Google Updates and SERP Changes - Apr 2012

[backdraft7]

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

Going, going, GONE!
After over 10 years of consistently ranking between position #1 and #3 on page one for a single four letter word search term, the month of March (starting on the 10th) has resulted in falling to below the fold, then to page 2, then page 3 and today I have been completely removed for that term.

In place is nothing but garbage. Branding obviously has lost traction. I'm thinking whatever they have done is meant to stick. I checked to see if I had been over optimized for the term, but with a mere 4 occurrences on my page and my need to use that term to describe my product, I really don't know what they want from us anymore...

The effect of lost traffic has set off all the "Big Traffic change for URL" warnings and the anayltics charts have nose dived. Anyone else seeing this type of situation on their long established sites?

Lost income from March updates is just about $1000 / week.

I'd almost guess that Google is just removing older authority sites in favor of nothing but news articles and blogs.

[edited by: tedster at 4:54 am (utc) on Apr 1, 2012]

[System]

Related Thread here: Google Announces Algo Changes for March 2012 [webmasterworld.com]

[edited by: tedster at 2:22 am (utc) on Apr 5, 2012]

[Lenny2]

Anybody seeing the video results? Aggregious amount of blatant spam results... Many links absent an actual vid. Anybody seeing this?

[robdwoods]

I'm seeing very similar results at one e-commerce site that was dominating the SERPs in it's niche until the updates of Mar 23-24 and especially 30-31. They were #1 on all their high traffic / high conversion terms then got hit hard as a bunch of the terms got localized in the 23-24 update. Then there seemed to be an across the board update on 30-31 that dropped their results below a major multi-channel retailer and a major manufacturer brand. The traffic hit looks like 40-75%.

Is anyone else seeing this for pure play online e-commerce where there is strong competition from multi-channel with a strong network of traditional locations? This could be a real blow to pure play e-commerce if so.

The only other thing I see that could have impacted this site is possibly over optimized anchor text, especially to product category level pages.

[robdwoods]

@mhansen

Looking at a few of the pages where we are seeing a drop in direct long tail traffic from Google, it's obvious to me that the internal anchor text has been discounted, as well as some kind of optimization de-ranking. (or a combination of both)

Formerly top ranked (1-3 serp rank, longtail) internal pages such as [brand widget model] that were linked only internally are no longer ranking in the top 20.

I'm seeing some of the same on one site I analyze (not my own). There looks to be a big discounting of internal anchor text but also an adjustment for over-optimized anchor text, especially to deeper pages.

If this persists I'm not sure of the solution beyond encouraging more varied anchors to those pages (something that really should have been on SEOs' radar for some time).

[reseller]

< The following 13 posts were spliced here from: Google Announces March Algo Changes [webmasterworld.com] >

Are they going to leave it like this?

I don't think so. Hopefully they gonna allow current SERPs of Google Korea [google.co.kr...] to propagate to Google.com etc. ;-)

[edited by: tedster at 10:40 pm (utc) on Apr 5, 2012]

[chrisv1963]

I don't think so. Hopefully they gonna allow current SERPs of Google Korea [google.co.kr...] to propagate to Google.com etc. ;-)

I might be wrong, but I think I read somewhere that Panda was not implemented yet on Google Korea. This might explain why the Google Korea serps are so good ... :-)

[reseller]

@chrisv1963

I also like the current SERPs of Google Hong Kong [google.com.hk...] . Maybe they haven't implemented Panda there too :-)

[bobsc]

Hopefully they gonna allow current SERPs of Google Korea to propagate to Google.com

I hope not, but I'll gladly take Hong Kong results.

[edited by: bobsc at 2:19 pm (utc) on Apr 5, 2012]

[chrisv1963]

@chrisv1963

I also like the current SERPs of Google Honk Kong [google.com.hk...] . Maybe they haven't implemented Panda there too :-)

That would be a real joke, wouldn't it? One year of Panda and tweaks and finally end up with SERPS that are worse than ever before.

[reseller]

..but I'll gladly take Hong Kong results.

Lets pray together!

Dear Almighty God, please give Google Search Quality Team the wisdom and the courage to allow the current SERPs of Google Hong Kong to propagate to the rest of Googles worldwide. Amen :-)

[SnowMan68]

It seems highly unlikely that the SERPS from Hong Kong would propagate to the rest of the world...I would imagine it's the other way around :(

[garyr_h]

@reseller @SnowMan68 the results on Hong Kong and Korea are not pre-panda. They are definitely post-panda, even post-March panda. However, they seem to be pre-April and pre-March other non-panda updates to me.

[Pjman]

Yeah, guys the HK results are awesome. I didn't even look in any of my niches yet, I had two real-world queries I have been searching for all morning. Building an inground pool, plumbing question.

I used every engine this morning; no dice. But HK answered both of my queries on first page results.

For anyone wondering:

Looking for a pool foundation expert that is located in the NYC area? Just go to Google HK, but of course! Come on G Plex guys...

[reseller]

@Pjman

I used every engine this morning; no dice. But HK answered both of my queries on first page results.

I.e the folks in USA may wish to use Google Hong Kong instead of Google.com . A win-win deal. Happy American Google users and happy Googleplex :-)

[chrisv1963]

Looking for a pool foundation expert that is located in the NYC area? Just go to Google HK, but of course! Come on G Plex guys...

