Google Updates and SERP Changes - February 2011

[tedster]

< continued from: [webmasterworld.com...] >
< active thread: [webmasterworld.com...] >

Related AdSense Farm Update < continued from [webmasterworld.com...] >


It's a new month and our regular SERP watching thread has been neglected a bit lately. Most of the posting right now is on dedicated threads focused on specific changes - especially the Scraping algo change [webmasterworld.com] and the promised (but not yet active) campaign against Content Farms [webmasterworld.com].

But Google's perpetual update machine keeps on turning. I'm particularly wondering about sites that publish a lot of legitimately syndicated content rather than a lot of original content. Did your rankings and traffic wobble with the "dupe content update"? If they dropped, did they rebound?

I'm watching one such website and though they are mostly republished content, nothing seemed to change.

[edited by: tedster at 6:00 pm (utc) on Feb 4, 2011]

[edited by: tedster at 8:38 pm (utc) on Feb 26, 2011]

[zerillos]

I see that some key phrases in my top twenty have recovered - while others that were untouched yesterday have been knobled

it looks like it's learning...

[walkman]

bottom line is that I think its a combo of things, no magic bullet.

Well, on 2/23/11 things were fine for those complaining today, and then something changed. So people are trying to see what it was that's not acceptable right now.

SEOPTI, the point was to try, as hard as it is, to cheer people up. Do I think Google will reverse this? Nope, but they will tweak it so most innocent sites will rank again, or at least partially gain some lost ground.

[scottsonline]

And there's still one more big article left to hit. Tough month for google in the papers.

[indyank]

CainIV,

Add this to your list as the 10th one.

10) Many of those blogs/sites that lost traffic weren't much affected by algo changes, until this one.Infact, many of them have another common pattern as well.They all saw an increase in traffic, just before this happened.

Do you remember me replying to Tedster about noticing an increase in traffc to the extent of 20%, during the timeframe that he saw traffic to one of his clients double?

I didn't notice Tedster's reply, if any, on that but this particular site I was talking about has been impacted. It is also notable that it saw traffic like never before, on the same days that a few others including Dickbaker had noticed on their sites.

So, what do you think is the major factor? The spam reporting tool?

I am surprised that googlers of the caliber of Amit and Matt using the data they received through the tool to "cross-validate their algo tweaks".They did mention in their blog post of not using it to demote sites, but the data that they have is not even genuine end users' data.It is hardly few days since this tool has been released and do they think that normal searchers would have downloaded them to report spam? Whatever downloads they would have seen and the reports they would have received are certainly from SEO/webmasters who know about it and there is obviously going to be a huge bias in these reports.We have already seen to what extent SEO companies fight it out these days.

Other than the above, here is what I think UGC (User Generated Content) is.

To me, it is not just forum or blog comments but also content in wikipedia, eHow and the likes.But I know where Tedster is coming from on this. It is the links from UGC of the type he has defined.

There are also two important observations from Robert Charlton (on the adsense farms thread) and Ismailman on this thread, which are in my notes and these are good angles to ponder.

[edited by: indyank at 6:59 am (utc) on Feb 26, 2011]

[indyank]

From an UGC perspective, if Google is writing off all the links from forums and the likes, it is contra to what they proposed recently "People share a lot these days". All these sharing is done by users and how long do you think the sharing phenomenon can be genuine?

Yes, people abuse forums, signature links etc. but anything can be abused these days and we have seen it recently in the form of two big examples.The only difference is the former (forum and sig links) is low profile while the latter is high profile abuse.

A generic demotion of this sort will definitely impact a number of genuine ones too. There are a number of genuine shares in those forums and it wouldn't be good to negate them.

I do think that instead of devaluing/changing something, it will be better if google is innovative enough to find new positive signals to promote the good pages higher.The system is anyway going to be gamed but these new signals will ensure that the cream will pop up.Reworking on existing factors is a big fail for me.

