Google Updates and SERP Changes - Jun 2013

[epmaniac]

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

[edited by: tedster at 3:52 am (utc) on Jun 2, 2013]

[SerpsGuy]

MikeHalo - If your website is wordpress based, do you use a responsive theme? Is it based on "bones" framework?

[MikeHalo]

My website is not WordPress or any other pre made script. It's completely custom. I spent 6 months making it in my spare time and it totals well beyond the size of WordPress in terms of code base. Another reason why it's so unfortunate. It's had a couple of rip-off's but they don't even really rank. One was even a scraper, but I blocked it many months ago so it doesn't appear to be the causer of any issues.

I'd love for some SEO style blog or agency to do a case study on my site like you suggested. But in all honesty, I'd love to just know why the site is penalized.

[Diabolik]

I'd love for some SEO style blog or agency to do a case study on my site like you suggested. But in all honesty, I'd love to just know why the site is penalized.

There's 1000's of Webmasters in the same boat, since Panda 1. We all would like some answers but we're not getting them. Why? Because unfortunately for us, Google don't give a damn.

[JesterMagic]

It really would be nice if Google did give some general feedback in GWT when your site experiences a ranking drop due to technical issues, bad links, or a content quality downgrade.

It would prevent webmasters who care from chasing every little thing they think may be causing the problem instead of actually concentrating on creating good content.

If your rankings drop and you don't receive a message then you can just assume that other sites are ranking better because of better content and quality back links.

Of course this would give the spammers a heads up but if done right (and IF Google can determine sites that scrape content ) it would force the spammers to produce quality content to rank.

[turbocharged]

It really would be nice if Google did give some general feedback in GWT when your site experiences a ranking drop due to technical issues, bad links, or a content quality downgrade.

This would never fly. It would give black hats some ability to reverse engineer the algorithm to fine tune their ranking efforts.

it would force the spammers to produce quality content to rank.

First we must request that Google respects an original authors work and rights. At the present time it does not matter who authored the "quality content" as preference is given to where it appears at and the quality signals it has. If stolen content is on a blogspot, wordpress, tumblr, etc. domain, it may very well rank above the original author. It's not like Google does not have the information to detect this, but they allocate very little (if any) computing power to it. An example would be an entire page copied word for word two years after its first post on the original author's own website. The length of time indexed should be enough to let Google know which version to rank - but it's not. One of the DMCA notices we sent out this week was for this specific problem, where a two year old page was copied, posted on blogspot and ranking above the original authors website. The copied version was heavily linked to from a Google Plus account, which also appeared to be auto-generated. The client has a completely natural backlink profile, and most natural backlink profiles for small specialized businesses tend to be weak. This makes them easy targets.

[JesterMagic]

This would never fly. It would give black hats some ability to reverse engineer the algorithm to fine tune their ranking efforts.

I know what you are saying but in reality black hatters already do this to a certain degree and if they get caught they just throw away the domain.

If Google helped white hatters out with this type of information it would also help push the black hatters content down in the results over time since the pages would be ranked more on content than on some technical reason.

This is part of the reason why blogger and wordpress sites rank well and why black hatters use them. They don't have to worry about technical issues, UI, etc.. because it is all built in.

[chalkywhite]

Is something rolling out? this is the worst sunday in a year. 45 % down on the same time last week.

[reseller]

@chalkywhite

Have your site been affected by a previous Panda update?

[chalkywhite]

@Reseller, twice = oct 2011 and may 9th this year. Looks like yet another hit. If so its gameover, I cannot be bothered anymore with this. Hello real life. Thanks google.

Actually I need a rant. 4 years of nothing but unique engaging content like google ask for and all they do is give a random few months worth of good traffic then as weeks go by they take more and more away until its not worth it and your left with 300, yes 300 on a sunday from highs of a 2k 8 weeks ago on a sunday and 4k on a weekday.

I now believe they algo is out of control, nobody knows why it does what it does but their bottom line looks ok so it must be working. Googlebot will be banned from the site tomorrow. They do not deserve my content, the sooner more do the same the quicker they will see what they are doing.

Sorry all for the rant.

[edited by: chalkywhite at 7:18 pm (utc) on Jun 16, 2013]

[reseller]

@chalkywhite

Of course it could be a Panda update underway which might continue for around 10 days. Its too early to issue a final judgement.

[taberstruths]

@Chalkywhite. It is Father's day. Family outings and such

[chalkywhite]

Anyone else noticed a dip?

[Martin Ice Web]

@chalkywhite, confirmed. Worst Sunday every and it continues today.
We have been hit on 9. April update gained traffic with penguin 2. Git a huge hit on 05.juni update. From this day it goes down every day a little bit more. Thursday was a big up, but it seems there was a filter not applied.
Now we are down to 60% from prepanda.
Although we are located in Germany we get traffic from Italy, Austria, Swiss.

