Winners and Losers in New Google Algo - Analysis

[martinibuster]

New article in Silicon Valley's San Jose Mercury [mercurynews.com] published a list of winners and losers in Google's new algorithm. A UC Berkeley researcher criticized Google for not going far enough. DemandMedia is still chugging along and they basically had no comment. Those behind the losers WiseGeek and HubPages had plenty to say, primarily that Google went too far. Do WiseGeek and HubPages deserve their demotion?

Here is The Mercury News list of top losers from Google's latest algo change:

wisegeek.com -77%

hubpages.com -87%

yourdictionary.com -74%

associatedcontent.com -93%

shopwiki.com -91%

answerbag.com -91%

fixya.com -80%

Here is the list of winners:

popeater.com 24%

sears.com 20%

britannica.com 18%

ehow.com 15%

linkedin.com 15%

hgtv.com 14%

marthastewart.com 14%

loc.gov 12%

facebook.com 12%

[maximillianos]

I think it is important to realize any changes folks try to regain traffic will most likely not result in any change to ranking for probably a few weeks to a month. Google doesn't want you to know what changes helped. So the window to re-classify is probably 30 days I would guess.

[Bewenched]

@maximillianos
Well that's not encouraging. Sadly our busiest time of the year for sales is the month of March. The 40% traffic/revenue loss is going to really hurt when we hit our normal slow down come summer.

[dickbaker]

maximillianos, upon what do you base your 30 day window advice?

There are a lot of pages I'm considering making changes to, but I'd like to see how things shake out before messing with my site. It would be a shame to make changes to what were successful pages only to have the site re-classified, and then lose ranking again because of the new changes.

[ken_b]

Google doesn't want you to know what changes helped. So the window to re-classify is probably 30 days I would guess.

Let me guess, the "I guess" part of that quote means it's just your opinion, right?

Do you have any official Google comments to support either the "don't want you to know" or "30 day" part of your opinion?

.

[martinibuster]

"30 day" part of your opinion?

I don't know about maximillianos, but it's been my experience that once or twice a year one of the algo tweaks will hit one or the other of my sites as collateral damage for about a month, sometimes longer, and then returns to it's former position as Google refines the algo. For me, the thirty days is not a hard number. It can last longer.

Most times an algo tweak does not affect my sites. Sometimes it affects it for a week. But there always seems to be at least one update a year that takes about a month to settle down.

• What we know is that Google tests their algo before they let it out into the official index.
• What we know is that despite their effort to eliminate false positives there is a period of refinement after the algo is introduced into the index.
• What we know is that Google often solicits feedback on false positives/collateral damage after an algo is released in order to help refine the algorithm.

I think it's safe to say that the refinement of the algo to eliminate false positives generally takes about thirty days, within the range of thirty days, but that there is no definite hard number to put on it. I wouldn't put a hard number on it. Update Florida is the update I remember as taking the longest to settle down.

[dazzlindonna]

While I generally agree with maximillianos and martinibuster (who could ever disagree with martinibuster?) about the period of time it usually takes to settle down, I also don't think we can say that no traffic will be regained before then. After all, cultofmac knows first hand that rankings can return long before a month or so goes by. :)

[tedster]

You're definitely right about that, Donna. I began seeing a gradual return of Google search traffic on many analytics graphs in 24-36 hours.

[seoholic]

More data:
[blog.searchmetrics.com...]

[dazzlindonna]

I thought it was time to look at the smaller losers than the ones listed here. I used the google thread asking for people to list their sites that were collateral damage, and grabbed 45 of the urls (there were more but I got tired out). I then did a screenshot of each homepage, mainly to see if they all looked like autogen'd MFA sites (ugly) or if they had tons of ads, etc. I then posted them on my blog today. Obviously I won't link to my post, but you can find it if you try. Point is, although I certainly didn't do any real research into the sites, just a quick glance at the homepages shows me something. It's not excessive ads for one thing. And it's not all ugly pages, for another. Most were fairly representative of the look and feel of the web in general. Anyway, I think if we look at the smaller losers, those not in the big lists we've seen, we might get some more information.

[kd454]

@dazzlindonna

I have been looking at the site listed as well, there are some very high end sites that got hit as well as ones in the middle to low end.

Nice list by the way, I hope someone can make heads or tails of this algo.

I have a site that traffic almost doubled on after this algo, funny thing is I have another site set up the same way in EVERY aspect that traffic was cut in half, the only difference is the niche.

Does not make sense..

[ken_b]

dazzlindonna;
Nice article on your blog. I've been looking at some of the sites on the list on the Google page too. Your post on your blog makes it easy to get a quick look at some of the sites negatively affected.

I'm baffled by why some of the sites on the list have been hit. Especially some of the ecommerce sites. The couple of ecoms in my niche that I saw I would buy from comfortably.

When I look at some of the info sites, and compare them to my site (I took a huge hit) on the surface I can't see why they got hit.

My own site, not so hard to figure out, there are only so many ways to say "powered by 4 drunken webmasters", so it gets tough to be unique while staying with a few facts in what I call the "expanded captions" that I've been passing off as "textual content" to go with the images that are the main content on my photo gallery pages. But I've been accused of aspiring to mediocrity before :)

.

[Mikey85]

What about classified ads websites? Did they lose, win or stable after the panda update?

Because users place there classified ad often on more then 1 site...so it's "duplicate" content?

[mslina2002]

What about classified ads websites? Did they lose, win or stable after the panda update?

Because users place there classified ad often on more then 1 site...so it's "duplicate" content?

Sites like Craigslist were on the 'winners' list, however, I suspect because they are somewhat an authority. Ugly sites are notorious for doing well. The site also has very few ads that I can tell of or unless they are text links that I can't see.