Google Updates and SERP Changes - March 2011

[Whitey]

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

< related Panda Farm Update [webmasterworld.com] >

I keep dropping mentions of this , but no takeup , so i did some digging, for clues to my theory Chrome's passing back intelligence that could influence this new algo and future changes :

New Chrome extension: block sites from Google's web search results
Monday, February 14, 2011 | 12:00 PM

Today the Google web search team launched a new Chrome extension to block low-quality sites from appearing in Google’s web search results. Read more in the post below, cross-posted from the Official Google Blog. - Ed


[chrome.blogspot.com...]

Also - [webmasterworld.com...]

I think user behaviour data is being underestimated in this thread. Each website will have an depth profile building that feeds into a potential quality assessment by Google. What say you ?

[edited by: tedster at 8:15 pm (utc) on Mar 15, 2011]

[realseopro]

Hi all, I'm new here. Glad to meet everyone.

Anywho, so here's my two cents ... I think all things point to Google trying to combat 'adwords avoidance'.

If you look at marketing dollars for seo in terms of buying backlinks vs buying adwords, it seems pretty clear to me. I can get 12 cents per visit on buying text links for my keywords, but I'd pay $3.00 per visit for it on adwords (WTF?!?!) So yes the choice is simple.

But then we see the JC Penny news, then Google Engage gets launched, and now this algorithm change. Coincidence? I think not.

[rowtc2]

I hope they roll back this algo and working on it offline. To put a patch on a broken wheel will not last long on the road.

[scottsonline]

Perfect example of what's "off" now. Went searching for a non ecommerce term today. Something I've searched for a ton of times previously and gotten good relevant .gov and .org results. Today I got e how first with a useless, stupid article filled with nothing. No links out to what I was looking for, with no specific references of what I was looking for....just terrible.

E how is the new wikipedia by at least wiki is/was useful

[realseopro]

Also, @Whitey - I thought it was a no-brainer that Chrome passes data to Google. Is there really no evidence to support this yet? I'm already convinced it's true, I didn't think there was a single doubt about it.

[robert76]

Observation: The page for one of our highest search keywords which dropped 18 pages after 2/24 was a category page. That page has been replaced with a product page in that category. However, each day since 2/24 it has been a different product page. We've since moved up by 5 pages but the inconsistency in the page being pulled for this search term on a daily basis is puzzling.

[dickbaker]

realseopro, in the sites I'm examining, AdSense doesn't seem to play a role. Actually, paid links don't seem to make a difference, either, as sites that were dropped as well as sites that are still ranking in the top ten are using obviously paid links. I don't see many of these sites using AdWords.

[Lenny2]

[searchengineland.com ] Search engine land article about Google admitting there were/are problems... at least there is some vindication there...

[robert76]

Saw signs of traffic throttling for a couple hours this morning. Haven't seen this since the change, or maybe I've just been too busy coping with the change to notice.

[realseopro]

@dickbaker - I'm talking just about Adwords, not adsense. And while it may be true that some sites with no adwords and obvious paid backlinking could still rank fine after the algo change.....One sample like that (or even 100) isn't enough to say they're not motivated heavily by Adwords revenue.

Sure some sites have paid backlinks. That's still hurting their adwords potential, but worse yet for big G is places for us to get FREE backlinks - like Content Farms. This algo shift focused more on scooping out easy low-hanging fruit links that were all but freebies en masse to the webmasters.

On a side note - Wow talk about a scare - in a coincidence to end all coincidences, I noticed a dramatic drop in traffic after 2/25 and feared the worst but I was still ranking properly for my keywords. Then after looking into it, I found out one of my developers accidentally removed the GA Tracking on the header. WHEW! That's all it was.

[AlyssaS]

OK, something is happening - I think they've put the filters back on, because one of my competitors, duplicate guy, who has been arriving and departing from the SERPs since Jan 28Th, has gone again.

Does this mean they are satisfied with the way things have gone? It's exactly a week since the Feb 25th change, and I guess they now have enough data about how the algo change works to restore filters.

This vindicates what the Mad Scientist posted on Feb 26Th which was the following:

Okay, I had to go WAY back to find a reference, but if you go to page 9 (20 per page) of this thread [webmasterworld.com...] there are comments about the data rolling first, then filters and backlinks being added in.

I'm sure it happens faster now, and with Caffeine I don't know if the process has changed, but imo it stands to reason for changes this big they may have to do something similar.

I'm about positive I've read much more recent 'officially unofficial' comments on the process working this way too.

Algo gets update.
Some filters and systems have to be 'turned off' during the process.
Those filters and system get added back on top.

[Jessica97]

Just wanted to report. I keep checking on a few personal sites that I have. The new algorithm was good to my personal sites. I have top 3 listings for many terms. No new content added and no effort at all for links. They are not low quality sites by any means, but were setup mostly as informational pages either months or years ago and haven't been touched. Before the change most were ranking 2nd page or low first page, now some again are taking 1st three spots. Not sure they deserve to be there (at least not in all 3 top spots).

[c41lum]

Hi Everyone, has anyone on here noticed the following senario for news publishers.

1st. Dropped from Google News.
2nd. Wiped out by the farmer update.

If this senario is happening in the US it might help other countries where the 'farmer' update hasn't happened yet to spot a pattern and make changes before it hits.

I know lots of sites were dropped in November,December and January from Google News. It would be interesting to find out if these same sites have been smashed by this latest update.

[mrguy]

I'm going to down load chrome and start blocking all my competitor sites.

