Google Updates and SERP Changes - April 2011

[zerillos]

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

Here's another fail:
One of the major manufacturers in my field launched a new product today that generated quite a media frenzy. The name of the product is made up, but G treats it like a spelling error for some other word. When searching 'brand product' you get the 'did you mean' option. I know of more than 20 big media outlets that reported on this new product. Unfortunately, g has only 3 and a half pages of results on it, half of which are not related. All the other reports about this product, all legitimate, are nowhere to be found in the SERPs.
Big fail. I guess their machines are down at the pub, instead of learning...

[edited by: tedster at 4:42 pm (utc) on Apr 1, 2011]

[johnhh]

walkman, I agree. It feels like there is another algo update coming.

+1 Walkman - I think so as well

_{Actually I have been looking at some really old archived threads - [webmasterworld.com...] -makes interesting reading}

[outland88]

No sooner did I speak than eight hours later things changed again. E-How has now come back strong in my areas. A lot of weak sites are hitting the front pages. Can't explain the heavy increases in traffic but no corresponding increase in sales.

[tedster]

A number of people are reporting significant shifts in the SERPs the past couple days - can anyone pin it down a bit more than that?

[supercyberbob]

I'm seeing some recovery for a few keywords today, but nothing I would take my pants off for.

Made no changes to the site btw.

[viggen]

...i always wondered, are you guys comparing your stats/serps to last week, last month or last year? I am way up compared to last eastern, but only a bit up compared to last year april, and down compared to last month, so again, what are we comparing here?

[walkman]

"I'm seeing some recovery for a few keywords today, but nothing I would take my pants off for. "

same as supercyberbob, but I made drastic changes. No comment on the pants :).

Overall no total traffic increase at all, just different keywords. Maybe old SERPS? I know I've seen those keywords before.

site:domain.com is going back and forth, but mostly with pre-Panda data.

[maximillianos]

We have seem a traffic bump of about 10% for a site that was hit by Panda 2 starting yesterday.

We did some tweaks to the site a few days after panda 2 hit.

[supercyberbob]

viggen

I'm assuming most of us are comparing current traffic stats to before Panda hit.

[mslina2002]

I am unable to compare traffic to historical data because I have deindexed 55% of my site (sofar), so what I am doing is comparing a ratio of how much traffic the indexed pages bring in.

Ratio = Visits Per Day : Number of Indexed Pages

So far,

Ratio Feb 23 = 1.32
Ratio Post Panda 1 = 0.91
Ratio Post Panda 2 = 1.72 (42% of pages de-indexed)
Ratio Apr 26 = 2.00 (55% of pages de-indexed)

Today, I have recovered my main keyword what I call my vanity keyword phrase (3 word keyword) that draw in the advertisers and traffic, and conversion have been up since yesterday. Hopefully this will keep up so keeping fingers crossed. Who knows what monkey wrench Google will throw out next. I am unable to tell why conversions are up by looking at my usual keyword list unless Google has turned on the long tail keyword faucet again which I feel like it periodically does and then shuts down for a period of time.

[crobb305]

Yesterday I reported a 45% improvement. Today that number is up to 55% to 60% improvement. So as of today, I have recovered about 55% to 60% of my traffic. It is NOT full recovery as of yet. Rather, it is a very phrase-specific recovery. I am back to number 1 with sitelinks for key phrases; but, modifying those phrases to put the words in reverse order often throws me down to page 3.

Monday, my recovery was 10%. Yesterday 45%. Today 60%. This is definitely an upward trend, as more phrases pop in. But until I see those key phrases ranking in reverse order, I won't declare victory. We have seen traffic surges prior to a spanking, so I don't know if it will stick.

My bounce rate is at its lowest point in 9 months. It would seem that the quality of traffic has improved. It may be due to the fact that I have not recovered my trophy phrases (not in the top 100), but those have never converted for me.

Since others are reporting improvements, but not complete recovery, it's hard for me to say which changes have helped my site, or if it will even stick. I want to wait a few days before I draw any conclusions.

(sorry Ted, I know I posted this in another thread, but I was trying to address another member's question there. More overlap again, but hopefully we're narrowing it down to a single thread.)

[asabbia]

yesterday i recovered something but today i don't see any further improvments

[walkman]

- Definitely an improvement in keyword quality for me, Google has started to retreat from their insane idea of giving 100% of traffic to a few "good" sites while killing others. It's just a start though.

