Google Updates and SERP Changes - March 2013

[gyppo]

< continued from [webmasterworld.com...]

I'm seeing daily switching between 2-3 datasets across around 600 keywords. Seeing roughly 10-20 keywords swapping in & out of positions.

[edited by: tedster at 2:47 pm (utc) on Mar 1, 2013]

[colonelu81]

2 e-commerce sites , Romania
One is ok , one got hammered on 6 march around 11AM with all its subdomanins ( ~ 80% loss on 6.03 and the following days )
Both sites are on shared hosting , same IP , no linking between them . Both of them with unique content . No link-building lately
What i see now on google :
-autogenerated , spammy pages , empty pages , pages with a lot of keywords
-facebook product pages which are empty ( no text on them)
-scribd pages with files related to the querie but with the uploaded files deleted due to copyright infringements
-pages from blogs some related some vaguely related with the querie
- e-commerce sites with scraped content , duplicate or thin content . Some of them don't even have backlinks
- one or more price comparison sites , some of them with 2-5 pages on first 10 google results
-some EMD sites ranking very well
Still no recovery

[SEchecker]

That’s the first time our main site doesn’t seem to be affected from pre-panda movements, like you guys report. I hope that’s a good sign as all is stable here by us!

[gford]

So bit confused. Are you guys saying those who say lost SERPs on March 6th, but back March 13th will feel the pain of Panda this Friday or whenever it rolls out?

[Sand]

Nobody knows, gford. But it's possible, yes -- from what I've seen here, that does happen sometimes before a Panda update.

But at the same time, I've seen a smallish (10%) drop in traffic for a week or so before making gains through a Panda update. There's just a lot of overall fluctuation while they're testing (I assume that's what happening, anyway).

[SEONoob]

Hi,

I also noticed (lately) a 90% drop of my "Impressions" in GWT that happened between March 5 and March 6 : I was at 60k and dropped to 5k only!

I'm crying all my tears right now (almost not kidding).

I did everything by the book, only White Hat SEO (I mean by that that I strictly followed Google's rules), and my competitors have absolutely NOT been harmed.

Why is that happening? I'm working hard to provide a quality website, and from one day to another, I completely vanished from Google search results for a few keywords, and for the others I moved back from 1 to several pages.

Is there a way to contact Google and ask them? I doubt it, but what else can I do? I don't want to modify my HTML with no reason :(

Thanks a lot for any answer, and best regards,

[SEONoob]

I don't understand how they work their algorithm, because I can still see one of my competitors in page 1 although it's website has DEFINITELY closed! Is this normal behavior?

Also, I can see another of my competitors with up to 30 SERP links in a row, completely hiding any other website behind him. Is this also normal behavior?

I'm desperate right now, really :(

[gford]

@Sand - We shall see when Panda rolls out. :D

[epmaniac]

@SeoNoob

Exactly same situation as mine... I invented a niche, and now my site has vanished and the scrapper who scrapped my website's page title's and made a site of thousands of empty pages is getting all orders,

It feels so stupid

[SEONoob]

It really is. I don't understand how Google works, but definitely their algorithm is particularly flawed.

[HuskyPup]

made a site of thousands of empty pages is getting all orders,

Orders for what, blank pages?

Whilst I sympathise that you have been scraped (Note one "p" only), are you saying that your site is, say 100 pages, and the scraper has scraped those and simply added another 1,000 blank pages?

What would be the point of that?

[epmaniac]

he is ranking for those widgets, i operate in a micro niche

while i am no where to be found, plus he has got a similar name as mine, so many a customers have mistakenly paid him... its pathetic,...

how come my site has vanished

[SevenCubed]

I did everything by the book, only White Hat SEO (I mean by that that I strictly followed Google's rules)

Blackhatters are thriving locally here. It's tempting.

But I would prefer to apply a more politically correct term to it -- personalized results for googlebot. If google can server completely different results to different users, based on personalization, why would it be wrong to for us to personalize results for googlebot versus other crawlers?

Yay or nay?

[epmaniac]

Yes, cloaking content for google seems to be working, as that scrapper site is showing my scrapped content to google only (i know it coz I see my content in serp description, but when i open the page and even view source my content is not there, i see only empty pages, hence my DMCAs get rejected)

[SEONoob]

I'm sorry but I don't serve personalized results for googlebot. The only thing I do is to base on the visitor country to show content specific to country, and on the device used to show content adapted to mobile (the HTML don't change much, but sometimes I hide a not-so-useful div in order to gain space).
My only sin is to do only half a dozen of banner exchange on my homepage. All my competitors do the same, far worse even, and they are still first page. I honestly/humbly don't think this is related to the 90% search engine drop I was inflicted on March 6th.

[epmaniac]

I dont have a single outbound link on my website, still i went down on 6th, so its not related to banners or outbound links

[SevenCubed]

I know what you are saying SEONoob. I wasn't being critical of you. I am agreeing and there are many others who would also agree.

I have a personal non-commercial project that will roll out (sooner or later) that I was going to totally ban google from. However now I'm thinking maybe I might allow them but serve googlebot what I want so I can maintain full control. If the site gets banned no skin off my nose because I was going to ban them anyway.

