Google Updates and SERP Changes - April 2013

[sunny_kat]

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

I am seeing a lot of ranking drop. Lot of keywords ranking between 10-50 have disappeared from Google top 100.

Is anyone else also noticing changes?

[edited by: tedster at 11:54 am (utc) on Apr 1, 2013]

[vic_mackey]

@backdraft. I don't know your model or your vertical(s), but you may want to consider cloning and 301'ing your old site. I've brought back many a site this way. No guarantees of course on it working or how long the recovery will last if it happens, but it sounds like you have nothing to lose.

[DumpManager]

This is so weird. It's been nearly 3 days, and instead of th 10,000+ visitors I would usually have in that time from google, I have 14.

I put hundreds and hundreds of hours into it.. so mad.

I also at this time did some searching around and while looking for MY site, i found about a dozen or so other spammy scraper sites, stealing text meta info and all that from my index pages, and mixing it with random gibberish. No ads or anything on their pages, thy are not trying to make money with it.. No, they are actually ONLY trying to ruin my website.

I contact the host, they say show me a DMCA request.. I am only 5 months old in the biz, completely self taught, one man business, multiple Unique sites. Fantastic success, and then rather release something better than what I do, they try to increase their sites by ruining mine.

I have no business training whatsoever.. no computer training except what I taught myself. Very talented, and extremely resourceful.

My sites have been making enough money that I can get by without having to look for a new job right? All the jobs where I live I cannot get because I don't speak minority languages etc, and if I do make a lot of money on my sites I was planning on either helping, or OPENING a new food bank.


What can I do to restore my websites previous ranks etc, and what can I do to get rid of the spamming theives who are only tryig to ruin me?\

BTW, Unlike most of my competition, I run a user friendly site, minimal ads, NO popups or unders, NO malicious code, NO Spam, quality stuff and it IS what people like. I assume this is why I am being unfairly targetted.. Because I am totally legit and safe. What a huge annoyance.

I am going to launch a new site very soon, and it is going to blow everyone's mind. Nothing has been done like it before, and it will be HUGE. I don't want to run into the same problems as right now..

How can I get rid of these spam scraper sites? They only exist to ruin competition.

In ruining the search results, they open google up more to having people go to fake sites, get a virus (as the enemies clone site of mine was intended). My site helps the economy, both my personal, and countries. My site has helped over 10 people get EXCELLENT paying jobs and they are very successful now.. In google sending people to fake sites, they are damaging their own rep. Not to mention putting users and children in danger.

I don't have the knowhow to do this DMCA stuff, nor the patience. Can I contact google and will they help me by removing the SERPs for the offending and copyright infringing website?

[netmeg]

You would need to go through their DMCA process.

[support.google.com...]

Unfortunately, their support doesn't really scale down to the individual sites.

[diberry]

DumpManager, I'm really sorry to hear that, but netmeg is right - that DCMA form is very quick to fill out, and you can put multiple violations on one form to save even more time. And those pages will disappear from Google within a week or so. I recommend going through a WMT account if you have one - they will email you back when they remove those pages from the index.

I have a couple of pages that keep getting scraped, and that form has made my life much easier. (To those who grumble that we shouldn't have to do this because Google should just detect the original, I hear ya, but for those of us who just want to know what we can do to keep our businesses going, this is it.)

[Dymero]

DumpManager: 10,000 to 14 in three days? I think it's something more than just a few odd scrapers causing your issues. I'd honestly be looking at server issues first, followed by perhaps something on the site causing a manual penalty.

Is the site showing up in Google at all?

[tangster]

For all the people losing rankings from updates nowadays there is one major factor and that is scraper.

Just take half a sentence from your page put it within quotes and search in Google. You will be surprised by what what you find.

Scrapers are now not only copying the first para but also sentences from the middle of the article.

You will rank well for sometime and then end up on the fourth or fifth page after the update just because scrapers copied your content.

If you post original quality content and scrapers steal your content, that's it for you.

How will you send DMCA for one sentence stolen? They steal very little content to escape DMCA. They take one sentence from each site. How are you going to fight them?

Fat pings, delaying RSS, blocking bots don't work.

I would like a comment from all the Google folks surfing this forum on this issue. When is this madness going to end?

