Google Is Working on an Algo Fix - to help wrongly demoted sites

[tedster]

Here's official news that many sites have been waiting to hear. Google fellow Amit Singal is quoted in Wired:

"We deeply care about the people who are generating high-quality content sites, which are the key to a healthy web ecosystem," Singhal said.

"Therefore any time a good site gets a lower ranking or falsely gets caught by our algorithm - and that does happen once in a while even though all of our testing shows this change was very accurate - we make a note of it and go back the next day to work harder to bring it closer to 100 percent."

"That's exactly what we are going to do, and our engineers are working as we speak building a new layer on top of this algorithm to make it even more accurate than it is," Singhal said.

[wired.com...]

[Southerncentralrain]

CSE=Comparison Search Engine. Which one was it?

[tedster]

Welcome to the forums, Southerncentralrain. Let's not name names on this - we're here to discuss Google, not to make trouble for any specific website.

[Southerncentralrain]

No problem. Like most of you, I have been trying to research the differences in sites that are in the same genre that did get hit and didn't get hit. This looked like a good opportunity but I definitely see your point. Thanks.

[jk3210]

@tedster et al-

As I recall, when you do a text snippet search, Google tries to return the best result for that particular text snippet, and NOT necessarily the original content producer, correct?

[apauto]

I woke up this morning to find my site is regaining traffic. Awesome.

What I did last friday, a day after the google update, was to take about 20 keywords, and write down their current cache date, and SERP.

I noticed during this time that about 20% of my keywords weren't showing up in the SERPs at all, and the rest went from around page 1 or 2 to 9+.

This morning I compared that list to the current SERPs and found that about 80% of them came back to page 1.

Makes me slighly worried because I did do some changes to those pages, but the cache date didn't change yet. So with the new changes I will either rank even higher, or fall. So I will at least know if these changes should stay or if I revert them.

Anyone else seeing this?

BTW, my site is eCommerce, no adsense, no affiliates, nothing of that nature.

[mromero]

apauto - some of the more senior heads here recommend NO ARCHIVE. Still dithering on that.

[apauto]

mromero - noarchive? Why? First I've heard of this.

It's interesting because I have another site that was launched about 6 months ago with very little backlinks that wasn't affected. However, I noticed that all of the new pages indexed since the panda update show up with a cached link, but always says there is no cache available when I click on it.

[outland88]

I noticed during this time that about 20% of my keywords weren't showing up in the SERPs at all, and the rest went from around page 1 or 2 to 9+.

I was wondering if that would be happening with many as they tried to focus on what was going on. Plus would people started flooding all the social sites, Twitter, and make a mad rush for links as a way to make a quick turn-a-round. Its only natural but with Google's setup it could trigger a lot of gyrations especially on high payout keywords.

[apauto]

Twitter links don't matter, they're nofollow.

[crobb305]

Looks like one of my sites got spanked today. The hole is getting deeper with each tweak they make.

[TheMadScientist]

Twitter links don't matter, they're nofollow.

They're not nofollow when Google gets them from the pipe feed and both Google and Bing use social media to some extent: [searchengineland.com...]

If you don't believe me about them not being nofollow when Google gets them, tweet a link to a new page right after you upload it without another link to it or visiting it with the tool bar or any other way for GBot to know where it is and watch how fast it gets spidered ... It's usually in < 5 seconds in my experience.

[indyank]

@TheMadScientist, crawling is different from passing PR.We never know whether credit is passed on for every link submitted to twitter.I don't think it will be that easy.

[Shaddows]

SM buzz is more valuable than most link-based PR increments for immediate ranking impact.

[browsee]

Check out this article in LA times about recent Google algo.

[latimes.com...]

[crobb305]

@browsee,

Thank you for sharing that article. I find it interesting that the article says Google is "pleased with the results." Isn't this a contradiction to their comments about working on a fix? They are speaking out of both sides of their mouth.

[browsee]

Agree, search results are so bad now. Look at the comments, common users are really annoyed with G search results.

G is trying to teach a lesson by banning some sites from the search. I agree, we don't need spam sites, but G actually screwed up the whole thing. Look at Blekko, they banned spam sites too, but not mom and pop sites who are depending on search traffic.

[crobb305]

If they know they have a problem with this update, they need to stop it from spreading further. We got our deep crawl yesterday, then spanked. Who's next? As the spider crawls, so will the junk algorithm change.

