Google Updates and SERP Changes - Jun 2013

[epmaniac]

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

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

[ColourOfSpring]

Feel sorry for the previous posters - epmaniac,serpsguy etc. I hope some people here don't bring you down further with their "just world fallacy" i.e. tell you that "you got what you deserved". As for myself, I decided early this month to base at least 30% of my income on fixed-income work - working for OTHER companies. Be it mowing a lawn, writing an article, cleaning a toilet, coding something. First time I've decided to do this since I went self-employed in 2004. Good luck to those who have 100% of their income largely dependent on Google....good luck.

[ubound]

SerpsGuy, MikeHalo: Impressive shots... Nothing to say. I think SEO is a waste of time these days. Building sites that rely on free traffic is a waste of time unless you enjoy the process.

I am just leaving my sites on autopilot to bring whatever they bring and moving on with my life, exploring other things.

[zoltan]

ubound, that is the real problem: "leaving your sites on autopilot", the SERPs are now full of similar sites / pages, untouched for years.
It looks like currently google is only rewarding sites that do absolutely nothing, has a copyright notice of 2000-2007 and when you try to communicate with these site owners you usually get some kind of "Internal Server Error"...

[JesterMagic]

I know this has been said before but I cannot believe Google can't catch these scraper sites easier. I realize it would take a lot of processing power to do a complete check but they could run the update like once a month and do the first five pages of the serps or something. They can also nail repeat offenders if it has been discovered a number of times that this domain has "stolen content" (which I really do not see happening).

Also they know when they discovered the content so more than likely whoever had it on first is the creator.

Plus why not take advantage of sites pinging Google about their content. I always ping Google when I post a new article (this doesn't work for all content like forum posts, etc..) to hopefully get my stuff indexed before the scrappers find it.

The only real problem I see is if your content changes over time. Mine does as I try to keep my content current with the latest changes in the industry. What I find happening here is that a scraper who stole my content 6 months ago (and when compared to mine now may be 30 to 60% different) could start ranking, even above me.

[turbocharged]

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.

This is the big problem that all of Google's algorithm updates have avoided - giving original authors the credit they deserve. Yes, creating great content does attract visitors AND scrapers. Yes, copied content on Blogspot, Wordpress, Tumblr and all the heavily spammed free blogging platforms DOES negatively impact the ranks of the site that originally published the information unless they are deemed an authority by Google themselves.

SerpsGuy, I truly feel sorry for you. At this point you must now spend time filing DMCA notices to get the content taken down. Just one word of caution - do not be surprised to see new copies appearing as you take out the existing ones. That's happening with one of our clients and it's a maddening process. Also keep an eye out for cached Google Appspot proxies. Once we blocked these and they started dropping from Google's index, our client popped back up in the SERPS again. As other copied/cached content on all the free blogs were removed, further increases in our client's ranks was observed. Therefore, rest assured your efforts in removing copied content from appearing on other sites will help your own ranks - but it does take time for those results to materialize.

Good luck and best wishes!

[reseller]

Back to Google Updates and SERP Changes - June 2013 :-)

Have any of the sites which have been affected by update Penguin 2.0 or the other update on 5th June (could be Penguin 2.1) noticed any sign of recovery?

[Mac_Guy]

@reseller:
I have an e com website in Canada, lots of competition in my line of products. I lost around 40% of my visitors and conversion since 8 to 15 weeks. Surprisingly I do better with my key words and my page position, mostly first and second page of a search. Does G send me only on my website the window shoppers that never buys ?

[mike2010]

>>Have any of the sites which have been affected by update Penguin 2.0
>>or the other update on 5th June (could be Penguin 2.1) noticed any
>>sign of recovery?

Not yet.

But on another note, regarding adult sites... I've been noticing just putting more than 1 outbound banner link. (or external text link) results in almost a severe pushback ...google keyword traffic wise. This I noticed for several months now, so before the last update.

Most in the adult biz, are clueless and don't know a think about seo...which is why I bring it up here. It always astounds me the lack of knowledge most adult webmasters are with their sites. (not knowing a thing about optimizing their title tags, meta tags, and page content) They think just putting a lot of images and no text will get everybodys attention.....riiiiight.