Hey google, do you have a job.I would love to be part of it :)

[falsepositive]

One thing I noticed about my authority site that's been heavily hit. It's large, with a lot of quality content. I checked the pages that are not ranking. They are either scraped heavily or copied/pasted elsewhere. There is a strong chance that I am thought of as a content farm because of so much copying and duplication, even though I am the original source. So what next? Do I sue the scrapers? Maybe we should, for lost income. Also, I've found my content on article directories as well as on scraper sites. Heck, even eHow stole some of my content and now ranks above me, even as I was cited by CNN on the exact same story. Ironic, eh?

I would strongly urge those of you affected, to see the extent of scraping and duplication done against your content. I will bet this could be the crux of the matter.

I could certainly file for a reconsideration request (if this does not clear in due time) and report all the places I've seen my content used. I'm just terribly surprised that Google does not realize at this point who is the original source of content and who isn't. The robots just aren't fast enough about spidering content now are they, such that they can't tell who wrote up the content first.

So as an example, my content (various pages) is found in articlesbase.com and referenced in eHow in many places.

[Spencer]

Our little site is back from the dead finally, but heavily penalised on our main target keys. Has seemed to have been given a PR1 instead of PR3 that it has had since 2005ish.

We've also had a couple of other sites get marked down in PR overnight.

I've also seen a 3 word key that I follow all of the time shift from 200'000'000 to 512'000'000 overnight !

[dickbaker]

Falsepositive, thanks for the nudge. I didn't think my text was worthy of copying, so I've never checked. I just did, though, and found that a lot of pages have been scraped to varying degrees. There's a project for me for the weekend.

Here's something that would be really funny if all of this wasn't going on. I get high-res product images from the manufacturers, size them (larger than anybody else in my niche shows them), color correct, and sometimes even retouch flaws. So, I have some of the best photos of my niche's widgets.

My widget pages are now buried deep in Google's search results, but if you do a search for a widget by name, and click on Google images, my photos are often in the first five or ten. I'm getting scraped by scrapers and by Google.

Gee, Google. Thanks a lot. (I'm reminded of a line by R Lee Ermey in "Full Metal Jacket" regarding a reach-around, but I can't repeat it here).

[falsepositive]

Well here's what's heartbreaking. I work 4 hours per day on each article I publish. These articles are at least a 1,000 words long with a lot of analysis and rumination, opinion and some research. I've got a community that chimes in with commentary. Content thieves lift my content and voila! I am punished, but these thieves are still all floating in the ether, enjoying higher rankings.

This smells of a site-wide penalty as I am unable to see some of my non-duplicated posts even ranking for the most specific keywords or even the full (complete) title of the article. Where are they Google? My site has been demoted to nowhere land.

Here's what else is funny. I have columns in some well known media sites. They rank higher for my NAME than my own site. It's incredibly frustrating. This has caused me untold hours of grief and distraction. I'm still waiting for all this to clear up.

[walkman]

Question: Are you still ranking for "sitename" and do you still have freshtags?

[falsepositive]

walkman, yes I am. I am just seeing lower rankings all around (or missing pages) compared to how it used to be. Right now, seeing some improvement though. Here are some traffic stats I have:

Thursday: down 35%
Friday: down 29%
Early AM Saturday: increase from friday of 10%. If it stays at this level, I should be down 20% for Saturday.

Crossing fingers that this is a sign of improvement. I am seeing multiple visits by googlebot as well as google.com referrers (visitors from Mt. View).

[rowtc2]

Here my observations:
- traffic drop on 24 February
- comparing US traffic 24-25 feb with 22-23 Feb results 43% drop in Analytics
- some pages are ranking better and drive more traffic, but are a few searches
- pages replaced in top results have 100% copied content
- sites replaced in top results have stronger link profile (and paid links)
- increased crawled page activity in GWT
- searching by page title with long tail(4-5 keywords) some pages are hidden in results for 4 keywords searched, but appear for 5 keywords search in page 1.


Interesting: searching for 2 affected sites site:example.com not showing homepage at first result, like was before. For competitor sites who are not affected shows homepage at first result.

For me it looks is not finished their re-calculation job.

1. No content farms or sites with copied content are affected. My hard worked pages with reviews are not visible, in top are pages with NO original content.

2. It looks high searched keywords on Google are affected. I have a low quality site with little original content and traffic is up with 13% from US, but didn't ranked well for competitive keywords.

