Google Updates and SERP Changes - Oct 2011

[Dave_Hybrid]

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

I just found this little nugget whilst search for something completely unrelated.

#2 Post from Google employee.

[google.com...]

That's pretty clear admission they are hitting sites they don't mean to imo.

[edited by: tedster at 10:42 pm (utc) on Oct 2, 2011]

[sandman22]

YEs my inner pages were all effected.. Some only dropped 5 spots,others droppede 30 - 100 plus spots back. The ones that dropped only 5 spots had small,spammy scrapers steal my content, the pages that dropped 30 plus spots were scraped by sellers using Ebay and Kijii.ca (or whatever it is), and a few were droped due to a major forum in my niche that also has a classifieds site. It seems like Google is blindly giving Ebay sites rights to all content, even though they sellers typically copy content from top ranking/informative sites (like mine used to be). I truly got kicked in the teeth, just because sellers on these big sites like to copy and paste my content.

[nadavs]

The era of Blogger has begun. Two of my Blogger blogs recieved massive amounts of traffic, something I haven't seen in months. One of those blogs was recently updated on my 2010 birthday.

nadavs

[Hissingsid]

@chrisv1963 I don't need statistics or anything else to draw one simple conclusion: Panda is crap and the Google "engineers" no longer know what they are doing.

Chris,

You are only seeing trees, look for the wood!

I think I understand what Panda is, something of how it works and what it is aimed at achieving. At it's core Panda is absolutely brilliant. At the edges it has had unexpected results. I suspect that what the various iterations of Panda are attempting to do is remove the unexpected effects. The trouble is what is happening is they are getting a different set of unexpected effects.

I've come to the conclusion that for my main site the demotion it has suffered was an intended consequence of Panda. I think I know why and I think I know how to fix it but I'm waiting. This is our low season and I have time to learn more before I jump in and make changes.

I suspect it is much harder to understand a demotion when it is an unexpected consequence of Panda.

Cheers

Sid

[kidder]

I don't think the concept as I understand it is bad. What I'm looking at here is to me a broken search engine and I would expect to see some better results sooner rather than later. I'm seeing stuff in AU that does not even come close to relevant.

[gehrlekrona]

Continue to drop visitors so I am not sure what's going on right now. Panda brilliant? Maybe just too brilliant for us to understand and follow, at least for me!

[ibmethatswhoib2]

uhhh I feel sick, I dropped from a steady 300 visitors to 8 on the 18th. No Panda has affected me before and I'm not sure what to do. I have a quality site, users love it, bounce rate is low, they check out other pages. I'm just speechless and sick of Google.

[Dave_Hybrid]

Things were starting to look up a little bit for me.

Today ive taken another huge hit, im down around 80% overall since the first panda hit. 20k down to 4k a day.

Its not about man up and find out what works rather than moan, its where do you draw the line, how many hours do you work for nothing before you accept you cant beat it and get a real job.

[dawnstar]

Aww man, I just checked a search term I used to be in the top 3 for now at bottom of page one; traffic annihilated...

ONLY to find amongst other (I'll be polite) 'thin' sites a PARKED DOMAIN! That's now ranking at No4.

OK its Keyword.com but c'mon a parked domain! Sheesh.

How do I compete with that!

[c41lum]

I v also seen another larger drop over night.

[gyppo]

I can confirm I also took another hit overnight.

[Martin Ice Web]

Germany: Confirmed

[nadavs]

A little GWT link update, because it's just hilarious:

1) The .edu site now gives me over 17K links. In fact, it is listed as my #1 source for links. God bless WordPress (actually I have 14 links from there).

2) I have over 5,000 links from a site that does not exist.

Ladies and gentlemen, Google has gone insane. I don't know if these weird links have any value, but they are definitely related to my penalty. I hope my reconsideration request will be accepted regardless of these ridiculous statistics.

nadavs

[Bill_H]

Hi All:
We saw a traffic drop after the Oct. 13th update, a recovery to normal started on the 16th, and then the same pattern repeated on the 20th with another traffic drop, just not as deep as on the 13th. Looks like Google rolled out the 13th algo with some minor mods. Anyone else seeing the same pattern?

Cheers,
Bill

[chrisv1963]

ONLY to find amongst other (I'll be polite) 'thin' sites a PARKED DOMAIN! That's now ranking at No4.

OK its Keyword.com but c'mon a parked domain! Sheesh.

It's unbelievable that Google is ranking parked domains and URLs with "this website could harm your computer" messages. You don't need a Phd degree to know that you should remove such domains and URLs from the serps immediately. Is this "quality" after Panda? This search engine is becoming a joke ... a very bad joke.

[Donna]

I have noticed for the past 3 " Minor Panda Updates" every time before the update my indexed pages start dancing from 4/4 to 2/4 to 3/4 in and out and so on till it hits(takes usually 1-2 days). Always the same story only Panda.


They are dancing again needless to say ....

[kidder]

I found the following text on the first page today while search for something "Panda" related. High quality stuff.... Way to go Google.

Over the pveryt week or so Sefoot posturemetrics hvery lgotlyof Google’s Pfantveryticda updgot in Europe. Today they shtend to blfantveryticket their dcoming froma for Switzerlfantveryticd Itingy fantveryticd Spain.

Sefoot posturemetrics hvery often shtend to blfantveryticket dcoming froma on Austria Frfantveryticce fantveryticd Germfantveryticy.

