Google Confirms Algo Change: "Quality Update"

[netmeg]

Earlier this month, some publishers began noticing changes to Google’s search results. We had asked Google if this due to a Panda Update or any other type of update, but Google replied no. Since then, more reports came in, with the change even being dubbed the “Phantom Update” because something did seem to have happened, even if Google wasn’t acknowledging it.

Now Google has. After more follow-up this week, the company told Search Engine Land that while no spam-related update had happened, there were changes to its core ranking algorithm in terms of how it processes quality signals.

[searchengineland.com...]

[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 6:26 pm (utc) on May 20, 2015]
[edit reason] updated link [/edit]

[Martin Ice Web]

@Paperchaser, you are wrong: its all in the name of increasing QUALITY.

[Edge]

its all in the name of increasing QUALITY.

I'm not seeing better "Quality" results. There are two particular webpages in one of my verticals that have risen. Neither are mobile ready, have very little text and have been static for years. The links to these webpages are artificially created from a single different website that was created exclusively for the links.

I'm not impressed with the quality of this update - at all.. In fact, I'm confused..

[EditorialGuy]

I'm not seeing better "Quality" results.

I'm not seeing dramatic changes for most of the queries that I watch, but some SERPs are definitely showing improvement. For example, several queries with the word "review" in them used to yield results that were stuffed with sell pages. Now most or all of the top 10 results are actually reviews. That's a first, and it's a welcome change after years of crappy results for those queries.

[indyank]

In the mean time do a search for "site:softonic.com/s/" and this is the proof that must be a whitelist somewhere...

The "site:" query returns a selection of indexed results for this site, this does not mean these would rank well enough for any keywords to get the traffic.

The page may be indexed and one could get to it by a well placed query (e.g. site: or searching for a quoted text), but that page may never get any organic traffic as it would not rank for any keywords people would search for.

I have seen this site's search result pages (and several of them) as no.1 or 2 for several popular and related queries...so i don't agree with this observation...

[tibiritabara]

@EditorialGuy some people report similar changes but "download" SERP is showing results without duplicate pages from the same domain. (it was very frequently in download software industry)

Can any one check this situation? any comments are welcome..

cheers

[silentneedle]

Wow! It seems the quality update improved the search results in google.de, now I'm seeing french brands instead of chinese facebook pages. At least it's the right direction.

[RedBar]

I'm seeing either or results in the UK.

Either the SERPs are reasonably good showing decent sites with relevant products or the sites are completely rubbish and totally biased towards US sites that cannot supply with the occasional, say 1 in 20, UK site chucked in for good measure.

This is how it has been for months now and I am seeing similar in other google.tlds for my widgets. It's almost as if one moment they understand where I am and what I am looking for and then let's move you across the Atlantic and give you multi million Dollar venture capital social scraper sites.

I know it's not just me who sees this since I heard complaint after complaint about these results at a major trade show in the US recenlty.

[Paperchaser]

if you ask me they still working on their updates i lost 20% of my traffic by Monday and then gain back 15% of which i lost again on Thursday till now lol. My site is 2yrs old and always had perfect score since day one never dropped and i got over 45% returning visitors each month. Definitely something is up hopefully everything will go back to normal in couple days as usual.

[Paperchaser]

Well, couple hours after typing my last post went back to #1 on many keywords.. If you are on the same boat don't give up! and keep working hard I wish you all trizillions traffic ;p

[RedBar]

It would be interesting for Google to even attempt ISO 9001, they'd be ripped to shreds!

[doc_z]

Let's make a "Gedankenexperiment" (thought experiment): Google is having a parameter which is (for Google) a measure of quality. To keep it simple we are talking just about a single parameter. Now Google change the key algorithm by giving this parameter a higher weight. Of course, the SERPs are changing and in average it's an improvement.

Simple examples of thus a parameter can be: number of FB likes, number of Google+, number of users bookmarking the page, number of users printing the page (also have a look at Msg #4748128). Now think of some countries where people don't use this sign of quality that often compared to the rest of the world. When you are located in one of this countries you would see after the update not only some re-order of the results in this language but also a weaking of results from these countries compared to the rest of the world.

Of course, reality is much more complex - this was just a simple example for explanation. Anyhow, I'm sure that something is wrong with the weight of german-speaking countries when I'm on google.de using German settings and located in Germany. There was a significant change with this "Quality Update" and it isn't an improvement.

In general you can see a lot of difference in the behaviour of people from D-A-CH (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) compared to people from english-speaking countries. Examples are the usage of adblocker or the relevance of privacy (Google streetview is a good example). Also the number of users which prints a copy of the page is probably different compared to other countries.

One can easily try to verify if actually something going wrong by comparing the number of users before and after the update which 1) go to page 2 in the result pages 2) Modifying the search by nur "Seiten auf Deutsch" 3) adding phrases like "deutsch" at the end of the query. In the case describes before all these numbers should increase.

[tibiritabara]

@doc_z right... We can see, each time that google has introduced significant changes in its algo, some disorder. SERPS of keywords classified as 'long tails' are more sensitive to this disorder. Probably we are seeing this kind of disorder that in few days can be solve.

Nevertheless we need to focus about which changes have been introduced for Google in this quality control approach. For example, some SEO experts are commenting that Google is give more value to update of web pages. I have checked that it is true in several websites that are dropping in traffic from 4th May. Other websites that were beaten for Google Panda 4.1 are dropping traffic again in this Google update.

cheers

[Spiekerooger]

If you monitor the chatter here at webmasterworld I've seen quite an uptick of german webmasters complaining about the new SERPs after the so called quality update. Therefor I second doc_z findings that whatever google is using as new quality vectors/features, is not working quite well for the german language / web scene (that is google.de (Germany), google.at (Austria) and google.ch (Switzerland, swissgerman language).