[ColourOfSpring]

It looks like currently google is only rewarding sites that do absolutely nothing, has a copyright notice of 2000-2007 and when you try to communicate with these site owners you usually get some kind of "Internal Server Error"...

zolten, lol - exactly right. I see a lot of these "Mary Celeste" sites out there. You visit them and get that uncanny feeling - then you realise they were last updated 3+ years ago - and yet, ranking well. The defense of such sites is "well they have great content, and great content doesn't get old". But....the site is SELLING STUFF, and the owner has abandonded the business. The phone number on the site no longer exists, contact forms return you a bounceback email announcing the email address no longer exists. If you buy from the site, you're only going to issue a PayPal chargeback 2 weeks later when the goods don't arrive. Such sites likely were in the Google doldrums (keeping the Mary Celeste theme here) for years before being finally snagged by the tradewinds and blown onto the first page - two years after the owner abandoned the site.

[SerpsGuy]

@turbocharged - thank you for your comments. Would you please elaborate on "cached google appspot proxies". I have never heard of this before.

[SerpsGuy]

@mikehalo - thank you for pasting that, although its sad to see, it helps knowing I am not the only guy struggling with this. I don't know for sure the duplicates are why I lost rank, but considering I lost all my placements and then saw blogspots with my content in the exact positions I held I think its almost guaranteed thats the cause. My pages are all in the supplemental index - meaning you have to reach the last page of serps, then click show similar pages, then go to the last page again to see my site.

[mike2010]

a little update regarding 2 of our blog sites that completely disappeared on June 5.

on June 4th, both of these sites were #1 on page 1 for their primary domain name keywords, and they held this spot for months.

June 5th , one of them went to page 16 somewhere.
June 5th, the other one is still nowhere to be found. I stopped looking after page 33.

Basically their blog sites that update automatically from multiple RSS feeds combined into 1 site.

[SerpsGuy]

Alright, for my website I update it twice weekly minimum. The content is researched and written by myself. Nothing copied, nothing reworded.

[turbocharged]

@turbocharged - thank you for your comments. Would you please elaborate on "cached google appspot proxies". I have never heard of this before.

serpsguy, go to google and search for the following without quotes: google appspot proxy hijack

Google owns appspot and many people create proxies on them. Because appspot is owned by Google, it has high domain authority. Proxies running on this domain can essentially copy an entire site, renaming the urls to that of the proxy it resides on. Instead of a single page being duplicated, it can create major duplicate content problems if your entire site appears under a cache on some appspot subdomains. Our client had been copied on well over 100 appspot subdomains.

Unfortunately penguin 2.0 did nothing to reward original authors or at least offer a safeguard. I'm seeing the same duplication as before. I believe that the problem is many of these scrapers simply scrape, post and build no links to their stolen content. Original authors, on the other hand, are more likely to promote their own content and are at risk of being demoted by penguin for unnatural links. It is also possible that some other pages that are hit by penguin 2.0 pass this penalty to new pages, which also leaves them at risk of being scraped by a "cleaner domain" and ranked by someone other than the original author. This may be why so much copied content is rising to the top of the serps while original authors are sinking.

[SerpsGuy]

A buddy of mine aggregates content on his blog, and it ranks great. Its cissptraininglosangeles.com. I think it ranks page one for cissp training. So its odd to me that his website ranks full of copied content, and sites which have original content are marked as junk.

[SerpsGuy]

Turbocharged - interesting! Maybe that is why these spam blogs are outranking me, because I have some kinda penalty and they are on a cleaner domain with no links. Maybe I should try registering a new domain name, and pushing my entire website over without a 301. Has anyone here (including you turbo) tried this and been successful?

As for the google appspot, I asked because I saw a lot of appspot referring traffic from analytics before my site crashed. Was this the case for your client? How would a webmaster block this?

[MikeHalo]

I am yet to see any recovery and am not expecting it. At least not any time soon. I agree with others that results above me seem to be a little dodgy in value, but I am still putting my downgrades due to something obvious that I am missing. It is weird to be the exact last result (before supplemental).