Since weekends and holidays of work from 4 years are almost vanished, I don't know what to say. I am thinking at on-page factors and backlink profile, to find a clue. Also i hope for a recovery, an algo tweak. Is a massacre, like someone said.

[zerillos]

There is a theory floating around that the cause of this massacre is too many pages with not enough link juice to support each page."

the only pages that got hammered in my case are the ones with external links.

I wrote an article last night on my blog and in the USA SERPs is on the second page. if i search it's title, the second result on the first page of the USA SERPs is some scraper that has my article in the description tag of his page and there's NO content on that page, except for a few images and AdSense. it even violates the AdSense TOS.

I wrote a DMCA complaint and Google said "Thanks!

Thank you for using our online DMCA complaint form. You should receive a confirmation email shortly."

It's been a few hours since then and I received no confirmation.

[Spencer]

"Thank you for using our online DMCA complaint form ...

... There's nobody here right now, but rest assured we've got it in hand"

;-)

[Whoa]

It seems to me that if I were at Google and wanted to improve the algorithm, I'd be intently focused on page and site quality measures that cannot be easily gamed. In the past, SEO folks could figure out how to get a page to rank well. But the reactions of the people who visited the page cannot be easily controlled or gamed. The subjective review of each searcher determines whether a page is relevant to their search or not.

For example, after visiting a page via a Google search, does the user immediately return to Google and search again on the same phrase or a close variant? If so, that page and site were not great results for the searcher, and they perhaps should be lowered in the rankings over time for that particular search phrase. For other phrases, the same page could still be ranked high -- if and only if it shows signs of quality for a given search phrase.

There are myriad ways to measure this and myriad complexities to each of the measurements. For example, if you view the time somebody spends on a site after a search as a measure of quality, you can argue it either way. They spend a lot of time on the site could mean it's a great site for what they are looking for, or it could mean the site doesn't deliver relevant answers in a concise and immediate fashion.

Same thing with bounce rates, a high bounce rate on a page doesn't necessarily reflect badly on the page. It could mean it gives the answers people are looking for and they are done -- which is a good thing. Or it could mean that Google is sending people to a page that they shouldn't be for a given search.

So, I would tend to agree with Tedster that this is a new data-driven, learning algorithm that is designed to get better results to the top of the rankings over time.

If you think about it, you really have to shake up your existing rankings to deploy something like this. For example, you need to put what used be a #41 ranking for a search up in spot #3 and see if it performs better than the incumbent #3. For a learning system to work, it needs to test hypotheses that haven't been tested or tracked before...and that means you may have to show some bad results in the top rankings to test whether they are truly bad. It's essentially a massive multi-variate testing machine.

So, in the new era, SEO puts you in the hunt to rank well -- it's a way to communicate to the Google algos after all -- but ultimately the best content will float to the top, regardless of factors that used to be more important (and could be optimized regardless of true quality), such as links, title tags, etc. If you truly have the best page for a given search and have been knocked down, you will likely float back to the top results over time...probably in a month or so.

While I'm frustrated that traffic has dropped on my site, it's a motivator to create better content for users and reflect on how my pages can be more valuable to site visitors. I mean that's always been a motivator, but you can get complacent and fall into ruts, so I guess we all need to make lemonade out of this lemon, and keep on trucking.

[BillyS]

I wrote a DMCA complaint and Google said "Thanks!

Thank you for using our online DMCA complaint form. You should receive a confirmation email shortly."

It's been a few hours since then and I received no confirmation.

They'll get back to you, but not in a few hours. The last time I filed one, I think it took a couple of days.
P-76

[goodroi]

I am having a hard time researching this algo change. I have a wide variety of sites in my private network and my clients are also a mixed bunch. I have not seen any negative impact on these sites.

[netmeg]

Same here. But I always wonder if the other shoe hasn't dropped.

