Google Updates and SERP Changes - Jun 2013

[epmaniac]

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

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

[MikeHalo]

Hopefully, though I am not holding my breath. If it is simply a Google Dance, I don't see why every single popular keyword would suddenly become the last result out of hundreds of others. I can say with 100% certainty that my site has better user experience than at least a few above me, ha! The fact that the pages are the exact last result is very strange. It seems like some kind of penalty, that's for sure. Where did your results move to?

In regards to Halo, I am not an Xbox gamer and I don't play Halo. I played the original but it never really appealed to me. I don't actually know why I put Halo in my name. Perhaps it's because I read an Xbox One article about 30 minutes prior to signing up. Weird, huh. I will say one thing though, the DRM restrictions on the Xbox One seem a little over the top. I hope Sony doesn't follow them down the same path... But I wouldn't doubt it.

[mike2010]

>>Where did your results move to?

I stopped looking after page 5. Previously were #1 or #2 for all our prime keywords for those sites.

I'll be really pis*ed if this is all permanent. It's like Google doesn't even care how long or how much we've worked on our sites...They just turn the switch off, laugh, and look the other way.

And quite frankly , I wish this Matt Cutts character would toughen up his image a bit in his videos. Quite annoying to watch at times.

[MikeHalo]

It was stated that Panda was going to be softened, this felt like a pretty harsh blow. That is of course if it is Panda related. There is bound to be some collateral damage with these updates. I am going to hold off on drawing any conclusions and see if I have screwed up somewhere.

The reality is, it's not going to be a fast path to gain that traffic back. My daily traffic was the result of many months (over a year) of slow increases. So technically, my site is still relatively new. I spent six months coding the project in my spare time, launched, and then the search engines slowly picked it up. The fact that my results are the exact last result for many searches sounds some kind of an alarm. Even if some kind of penalty is lifted or eventually fades away, I am guessing my pages will need to start the climb from last position anyway.

The only thing which may lead me to believe it is Penguin related is that after the recent update a couple of weeks ago, I observed a steady increase of 15-20% visits from Google.

[diberry]

I would say that this is not Penguin. I have done no link building at all. In fact, the website has less than 20-30 or so back links and they are all organic.

Actually, Penguin has hit at least a few sites with clean backlink profiles like yours. If you took a hit on May 22, it's almost definitely Penguin. We don't fully understand Penguin - Google has said we'll never backward engineer it - but a spammy backlink profile is definitely not required for Penguin to affect a site.

[MikeHalo]

Yeah that's true. We didn't take a hit on May 22, quite the opposite actually. We had a 20% increase or so in traffic from that date. There's definitely a chance it's Penguin related. I know there was comments about it targeting specific spam patterns/techniques for example. Not sure if I have triggered that somehow. I don't see how that would be possible but I guess I can't rule anything out. My actual "hit" came on June 5. If it was Penguin, wouldn't the entire domain have been removed, and the results removed, rather than moved to last position? For the domain name/keyword, the site still ranks #1.

There is quite heavy use of Ajax related functions and options, that's another area that could have effected it. But those functions are there to add user experience. For non JavaScript powered browsers the site displays as is (with all functions, just no fancy stuff).

The only thing out of the ordinary is when I added a largish directory that was often crawled to robots.txt -- Perhaps Google didn't like the fact that it was blocked out from a previously crawl-heavy area of the website. But that was about six weeks ago. I figured the directory was not the greatest for searches (though good for our users). I never received any messages or errors via WMT, and Google carried on crawling the site as it did in the past. And continues to do right now... I am tailing a log showing about 2-3 pages/second from Googlebot.

[epmaniac]

i think June 5 update has hit those micro sites which specialize in niches but overlaps topics with big brands... now all the micro niches sites are gone (which really were useful to the users because they were answering the queries, searchers were looking)... instead of the big brands which now dominate.

[epmaniac]

i think June 5 update has hit those micro sites which specialize in niches but overlaps topics with big brands... now all the micro niches sites are gone (which really were useful to the users because they were answering the queries, searchers were looking)... instead of the big brands which now dominate.

