Google Algorithm change this month - theories ?
-
Hi Moz fans!
If you've not had the chance to check out moz cast go check it out it seems Google has been busy and so much so it broke Moz cast. There has been some discussion on seo round table about the changes and something seems to be going on.
I wanted to find out how you guys are all finding it have you had a change in rankings? Any theories on what you think Google is up to? Personally I've seen rather a few of my sites go up in the rankings last week or so.
As always look forward to hearing your thoughts and feelings on it Moz.
-
Thanks Marie,
You can also read more about it on Dr.Pete's Moz post here-
http://moz.com/blog/panda-4-payday-loan-2-and-ebays-very-bad-day
-
Mystery solved. Two major changes happened today:
1. Payday loans algo update - affects very spammy queries: http://searchengineland.com/official-google-payday-loan-algorithm-2-0-launched-targets-spammy-queries-192027 - This is what looked like Penguin but it wasn't Penguin.
2. A big Panda update - https://twitter.com/mattcutts/status/468891756982185985. Google doesn't usually announce Panda updates but I suppose if they affect enough queries it's worthy of announcing.
-
We saw some gains on Friday on a few terms that had fallen out of the top 50 quite a while ago. This morning though we saw some major gains. This is for an eCommerce site that was hit hard by the first panda update and also had a manual penalty for unnatural links (though the penalty was removed in late 2012).
-
Our data on eBay can fluctuate a bit, since both the main domain and "popular.ebay.com" occupy a lot of real-estate, and seem to shuffle around. Historically, though, this is a big drop for a "Big 10" property.
-
I've seen Ebay take this kind of hit in the past. Then, after Google settled down, new auction pages began to appear.
I think that Google is playing with stale data because I see old versions of recently changed title tags. With so many pages on ebay being ephemeral, I bet Google deleted them temporarily. But, who knows what they are doing?
-
I think the SSL thing is more Matt's personal crusade than a near-term change coming from Google, but it's hard to say. I suspect it's too early for that, personally.
-
Posted some preliminary findings on Google+:
https://plus.google.com/b/112544075040456048636/+SEOmoz/posts/Tj2H3QDwX56
TLDR - definitely seeing unusual activity, and it doesn't seem to be a glitch. The last week we saw historic lows, so the contrast is very telling. It might be that Google kept changes light before rolling out something major.
I can confirm EGOL's observation that eBay took a big hit (also mentioned in the G+ post). This is unprecedented for a "Big 10" site, but it could well be temporary. An eBay-sized site moving in the SERPs that far could move the overall needle a bit, but I don't think it's the whole situation.
This feels more Penguin-like than Panda-like, but that's just my gut, and I think we have to be careful putting everything into those two buckets. With in the ballpark of 600 updates/year, there's a lot more than Panda and Penguin. If it's Penguin, we may yet hear confirmation from Google. If it's Panda, we probably won't.
-
A lot of people are saying it's a test for a Penguin refresh, but none of the sites that I monitor for Penguin issues are showing any changes. I spend a lot of time monitoring Twitter and SEO forums and here is what I am seeing:
-A lot of black hats are complaining that their sites are taking major hits.
-In the Google Webmaster Help forums there hasn't been an increase in people complaining that their sites are affected.
-A site that I monitor that gets affected both positively and negatively with many Panda updates is showing almost a 50% increase in organic traffic
So my conclusions? I don't know.
I feel like there may be a couple of things going on. I think there is a Panda refresh as we haven't had one in a little while, but I also feel like Google is doing something new.
-
I've noticed it too and Matt Cutts posted something on SSL on Twitter (he's talked about how he loves encryption before, but the timing is suspicious). Are your sites encrypted? Wondering if there's an update that responds well to encryption.
-
Thanks for the responses so far really great. Just a quick update Dr. Pete just mentioned the following - (attached)
Basically Moz cast just bottoms out at 40 degrees all time low!
-
If I was going to guess, this is a topic-sensitive update. Strengthening the rankings of sites that are all about something and demoting sites that are a little about everything.
Ebay has taken major hits in all of my SERPs.
Retail sites with substantive informative content are up with double listings.... showing product page and informative article about that topic displayed together in the SERPs.
-
I have noticed some major changes today too, i hope it stays lol.
-
I have seen a remarkable positive change this morning in rankings on one site which we have been trying to recover from an algorithmic penalty, however this appears to be an isolate result unique to Moz. Other tools show no such recovery in rankings for that site. Other similar sites we are tracking in Moz show no significant changes this morning.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Does changing text content on a site affects seo?
HI, i have changed some h1 and h2 , changed and added paragraphs,fixed plagiarism,grammar and added some pics with alt text, I have just done it today, I am ranking on second page QUESTION-1 is it gonna affect my 2 months SEO efforts? QUESTION -2 Do I have to submit sitemap to google again? QUESTION-3 does changing content on the site frequently hurts SEO?
Algorithm Updates | | Sam09schulz0 -
Why google is not visiting any website from past 10 days
Hi, I observed why Google is not visiting www.SubhaVastu.com from past 10 days, later I checked thoroughly, not only for my site, google stopped visiting all websites from past 10/12 days. Is Google releasing any new updates to the crawler? Any new system is releasing soon. I am expecting Google updated their crawler by this Sunday night and it may visit as usual to all sites from 12-midnight pacific time. Has anyone observed it, any information regarding on this Google step. Thanks.
Algorithm Updates | | SubhaVaastu0 -
One keyword gone in Google SERPs - Fred?