I noticed two things since the 5. Juni update:

1. Domain crowding is back, unfortunatelly we have 3-6 URLs listed in serps. Every time this Shows up, our refferals and Quality traffic goes down. I think that it has something to do with Impression throtteling. One query takes away 6 Points from Impression-account, so there is not left much for other queries.

2. since this update, refferal spam from russia is gradually growing. I think its related to a certain dataset. I canīt exlain why but there is surely a correlation.

3. all of our canonical sites that worked very good are now 30+. We have been replaced by Domains that do NOT USE canonical tag but have a summary page and widget deatil pages online.

All webmasterguidlines seems to be set to off. If u follow the guidelines your site will get down. Make a non guidelines-conform site and your are on the sunny side.

[Savanadry]

[twitter.com...]

Something to have a giggle at, well, we have to laugh or we'd cry. It's a tweet about 'payday loans from Mr Cutts' being no.5 on google UK.

[SnowMan68]

@chalkywhite

Fathers day in the US could definitely be playing a factor in the drop. Might want to compare to Fathers day last year and see what the drop looked like. I know we saw a pretty steep drop for Fathers and Mothers day.

[Sand]

Saw nice gains yesterday (surprising, given Father's Day) and it's carrying into today so far. Informational site, US.

[reseller]

Saw nice gains yesterday (surprising, given Father's Day)

I.e Father's Days aren't as bad to business as some of you might think. Maybe we need more Father's Days ;-)

[Sand]

It definitely isn't as bad as Mother's Day, typically. But it still bucks a trend (previous years were down week over week on Father's Day).

[scottsonline]

Part of the problem is that the spam team IMO is largely comprised of people that have never owned businesses. They have no understanding of how devastating their little 1% changes are to many honest businesses. Saying that we shouldn't rely on google is like saying people before us shouldn't have relied on Bell to make the phones work or to deliver the yellow pages.

We are watching the unmitigated biggest spammer in our segment dominate on every term. All with blog back links stuffed at the bottom of a paragraph or in sidebars, advertorials, directory and paid links from the directories. There are countless dead pages ranking in the top 3. Test sites, sites with banners that read "under development" or product searches to amazon pages that say its not longer carried ranking first.

The spike today in ad spend is incredible but it is also terrible non converting traffic.

I cannot believe for a second that the display layout changes are designed to increase the quality of results. Placing barely relevant ads above everything else isn't increasing the user experience its increasing googles revenue. Bottom line it's that simple.

[johnhh]

I must say ( after being online since 1997, and BB's before that ) that this has been the, well, most 'interesting' day since April 12 2011 when Panda 1 hit us here. I thank you all for your comments and attempts to get the Google god to communicate, not just in this thread but others.

I feel the SERPS are terrible, easily spammed and open to extreme black hat's as well as templated rubbish.

Me, I'm off to Bing, it may not have all the web indexed , but it has a more 'open' outlook.

Also we always on Page 1 :)

One final thing - we get short tail quries from Bing, long tail from Google. Panda and Penquin has failed ! Google should be asking white hat webmasters to join them, not work against them.
_{now where is that bottle of whisky}

[mhansen]

I probably heard this somewhere else in the past... but my feeling right now is that after a major update like this, the entire serp eco-system needs to regenerate over several weeks. Spam will rise to the top until it's re-evaluated by the latest algo recipe, and forced back down in the results due to poor [insert whatever metric here].

We were effected on June 9th with roughly 40% drop in Google referrals. We have lost no rankings in our highest volume referral phrases, however the longtail and obscure phrases are simply no longer delivering traffic, as if people stopped searching for them.

[Kelowna]

The only ones that get hurt in these so called "updates" are the ones that try to play by the rules. Google targets spam but misses every time. See this for a laugh... [seroundtable.com...]

Build your good sites for bing and spam google.. or of course just keep complaining while your business fails.

The example above was just thrown together in minutes with about $10 worth of links and spun content, and I love the title "Payday Loans from Mr Cutts" Content is king my a$$. This was just done as a joke thrown right in the face of google, and ranking top 5 for "payday loans" in just a couple days. White hat is dead, spam is sooooo easy with the new google.

[Pudders]

Since Sunday we have been dropping a little each day. I seem to be chasing the updates every time and it's getting frustrating! They roll out an update, drops happen, we spend a few weeks crawling back up by tweaking..... then, another update and another drop!

I wouldn't mind if the updates they roll out actually do what they set out to do! Like most in here.. I play by the rules and have a well aged site/blog and fresh pages.

When the EDM update was rolled out, it did nothing to one company that had heavy overcrowding and a spammy site and blog!

Don't even get me started on sites that do next to nothing and still appear on page one!

Just feel a need to vent my frustration.. don't get me wrong, I love it when we creep back up but it seems there are more drops than increases....

[robert76]

They have no understanding of how devastating their little 1% changes are to many honest businesses. Saying that we shouldn't rely on google is like saying people before us shouldn't have relied on Bell to make the phones work or to deliver the yellow pages.

