Google Updates and SERP Changes - January 2015

[RedBar]

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System: The following 2 messages were cut out of thread at: http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4719320.htm [webmasterworld.com] by robert_charlton - 1:18 am on Jan 2, 2015 (PST -8)

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I have absolutely no idea whether it's me, my sites or whatever but Google seems to be totally incapable of indexing and ranking new sites these days other than finding irrelevant garbage and ranking it well.

How have they managed to do this so well?

[outlaw racing]

I have seen what looks to be something of a ranking shake-up in two separate countries. Looks like a Panda style change. Started a week ago.

[Jez123]

I saw some VERY fast switch and switch back of something early this morning I think. I can't be sure but my site went from page 3 to number 2 for my main SERP. Unless some personalised search happened (but fairly sure it wasn't that). No sign of anything before it or after it. Perhaps filters were lifted momentarily.

[aok88]

It has not been quiet for us. Mid December saw a decline in traffic (and it had been going up for months), and it went down a lot, then back up a tiny bit, then since 2 days ago things have improved a lot. And these changes are all 20%-35%, so significant.

We're not even touching the site through all this, so it seems to me there are some almost-constant dials being turned and tweaked during this time.

Anyone else seeing some Panda-related improvements over the last couple days?

[RedBar]

So the rankings have been pretty stable guys over the past 30 days, right?

Amost a carbon copy of the past 15 years with traffic declining all through December until everyone went back to work in January with a slight boost to most sites especially this week...as in previous years.

Stable, yes, accuracy and quality, no.

[aok88]

It hasn't been stable for me. Today, as if by magic, the floodgates have been opened, and better conversions and lower bounce rate. We've made zero changes to the site lately too.

[Rank_n_Bank]

It hasn't been stable for me. Today, as if by magic, the floodgates have been opened

Google has been making it too easy since their last update in the fall. New churn and burn sites indexed and pulling in profits within 3 days of adding any form of links, and not one site banned now as long as you stay within their numbers, it's going to be a great year, make hay while the sun shines boys (and gals)

[Itanium]

My main competitor is still outranking me for most of the keywords after he hit a rather large news story and got lots of coverage. He even ranks better for keywords I specificly got (natural) links and he doesn't. Before Penguin the ranking was somewhat comprehensible, but now it's not. It looks like the overall rating of the website is currently much more important than individual subpages and links to those subpages. I hope Google changes that focus back to where it was before.

[jccsyd]

Yes, some shuffling and I suspect it has to do with localised results. It seems to affect search term 'location' followed by 'profession'. Results are also shuffling week on week off so you dont get the same results every week. I dont think it has anything to do with Penguin as most highly ranked sites observed have thin content. With the most recent shuffle, clean sites with no links seems to be winning. I'm located in Hong Kong.

[syedyasir]

@RedBar

Thank You

The sites I see in SERPs, they are indeed hacked. All sites are using Wordpress and Rev Slider plugin. Hackers are using this plugin to insert malicious code in these websites.

Just checked one KW in Google . com and in first 100 results, Google is showing 39 Hacked pages. I am seeing these sites in many KWs that I check.

[RedBar]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld Rank_n_Bank

New churn and burn sites indexed and pulling in profits within 3 days of adding any form of links

In which general sector are you? I'm not seeing this at all, well, not that I am aware of!

All sites are using Wordpress and Rev Slider plugin. Hackers are using this plugin to insert malicious code in these websites.

Really, very few in my industry use WP however knowing my logs I do get one heck of a lot of hack attempts all based on WP stuff and that was one of my main reasons a couple of years ago to remove the few WP sites I had.

I wonder, does Blogger suffer such hack attacks, anyone know?

[philgames]

I see an increased amount in hacks too. It all seems to be in the same format is it all from the same group of hackers? If so why aren't the police getting them!

Illegally accessing computers =10years in jail x 1million hacked sites.

Selling counterfeit goods = nice big fine

All the deaths caused by selling dodgy pills = capitol punishment for mass murder.

[Rank_n_Bank]

In which general sector are you? I'm not seeing this at all, well, not that I am aware of!

We work in the highest payout area's, think loans as well as diet and lots in between. We stay away from the p0rn & pills but everything else is fair game. We don't or ever will work for anyone, I mean our seo team is not for hire. I was just stating that this last major update in the fall, has really simplified the algo for us churn & burn types.