Delocalized local search? :-)

[jastra]

About the #16 and #24 points:

As I said in the previous thread I may have gotten whacked for over-optimizing on-page KWs. They happened to be in anchor text. I got the -90 and freaked out.

I ran to my Wordpress theme admin pages and took off the location-KW1-KW2 instances and tamed them down.

I was back in my accustomed spot within 24 hours.

I still see a couple of unaccustomed sites in the top 10 that weren't there before and, conspicuously, my evil nemesis database driven site that I suspect scraped other sites for its seed listings is gone, back at #17.

[econman]

I like the present SERPs of Google Korea [google.co.kr...] . How about you?

Just did a bit of experimenting with Korea and Hong Kong.

Didn't take the time to compare them closely, or test a large sample of key words, but if this is any sort of early stage beta test of where Google plans to take the .com results, then the future looks awfully bright for us.

Unfortunately, it's probably some sort of "reverse" test, so sites that rank highly in Korea and Hong Kong are about to be pushed farther into oblivion on the .com results.

:(

I guess we have to wait and see, but I for one am curious what others see in the Korea and HK results.

[johnhh]

Um as I posted elsewhere - what you are seeing at Google Hong Kong is NOT what local users in Hong Kong are seeing - they are seeing the usual .com results. I have had someone check.

Smoke and mirrors.

[Pjman]

I switched my search habits to strictly using HK results today. I have to say it is the happiest I have been in years.

My sites are still buried in the HK results, but on a personal search basis; I have never seen better results since I can remember. Even searching for camps for my kids for summer was a ton better.

Hopefully that is a beta test for their new changes...

[Habtom]

google.co.kr I see results are grouped in and labeled:

Site

Webpages

Video

Blogs

News

Q&A

Images

Does anybody else see this, or am I just late to this?

[garyr_h]

Welp, traffic back to early March levels. Knew it was too good to last. I got some help from the March-Panda but all that help has completely gone away. The site was hit by Panda 1.0 but thought it was finally starting to come out of it with the March-Panda update...sadly, maybe that's not the case? I simply do not understand why the results would be showing the way they are.

@Habtom As for the google.co.kr, yeah, it has been there for a while.

Anyway, I wonder why my site is listed as a blog there. It's most definitely not one. There is a blog on the same domain, but that's about it. It even has a date. There's no dates on that page and it wasn't the last time it was updated either. This is only some pages. Other pages are listed under "web pages."

[reseller]

From Europe... I still see high quality SERPs on Google Hong Kong, and I like what I see.

The SERPs of [google.com.hk...] illustrate that Google Search Quality Team is able to produce the best SERPs on planet :-)

[Aoe2913]

In the 2011 April Panda Update, Hong Kong Results were the lagging indicator as in the Panda from .com had not been applied (saw this first hand). Remember the international roll out afterwards?

[indyank]

Those are definitely pre-panda results in HK.

One significant change I see now in the Google SERPS is wikipedia ranks number 1 for everything. Be it search for countries, flags, celebrities, meaning of English words, places or anything else..not sure whether it is because of the changes to anchor text or synonyms or the wikidata partnership or the general partnership..

goodbye Knol and long live wikipedia...Conflict of interest - [en.wikipedia.org...] has now been handled well.

[Hissingsid]

Looking at a few of the pages where we are seeing a drop in direct long tail traffic from Google, it's obvious to me that the internal anchor text has been discounted

That would explain what I'm seeing also. I said last month that some big sites (many pages) had dropped significantly for the big $ 2 word term in my niche. This could have been because they were unfocused on the specifics but very strong on the broad term semantically. However it could equally be because their ranking was for an internal page that benefited from 1000 of internal links with exactly the same anchor text. They have a large included footer with long list of in-site links, the same list on every page.

I have the same type of internal site links list included in a footer on most pages of my site but it is more focused and has many more external links to it than the badly affected site. I've dropped 3 places.

For other terms my ranking has improved recently for terms included in the footer list.

On 22nd of February I decided to target a 3 word term that I know converts well. I changed a bunch of anchor text to this term on a few sites that I control at that point I was at #11 I'm now at #6. On March 6th I decided to target another 3 word term also just by adding some exact anchor back links to a few sites. I've gone from #14 to #11 on that one.

[mh_and]

I had 2 waves of ups from March Google updates, but yesterday April 5 - (and today proportionally) I saw traffic declined across all sites I manage, both clients and my own. Is this pre Easter user activity drop or yet another Panda iteration?

Traffic is down like 20-25%.

Am I the only one here seeing that, or you can confirm that as well?

[garyr_h]

@mh_and I can confirm that. Something happened. There was a big crawl on April 3, anyone seeing major crawls after that?

I'm not sure if it is Panda or what (although that would make sense, because all gains made by the March Panda have disappeared).

[mh_and]

I noticed a double size of usual day crawl on April 1, but that's after the update on March 30-31 majority are reporting as another Panda change.

So Easter has nothing to do here? I'm not sure I can remember user activity drops regarding this day.

[HuskyPup]

There was a big crawl on April 3, anyone seeing major crawls after that?

Just had one in the last hour across several sites.

[SnowMan68]

@mh_and

In the USA it is Good Friday and many public/private companies are closed. I believe that it is also a state holiday in 12 different States. Most schools and universities are closed as well. That pretty much covers 80% of our clients and I would expect traffic to be down until the start of next week.