[viggen]

...since 2003 as by accident i was away and off the internet for two weeks while a big google update happend, seeing in hindsight that doing nothing did good to my site, i keep on doing nothing for the first weeks during times of algo changes, might be not helping you but just saying for 8 years doing nothing in the week after an algo update was so far always a safe bet, (i was so far only hit very slighty with about 5% less traffic which could be a thousand reasons not just the update)...

just saying, maybe not freakin out yet maybe what you need to do...

cheers
viggen

[goodroi]

In case you are not sure if you have been hit this algo update you may want to do a little research on your analytics.

Look at your top keywords generating traffic between Feb 1-Feb 22. Then compare it with the list of top keywords generating traffic from Feb 23-Today. This can help to identify if any of your keywords are possibly having issues.

[walkman]

Interesting: searching for 2 affected sites site:example.com not showing homepage at first result, like was before. For competitor sites who are not affected shows homepage at first result.

Let's make sure of this: You search for site:example.com and the first page listed is not www.example.com but www.example.com/other-page.html ? Do you rank for your 'example' (domain keyword) ? Do you have a fresh cache?
Long time ago there was a penalty, link related, where the first page would be demoted and by extension everything else too.

[econman]

It's essentially a massive multi-variate testing machine

I think this is the main reason we routinely see so much "everflux" in the SERPs.

On the other hand, given the way Google announced this change with such fanfare, it is likely that the changes that have just been rolled out have been verified and improved through a few months of low-profile multi-variate testing going on in the background (rather than the start of such testing).

To the extent this change has resulted in "false positives" Google will presumably struggle to find and fix those problems. Whether they succeed anytime soon is another question entirely.

As mentioned in other threads, I think the true significance of this change is conceptually related to the change in their terminology. Instead of referring to "relevance" as Google spokespersons have done for years, they are suddenly talking about "quality".

I'm not saying they have succeeded at detecting low quality. My point is simply that they are now focusing on quality in a way, or to an extent, that they have never done before.

And, quality is a subtly but fundamentally different issue than relevance.

Perhaps it is dawning on the folks at Google that negative feedback mechanisms between their algorithms and the behavior of webmasters is leading to a proliferation of junk pages, and that their emphasis on "relevance" and failure to pay attention to "quality" is the main reason they are struggling to index and analyze millions of nearly-worthless pages, as well as leading them to the criticism that their first page is filled with low quality pages that aren't particularly useful to the user. The reason those pages were ranked highly (though of low quality) is that they were created specifically to be relevant to the user's exact query.

Assuming any of these thoughts are reasonably close to being on-target, the key question is what quantitative data are they using in their new attempt to distinguish between low and high quality? And, is this data primarily at the site-wide level, or at the page-specific level?

[zoltan]

IMO, this is definitely all about external links coming from other homepages and possibly sitewide links as well. We mainly lost rankings on the pages and keywords that we targeted on external ON-TOPIC only sites. I say it one more time, our external links were not coming from link farms, were coming from similar sites and most of the time these links were sitewide.

[dazzlindonna]

A few quick observations from one affected site:

1. Rankings lost across most but not all keywords, some falling about 30 places, some more than 100.
2. Still ranks #1 for its site name, with all its 8 sitelinks intact.
3. Most of the drops centered around pages that naturally don't lend themselves to lots of content. In other words, the pages may look "thin" but only because there's not much to say via text about the actual content. This could be applied to various types of content including images, online games, downloadable or printable items - anything that might only contain a few lines of how-to-download or how-to-play type of content, near the main non-text content. Starting to think I'll need to create ehow type content that is useless but must-have filler to avoid being filtered.
4. Some of these might have some duplicate issues as some of it has been scraped by others (affected site's content is original), but I don't think there's enough of that going on to be the main culprit - still, it could be a factor.
5. Several other sites (5 total) that are essentially built in the same way, with the same types of content, but for a different niche, were not affected at all. The affected one is the largest and most high-quality of them all. It's the one that garners the most attention and traffic. It does have a lot of funky backlinks but they are all natural. Funky sites link to it all on their own, with no requests being made and no link building of any kind being done. No paid links (to or from) at all.
6. Oh and there are some pages that are "natural dups", meaning everyone who has these types of pages would have no choice but to be duplicating everyone else - a good example might be a song's lyrics. I suppose UGC or more bogus content could be added but that just dilutes the user experience, I think, still, it may need to be done anyway.
7. Even if all the potential dup issues were removed from the equation that wouldn't explain all the drops. So, while that might be a factor, it's not the only one.
8. And I still don't understand why one niche of its type got hit but not the others. This might be my best hope of analyzing though, since I'll be able to compare link profiles, onpage content, dups, etc. on very similar sites. Will report on anything else I find.

