Google Updates and SERP Changes - July 2012

[Alex997]

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

A lot of my keyword SERPs dropped a page today - totally out of the blue. They have been going up and up in SERPs steadily all this year with no panda or penguin impacts. I havent changed anything on my home page and no new spammy links, so I *guess* it's a google algorithm change?! I doubt its a penalty as the drop would have been even more severe.

Anyone else in the UK seen something similar today?

[edited by: tedster at 1:14 pm (utc) on Jul 1, 2012]

[bwnbwn]

There was an update on Sat. 3oth. I think it is an anchor text update. This happened about 2 months ago same drop on an ecommerce site. Site lost wholesale and picked up cheap as the main target keyword. Look at the serps were your site is now ranking see if your primary term has changed.

[setzer]

Looking around the SERPs, I just noticed a generic product page on The Verge with essentially no content other than a generic spec sheet is outranking a 2000-word, in-depth review I wrote on said product. Sigh.

[varun21]

Google SERPS are now nothing but a list of elite sites. Something like SMOZ or any other web directory. Today if you want to run a site and make it popular, SEO won't help, black-hat won't help and Google won't help. You must be plain lucky and pray the Panda ignores you somehow.

[SnowMan68]

Google SERPS are now nothing but a list of elite sites. Something like SMOZ or any other web directory. Today if you want to run a site and make it popular, SEO won't help, black-hat won't help and Google won't help. You must be plain lucky and pray the Panda ignores you somehow.

100 percent not true.

[PaulJa]

Not sure I agree with that, varun21. Things are definitely changing, a lot, and fast, but that's no reason to get so glum.

[diberry]

I agree that the days where you could rely on Google for all your traffic are gone. But a lot of people saw that coming, and shouted about it. Google's extreme dominance of web traffic was an unusual market condition. It was never going to last forever.

[PaulJa]

^^ what he said

[chalkywhite]

Seems like someone has flicked switch at google from 3pm uk time. Never seen traffic like it in a short space of time. From the lows of last weeks panda update to this.Please let it continue

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Google says they rolled out an update on July 8th but my stats show me it hit July 6th.

Noticeably impacted were pages about products, even if they weren't 100% transactional in nature. Equally impacted, in a positive manner, were purely informational pages(this is an informational site).

I'd say Google has strengthened their labeling system between informational and transactional sites and is funneling them more strongly.

Gameplan: Separate informational content from transactional content, perhaps moving all informational content to a subdomain. Being labeled one type of site seems to preclude getting much traffic from the other type.

[netmeg]

(I dunno where you are, but we haven't had July 8 yet here)

[Alex997]

Google announces tachyon technology integration with Panda/Penguin...

[SnowMan68]

Google says they rolled out an update on July 8th but my stats show me it hit July 6th.

I don't get it...

[diberry]

Sgt_Kickaxe is across the interplanetary date line.

[SnowMan68]

I will say something does seem like it went through today/lastnight. Our traffic is unusually high for a Friday, especially with the 4th of July falling during the middle of the week. Maybe Sgt_Kickaxe just got his dates wrong :)

[SnowMan68]

Our G referrals are comparable to a Tues-Wed, wonder what went through lastnight.

[docbird]

Discovery of Higgs boson announced, and then Google rolling out an update a day in the future
Could be far more to this panda/penguin business than the regular kinds of mysteries discussed so far...

Too bad if have to separate info from transaction material so strongly; might think that should be enough to untangle it in on any one site. Perhaps google can grow to understand this

[CainIV]

I would wait about a week to ward off any external factors like outages. Also, there are plenty of other DC iterations going around, so its important to stay the course.

That being said, something tested looked at your website dis-favorably. Many times we find that is an indicator of lack of brand solidification and links / signals representing brand.

For anyone who has NOT made determination on what their brand name is, how and where it is registered, and how their back links appear in relation to that brand has some hard times ahead. I am not saying this is the in your situation, its just what we see more often than not as non-branded links are targeted with each subsequent iteration of updates.

You must be plain lucky and pray the Panda ignores you somehow.

Nope, simply not true

[Kendo]

Some fluctuations in traffic may be lack of bot activity. On one site when we blocked a series of servers our page hits were reduced by 83%.

[dolcevita]

i have noticed a couple weeks a go that the result are terrible than ever before. Take a look for [a 2-word example term] and then go to SearchPage 3. It is unbelievable that i see all the results only from one domain!? So from position 18 till position 32 is taken only by one domain.

I have seen much more similar results for other terms and it does not make any sense to myself to see something like that. What's going on with big G?

[edited by: tedster at 4:37 pm (utc) on Jul 7, 2012]
[edit reason] no specific keywords, please [/edit]

[bsand715]

Google seems to be lost when it comes to good serp returns.

This is the return on a number 4 site in my nich. The ranking of the site depends on which day you check it. It shows up between 2 to 4. Has been like this for several weeks now.


"Could not save data.
status: error error: Not Found
OK'

Now, before Panda/ Penguin started I was seeing Low tech low content, 10 page and less sites rising to the top. So I launched a New Site. Site is 5 months old. Short 7 page site, URL is keyword .com. light content Just as low tech as I could make it. Has a few links now (6).

The new site has been ranking between 2 and 4 revolving around the above mentioned site for weeks.

My older site ( which google loved for many years #1 for 8 years) Large site, 1000s of natural links, lots of good original focused content. Built like google and webmasterworld Gurus said to build. This site is slowly slipping off page 1.

All the tools I use to check quality of web sites for search engines still say the older site should be a run-a-way #1.

Has the new google algo made what we have learned and the tools we have used outdated as far as google is concerned? Is there a new set of seo toold some where?

[aristotle]

@bsand715
In my opinion Google's attempts to fight over-optimization are a big cause of the problems you describe. Also, the different pieces of the Google algorithm don't fit together very well.

[asusplay]

My main site is still down after the 30th June update. Traffic is stable though, so I have been seeing pretty much the low levels for the last week.

What is interesting is that the site does rank on page one of some money terms which I would expect a lot more traffic from, which historically has brought traffic, so I am not sure if there is some throttling going on, or why all of a sudden why traffic is so low for certain keywords.

I am not sure why with lots of diverse anchor text terms and quite a few backlinks the long tail seems to have been lost in terms of relevancy and I am seeing some quite random terms in my stats.

I did read somewhere that relevancy is, well, no longer relevant! So can we expect this to fix itself any time soon?

[gouri]

Can anyone mention what they think that the June 30 update is emphasizing?

[jerry12]

"Can anyone mention what they think that the June 30 update is emphasizing?"
no idea......

[Alex997]

No idea either but some of my keywords started to make a recovery yesterday. I have made no changes.

[Pjman]

@Alex997

Recovery from what? (i.e. Panda, Penguin?)

[Alex997]

From unexpected drop of 10+ places on 75% of main phrases on the 30th June.

[SnowMan68]

Our G referrals (7/1-7/7) are up 35% from two weeks ago and 15% from last week. Not sure what happened either. I'll take it though.

[Peteark]

I manage 17 UK based corporate sites, I've not seen anything unusual in the past few weeks. Traffic pattern steady, if anything SERPS up

[jinxed]

I'm seeing big increases in traffic in the last day or so. Can anyone elaborate on any confirmed updates?