That's well and fine for something that is for my own interest but I just wouldn't do it with an unsuspecting client's site.

[menntarra 34]

I'm still up 10% from google traffic, i don't know what happened... Heard about the Panda which might come on Friday OR Monday, maybe the roll-out already started?


informational site, USA

[gehrlekrona]

You who knows me know I haven't been here in months. From what I see here and on other boards nothing has changed. I remember that I suspected that what we had back then, it'll be the same i9n the future and in my case that was what happened. There are days when I gain 25% or so but then it goes down to the allotted level.
Did anybody "recover" from any of the Pandas or Penguines?

[menntarra 34]

@gehrlekrona:

This site of mine is HUGE... and cause of this 10% is HUGE. I have never experienced such gain/loss without an update. Later i could always pinpoint the cause of these traffic movements. So that's why i'm quite sure this is "something".
I have small sites where i gain/loose 25-30% from day to day(without an update), but those are not important, cause they're small, and they does not indicate anything.

About recovery: i would be interested as well, if anyone (at least 20.000 unique visitor sites) here can surely tell us about a full recovery experience.

informational site, USA

[garyr_h]

Got to love it when two sites make up the majority of the top 3 pages.

[Sand]

I did everything by the book, only White Hat SEO (I mean by that that I strictly followed Google's rules)

I don't mean to be a jerk, but so what?

Following the rules is something that helps you when you have a great site. You can't just throw something out there, follow the rules, and expect to get anything out of it. Not with how competitive most niches are these days.

If you were my client, I would ask you what makes your site so good that it deserves to rank above all the others out there. Forget about the rules, or who is getting away with what. If you showed 1,000 people who didn't know any better the top 20 sites in your niche, would 750 of them say that yours is the best?

And even if they do say yes, are you marketing it like a mad man?

[netmeg]

while i am no where to be found, plus he has got a similar name as mine, so many a customers have mistakenly paid him... its pathetic,...

Every time you post the story changes a bit. First this *one site* was scraping your meta descriptions. Then your titles, on blank pages. Now you say they're taking your orders - how do you know? If they're not selling your products, and unless you have access to their back end, why would people be ordering from blank pages? I'm sorry, but the dots aren't connecting.

[ScubaAddict]

About recovery: i would be interested as well, if anyone (at least 20.000 unique visitor sites) here can surely tell us about a full recovery experience.

I'll have a story on Friday, Monday at the latest.

[gracealex]

Well it is confirm that Panda is coming back between 15th March to 18th March 2013.

[netmeg]

Stop censoring?

WebmasterWorld terms of service prohibits posting specifics with URLs, specific niches, or other site details (except in the supporters forums) in order to keep people from spamming the forums. Your post had a lot of URLs in it, even if they weren't all linkable. (Also, it was adult in nature, and you didn't mention that)

That said - I did take a look before the post was removed, and if your site was the one that required the click in order to verify that the user was an adult, and otherwise redirected to Google.fr - well that well could be a large part of your issue right there. Googlebot isn't going to click on that to spider the rest of your content. And if you're hiding it from Google, then that's another problem altogether.

[themaninthejar]

WMT Search Queries is showing dozens of first page rankings for my site which simply don't tally with the real serps for those search terms. This has persisted for a couple of weeks now. If these average rankings come true after this update then it will represent a full recovery after approximately one year in the wilderness.
(UK commercial but not e-commerce)

[SEONoob3]

@netmeg

The links were not clickable, or if they were, I did not do it on purpose, sorry.

Yes, it is adult content, and it is already hard enough to work with that kind of sites, not for being censored also in webmaster forums :( No adwords, no linking, no SEO expert (at least none that I know), ...

It worked like a charm until the 6th March. Because my content is under the popup, then it is indexable by google, and in the HTML, the popup is at the bottom of the document, thus it should not be of great importance to google, right?

All the websites work like that (for example check SNIPPED which is a great competitor of mine because it has a great visibility). What should I do?

[edited by: engine at 11:41 am (utc) on Mar 14, 2013]
[edit reason] please read the WebmasterWorld TOS [/edit]

[Wilburforce]

WMT Search Queries is showing dozens of first page rankings for my site which simply don't tally with the real serps for those search terms.

That has been the case with my site for a very long time: my site returns a high number of first-page results, and the number of falsely reported page 1 results in WMT is proportionately very small (probably in the order of 1 or 2% at most).

I do check surprising page 1 results in WMT, and it looks to me like the reported result probably is or has been correct for at least a couple of days: sometimes the result is still there when I check, but gone the following day. However, WMT data are historical, so what you see today reflects some past state of the SERPS, not necessarily their present state.

What you see in WMT today probably doesn't indicate much the future state of the SERPS either (I don't think it should give you any grounds for optimism about what the next update will do).

[netmeg]

All the websites work like that (for example check <removed> which is a great competitor of mine because it has a great visibility). What should I do?

One thing you could do is read the terms and conditions. No specifics, whether it's clickable or not. There you did it again.

[HuskyPup]

Is anyone else seeing green ticks to the left of all the regular SERPs results?