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]

[TheMadScientist]

IMO Definitely, and they've actually stated they will be adding a layer (or layers) to the new algo, so I would definitely expect some 'shuffling' and 'shake-ups' for a while.

[potentialgeek]

Google may have a difficult time discerning between:

a) the site with content which was copied onto other sites as a form of spam; and,

b) the site with content which was copied onto other sites because it's high quality

[alecs]

@ potentialgeek

well the rest of the serps apart from the ones in U.S. where this new algo was applied are fine. And I'm sure is easy for google to figure it out that site A has published the same piece of content that appears on site B before site B

[semseoanalyst]

@alecs what about those contents which are copied even before Google index the original piece of content?How Google manipulate those?

[Shaddows]

On an established site, Google is pretty swift at crawling pages. Discovery dates should be reasonably accurate, combined with "Definately not published before" dates. Together, these create a window, and if windows overlap on different sites, Trust, Authority and profiling might allow Google to make a reasonable assumption about the true originator.

Anyway, what I understood from potentialgeek was that sites might be identified as a spam originator, rather than credited as a publisher of such good content that others legitimately copied it as valuable.

[alecs]

@ Shaddows
I understad your point, but doesn't that make every site on the web a potential spam originator? It is not like these sites I'm talking about are some close rivals of mine, and google is having a hard time deciding which brings more quality. These are sites that have 0 page rank, a two button navigation bar with contact and privacy policy, adsense splattered everywhere etc, etc...i'm sure you known what i'm talkibg about. P.S. I just filled a DMCA for one of them today.

Anyway I was doing fine before the Panda Update, so I guess what im asking is :
1) Should I connect this problem to the recent algo change (my traffic did drop on the 23rd or February)
2) Is it something else that is causing this?
3) Should I start modifying my site or just wait?
4) How would you treat this if you were in my shoes?

[member22]

My ranking on a 2 keyword word went from page 8 of google to page 14 in a month an half... what is going on ?

[kd454]

What I thought yesterday was an uptick of traffic was the countries they have not pushed this to yet having a better than average day, U.S serps = stale.

[Elsmarc]

@mrguy

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

Good luck with that. Karma is a bitch.

As to the update, I haven't been hurt at all. What is interesting is I'm starting to get visitors from Yahoo and Bing. Never did get many visitors from either Yahoo (prior to Google I did) or any of the variously named Microsoft sites over the years. Now they're showing up a lot, so it's not just Google changing their algo.

[DanAbbamont]

@Shaddows - You would think that's the case, but it's really not. Whatever script you're scraping with could easily be hitting your targets RSS and publishing every 30 minutes or so. If they do implement something like this, most autoblogs would probably do better than they do because there's a good chance that their copies are indexed first.

Anyway, content that's years old gets copied and outranked all the time.

[mrguy]

Good luck with that. Karma is a bitch.

What's karma got to do with anything? I don't want to see my competitor results in my searches. I'll be using the feature exactly as Google intended it.

Whether or not they use that data for anything else is not my problem.

[Shaddows]

Indexed first would not be the key- after establishing the event window, other factors could be the tie breaker.

However, to return to an earlier point of mine, being the originator does not entitle you to the top spot, from Google's POV. If the original is crap and ugly, and a copy is pretty, usable, useful and well integrated into a body of related work, Google will return the copy.

[tedster]

went from page 8 of google to page 14

I'd say (general impression) that the deep pages of the SERPs have been seeing more and more churn recently, more and more "yo-yo" or "sine wave" patterns. My guess is that this is an artifact of Google's dynamic machine learning algorithm, and not really a true comparison of those deeper relevance scores in relation to each other.

Or said another way, unless a query term is bringing in at least some traffic to the site, any ranking change you see for that query term is not worth much attention.

[netmeg]

I'm not doing anything different than before, meaning i write an average of 10 articles per day

Not to put too fine a point on it, but that's a lot of articles to average per day and still keep quality up without lapsing into "thin." This may be where you want to focus your attention.

[member22]

I know it is not worth much attention but I am trying to get it to have attention and instead of moving up the ranking I am moving down and don't know why... other than some algorithm changes...

[alecs]

netmag you could be right but my niche is widget news, 10 articles would be below average for some of the bigger players in this segment, elaborating more on a single article would leave me no time to cover all the braking stories, plus it would be harder to write more than i already do, because is mostly about reporting the facts.

[alecs]

corection >> netmeg :)

[Bewenched]

Has anyone had any luck getting Google's team to evaluate your site if it was affected by this new algo?

They had created a forum for those that were negatively affected so that they could manually look at them. I put in a request, but havent seen any change at all...sigh.

[google.com...]

Not that I really thought they'd actually take a look at mine, but I was definately hopeful.

[falsepositive]

@Bewenched,
Seems like a lot of site owners who are making changes are becoming antsy about getting reranked and hoping to see positive results for their work. I think we're entering the stage where we are hoping Google throws us some kind of bone -- any sign that there is hope here! Well, I read somewhere (and not to scare anyone) that it may take months for this to get back to normal. What -- June to August timeframe? Ok just a rumor, and a wild guess, but I don't have any experience on huge changes like this, I'm afraid.