E.g. in 2011 google published a list of quality signals on their webmastercentral blog (in preparation of panda) and if you compare sites that lost and won in the quality update lots of sites that follow those quality signals (privacy, security, credit card safety, earnesty, range of coverage and helpfulness) have not won but quite often lost. Only "big names" won, even if they lack those quality features. So if you forget about privacy, trick the customer into uppaying but do tv commericals, you are quality ;)

[doc_z]

If you're focus on the changes then you'll find a lot of good advices given in this forum. Btw, I'm not seeing any hint that the frequency of updating a page is getting more important.

My point is the specific behaviour of google.de (the increase of non-german sites) after this update. So far nothing was fixed. Even the domain google.de lost about 1/3 of it's visibility.

[tibiritabara]

it is not in Google.de It happens too in Google.es and positions in Spain, Mexico, Argentine, etc. So probably we can say that when Google introduce new quality vectors/features is not working quite well for Google languages versions.

@doc_z thank you for your recommendation. By the way I'm too not seeing any problem with wbepages update.

cheers

[seoskunk]

I suppose I go back way too far with google. They always boost something. In the old days it was .edu sites now its brands but fundamentally these sites are backfill until the true leaders of the search term are out of penalty. However Google have enjoyed commercial success with this , brands spending more because they're pleased, small business spending more because their desperate. So why update? Let them squirm a little longer and tell them we're working on it. When really current results are good enough for users and more importantly please shareholders.

[anallawalla]

I work for a large enterprise where the SERPs are mainly dominated by other large enterprises where it's all white-hat. The second-tier players in this niche are comparison sites. I have noted a reshuffle of places that were steady for the past four months. It's usually one or two positions up or down. The main winners are the large companies and the main losers (relative drop in position but still on page 1) are comparison sites.

This is across roughly 900 keywords in nine product niches.

[Nutterum]

Now that sufficient time has passed, I see a slight increase in organic traffic(between 4 and 5%) even though I have not moved much in terms of SERP positions. Some countries are still a mess though.. especially the .de

[EditorialGuy]

it is not in Google.de It happens too in Google.es and positions in Spain, Mexico, Argentine, etc. So probably we can say that when Google introduce new quality vectors/features is not working quite well for Google languages versions.

When Panda was released back in 2011, it affected the U.S. first, then the UK. and then other countries or language areas. As I recall, it took a few months before Panda was rolled out worldwide. Updates may not be rolled out in waves anymore, but stamping out bugs may be a country-by-country or language-by-language process that can take a while.

[doc_z]

Unfortunately, others have to pay the price for Google's bugs. If this would be their own money, they would do it in a different way: rolling out the algorithm in one country/language and fixing bugs before going to the next country/language.

[mikhailblaze]

I think the new algorithm targeted websites providing "How-to" content. Despite the quality control guidelines in Hubpages, it's become such a spam-riddled community. The Hubs being published aren't as good as they were before.

Considering that E-how and Wikihow, this somehow confirms my theory.

[tibiritabara]

Chaos is reporting in Google.dk so the new update is applying not only in English, German, and Spanish versions but also in all languages (including small market, focus in one country).

@Mikhailblaze - do you know if these websites are using "doorway pages" to increase traffic from Google SERP?

cheers

[mikhailblaze]

@Tibi - not sure if they do, but I do know that a lot of links and anchor texts being posted on those website (by the users themselves) are spammy (pointing to websites for the sake of getting authoritative backlinks).

[tibiritabara]

@mikhai, thank you very much for this information. I haven't seem similar problem in Google.es

What I can see is that websites that including blog as subdomain and optimising content from main domain and subdomain (blog) for same target keywords have been dropping in traffic from Google since last 4th May.

Any other observations?

cheers

[Martin Ice Web]

The computer accessories niche is now complete dominated by amazon. It is hard to find a result where amazon is not at #1 , #2 and #3 ( yes all three in a row). The guys at amazon must have a big laugh about this google update while they still f*** google in every way they can like don´t buy GSA, pushed their ads out of their sites, beat them in cloud services and streaming....

[tibiritabara]

Hi folks,

Traffic is dropping in many websites with blogs in subdomains. On the oher hand I made analysing of about.com It is in spanish (but.. google translate ;-) can help)

<snip>

According to this website the new update algorithm can be connected to Panda 4.1

cheers

[edited by: aakk9999 at 12:32 pm (utc) on Jun 3, 2015]
[edit reason] Sorry, had to remove the link, no personal blog URLs [/edit]

[RedBar]

The guys at amazon must have a big laugh about this google update

I wonder just how much extra traffic they do actually get?

One would have had to have been sleeping under a very big rock for the past 4-5 years not to know that Amazon usually comes up #1 or so for this kind of stuff therefore I would have thought that most people, me included, go straight there for availability and pricing, then look at our other favourite stores for their availability and pricing and then, if one is still searching, as a last resort use GooBinYah to see if any new possible suppliers are unearthed.

Then again the searching ability of many people has to be seriously questioned so maybe they do get loads more traffic!

[Rlilly]

The question is how does Google determine quality. Just because a page has a few images and 1500 words with some links out to an authority site makes it quality? Or is it, clean code, viewer retention and direct referals as the main gauge.

[kewlchat]

The question is how does Google determine quality. Just because a page has a few images and 1500 words with some links out to an authority site makes it quality?

It would seem so.