[MrSavage]

Well, something new for where I tend to look. Let's say a search of pink widget. What I have is a shopping results, couple UK results (in Canada using Google.com), walmart, hp, amazon, and samsung. Can't say I've seen that before. Nothing remotely mom and pop in those page 1 results anymore. Gotta ask myself, and I get in there how exactly? Getting to that brand status? Yeah right.

[mhansen]

Today, I noticed eBay and Amazon in several serps they have not been in prior to this weekend. The resulting pages are the exact type we try to avoid building for fear of penalties, and obviously promoted for their brand value!

We also noticed that several of our strongest, most aged, and well linked site pages, those we have spent the most time to provide the best info and user-experience (lowest bounce, most informative, etc) have all but disappeared from results since Friday. Other site pages are fine. They are still indexed and still deliver traffic, but much fewer of the same visitors they were designed for.

From a business owner perspective, Google seems to change the visitor profile they send us every day or 2 lately. Whether its Panda or one of the other 500 dials they choose to screw with, its very frustrating. I don't even know what to say. Googlebot is fully reindexing sites twice a month now... stuff we would block others for. Is it time to block Google, and remove them from our business decisions completely?

I am fully aware not to build a business on the back of free traffic from Google, but its really a catch-22... if you don't scale up to take care of the visitors they send you, you suffer through negative reviews. If you DO staff up to handle the demand, and they pinch off the flow, and you have to scale back and lay people off.

Google Consistency = Non-Existent.

[AlyssaS]

Anyone noticing a change to SERPs layout? I'm seeing the ads with a yellow background, and a pink line bordering it, so that you clearly see where the ads stop and where the organic results start.

Anyone else seeing this? Wonder if this is just a test or their new layout - should make a difference to organic clickthroughs

[netmeg]

Anyone noticing a change to SERPs layout?

Not seeing it here.

I am fully aware not to build a business on the back of free traffic from Google, but its really a catch-22... if you don't scale up to take care of the visitors they send you, you suffer through negative reviews. If you DO staff up to handle the demand, and they pinch off the flow, and you have to scale back and lay people off.

In that situation, I myself start thinking about what I could do improve customer retention, and repeat business. I might not have any control over who or how many Google sends me to begin with, but I should hopefully be able to have an effect on how many *stay* with me. And then predict my scale and resources accordingly.

[ibmethatswhoib2]

Anyone noticed for websites that aren't brand new rankings aren't moving much at all. Seems like the last couple weeks rankings are stagnant for my older sites and a new site I built is moving some. I have been doing this for years now and haven't seen anything like this. Pretty weird, I'm doing constant backlinking too, it's pretty weird.

[Bewenched]

Well I've finally bitten the bullet and sent Google a Reconsideration request. I feel that our ecommerce site was unfortunately slammed by the new algo. We got hit in the first iteration in February, and thought that it would certainly work itself out since we are a 14 year old ecommerce site and have always been transparent to google through webmaster tools, but sadly that hasn't been the case.

If the reconsideration does not make a difference very soon all google products/services will be removed from our site sitemaps, analytics ... all of it.

Is there another way besides doing a reconsideration request to get google to do a manual review?

I wanted to add that our page rank went to a grey bar site wide on the 20th, what the heck is going on?

[edited by: Bewenched at 5:51 pm (utc) on Oct 24, 2011]

[Robert Charlton]

Anyone noticing a change to SERPs layout? I'm seeing the ads with a yellow background, and a pink line bordering it, so that you clearly see where the ads stop and where the organic results start.

No, I'm not seeing clearer ad highlighting here (in the SF Bay Area), but it would be a welcome change.

I am seeing that some serps are clearly in a "test" mode again, trying out combinations of 10 organic results plus Place and Universal results, as I'd reported on Oct 5th. (Did these drop out for a while during October? I haven't been watching continuously during this period).

[tedster]

Is there another way besides doing a reconsideration request to get google to do a manual review?

Sometimes posting about the site and the issue on the Google forums brings that to happen - no guarantee, however, but it can do the job.

[maxmoritz]

Or, getting mentioned on another high profile site/blog, in the media, etc.

[nadavs]

Just received a response for my reconsideration request. As you can guess, it was the standard violation message.

I also went through the traffic logs in the time period of the previous request, and all I found was two pages - the home page and the most popular page of the website. That's it. Two pages made the decision for the entire website.

From the look at the logs of the current request, I see that they first did a whois on my site, and then nothing. Up till yesterday, I didn't have a single visit from the quality team. They probably based their response on gut feeling.

nadavs

[sandman22]

Has anyone that got hit hurt on Oct 13th rankings come back? I have seem some improvement, about half my pages have improved, but many of the pages still seem slapped. I did get many sites remove the content they took from my site (without asking), which has helped. I'm still waiting for Ebay though, which was the biggest culprit of my sites stolen content. The sellers seem to just copy and paste at will.

[ryanep]

I'd just like to gauge the number of people affected by Oct 14 update have directory listings on the 3 paid-review directories that big G accepts?

BOTW, Business and Yahoo?

[bloard]

One of my sites was hit Oct 14th. It has a Yahoo directory and dmoz link. Neither are paid. I was thinking the other day that one potential cause of the problem could have been a devaluation of those old directory links which had propped the site up for years and were by far the site's 2 most authoritative links.

[AlyssaS]

Here's a screenshot of those ads with the pink border:

[flickr.com...]

Interestingly, it's just on some keywords. When I did searches on other keywords, it was absent, but when I re-searched the keyword above, it showed again. So they can't be doing this by datacenter, it must be keyword driven.