I have an ecommerce site. One keyword, which I use to rank #1 for on Google years ago, I'm now completely gone from the SERP's as of a couple weeks ago. I'm scratching my head here, my other keywords don't seem to have changed much recently. Around mid-March of this year, which seems to line up with the Fred update, I noticed I went from page 3 to middle of page 1 for a few days with this keyword. It was a very happy few days. Then it slipped down and down and hovered around page 6. But as of a couple weeks ago, it's now gone. Before the Fred update, I changed a bunch of product pages within the keyword category that had duplicate content because they were kits of items arranged different ways. So instead of repeating the individual item descriptions over and over in the different kits, I changed the descriptions on the kits to links to the individual items within the kits. After the Fred update, at the end of March, I set all these kit item pages that I reduced to very thin content with just links to noindex. My theory is that the Fred update reset algorithmic penalties for a couple days as it was being introduced. So the penalty of duplicate content that I may have had was lifted since I took out the duplicate content, and I made it back to page one. Then as Fred saw I now had a new penalty of thin content, I got hit and slid back down the rankings. Now that I updated the pages that had very thin content to be noindex, do you think I'll see a return of the keyword to a higher position? Or any other theories or suggestions? I remember seeing keywords disappear and come back stronger years ago, but haven't seen anything like this in a long time.
Algorithm Updates | | head_dunce0 -
Does Google ignores page title suffix?
Hi all, It's a common practice giving the "brand name" or "brand name & primary keyword" as suffix on EVERY page title. Well then it's just we are giving "primary keyword" across all pages and we expect "homepage" to rank better for that "primary keyword". Still Google ranks the pages accordingly? How Google handles it? The default suffix with primary keyword across all pages will be ignored or devalued by Google for ranking certain pages? Or by the ranking of website improves for "primary keyword" just because it has been added to all page titles?
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Is there any way to prevent Google from using structured data on specific pages?
I've noticed that Google is now serving what looks like host-specific video cards on mobile for our site. Is there any way to control which videos are included in these lists without removing the structured data on those clip pages or user pages? We don't want to noindex those pages but we don't want content from those pages to appear as video cards. 1kzPW
Algorithm Updates | | Garrett570 -
Help for a webstore with Google Warnings for Watermark Images and Panda
I have not had too much experience with helping websites that have been hit by Panda - any tried and tested formulas I can pass to website owner would be great. He does not want to reveal domain name - its in the area of children/baby products 'Web site featured on page 1 of Google search results for many years (website 5 years old- Australian domain) . In April/May 2014, Google suspended our Google Shopping account because we used watermarks on all our images. We were advised that the suspension would remain in place indefinitely or until such time the watermarks were removed. We wrote back to Google to explain that these watermarks were put in place by our store back 2005 with the sole purpose of protecting our intellectual property. Needless to say, their attitude was unwavering. And as a result, revenue plummeted. However, the perfect storm was about to hit our store without warning. In the same month, Panda 4.0 was unleashed and our store was hit once again. This update alone reduced visitor numbers by around 50% overnight. The Panda 4.0 algorithm update was designed to target poor quality, duplicate content and unfortunately we had some of it. We have now begun creating original content with many of the new products we're uploading onto our web site. It's slow and tedious. We have modified our web site to now include a tag on a the home page (this was missing). We have removed many duplicate links from our footer (it was too big and contained hundreds of links that were also repeated from the header). We introduced a blog and we have engaged the services of a local seo company to disavow any bad backlinks and add missing or improve existing content to category and brand pages. No improvement in our situation is yet visible and with Christmas just 3 months away, poor sales during our 'bread and butter' period will mean even tougher times for our store in 2015. ANY PANDA EXPERTS who can help please email me felicity@gardenbeet.com - looking for independent freelancers rather than agencies
Algorithm Updates | | GardenBeet0 -
Site name appended to page title in google search
Hi there, I have a strange problem concerning how the search results for my site appears in Google. The site is Texaspoker.dk and for some strange reason that name is appended at the end of the page title when I search for it in Google. The site name is not added to the page titles on the site. If I search in Google.dk (the relevant search engine for the country I am targeting) for "Unibet Fast Poker" I get the following page title displayed in the search results: Unibet Fast Poker starter i dag - få €10 og prøv ... - Texaspoker.dk If you visit the actual page you can see that there is no site name added to the page title: http://www.texaspoker.dk/unibet-fast-poker It looks like it is only being appended to the pages that contains rich snippets markup and not he forum threads where the rich snippets for some reason doesn't work. If I do a search for "Afstemning: Foretrukne TOPS Events" the title appears as it should without the site name being added: Afstemning: Foretrukne TOPS Events Anybody have any experience regarding this or an idea to why this is happening? Maybe the rich snippets are automatically pulling the publisher name from my Google+ account... edited: It doesn't seem to have anything to do with rich snippets, if I search for "Billeder og stuff v.2" the site name is also appended and if I search for "bedste poker bonus" the site name is not.
Algorithm Updates | | MPO0 -
What are the differences between Google SEO and Bing SEO?
I came across this question on why the poster's rankings in Bing/Yahoo were so much lower than his rankings in Google. One of the links responded with was a presentation Rand gave about the difference in ranking elements of Google and Bing. My purpose for looking into this is to boost rankings in Bing to be more in line with my Google rankings. My takeaways from Rand's presentation were that Bing likes shorter URLs than Google and it's better to have more links from more root domains with more precise anchor text. Unfortunately this presentation was given at last year's SMX Advanced and is almost a year old. Since then Microsoft has been accused of basically scraping the Google SERPs and Google unleashed at least two maybe three rabid Pandas. Needless to say the environment has changed. So my question is for those people who are happy with how they rank in Bing: What SEO factors are you seeing make a bigger impact in Bing vs. how they impact your Google rankings?
Algorithm Updates | | rball11