[SerpsGuy]

epmaniac - that sounds in line with my situation.

[epmaniac]

what do you after something like 5th june happens? do you wait and hope that your site will be back on google some day? how do you justify thousands of dollars of investment and time gone down in drain in one day?

[reseller]

what do you after something like 5th june happens?

I think the folks in Google Plex are busy modifying Penguin 2.0 because they didn't like its results on 22nd May 2013. So we could expect to see modified Penguin updates as; Penguin 2.0 B, Penguin 2.0 C, Penguin 2.0 D etc..

IMO, we had a modified Penguin 2.0 B update on 5th June 2013.

I.e its too early to issue any conclusion. Better.... lets wait and see :-)

[Evilboy]

I don't know what these Google nerds are up to. My comparison site (gadgets) has been horribly hit after the recent update...down from 700 clicks daily to 35 clicks. I can accept that if the other sites which have taken over my rankings are better than mine. However, that's certainly not the case. All the new results for "XYZ prices" or "XYZ Best offers" point to individual retailers. So if a customer has to find out the best price, he'll have to open all the links of the 1st page and find out which one is the best. Great job! One of the results on the first page is a Youtube video that says "XYZ Product Launched". So, why would you want to watch a video while searching for prices? Another one is a blogpost with a fake author image which has a link which says go over there to find the best prices for this certain product.

The site I'm operating has a high conversion rate compared to the network average. That shows that users are happy with the website but unfortunately Google thinks otherwise. Whom should I believe? Google or the users? As for my backlinks, I can't seem to find any which can be considered spamming. I'm seeing sites with just directory links ranking above mine whereas I haven't used any such links. Seeing the results, I don't know what they have fixed with this update.

[mastersat]

my actual hit at 5 June
no notification on GWT
decline in my traffic and visitors , all most of my kw went down
check those images

[imageshack.us...]
[imageshack.us...]

[netmeg]

It's like Google doesn't even care how long or how much we've worked on our sites

They don't. They don't. They care about users and advertisers, they do not care one whit about webmasters or site owners. Individually we do not exist for Google. They're Godzilla, and we're the squashed villagers stuck between their toes. So if you want to know what to do now, the answer is capture your existing community and diversify your traffic sources.

[mike2010]

>>i think June 5 update has hit those micro sites which specialize in
>>niches

same here, EP. Whatever they did on 6/5 , they need to undo it. A lot of legit sites with decent content squashed for no reason.

I can't be spending my summer stressing out over this tinkering around google continues to do to kill off legit businesses / sites in which people have worked for years on. It's enough playing around, just reverse it and concentrate on penalizing spammy sites.

If they claim nothing was done on 6/5 , then explain why so many of us have gone from #1 to page 25 somewhere so many days AFTER they claimed 2.0 was already in place.

Just a temporary shuffle, or something permanent ? This is the kinda junk we lose sleep over.

[reseller]

Just a temporary shuffle, or something permanent ?

As I mentioned early in this thread, I think they have launched on 5th June 2013 a modified version of Penguin 2.0. You may call it Penguin 2.1 or Penguin 2.0 B etc...

I expect them to continue launching modified versions of Penguin 2.0 until they are satisfied of results ;-)

[frankleeceo]

I see some very minor uptick through my sites. But nothing major as some people described for the June 5 update.

Although it may be that my hot season is starting as more students start their summer school. Entertainment information related websites.

[taberstruths]

Looks like the June 5th algo change, whatever it was, took about a 20% bite out of my traffic. However I do not see any ranking changes at a cursory glance. I don't track serps very faithfully anyore. I am not even convinced that all the traffic sent by G is real traffic. If it was any other traffic provider or a paid traffic provider I would be really questioning the quality of the traffic. Compared to any other search engine traffic the bounce rate, ctr, and time on site is way lower suggesting paid or bot traffic with no real interest. Could G be artificially inflating their traffic numbers? That would be a story!