[syedyasir]

@RedBar

The problem is a premium plugin called Rev Slider. Here is an article on this:

[blog.sucuri.net ]

[RedBar]

The problem is a premium plugin called Rev Slider

Ah yes, I remember this now even though it was not so long ago, I did check it out however it has noting to do with me so I filed it in my waste bin:-)

We work in the highest payout area's

That'll be why I'm not seeing it, I stick to the widgets in my sector plus I'm really there to promote my products, AdSense is a small beer bonus each month:-)

[silentneedle]

We're currently monitoring some competitors (those churn&burn types as rank_n_bank talked about) using russian backlinks which rank very well for over 2 weeks now.

[philgames]

I think these churn and burn hack pages arent trying to rank their sites anymore but just fill up the search results in the hope some traffic converts... thats why they scrape random sentences and mash them together with hundreds more.. to rank for random stuff.. it is a numbers game and they are doing it at such a scale that someone will come across there spam eventually and get redirected to their garbage.

[Robert Charlton]

thats why they scrape random sentences and mash them together with hundreds more.. to rank for random stuff..

philgames, thanks for the observation. This is an old technique. I think I first came across it over a dozen years ago when a friend asked me why her name was ranking on this type of site. She has a name that's unusual enough to stand out, and it was just accidental that it got mixed in with the junk.

Often, these sites used 100% frames and mix target terms in with the random stuff. Haven't seen the technique in a while.

It makes sense that with the payday loan algo applying extra scrutiny to prominent money phrases that churn and burn spammers would turn to more long tail targeting.

[RedBar]

Thanks for that explanation Robert, I was wondering what it was I was not seeing, now I remember...what goes around comes around, again!

[samwest]

Right back into cold traffic again. Volume is OK, but conversions are terrible. Tomorrow it could be red hot...you never know anymore from day to day.

[samwest]

Mod's Note: Let's remember to keep the discussion on-topic which for this thread means Google Monthly Updates & Changes

[edited by: goodroi at 4:37 pm (utc) on Jan 21, 2015]
[edit reason] Please follow the forum guidelines :) [/edit]

[Rank_n_Bank]

I think these churn and burn hack pages arent trying to rank their sites anymore but just fill up the search results in the hope some traffic converts...

True there is a ton of low level spam like that but the true art is making complete crap that looks great and converts into sales and leads like mad. Besides, if Google allows people top mass produce crap and make money from it then only fools would not take advantage.

Leave on your white hat when talking about the internet, but when talking about Google who is just one big huge scraper built to profit from the net then get the old black hat dusted off. Google is not here for the people, Google was built for profit, period.

With these updates Google is killing the good sites and promoting the junk so dont complain if your white hat site does not rank on this back hat scraper search engine. MSN and Yahoo provide content to the net, Google?

[aok88]

Right back into cold traffic again. Volume is OK, but conversions are terrible. Tomorrow it could be red hot...you never know anymore from day to day.

Same here. Today is really bad for traffic and conversions, ugh.

[Kratos]

My traffic has been steady or climbing slowly over January so far. My conversions have drastically increased however. Since the 10th, my conversions have increased by 50%. I believe Google has pushed me up for some buying keywords which I was indirectly working on. I don't use any SERP trackers though, but it looks like (from WMT) that it's been several buying keywords being pushed up.

Other than the above, there have been no surprises so far.

The only exception has been a big site that I co-own. The site has received (from a neg. SEO attack) dozens and dozens of spam links from eastern european and vietnamese blog networks. The traffic has been decreasing slowly but surely soon after those links started appearing on WMT.

True there is a ton of low level spam like that but the true art is making complete crap that looks great and converts into sales and leads like mad. Besides, if Google allows people top mass produce crap and make money from it then only fools would not take advantage.

Leave on your white hat when talking about the internet, but when talking about Google who is just one big huge scraper built to profit from the net then get the old black hat dusted off. Google is not here for the people, Google was built for profit, period.

With these updates Google is killing the good sites and promoting the junk so dont complain if your white hat site does not rank on this back hat scraper search engine. MSN and Yahoo provide content to the net, Google?

I agree that Google is here to make money (who isn't?) and that they are a massive scraper after all, but I'd be more specific and say that Google doesn't give an actual rat-ass about us webmasters even though it's us that Google depends on to provide their search service and it's us whom they used to build their business. Imagine for a moment what if all webmasters blocked Google from accessing their sites: Google would see very clearly how much they depend on us. Not that they don't know how much they've needed us webmasters to build their business, but we webmasters would be able to see with our very eyes (and for once and all) how the tables are turned.

Google is here to please their users and their stockholders, that's it. When pressed for a decision, they've shown time and time again that they will choose their stockholders over their users, but at least their users get some benefit regardless of what Google does, like now with those nice little buttons telling them (users) whether a website is mobile optimized or not.