I read somewhere in one of the threads here that it could take a month to shake out.... one person's experience has been around that long.

If I see any improvements on my end, I will share it here.

[netmeg]

netmag you could be right but my niche is widget news, 10 articles would be below average for some of the bigger players in this segment, elaborating more on a single article would leave me no time to cover all the braking stories, plus it would be harder to write more than i already do, because is mostly about reporting the facts.

Ok see now we're getting somewhere. You're writing short articles on widget news, there are bigger players writing even more articles on the same topics daily, and you can't cover them all that thoroughly because of time and the nature of the news.

Unfortunately, your business model sounds exactly like the type of site that Google was targeting with this update. Thin content that is not necessarily unique, with bigger players (possibly more authoritative) publishing the same or similar content. Even if they're scraping you, you're probably going to have a difficult time convincing an algorithm of that.

You've been content-profiled (it's like racial profiling only for content) It's unlikely that Google is going to make a change that's going to allow your existing business model to work within Google organic search, so you pretty much have two choices - develop some traffic sources outside of Google, or change your business model to something that works in Google.

[alecs]

Netmeg in theory everything you said makes sense, and like I mentioned before, having authority/well established sites rank higher than me is perfectly understandable, but in practice things are different. Ok I have been lowered in SERPS because my articles are not quality...why do my scrapers and pages with my feed on them appear higher?

I don't know, maybe my impression of my site is too good, but I can sticky you with the scraper pages so you can tell me what makes them higher quality in google's eyes.

And also something else that baffles me is this. What ever happened to finding and existing business model and making it better? In my case for example I try to be among the first to write about newly launched widgets, try to diversify my sources and spend all day in front of the computer so i can write about these new widgets as soon as the press release is available. How can any new business have any chance in this new google environment where only the well established sites are getting even bigger, and the new comers get dismissed?

[netmeg]

I'm not Google, so I can't answer your questions.

But it's going to be really difficult to convince either users or an algorithm how hard you work or how long you stay in front of a computer.

[Bewenched]

@falsepositive
I hope you're wrong. But in my experience these things do take a long time to get worked out.

Sadly this is supposed to be our busy time of the year to get us through the dry spell of July and August. I smell a layoff or two for some folks around here if it doesnt turn around for us.

I'd certainly hate to think that we have to start a secondary website to maintain. That's what our competitors are doing. In fact one of them has about 20 different sites, all using the same content, just different templates.
And what really peeves me is that they were not impacted by this, in fact their sites are in the top 10 for a particular phrase I'm watching.

I've dug in my heels for years not to let that happen around here. But I am getting pressured.

[apauto]

My site was affected with a 35% drop in traffic after Panda. it's now about a 15-20% drop and many of my keywords have come back.

however, I don't have articles on my site, and it's ecommerce, so I don't have any ads on it either.

I did submit a reinclusion request 2 days after Panda, but I doubt that had anything to do with my traffic coming back slowly.

[brinked]

the #1 site which ranks for a very popular term, this site is also about the top 200 most popular sites in the US as well has actually managed to rank #8 as well. The #3 spot it secured is a 100% exact copy of the original site just a shorter domain name.

Why oh why would google do this? This is not even an attempt by the sites owners to get it to rank, after all the progress google is trying to make it goes and does this (slaps self in the forehead)

[stuartmcdonald]

My site was unaffected by the Panda update, but there appears to have been a supplementary update on March 8 that has wiped out 70% of our traffic from US Google.

Travel website.

Scratching head.

[JohnRoy]

In fact one of them has about 20 different sites, all using the same content, just different templates.
And what really peeves me is that they were not impacted by this, in fact their sites are in the top 10 for a particular phrase I'm watching.

First, their content is most probably not the same. It's either spinned or modified. Otherwise, they would've been impacted long ago!

Now, why are you just watching that phrase?

Stop watching. Start moving. Do what they do and compete.

They are putting their eggs in 20 baskets.(hard but) smart idea.

[stuartmcdonald]

False alarm re my comment above (on March 8 update) seems was a quirk in Google Analytics data in the advanced segments -- looks normal now.

Heart attack averted.

[robert76]

Google may have a difficult time discerning between:

a) the site with content which was copied onto other sites as a form of spam; and,

b) the site with content which was copied onto other sites because it's high quality

My research shows that 2 or 3 major retailers, including the largest one on the Internet, are the ones getting credit as the originators for copied content.

I've been studying manufacturer's product feeds (data sent to retailers by their suppliers which includes product descriptions) for the past several days to determine those who are using them verbatim and how they made out after the shuffle. In some cases there are many dozen sites using the same product description.

Over and over, it's the same couple companies who come out at top for the search phrase. Because of their mere size, does Google consider them the originators of the content?

[falsepositive]

Over and over, it's the same couple companies who come out at top for the search phrase. Because of their mere size, does Google consider them the originators of the content?

Perhaps it's because of their mere size that they can get away with duplication. I think it's the amount of duplication there is relative to uniqueness for the entire site. Could it be that they offer enough of something different to be able to get away with the duplicates? There's a lot of factors to consider and the "duplicate" aspect is just one of them. If you score well for all else, you may still pass. My .02.