[diberry]

^^^Interesting thought, taberstruth. But Google traffic has never converted well for me. I think it only converts on sites built for Google.

[taberstruths]

Well I am not an e-commerce site so all I can go by is page views and time on site to compare metrics between search engines but invariably G traffic is lower quality than Bing, Yahoo, or the other tiny search engines. It would also explain all the complaints there have been about zombie traffic.

[SerpsGuy]

results look permanent.

[SerpsGuy]

Thought you guys like enjoy this:

[img703.imageshack.us...]

Also- I can search for any two sentences on my website in google and the blogspot and wordpress dupe scraper spam outranks me. I am listed in the supplemental results for everything - despite using authorship and being indexed in google 7 months longer than the spam. So thats my situation, all traffic gone and all income destroyed. No explanation from google, and all content ownership lost to spammers. Thanks google.

[epmaniac]

in my case, its the big brands which are outranking me just because they have the term somewhere, some place on the page,.. related but not fulfilling the query which users searched

[SerpsGuy]

This really hurts me, I built this website from scratch myself. I chose the domain, I coded the site in css3 html5 and ajax, I researched and wrote all content myself. Just implemented a forum that my visitors were registering for and chatting on. I took a lot of pride in what I built. I even bought every product I reviewed so I could give honest opinions, real pictures and good advice. Thing is, no matter how much you try, it means nothing without exposure. Google took that away, and in my place are reviews with no real feedback just sales pitches and call to action buttons all over the place. Stock photos, and no forum. Just fake liars- and me, the guy who took the time to provide something better- was stomped.

I didnt do link building other than post a signature in 5 major forums in my niche. Thats all. It hurts, my wallet and my sense of achievement.

[JesterMagic]

Thought you guys like enjoy this:

Not at all... that is just scary.

How old is the site?

[SerpsGuy]

All my content has been marked duplicate because someone copied it all on blogspot and wordpress.com blogs. I use authorship, always have. Google does not give a #*$! who made it, they #*$! on my site. You can search any of my terms, and the scraper spam comes up in my old spots.

[epmaniac]

are you sure your's is the original content and you have not copied it from someone else?

[SerpsGuy]

yea epimaniac- you must be right. when i wrote the 1200 words per article from research i must have actually been copying it from someone without realizing it, word for word. smartass

[MikeHalo]

SerpsGuy, maybe this will make you feel a little better...

[i.imgur.com...]

BTW, what makes you think that it has been marked as duplicate? I guess other people duplicating content could cause that. Not sure.

[chrisv1963]

Google does not give a #*$! who made it, they #*$! on my site. You can search any of my terms, and the scraper spam comes up in my old spots.

What do you expect from a company that owns one of the biggest community of copyright violators (BlogSpot)?

I have a perfect example of one of my very popular graphics that gets copied by bloggers over and over again. It used to show up as the number result for certain queries for several years in a row. Then copyright violators decided to steal it and use it on BlogSpot. All the sudden the stolen version (BlogSpot of course) showed up as number 1 and the original on the second place.

I sent a DMCA and Google removed it. Only a couple of days later a new illegal BlogSpot copy showed up on the first position, pushing mine to the second position. This silly game with new illegal copies showing up is still going on. After more than 10 DMCA removals there is still an illegal copy on the first position and guess what ... the original is nowhere to be found in Google.

However there are 3 "In response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint that caused the removal(s) at ChillingEffects.org." mentions at the bottom of the page. 3 complaints I sent.

I'm tired of Google being "excited" about showing "quality" content generated by Panda and Penguin and causing a lot of collateral damage when at the same time I know that they support copyright violations and are not able to detect ordinary scrapers.

[rowtc2]

I see rising of blogspot pages, most of them low quality, many of them with pop-ups.

I see on first results brand names, but with tag pages (a kind of spam, not what i am looking for).

I see wildcard subdomains (internal pages have subdomain structure) rising, obviously made to trick Google.

I have made some video and added images on my blog, now are hidden on >1 result pages, on 1st page are results with lower quality, no multimedia/added value.