[pontifex]

donna: thanks for the details, I mostly agree to the findings! Especially the dupes and "thin" pages worry me, too in that case...

@tedster, robert and goodroi: I know it is a lot of work, but could you start a new thread for this update with a summary of your personal favorites from this thread to start clean? It gets messy and some postings are hard to find on over 36 pages :-/ - like

Farmer Update - Aftermath

or something like that?

Cheers,
P!

[indyank]

it is likely that the changes that have just been rolled out have been verified and improved through a few months of low-profile multi-variate testing going on in the background

google had been doing a lot of tests/changes recently and one site that got hit by this update never faced any issues in all those tests.This site saw an increase in traffic with every update they did so far and had the best traffic on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.When this roll out was finally announced, many pages (but not all) that pulled traffic got pushed down to page 2 or 3 for their primary keywords.

is this data primarily at the site-wide level, or at the page-specific level

It does look sitewide (refer above) and it does appear some generic factors were used to filter its pages.Most pages now appear in page 2, 3 and 4.

The other competing pages on the front page are thin pages supported with lots of auto generated internal pages.These are sites run by content producing business houses like eHow (adsense premium publishers).All of them remain intact.

What is unique is the site never got impacted until now.It is like google simply pulled up those sites that weren't run by their premium publishers and pushed all their traffic pulling pages down by a few pages in SERPS.

From a quality perspective, I would rate this site as very good and it is neither a thin site nor does it contain duplicate content.Content is unique and based on research.

But yes, partial feeds are being syndicated ( title and a brief description) and these do appear on several feed aggregators.

Another interesting thing that happens now is the site is the site pulls traffic higher than usual from other parts of the globe and the pages that were pushed down in US SERPS are ranking highr than earlier in other google TLDs now.

US traffic is way down but compensated to some extent elsewhere and the overall traffic drop is 10-13%

For those who focus on PR, the site has a toolbar PR 6 to home page.Pages that went down has PR 5, 4 and so on.

Backlinks are natural and like Donna said, there are some funky sites linking to those pages and domain naturally.But there are no high profile paid/discount links or links from large groups (farms) of sites that we often see in sites run by business houses.

[edited by: indyank at 3:39 pm (utc) on Feb 26, 2011]

[tranquilito]

Let's make sure of this: You search for site:example.com and the first page listed is not www.example.com but www.example.com/other-page.html ? Do you rank for your 'example' (domain keyword) ? Do you have a fresh cache?
Long time ago there was a penalty, link related, where the first page would be demoted and by extension everything else too.

Walkman , the same happened to me :
- when I search for site:www.domainname.com , www.domainname.com is on 5th place ( cache date is 26th Feb )
- the first 4 places are other pages www.domainname.com/a-page.html ( cache 23rd, 24th, 26th Feb )
- I rank for domainname.com or www.domainname.com
- some of my keywords went from first page ( pos 3-4 ) to 3rd page ( pos 23-29 )

Do you think it is a link related penalty ? I never bought/sold links

[chrisv1963]

The affected one is the largest and most high-quality of them all. It's the one that garners the most attention and traffic

Same here. It's "funny" to see how my large high quality site is hit AND how my old low quality sites (some of them haven't been updated for months and the content is far from high quality) are going up in the serps.

[walkman]

I think Donna is spot on. Google needs to understand that not every page is supposed to have a minimum number of words or a proper sentence structure. If you have to edit your pages for Google, by adding BS to make it 'thick', then this is a tragedy.

[zerillos]

They'll get back to you, but not in a few hours

i wrote one last week too, regarding about a dozen or so blogspot pages. they didn't get back to me on that one either...

the aglo update was two days ago. has anyone seen any improvement since the fall at the beginnning?