[DumpManager]

Tangster is right. I have found so many sites trying to devalue my sites by mixing text with from my site with gibberish.

There are also those "SEO" sites that for whatever reason build an automatic profile with your page and have every single bit of text and meta data copied. I can only assume this is to derank your site. Why is this BS allowed? It is pure copyright infringement plain and simple.

[tangster]

Before scrapers used to outrank you. Now they just take you down with them but will not outrank you. I have seen this on many many many sites.

Its astonishing how even a little copied text will hurt your ranking. I have seen facebook posting hurting rankings too. The text that you add to you FB posts will hurt you in this update.

The only people to escape this are the big boys with huge link buying power. That is why you will see a handful of sites repeating on the first page for all keywords you search for in a niche.

All medium and small guys are being systematically erased from the serps.

[moxie]

By looking at the serps Google is making very poor quality judgments in A LOT of cases.

Tell me about it; our main money term (think "shop widgets") is now displaying YouTube pages in positions 2, 3 and 4, knocking us below the fold. Really Google? Really? How exactly is this helping our users? Please, do tell, because the last time I checked, you can't buy this stuff on YouTube!

[gouri]

If you do a search in quotes for text that is being scraped from a page on your site and the page from your site comes up first or is among the top results, does that mean that phrases which that page ranks for are not being affected by having the page's content scraped?

[Ersebet]

By looking at the serps Google is making very poor quality judgments in A LOT of cases.

our main money term (think "shop widgets") is now displaying YouTube pages in positions 2, 3 and 4, knocking us below the fold. Really Google? Really? How exactly is this helping our users?

Maybe Google ask user to click on ad more when result not that good. When semester earnings come, we see if increased for google.

[DumpManager]

I have a bit of info.

Having checked webmaster tools, it is now showing stats on the 6th of April, when I lost the listing.

Everything shows fine, except for 1 thing. Pages crawled went from 365 to 14. HUGE drop, like a rollercoaster going over a hill.. that sort of thing.

Is this the problem we are all having? check your webmaster tools and crawl stats and see if they dropped like mad on the 6th (which now shows for me).

[Wilburforce]

check your webmaster tools and crawl stats and see if they dropped like mad on the 6th

Not in my case.

The "local results" issue is back with a vengeance. I wouldn't want it even if I actually lived anywhere near my ISP's server. If I want results based on location, I search for Search Term Location, and no longer use Google to do it.

[mcneely]

@Automotive site ..

I do this too .. write for the user.

I remember once when the guys over at Adwords were telling me to write this and to write that (for the sake of the ads), and it all turned out looking stupid on the page. Sometimes I think that Google via Adwords sort of propagates the cramming in of words onto a page .. of course, who cares about listings anyway when you do big on the Adwords right?

[rajeshth02]

Anyone know about the Google panda 25 update?

Whats the result I am getting on Google India are very surprising, The sites having error page, without content are ranking higher then the sites have good content.

[backdraft7]

I noticed the other day in WMT that I now have "structured data" statistics...strange, since I never set up structured data and that page always displayed "No Data Available". The data stretches back to the first of the year, started out in the 2400 range, then took a dip, but has now slowly increased and now is almost back to the starting level.

My "fear" is that Google set this up automatically, which means it's probably not representative of my actual site. From the little I understand about SD, it's used for events type sites (netmeg, are you familiar with this?) and mine is not really an event based site.

I better go watch that scary data highlighter video again.

UPDATE - looks like this is coming from my blog only...I suspect an seo plugin may been the culprit.

[tangster]

@gouri You are affected too. Its only more severe.

[netmeg]

I get scraped to heck and back - and by newspaper and TV station sites, some of which are pretty authoritative, and so far anyway, they don't manage to sink me or outrank me (I don't do DMCA, I make huge shaming stinks about it on Twitter and/or Facebook or other places) So while scraping is a huge issue, I don't think it's *only* scraping that can knock you out, I think it must tip some balance.

backdraft7: Sure I'm familiar with structured data - that's basically your microdata/microformats. I actually use it on all my sites; events, or recipes, or ecommerce (there are different types of formats depending on what kind of site you're talking about) and while I wouldn't be prepared to say it helps with ranking, I do like the way it formats snippets and so on, which might encourage clickthroughs. It's possible that an SEO plugin is using it on your blog, I think a couple of those plugins have it built in. It's not evil and it shouldn't hurt your sites, although a default setting from the plugin probably won't help a lot. We needed to do some tweaking to get it right.

