we use for paper advertising (i.e. possibly tripped a dupe).

I'm also seeing a lot of new data in my regular searches and predicted PR is changing across a load of sites, so I'm fairly sure we're in for an PR update soon, probably on the bank holiday (UK) at end of month.

[steerpikegg]

Still no change in traffic for me since 2nd August - still running at about 20% of normal traffic.

One thing I have noticed, looking at the search queries graph in WMT is that on 2nd, my UK traffic plummeted dramatically, but my US traffic increased dramatically. It's a UK site.

My settings in WMT still say UK target, but looking at the graphs it's looks exactly like somebody flipped a switch to say it's a US site, although we are getting nowhere near the traffic.