- I don't think Google has accounted for changes we made yet. Mine were drastic but the improvement in keywords is very small. Maybe soon they'll re-rank all pages?

[crobb305]

- I don't think Google has accounted for changes we made yet. Mine were drastic but the improvement in keywords is very small. Maybe soon they'll re-rank all pages?

Yeah I think you're right. I think we're seeing a recalculation page by page, very slowly. I made a sitewide tweak to my title tag during the middle of last week, and only about 5 of the pages (~5%) on site: search are showing the new title. These are also the pages that have seemingly been unpandalized in the past 48 hours with an apparent bleedback to the homepage, boosting related phrases between the linked documents.

[wingslevel]

another thing to think about is the record crawling that seems ongoing. they are deeply crawling our longtail pages - many of these are deep white page rank pages - like the old supplemental ones. as these get indexed - for us we now have a record # of pages in the index according to wmt - they will disrupt the serps, at least longtail ones

[ErnestHemingway]

Lots of ups and downs today and past few days a lot of changes in serp in my verticals.

[backdraft7]

@EH - agreed. On Wednesday everything dropped out again. SERPS juggling with the Youtube Videos taking the form of regular listings, so rather than hogging one position, they now hog two. It's bouncing all over the place and quality traffic is non existent.

[walkman]

Google is going nuts, grabbing each day 50-70% of pages.
I think whatever boost I got a few days is harder to see now. WTH Google

[canuckseo]

I'm seeing slight increases in traffic as well - 2 of my sites that got hit the hardest seem to be improving traffic wise. Other sites that maintained or gained through panda2 are showing even bigger gains. Also, googlebot traffic is similar to what it was the week before the panda2 update.

[ErnestHemingway]

G is pushing insanely their own sister sites in the search lately. Past 1 week it has been crazy for us. Earnings and Traffic gone even for the sites which were doing great after Panda.

[tedster]

In another thread here, several members who are struggling to bounce back from Panda problems are reporting traffic recovery for just one page. That's an interesting behavior - something to keep an eye on, I think.

[walkman]

G is pushing insanely their own sister sites in the search lately. Past 1 week it has been crazy for us. Earnings and Traffic gone even for the sites which were doing great after Panda.

Google's a portal now, minus the content. It pretty much steals it from others and send them no traffic. So Google is after you and your site, make no mistake about it. In a few years they will be in every niche, making the first page Google only, and for most searches you already see 10+ links for Google related services. So even if Serps are fair (that's an if, IMO) people will not see them unless they make an extra effort. But as Google provides more answers and solutions, why index or rank well your site? It may or it may not.

[GBehr]

My site got hit by the Panda, just like most other sites and I lost about 50% of my Google traffic. I am not sure how to fix my thin pages, if I have any and I have been looking at titles, links and everything else I could think of. I haven't changed anything so if I should have for Google to get better positions, then that is what have happened.
Yesterday the traffic dropped again and it's slow today and if I check Google for "old" search phrases I used to rank for then I see a lot of new sites popping up and most old ones that used to be there beside me are gone.

[asabbia]

today +10/20%

I am not able to find a pattern of this ups and downs =/

Especially because my main SERP are almost immutable, the serp that changes are that of long tail that are much more difficult to keep track of (because they are a lot)

[tedster]

Welcome to the forums, GBehr. If I were you, I'd start by inspected the URLs that lost the most traffic. The way Panda works seems to be first by rating individual pages - and then by lowering other pages on the site not because they are low quality, but because the initially targeted pages were rated low enough that Google decided to lower others by some factor, too.

So the key is to start with the pages that took the most damage. As you probably have read, there can be lots of factors to inspect - but your job gets easier if you focus on the worst problems first.

[My_Media]

Any one experiencing today that our latest post are gone from Google's index it was there this morning?

Also the ranking are going wild up and down?

[edited by: tedster at 1:58 am (utc) on May 1, 2011]
[edit reason] moved from another location [/edit]

[AlyssaS]

My competitor duplicate guy is still in the SERPs - he reappeared on the 26th - so G still hasn't closed their filters. Whatever they are doing is taking them a while.

< continued here: [webmasterworld.com...] >

[edited by: tedster at 8:05 pm (utc) on May 1, 2011]