Google Updates and SERP Changes - February 2013

[petehall]

< continued from [webmasterworld.com...]

Not just location screwing things up... all web browsers are now using your history to distort results, even with Web History switched off. Only way to check the real results now is Chrome Incognito.

That and the location issues are really screwing things up. If I type in weather, G gives me weather for Windmill Hill, UK... I don't even know where that is. I looked and its 200 miles away at the other end of the UK!

[edited by: tedster at 2:08 pm (utc) on Feb 1, 2013]

[Jez123]

I reckon this is now having an effect:

I don't. I think it will be a while yet before the masses start to even realise. They trust google's results and will do for some time yet. When the realise just how poor they are it will be the death of google though. What the hell are they doing? The only thing I can think is that they are just trying to make the adwords ads look good by comparison and that means the crap is here to stay. Until google dies, that is. Why the hell aren't Bing taking advantage of this though? They could at least be looking good if someone were to accidently use them.

[netmeg]

I canīt see why amazon has this power ( only because it is big ) because it is an affilate site, descriptions are scapped from manufacturer. Where is the added value?

Seriously? Trust and authority. Understanding why Amazon gets the positioning they do goes a long way to understanding how you can improve your own organic traffic.

[nomis5]

I canīt see why amazon has this power ( only because it is big ) because it is an affilate site, descriptions are scapped from manufacturer. Where is the added value?

My opinion is the added value, as G see it, which is in the reviews that are on Amazon which normally are much longer than other sites.

It all goes back to how long viewers stay on a site and how many pages they view. Amazon have a large repository of reviews which keep users on their site - "stickiness".

G is not that clever, forget the various theories put out by many as to how they rank sites. They rank them now on how long a user stays on the site and how many pages they view. G uses very crude mechanisms to rate sites, don't attribute any clever judgemental mechanisms to them. If a user spends an average 2 minutes on your site compared to 3 minutes on another site, the other site will rank higher. No complicated stuff, it's that simple.

G are unable to judge quality - visit length etc.. Metrics are now king. And they are king by a large margin compared to the much quoted back-links.

Think about it for a moment, if you were G how would you rate the usefulness and popularity of a site? Your brain is at least as good as theirs.

[Martin Ice Web]

They trust google's results and will do for some time yet. When the realise just how poor they are it will be the death of google

goomazonbay is verpoor since first panda release and yet the break another stock high each quater although they did put their feet deep in anyones .... . They have been blind and now they relized what they can do and did it. g will try to take over all the markets because of making money. The last step of the kindergarten look like weather report is only a little step. Others will follow.


bing is just sailing in the wind of goomazonbay. Instead of bring in something new they just copy all of the silly crap. ( Although the bing results are much better than goomazonbay once ). Create something new and poeple will change. You see it with g+ and facebook. Facebook was new and g+ copied it and will never get through with it. At contrary it is very quiet arround g+ , isnīt it?

[Jez123]

Understanding why Amazon gets the positioning they do goes a long way to understanding how you can improve your own organic traffic.

If you mean poor customer services, not caring how affiliates abuse Amazon's position and horrible design then I agree.

[Martin Ice Web]

netmeg, i was refering to my niche. Yet, many sellers on amazon do not sell the original stuff. Many of my manufactures have to do test buyings because of this. Poeple donīt know that they did not get the original widget, they only think they got it very cheap and it must be the right one because it is from amazon.. Amazon does not care about it. The honest selling sites canīt go this price because we sell the original stuff that is way more expensive. If g trust something like this?! Trust?!

[potentialgeek]

Google still is horrible with dated results for new software. For example, just searched for adobe premiere, a popular video editing program, that gets updated regularly. In 2013 Google provides on page one a link to a YouTube video from 2008!

Lol.

Same issue with WordPress searches. Google's best tutorial rankings are usually for outdated editions.

This should be one of the easiest things for computer programmers to fix, but they still haven't done it. Lame!

[rubinetto]

I see Google page rank changes on two of my sites.

[Wilburforce]

@Jez123

On my server stats, Bing is now providing 6.4% of all referrals. Google.com is 21.3%, but google.co.uk (=income) is now only 11.2%.

Total Google referrals (including outliers like .in) are currently around 20% down on this time a year ago, with most of the losses coming from .co.uk (=income). However, Bing has more than doubled over that period, with most of the increase in the latter months. I appreciate that:

1. My site isn't a representative sample; and
2. All regions are not equal (although if anything I think Bing is doing worse in the UK than elsewhere).

It is a small sign, nevertheless.

[Sand]

This should be one of the easiest things for computer programmers to fix, but they still haven't done it. Lame!

Don't be so sure. Newer is not necessarily better (or the other way around). For example, a WordPress post from 2008 about a particular function (the_permalink, for example), is just as relevant now as it was then. Of course that won't always be the case, but the problem isn't as simple as age. And if you make it about age, then people needlessly keep re-publishing the same stuff to keep up.