Even though they say it doesn't influence anything, just to be safe I'll do it anyway.

I won't use chrome to search, just block sites and send data to Google is all it's really good for anyway.

[TheMadScientist]

Oh, big spider run ... Got hit like this about 4 or 5 days before the Panda Farmer went on a rampage ... I think there may be 'churning' in the not too distant future ... I know some have said they're already starting to see some, but I think there may be more on the way, soon.

[walkman]

The spidey is taking lots of pages from me too. Lots of noindex this time though and I can see the number getting lower on site:name.com. Maybe I've noindexed more than I should but I can't afford this situation so I need an improvement.

[piatkow]

Not seeing any problems and moved up a place or two on some arguements ahead of less relevant sites.

[kd454]

I am starting to see some major shifting of results, looks like a slight reverse/shift of the algo traffic is up a bit today.

A sign of hope even if they just give back a little I will be very happy :)

[Demaestro]

Google Chrome is about 7% of the browser market. Is that a large enough sample for Google to use?

Compared to most sampling for statistics that is a massive sample size. For doing polling that is even bigger.

[JohnRoy]

@Dataguy

content still rules, but only if it uses perfect English and speaks more than 400 consecutive words at a time.

Any concrete proof for this statement? Where did you get the 400 figure (and perfect english) from?

[JohnRoy]

The pages I have that were ranking well on Google are still ranking excellently on Yahoo, Bing and other engines. In fact, they're ranking the way Google used to rank them a year ago.
So, making changes to satisfy Google could jeopardize the Yahoo and Bing results.
That means putting all of the proverbial eggs in the Google basket.

Well said.
However, given the past results, and as indicated in the quote, Yahoo and Bing will follow Google algo within the upcoming months.

[Shaddows]

AlyssaS linked to a paper co-written by a Mr Panda from Google. The paper talks about statistic sampling as a potential add-on to the discussed learning methodology. I just re-skimmed the document, only to find
a) The bit I was looking for was at the end, and
b) P1R already quoted it.

It is thus

For future work, our short term focus is to extend the functionality of PLANET in various ways to support more learning problems at Google. For example, we intend to support split metrics other than those based on variance. We also intend to investigate how intelligent sampling schemes might be used in conjunction with the scalability offered by PLANET. Other future plans include extending the implementation to handle multi-class classification and incremental learning.

[Shaddows]

Actually, that sounds like the traffic shaping some of us discussed a little while back might have been split test sampling for precisely this update. Testing results against predicted behaviour for a given dataset (traffic type)

[alecs]

Nothing has changed in my case, scrapers still outrank me, and adsense earnings are now even lower. With every day that goes by I'm starting to think this is it. But if my site went down in the serps because of this new quality factor then I really cant figure it out why others who copy my articles word by word, or just publish my RSS feed appear higher than me. Could there be some other reason other than collateral damage?

[c41lum]

Hi alecs, Your not alone I have the exact same problem on one of my sites.

Anyone have a hunch we can expect Google to bomb the BOMB in the UK.

[AlyssaS]

Nothing has changed in my case, scrapers still outrank me, and adsense earnings are now even lower. With every day that goes by I'm starting to think this is it. But if my site went down in the serps because of this new quality factor then I really cant figure it out why others who copy my articles word by word, or just publish my RSS feed appear higher than me.

Is there some reason you can't switch your RSS feed to summary/short? Or switch it off entirely? I've brought this up before, and someone protested that they left their feed on full because they themselves hate having partials in their reader. But, realistically, how many people really subscribe to feeds outside the social niches eg. politics, SEO blogs and the like? In other words, how many of the people using your feed are real people rather than the scrapers?

Also, if you are either beefing up your site content, or repairing your backlinks (because they came from sites weakened by this algo), then it will take at least a week to two weeks before you start to see the results, if any.

[AlyssaS]

Shaddows - I think they are still doing split-testing. I keep seeing a new site in the top ten, every day, and it's there for just 24 hours, and then it's replaced by another. The sites seem to come from page 2, and after their 24 hours in the sun, they go back to page 2.

[Bewenched]

Spent some time today working on some articles for our site that had never been published. Pushed those live to the site, so hopefully it will help us get more traffic back to our ecom site. Frustrating to think that a scraper will soon steal that info as well.

[alecs]

@ AlyssaS

my feed is switched to summary/short, and you are right I do not have too many subscribers, but they should be growing in time (I think), as some of the bigger players in my niche (widget news) have thousands or tens of thousands of subscribers.

I'm not doing anything different than before, meaning i write an average of 10 articles per day, and do little in terms of link building. I mostly rely on them growing naturally. I certainly have 100 times more links than these scrappers who have adsense instead of a site navigation menu.

Like I said, I wouldn't mind seeing the best sites in my niche in the top 10 or top 20 results, but when i see 2 or 3 sites (who either copy paste everything on my pages or partially use my content, with something like 3 links pointing back to me per article) appearing on the front page of google and in front of me, then how can they say this algo change was a success?

Which is why I don't want to start and change anything on my site yet. I refuse to believe it is over and these crappy results are final. It is like somewhere inside their code they have put 0 instead of 1.

[vandread]

Just to weigh in, you cannot keep scrapers from scraping your contents by switching to partial feeds. There are lots of options to turn a partial feed back into a full feed, automated that is.

[frank72]

how is it possible that on the 24th of feb and days later i didnt notice any drop in traffic. The traffic drop started around the 2nd of march. Is it safe to assume that the algo change is still going on and blogs and websites might experience traffic drop even weeks later?