Another blow of google

[mindhunter]

Hello,


Just now I saw the many sites's ranking affected, I think its google new update.
Does anyone know about this?

 

[Mary S.]

hm, I haven't noticed something strange in my page rankings. May be just you were punished for something?

 

[webgeek]

Yes, there's a pretty good sized update in progress, and has been for 12-18 hours or so.

Rankings are bouncing, particularly in the UK, like a seismograph during an earthquake. Oddly, some sites seem unaffected, some are up across most keywords, others down across most, and finally some with mixed results.

As we've seen over the past 6 weeks, Google has been making peaks and valleys in ranks, with some jumping/falling 10, 50 or 100 points, staying for a few hours/days, then returning to their former position.

Perhaps that was the prequel to this update. Only time will tell.

 

[gemd89]

I think its about time they fixed it, When I search currently for items I am finding sites in australia, NY and america outranking UK sites - If i am in the UK why would i buy party supplies in other countries!

Gemma

 

[LianneF]

Anyone know what this latest update is for as some of our keywords have dropped a little and some alot. We were just getting back to normal from the last update! hopefully we will bounce back in a few days :0)

 

[Alan]

That is interesting. We have seen a big jump up without doing anything special, so not complaining.

 

[downsouth]

seen one of our sites go from pos 3 -> pos 7 -> page 7

This dont look good!!!

 

[Alan]

Ah ha, then you must have been doing some SEO then :|

 

[downsouth]

Product description re-writes and a few blog articles

 

[OldWelshGuy]

Google are denying there is any large update. But then again who believes anything they say these days?

 

[TOKN]

Yes, there's a pretty good sized update in progress, and has been for 12-18 hours or so.

Rankings are bouncing, particularly in the UK, like a seismograph during an earthquake. Oddly, some sites seem unaffected, some are up across most keywords, others down across most, and finally some with mixed results.

As we've seen over the past 6 weeks, Google has been making peaks and valleys in ranks, with some jumping/falling 10, 50 or 100 points, staying for a few hours/days, then returning to their former position.

Perhaps that was the prequel to this update. Only time will tell.

Do you mind me asking where you get your information webgeek?

 

[webgeek]

I'm closely tracking (hourly) about 100 domains with 1000 total keywords, mostly UK, but not all.

There's a slew of domains/keywords checked much less frequently without any data to report, yet.

Been reviewing activities to try and draw an early conclusion as to a 'cause'. Would be great to say, oh it's some old article directory or press release sites, sitewide links, over-optimised anchor text, links from low authority sites or those with excessive OBL's, etc.

Thus far a couple of hunches, but none that fit all the data

Funny really, seeing a stable keyword drop from #3 to #9, only having 3 inbound links, you'd figure it would be easy to narrow. But, when you have another term do the exact opposite of that, with an almost exact link profile... it's head scratching time.

Perhaps some sleep and a hint from Google will help.

 

[Normansmith]

I agree with Webgeek, i regularly check 50-80 websites , so have been affected some not. One thing i have noticed on UK sites domain age is jumping up ! Not all sites but 60%, that could be significant :|

 

[johnlaster]

Yeah Guys I also noticed my keywords ranking down but I did not get any post about it on any SEO blog like SEO moz, Searchengineland. I can say that it is definitely an update and this time my website has got affected.

 

[Normansmith]

?? SEO blogs, Twitter and Forums full of comments about it !!

 

[webgeek]

Yep, plenty of chatter from everyone except Google.

I've looked at 3 different established, aged sites, each of which had some keywords go up, most stay flat, and one or two go down.

- None of the 3 keywords have issues with inbound link anchors being exact match text. (5%, 2%, 1%)
- All have quite a few different partial match anchors (46, 39, 7)
- None have any bookmarks, blog comments, forum posts or profiles, or web 2.0 profiles links at all
- All have 50%+ of their backlinks from link directories and article directories
- All have a least 1 substantial site linking to them which is offline (different site for each), thus looking like a dropped link
- 2 are deeplinked, 1 lives on the site homepage
- Some spot-checked partial match terms on each site have moved independently of this root term drop
- None of the partial match terms had undergone recent link building

Given the fact that in another case, a keyword dropped 20 points, and it has 0% exact match, and only 2 partial match anchors, I'm skeptical of the partial match influence and dismissing the exact match influence.