[browsee]

Funny... look at the comments, one user said

Amit singhal and matt cutts - Shame on you for ruining Google.

[TheMadScientist]

indyank, did you not read the article I linked?

Emphasis Mine

But are either of the major search engines actually using those social signals to rank regular search results? A bit, they tell me. In particular, your stature on Twitter could help influence how a page ranks in web search.

...

Authoritative people on Twitter lend their authority to pages they tweet.

I don't know how 'Tweeted Links Count' gets any more clear than the preceding?
Forget about the PageRank ... Who cares ... Twitter and Tweeted Links are factors.

Here's a live link instead of the copy and paste version:
[searchengineland.com...]

[hyperkik]

Getting back to the idea that Google is working on an algorithm fix....

From what I've seen, Google is not only working on a fix but has implemented some new code. Specifically, I'm seeing pages from my site that were affected largely bounce back. I'm also seeing the traffic curves in Google Analytics become more normal - my traffic usually appears as a pretty smooth sine wave, and I'm coming back to that after a period of what looks a bit like arrhythmia, particularly if I focus on the most affected content. The traffic level curves are also closing (or have closed) when I compare the past week to a recent, pre-update week of traffic.

The pages for which there remains a significant re-ranking effect resulting in a loss of traffic appear to be those that have a lot of text in common with other legitimate sites. I have a couple of forms on my site that used to get phenomenal traffic, but they're forms - they don't look much different from other versions of the same form and, beyond that, they've been so heavily "borrowed" by trusted sites that... they're everywhere. I have another article that goes through a complicated statute, and much of the text is comprised of quotations from the statute (albeit formatted to be much more clear) - and a state government agency reworked my article a few years ago and put it on its own website - so it doesn't look very unique. I don't expect these pages to bounce back to prior levels with their present content and... to the extent that Google is simply reconsidering how it ranks pages that are very similar in content, that's not unreasonable.

[crobb305]

hyperkik, how long were you affected?

[SEOPTI]

hyperkik, you are really seeing panda affected URLs bouncing back? I can't believe it, for me everything is stale since the panda chaos started.

[hyperkik]

I heard second-hand today from a representative for a major ad network that a number of his clients who have long-standing sites with original content that were initially hit are experiencing a rebound. I suspect that Google is either refining its test for what site should get credit for initiating content or partially rolled back the changes to that algorithm.

I'm still affected, but as described above I understand why the pages I've identified that remain affected are impacted, and over the past day I haven't seen search results where some of my pages were only visible after I clicked "repeat the search with the omitted results included", although I can't be certain that no such 'penalty' remains on some of my pages.

[Tallon]

I heard second-hand today from a representative for a major ad network that a number of his clients who have long-standing sites with original content that were initially hit are experiencing a rebound. I suspect that Google is either refining its test for what site should get credit for initiating content or partially rolled back the changes to that algorithm.

I experienced slight dips in traffic yesterday on two sites (one large, one small), both experienced slight growth since the new algo. So methinks there was an adjustment somewhere.

[maximillianos]

I experienced the same. Slight growth all week followed by a slight dip yesterday off last Friday.

Not encouraging since I had been working to improve my site all week. :-)

[crobb305]

I had an enormous increase in traffic since Feb 20 (30% to 40%), then spanked on Thursday (-60%).

[rowtc2]

I have updated thin pages with content on 03 March and are not cached yet with changes. Other modified pages or new pages are cached with changes.

[crobb305]

rowtc2, it makes me wonder if adding content to thin pages will help, or if the thin pages need to be deleted altogether.

[tedster]

rowtc2, are you speaking about the "cached" link in the search results? The "cached" link is not always the same version as the one that Google has evaluated for the current search results. Sometimes the cached date can even move backwards in time.

[crobb305]

Sometimes the cached date can even move backwards in time.

I have seen this happen. I have seen Google display an updated page title, but the "cached" version shown is much older. You can sometimes get a better idea of what Googlebot has seen recently by looking at the page preview (magnifying glass).

Tedster, what is your feel on "thin" pages as they may pertain to Panda? Do you get the feeling that they should be deleted or added upon? I suppose a thin page could be deleted, with the content/ads moved to a new page (while adding more and better content to the page), but then you lose inbound links to that old page. Alternatively, we should wait and see if Google reverses these ranking drops via a "fix".