In the meantime, we webmasters have to put on several hats on (no, not talking about black hat, more like marketing/sales/accountant) to have a decent enough site that actually ranks. Moreover, it's Google who gets to call the shots on what's "high quality content", not us. So we can see our websites as brilliant works of art that are extremely useful to humanity, but Google may have a different opinion and never show your site to said humanity.

When I first got into making websites, I didn't know how this all worked. I only recall a friend telling me that he found my site on Google by searching for my name on Google. I didn't know that Google had visited my site and indexed it, and frankly, I would have preferred Google have waited before visiting or at least have asked for permission first before indexing it on their search results. But hey, I as a complete noob to internet only wanting to create a blog about tuxedo cats, should already know how to use robots.txt to block Google, set up a noindex tag and/or present a 503 on my blog while working on it on it locally, despite the fact that the mere act of logging into Cpanel is giving me a headache.

[samwest]

Today I decided to call the Awords team. I spent about 20 minutes on hold waiting for a support person, then was connected with a fast talking woman who was clearly from India. After about and hour of torturous conversation, she did help me verify that I am NOT delivering paid ads for mobile and a few tricks with broad and phrase match. She was helpful, but the overall goal of her part was to increase my spend. She seemed to indicate that these changes would produce results "today"...so far nothing. In fact the only person who made money today from my site was Google.

BTW, did you know the NFL makes a paltry 10 billion per year for all the football games and merchandising of 32 professional teams? G makes almost DOUBLE that in one quarter....and I had to sit on hold for 20 minutes before getting connected to a Google Sanguisuga. Kinda disgusting.

[Kratos]

Hey guys, I may be speaking too early, but since one hour ago today all my websites have doubled in traffic. The effect is way too notable to say it's just casual and the increased traffic is all from Google search. Even websites of mine that were dormant are now getting way more traffic the traffic.

Anyone noticing anything today?

-- EDIT (10 minutes later)

All traffic from Google search. All websites in the same industry but different niches. All websites with solid links. Competition is mostly black hat spammers.

-- EDIT 2 (5 minutes later)

The more I refresh my stats, the more traffic increases. One website that hasn't been updated for months has way too much traffic from it's usual traffic. The rest continue increasing. Mindblown. It'd be great if anyone cold post if they're noticing anything right now with their US traffic.

[edited by: Kratos at 1:01 pm (utc) on Jan 21, 2015]

[elAndrew]

Hi @Kratos, can you see changes in your rankings according with that traffic shift?

[Kratos]

Hi @Kratos, can you see changes in your rankings according with that traffic shift?

Yes, however I don't use a SERP tracker and WMT takes two to three days to update. In any case, I do track some words manually and quite a few have jumped up. These keywords have strong competition.

The only time I had something like this was with the last Penguin update, and still the traffic increase is way higher in today's case. I'm just reporting what I'm seeing folks, not trying to ring the alarm.

[edited by: Kratos at 1:05 pm (utc) on Jan 21, 2015]

[elAndrew]

Thanks for sharing it @Kratos!, żin your knowledge, have your sites been hit by any algorithm penalization ever? or your sites has been doing normal. I'm trying to disclose if is just your site or we can expect some big change these days.

Thanks

[Kratos]

Thanks for sharing it @Kratos!, żin your knowledge, have your sites been hit by any algorithm penalization ever? or your sites has been doing normal. I'm trying to disclose if is just your site or we can expect some big change these days.

The websites have not been penalized and they have benefited from each Google update. They all have solid links and I was looking forward to another Penguin refresh or update as the niches I'm on are full of black hats pumping GSA through tiers.

As said, this is just what I'm seeing now. It's been two hours now and the traffic continues to increase but I was hoping these sites to increase their rankings from the solid backlinks they've acquired lately. It could well be that this is just Google benefiting my sites for their backlink profile or Google testing my sites and putting them on the first 3 spots to gauge the traffic reaction (once again, they've done this before).

(the website that I mentioned in my first post that has been negged SEO isn't benefiting though like the rest of my sites)

-- EDIT

I am editing out the actual numbers as I don't want to create an alarm here. The traffic however is way too high to call it a casual coincidence. I am also seeing black hat websites (GSA used with tiers) disappearing from Page 1 and 2.

[Kratos]

I wanted to do one more edit but the allowable time to edit has passed so I'm making this new post.

I just wanted to let you know of my industry for more specifics, in case something is going on just in the industry alone. My industry is automobiles and my niches are cars related and motorbikes related.

Cheers


-- EDIT

I just noticed that if my post is the last on the page, it is also posted in the following page?