There is a possibility that partial match anchors are being collated in with the exact match, which would make anchor text distribution off the chart for some of these. While I hope/doubt it is behind this, I'll have to wait and see for further data.

The smoking gun looks to be relating to article and link directories, likely being devalued in another Panda-esque manner. 50% of the directories one site has links from are now down to PR0, which was definitely not the case 30 days ago.

The likely culprit is a combination of article and link directory site devaluation algorithmically, combined with page rank scalping on the others. It fits this dataset anyway.

Off to dig a bit deeper...

 

[OldWelshGuy]

Google removing directories passing pagerank from the link graph?

 

[webgeek]

I tend to think so, but could be wrong. It is consistent with their position on them.

The weakened link juice coming in for the core term then pulls down some partial match terms (which haven't had any linkbuilding done to support them), thus leaving other partial match terms to stand on their own (which survive due to have linkbuilding help).

It all fits neatly together, but is a small dataset.

For all we know it could just be Google switching on the rank-modifying spammers patent code, and giving us all mixed signals to try and confuse things, so we don't know what's ranking or why.

 

[terryuk]

Can anyone remember what the SERPs were like before Panda, Link Velocity etc were introduced.

Even then I saw strong sites knocked out of the rankings due to lack of new content, new links and freshness and continuity, but still some stay strong.

 

[mindhunter]

Its really so confusing...And now its difficult to understand that what to do or what not to do?

 

[terryuk]

The likely culprit is a combination of article and link directory site devaluation algorithmically, combined with page rank scalping on the others. It fits this dataset anyway.

I found this just now;

http://www.branded3.com/blogs/google-moves-towards-continual-link-devaluation

 

[webgeek]

Yeah, makes sense, though the big update on 17 Jan was not something continually done on the fly, but rather a big sweep.

In case anyone is still thinking anchor text ratios... Here's a nice recipe for what a 'natural' backlink anchor text distribution looks like. More branded, less exact match For The Win!

 

[webgeek]

As a further update... we've been examining a lot more backlinks (for many keywords we haven't SEO'd) in reviewing ranking shifts over the past few days.

So, in addition to what was discussed previously, this is looking more and more like an Operation Cleanup, whereby some sites have been de-indexed by Google (with their loss being taken into account in one fell swoop), some sites have been page rank stripped (again with the impact felt in a short period), and a tightening of Panda duplicate content being enforced, as links are devalued and rankings recalculated.

A number of keywords examined today have dropped 4 to 40 points, each had only a handful of exact match anchored links, very few broad/phrase match, and in general had no signs of being optimised. They just had a few links.

The problem, when you only have a few links to a page trying to rank 1 keyword, if 1/3rd of those sites are de-indexed and several are brandishing easily spotted duplicate content from several other sites online... When those get cleaned up/devalued, it doesn't leave much of a foundation to hold rankings on top of page 1.

Several other terms were looked at in detail, and those which dipped more than a couple of points had links from link directories, article directories and tier 3 press release sites. Many of those were de-indexed, stripped to PR0, or had duplicate content in offering nothing unique (yes I know press release syndication involves duplication).

Some small silver lining is that some of few keywords that had disappeared out of the top 500 or had dropped 100 points, have now re-appeared very close to their prior positions.

Unfortunately, there's still a long way to go for many websites....

A few tips:
- As always, site owners of de-indexed sites should be sent a link removal request.
- Site owners hosting duplicate content (which links to you) should be contacted and asked to clean up the plagiarism (using much more politically correct word choice).
- Sitewide dofollow links should be examined and considered to switch to nofollow (if the site has traffic potential). Otherwise, an option might be trading the sitewide for a single homepage link.
- Mass linkbuilding from link directories and article directories? Might wanna rethink those tactics!