Google is still crawling my site at a very high rate. What about you other guys? I've taken this chance to roll out some development features that were more difficult to do in high traffic as well as make my noindex/nofollow rules a little more strict than they already were.

[SerpsGuy]

@MikeHalo - I am sorry to hear that, I don't think I am missing anything. All original content, no warnings in webmaster tools. All I can think is the negative seo attack against me is working. Check out these links being built to my site, as reported by majestic seo;

[imageshack.us...]

I disavowed over 917 domains just the other day, but I am getting about 100 new domains linking to me per day. If this is the issue, I would be surprised though. Cutts just said negative seo doesnt work, and I have been disavowing them non stop.

I think its despicable how people see one mans work earning him something, and their natural instinct is to attempt to steal and destroy it.

[turbocharged]

As for the google appspot, I asked because I saw a lot of appspot referring traffic from analytics before my site crashed. Was this the case for your client?

Yes, that is precisely how we found it!

You should dig deeper to find out how many appspot subdomains are indexed in Google with your content. To do this, use the site operator and a quoted snippet from your page.

site:appspot.com "a small sentence from your page in quotes."

How would a webmaster block this?

With htaccess blocking appspot subdomains. Also verifying the IP of Googlebot may be useful.

As for the google appspot, I asked because I saw a lot of appspot referring traffic from analytics before my site crashed. Was this the case for your client?

His ranks were horrible for years until we got a hold of the project. To use your terms, the site's homepage crashed years before we got the job. I am a designer, not a SEO specialist, but the client requested we handle the problem (because of his limited budget) and we did.

I'd defer the 301 redirect question to someone more knowledgeable of that approach and its usefulness when hit by penguin. I work with a lot of branded sites (some local and others much larger), and using a 301 to a new domain is out of the question for brands unless it's part of a merger, etc.

[MikeHalo]

That's interesting SerpsGuy. Maybe it is indeed Penguin related. My backlinks profile remains unchanged from what I can tell.

[levo]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} AppEngine-Google [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]

[SerpsGuy]

I dont see any duplicates in google, but I did recheck my analytics (which is very depressing to log into these last few days) and looked up the domains I got traffic from. They look like some kinda proxy browsing websites.

[MikeHalo]

SerpsGuy, is Google still crawling your site?

[SerpsGuy]

MikeHalo- It appears they are. I did notice after i dropped rank they were very slow to index anything new on my website. Generally anyhing I post is in the serps within 5 minutes. After I post rank it tales 24-48 hours. does that mean something?

[MikeHalo]

I am not sure in all honesty. I just figured it is strange that my site is being called at the same rate it was previously, after this algorithm shift/penalty.

Are all of your results only in supplemental? None are in regular?

[SerpsGuy]

Some are out of supplemental. It really does seem like those duplicates are the reason I lost rank. As I remove them, and ping the old url, I gain rank back for them one term at a time. It sounds unrealistic but so far its accurate to my experience.

Here is something you can try out, and dont ask me what data center this uses or anything because I have no idea at all. But this URL has shown me the future of serps on a consistent basis. You can search now, and youll be seeing what the search results will look like in a few hours to a few days in the future.

Only sharing so you can tell me if you are making a recovery here, based on this tool. Link:
[landing.secretbrowserapp.com...]

[MikeHalo]

I am seeing no changes... Not really expecting it either.

[JesterMagic]

Thanks for the AppSpot Proxy information. I noticed them for the first time a few months ago visiting my site and ignored it thinking it's Google, a trusted site.

I just blocked them now (any HTTP User Agent that contains AppEngine) after seeing my content being index by Google using:

site:appspot.com "site text here"

I never have seen the content actually out rank me or even in the serps while checking keywords, etc.. but why take the chance (my confidence in Google is at an all time low).

I can't believe that Google would index duplicate content off of their own proxies. Can anyone give a reason why?

[Martin Ice Web]

is there anybody out there who benefited from last Quality brands update?

[Savanadry]

I'm not sure I understand the question Martin Ice Web, but I just noticed my beloved site which has been panda'd and very lightly penguined (lost 1 term on pen2.0) has just got it's site links back. After we were panda'd when you searched for our name it had no site links below it - now it is back to 4 sitelinks, not quite the 6 it had, but something is going on today.