+1

[Jez123]

I am definitely seeing more referrals from Yahoo / Bing. I doubt it's anything to do with the actual results more perhaps something to do with the tax avoidance scandal (in the UK at least). But having said that, today is deathly quiet on all fronts today.

[tigger]

But having said that, today is deathly quiet on all fronts today.

I'm seeing the same VERY slow traffic day, had to check my rankings a few times just make sure I was still ranking

As for Bing and UK traffic - we can hope ...G just needs more bad press about not paying tax

[mike2010]

I think Matt Cutts does care, but keep in mind they are trying to scale solutions for a very large index. They talked about having specific algo filters based on niches at SMX, but its not a reality yet. Imagine how ineffective that would be for anything else in life, for example if a person has 100 people hate him his voice is effectively silenced because he is not valuable.

Coming from a webmaster who is now google's collateral damage, I don't believe google is able to combat spam effectively, and they don't value webmasters because why would they? If they destroy one webmasters business, another one take his place. It's a benefit afforded to them by us as webmasters, and our wilingness to jump through their hoops. They are number one, and they take full advantage of that.

Anyhow, Before I check out- here's what I see in my niche;

*** Several websites on page one with 1 to 50 unique domains linking in, and that have between 9 to 30 pages of content are holding top ranking positons. The content is not bad on all of these websites, however several of them host what I call "fill in the blank" content. Choose a product and fill in the blanks, and poof you have a long article that kinda makes sense. Google seems to love this.

*** The first page was previously dominated by small independent websites, and is now filled with merchants for "branded terms", and where there are not enough merchants to fill page one, Amazon, eBay, Press Releases, and Forum threads (however minimally related) fill the page.

*** For several terms, a couple of tech domains with powerful backlink profiles rank in the top two. They expired, and were rebranded into the "blog review" style site that sells you a review and link for a few bucks. The review pages rank, very well. This content is trash.

*** Blogspot, Wordpress, Google Sites, and Tumblr all are ranking extremely well. Typically I would call spam, but after looking at the sites I think some of them have decent content. It's not top notch stuff, but its not spam either.

*** Keyword domains (not EMD) are ranking very well, all with less than 10 unique domains linking in according to MSEO.

*** In some cases, and more so today, I see older domains and pages that are clearly no longer maintained or managed, ranking well. Older sites from 2010 - possibly just being released from panda jail for breaking rules a lifetime ago. These domains have varying link profiles, nothing I can summarize here.

---

My website has 145 pages, and previously had 57 unique domains linking in when I was ranked page 1 position 1 to 5 for every term. Now that I have over 147k links of spam from being attacked, I am ranked on page 7 and 8 maximum.

My site has a forum that was growing, and is an affiliate income website. I review 5 products, and 70% of my traffic was to non-income producing pages. (tutorials, how to pages, and some link bait stuff that people just loved to read and commend on)

The only differences I see between my website and these newly ranking sites, are;

1- They do not control their internal anchor text. If its a wordpress blog, links are post titles, nothing is shortened. If its a different platform, the links are unique on every page, typed out by the admin.

2- Very few links (this used to be the case for me as well, but spam attack gave me hundreds of thousands of links).

3- No comments allowed on top ranking sites. I allow comments for support, and answered about 5-10 a day, making the post word count huge. Maybe a bad thing?

4- Merchants and Larger websites with established forums are ranking better. This I think is fair most of the time. (not including blogspot and wordpress scrapers, and doorway tumblr pages). I am a medium to small website, so maybe this is an indication I should grow larger? However this is not consistent, several smaller sites also outrank some larger with a keyword domain.

Thats my take. I think at this point I am ready to give up. If google cant appreciate the content I provide, then they can have the spammers.

another fine post, sir.

wish others would post similarly.

[SerpsGuy]

To those of you experiencing slow drops in rank recently, I can assure you they are temporary. I keep a close eye on all my competition, their backlinks, what ranks they hold daily, etc...

Because of this I noticed one of my competitors (if you can call him that after I dropped out of the results on the 5th) rebranded, new domain name and logo etc... He 301'ed his old links and site ofcourse, and it took about two days. For the last two days I see him ranking with his old domain - showing there has been a rollback to a couple weeks in the past.

I am confident about this, but would like you guys who had a traffic drop confirm- was your rank recently increased after a recent drop? If it is, and if you keep rank records, check your historical rank. My data shows the rankings are from June 10th.

[SerpsGuy]

As a side note- I notice right now this forum is very silent. I experienced a drop in rank on the 5th, and have yet to recover. This leads me to believe that a lot of the mid grade content I see ranking may belong to some of the members here, since nobody is talking rank drops.

I hope I am wrong though, I read and listen to the people here. Oh how disappointing if I regain rank, the trash settles to the bottom and this forum flares up with talk of rank drops. Please be hard working, value offering web-masters guys :)

[Simsi]

They have no understanding of how devastating their little 1% changes are to many honest businesses.

+1

Those businesses shouldn't be blaming Google though. They should be blaming whoever signed off their business plan.