[schema.org...] for more information.

[gouri]

@gouri You are affected too. Its only more severe.

I am trying to determine if I have been affected by this.

I have content on a page on a site that I am working on that has been copied by other sites (It is a lot of the content from that page on my site). They do link back to the page on my site, but I am trying to determine if the fact that the content is appearing on other sites is affecting my rankings.

On one of the sites that my content is appearing on, the page on that site that my content appears on is tagged with keyword phrases, so my content is actually appearing on more than one page on that site. It is appearing on more than 15 pages. Could this be affecting me?

[stevenmark]

Day before yesterday one of my site keywords rankings are gone in 2 and 3rd page, today again i check those keywords, it's back to 1st page show in 10# position

[JesterMagic]

@backdraft7 - as netmeg says structural data is your microdata/microformats. I would think the page should only include what you specify in a standard format but I know Google does try to help out with things like breadcrumbs. Our forum doesn't use a standard format for it's breadcrumb but Google has been able to figure out it is a breadcrumb and now displays it in the SERPS

[tangster]

@gouri From my experience yes.

@netmeg High authority sites with lot of backlinks are immune to this.

Another beautiful outcome of this update is that the some sites will rank when the keyword is repeated around 5 to 15 times in an 300 - 350 words article. But if you try to do the same your page wont rank at all.

[TheOptimizationIdiot]

@backdraft7 - as netmeg says structural data is your microdata/microformats.

Usually. They're also getting to where they can detect things in a standard format through tables and lists without microdata being present. Of course, the degree of accuracy as to what they think they're detecting may vary, so I think it's better to code it personally.

[backdraft7]

It must be absolute evil magic in play that is keeping my visitors capped at no more than 4 at any one time. It's amazing. Not even PPC can give me a boost.
One of my most obscure, unrelated pages keeps getting spotlighted for about 15 mins, then back to the index page, then back to the obscure page. Data sets appear to be cycling like crazy. Then suddenly BOOM 2 sales in two minutes, then off again for hours. FM!

Comparing this to last years nice, regular, all day, sale every 30 minute natural pattern is enough to make a grown man cry.

[TheOptimizationIdiot]

Data sets appear to be cycling like crazy.

^^^ This or datacenters are not aligned. I can't decide which it is (sort of leaning to datacenters not being aligned right now but I've change my mind about 10 times on which it is). Either way, I've been seeing crazy cycling in things too.

[Convergence]

This or datacenters are not aligned. I can't decide which it is (sort of leaning to datacenters not being aligned right now but I've change my mind about 10 times on which it is). Either way, I've been seeing crazy cycling in things too.

Noticed that the last few days, traffic has dropped (a lot) and the Googlebot has been pretty much absent.

Today, however, the Googlebot is on a feeding frenzy - 1000+ pages being crawled per niche/category on our main site. This rate It should have the entire site recrawled in a couple hundred hours, lol.

Downside - still virtually no traffic to speak of since Friday night 11:04PM EST...

[backdraft7]

This is really amazing how many of us are seeing these similar messed up patterns. They've had 15 years to get it right and yet it seem like year 1. 'cept in year 1 everything converted.

[edited by: backdraft7 at 6:57 pm (utc) on Apr 9, 2013]

[JesterMagic]

@netmeg - How do you file a DMC report against a site that has scraped a couple hundred pages of your content? The link you provided which I have used before is only really good for 10 or less pages. Plus it really starts to be a huge time commitment to give examples for a lot of pages.

[TheOptimizationIdiot]

I personally wouldn't be totally surprised if the integration of Panda to the front end of the algo has caused some processing power issues that's keeping the datacenters from being aligned. IIRC the reason they only ran it once in a while was due to the size and processing necessary for it.

A bit before and since they stated it's integration I've seen a definite lag in indexing, slower spidering, obvious cycling in results and different site: result counts way more than I saw previously.

[backdraft7]

TOI - yet this process now seems continual...once it settles out for a day, they drop the wrench again and it's back into another update cycle, or so it seems from where I'm standing.