Google Updates and SERP Changes - October 2010

[tedster]

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There are many different kinds of ranking disruptions being reported right now - dropped domain roots, unexplainable traffic spikes and dips. These things often come right before some kind of algo shift. What do you think - is something brewing?

[edited by: tedster at 12:38 pm (utc) on Oct 1, 2010]

[anthem1612]

Don't want to speak to soon but whatever happened to my site on 22nd October appears to have been resolved today as traffic is back to more "normal" levels.

It just looks like a number of pages in my site were completely dropped (I mean COMPLETELY dropped - not dropped in the SERPS) by Google for a time there and there seemed no good reason why those particular pages should have been dropped - they were no better or worse than other pages of mine that were kept in by Google.

I don't know if it made any difference but I took it upon myself to generate and upload a sitemap into my webmaster tools area a few days ago.

[danimalSK]

hey Anthem,

I'm seeing similar, whatever happened on the 22nd seems to have been gradually rolled back on the 29th (for a while it seemed to be fluctuating between 2 data sets).

Yesterday's traffic isn't a good comparable due to Halloween, but today is looking a lot more "normal".

Cheers,

Dan

[JoeSinkwitz]

@martinacastro, I was stating my opinion but I'm apparently not alone on this one -- just about all the sites I've seen so far with these issues either were using the canonical tag, had canonical issues (like your having to 301 the wrong index page to the right index page), or something of that genre of canonical problem. This does not mean 100% that the issue is because of canonicalization, though it is the only pattern amongst the sites that I have personally noticed.

[scottsonline]

I think I'll wrap up my posting on the October results with some 10/31 data

Overall traffic through the last hour is down slightly from
Last Sunday. Google is down 20%, bing is up about 20. Other search engines including yahoo are up sharply.

Here is the kicker. Google adwords impressions are down by about the same 20%. The rate at which non google engines are increasing share is accelerating. Impressions in my niche at the same position/page are decreasing. Content network impressions are staying steady.

If google rights the ship this will all just be a blip but they left the door open in the B2B area and the others are finally delivering a good product.

Our rankings are not improving on bing per metrics. More people are using it. In the last 35 days the bing share has grown each day. At the same time the percentage growth with bing is rising.

The google results tonight are just as whacked. Searches for specific products return keyword domains more than they should. The top ten is filled with affiliate sites that clearly point to the parent site. In no case is a page with the exact search I type first even though bing will return those and a cache check verifies google sees them. The result in an example that has changed today, a popular gaming console instead of returning articles on it I get play at the station, Penn station depending on the search.

Do we need to all go to google retraining so we can understand how to search?

One last comment. The disturbing trend of having ugly, disorganized sites that are part of multinational conglomerates first in the rankings even if they have duplicate content, meta keywords right on the page, hidden text and worse stinks. If IBM opened up a business in any of our niches and IBM gave a link off their homepage to those sites they'd go right to the top. Better yet have a keyword name for the niche and the link and you can turn the lights out.

Edit: forgot one important part. Google traffic is down the last couple of days but google conversions are way up. Shaddows theory 101.

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[edited by: tedster at 2:15 pm (utc) on Nov 1, 2010]