[Jez123]

@ Wilburforce. Hope so. Google do not deserve to be where they are at the moment.

[Sand]

I also just noticed that there was a TBPR update, for whatever that's worth.

[gouri]

I am seeing that some of the link information in WMT is not showing. Is anyone else seeing this?

[GreenDog18]

@gouri I just check and I am missing a group of links to a key part of my website....

[petehall]

Looks like my results have reverted back... yet again?!

[Ogdeni]

@petehal - we agree - UK traffic fallen off overnight - lots of new pages not showing in results and inbound link stats reduced significantly

[SnowMan68]

Traffic to our main US ecom site took a slight hit. Looks like it is in the long tail. Maybe 3-5%. Won't know for sure how much until later in the day though.

[gouri]

@GreenDog18,

Thanks for checking your WMT and posting.

[SnowMan68]

Spoke too soon. Looks like traffic is actually normal and our G analytics are just lagging a bit this morning.

[Wilburforce]

This is getting personal.

On Key Term Mytown I am now at #10 (#1 on Bing and formerly on Google). One of the three Google Places entries is further from Mytown than me.

In top position is a low-quality site with a lower-quality service with their other (highly-duplicated, same products and trading address) site at #3, while two of the sites above mine don't provide the service at all.

The only upside - I still assume (and hope!) the public are losing patience with Google too - is that Bing referrals are still increasing.

[cruzer2006]

The Google SERPs are ridiculous. In a highly competitive niche, I see a bunch of sites using free providers. Only one page with thin garbage content. 23 Million alexa ranking and 10 backlinks. Top 10 in a very competitive niche. My site with hundreds of quality unique content and great backlinks lost most of its rankings. These articles are very useful for the searcher. Google has a weird way of returning results from keyword search, looks like title doesn't make any difference. It just takes whichever keyword it gets from the content. End result is the user doesn't get his targeted keyword search returned. He needs to dig in the results. All these Panda and Penguin have mostly cluttered the Google SERPs with more spam.

[Wilburforce]

The site I disavowed on 31 January is no longer showing in WMT as of today, which is encouraging (I wasn't expecting to see anything for potentially several months). Can anyone here shed light on whether this is typical?

Whether it will make any difference at all to the results remains to be seen. I am not confident.

[aboshakeeb]

The site I disavowed on 31 January is no longer showing in WMT as of today, which is encouraging

Something wrong here ! i disavowed about 10 domains , but today i lost not only those domains but plus about 700 domains was showing in WMT ! it was [Top 1000 domains that have links to pages on your site.] ,today it is only 300 !

[Jez123]

I am seeing a dramatic drop in links reported in WMT too. Down to 52 :( I am seeing a ranking drop as well.

[Wilburforce]

I am seeing a dramatic drop in links reported in WMT too.

I also note a drop in links, but not in sites (e.g. one site that was showing 60+ links is now showing 23, but all except the disavowed site are still there). Not counting the disavowed links (192 from one site, all to my Home page, all with the same anchor-text, so quite possibly a linking issue for Penguin) the overall drop is around 30%.

I think in my case it is an improvement: a lot of the sites showing mulitple links are not spidered by Google at all frequently (the one I disavowed was reporting 90 days since last crawl), and I think a lot of the links showing in WMT are either dynamic pages or get removed/renamed much more often than Google's crawl rate. Most of these are also worth little, if anything, in terms of SEO/PR (they are at best PR1), so losing them is of no real concern to me.

[Wilburforce]

Further to the above, I notice today that Key Term is no longer listed under Anchor Text in WMT, and that my two strongest backlinks (PR5 and PR4 respectively) are no longer listed either. Both links are still live.

That might explain why my Home and Key Term pages are now on p46 for Key Term, but it doesn't explain what is going on.

"This ain't rock & roll. This is genocide."

[Jez123]

p46 for Key Term

I'm on page 42 myself. Few hundred more authority links and you might be able to experience the heady heights of page 42 yourself. I really feel like I am getting somehere now. Sticky me if you want to know the secret of my success :-) Honestly, you won't believe the difference when you get there.

[Jez123]

Bing and yahoo are showing in my logs more as well. I don't know if it's just more prominent as google is showing less as google now hates my site but Bing results are looking a bit better than they were. I wonder if they have changed something? I know they like to copy google so I might suggest they go back in time and copy google's results from about 2006 and start from there.

[Wilburforce]

Bing and yahoo are showing in my logs more as well.

Yes, the increase is holding up here. There must be some people who just give up trying to find anything on Google: I have been doing some research on my competitors (actual physical businesses in my locality), and Google is just returning garbage results: businesses in other sectors, businesses based miles away with cloned pages for /mytown.html, /yourtown.html /everyonestown.html, everything except the actual businesses I am looking for.

[backdraft7]

So am I the only one to see an unusually slow day today? Slow like "no
user interaction whatsoever". Yesterday was good, today the switch was noticeably shut off again. With the snow storm on the east coast, you might think everyone would be home surfing the web, unless power is out. Anyone?