Google Update 17th January 2013 - thoughts?

[kellyman]

Hi Guys

Google had an update on or around the 17th Jan this year, just before the reported Panda 23 update on the 22nd.

any idea what this update was targeting, i have read articles saying it could be a big brand push but im not sure.

My site has survived every update in they last 14 months, with the site reporting an all time traffic count, but the 17th update hit me hard, but cannot find enough solid information as to give me a clue why.

Im UK based and a few people reported this in the UK but not enough noise to think it was a Google main update Unless it was a pre panda being rolled out uk first

Any ideas or thoughts would be great,

[tedster]

the 17th update hit me hard

How much traffic did you lose, as a percent? Also, was it over just one or two "big" keywords or many rankings of various degrees?

[TheMadScientist]

...i have read articles saying it could be a big brand push...

I would guess 'big brand push' from the 'talking heads' = visitor behavior

I don't mean this to be rude (or too rude at least lol) to anyone (or most who read here anyway), but most of the people I know prefer to find 'big brand' website over 'optimized mom & pop' ... So, my guess is what many 'parrots and talking heads' define as 'brand pushing', because they need to stay in business, sound smart and 'explain' why it's Google keeping sites from ranking, not their information, is really visitor behavior, even though Google's visitors indicating 'satisfied by big brand' through behavior is, in my opinion, most likely the real base of the 'mechanism' for 'big brand' rankings.

[gyppo]

My thoughts on this is that Panda was on the 17-18th & the announcement came a few days late. Nothing significant happened on the 21st (if you look at Mozcast).

[onebuyone]

No update here(not English speaking country)

[kellyman]

How much traffic did you lose, as a percent? Also, was it over just one or two "big" keywords or many rankings of various degrees?

I lost about 40% traffic, which seems a bit drastic however over the lead up to the 17th I gained around 40% in the three months prior, it seemed to mostly hit the home page, i did have an inner page i was targeting (High class motor manufacturer), and the keywords i was targeting initially dropped but all recovered a day or so later, which made me think that whatever was rolled out was done In the UK first and then tweaked (just my thoughts) However over the last 2 weeks keywords seem to be losing ground very slowly all over the site, no major big drops but still enough to get concerend about

My thoughts on this is that Panda was on the 17-18th & the announcement came a few days late. Nothing significant happened on the 21st (if you look at Mozcast).

Im hoping its panda as i survived every single update prior but on this occasion i got caught up in something, I did amend my home page visually I added a few Images, I have now removed them and await the next update, if i recover then Google is being really harsh as all these images did was target some after season products which did push some of the text not all the text below the fold.. we will see

[RedCardinal]

I'm watching 2 sites that have seen a decent reduction in Google referrals since around 24 Jan or thereabouts. Both now down 35-40%.

One site was hit by original Penguin, and had shown some very tentative new life since Dec 2012. Back to absolutely crushed now.

Other site has only a handful of clean natural links, no images, no ads and only ~15 pages of non-commercial content. Only thing that we found was a newly added UserEcho forum for feedback which had a site-wide link to this second site which was invisible to users (a problem in UserEcho).

My guess is something Penguin related came out. Trying to find more affected sites to take a look at.

[Sand]

Nothing significant happened on the 21st (if you look at Mozcast).

I've found that Mozcast is generally a really poor indicator of Panda refreshes -- they're often little more than a blip.

With that said, as someone who had a site impacted (positively) by this last refresh, it did start rolling out a few days before they announced it. I started to notice a difference on the Thursday evening before, and the refresh was announced on Monday. I think that it was already completed by the time that Google said it was rolling out (as usual). So matching up dates can be difficult sometimes.

[thudufushi]

Hi Folks, amazed that this thread never had legs beyond Feb 4. We lost major ranking and traffic on exactly the 17th Jan, Google deny an update but something happened at Google this day. Look as webmaster tools search queries.. [docs.google.com...]

[tedster]

@thudufushi, in our SERP changes thread for January [webmasterworld.com], most of our members were noticing positive changes on Jan 17-18. So you're in an interesting position to research what the Jsn 17 update did in a negative direction.

I see that the number of queries that brought traffic to your site went down dramatically. Did the variety of search phrases drop? Or just the volume on each one?

Was there any pattern to the phrases that dropped? For instance, was it shorter phrases that lost traffic? Maybe just one or two important phrases?

Any other patterns you can see?