Google update January 2015
-
Hello,
In January 2015, google changed its European Algorithm. The change decreased the ranking of some of our keywords but not all. See article for more evidence in google changing its algorithm.
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-update-maybe-19760.html
The biggest change was the keyword phrase ‘Wholesale Silver Jewellery’ which we ranked 1 in SERP, but now we’re nowhere to be seen. However, the change didn’t affect our keyword phrase ‘Wholesale Jewellery Silver’, ’Wholesale Silver’ and ‘Wholesale Jewellery.
We’ve been through our data and see that all of our ’Silver Jewellery’ keyword phrases are no longer showing in the SERP. Further research has shown that our competitors were also dropped down the rankings for the same keyword phrase.
Our question is: Why has this update affected certain keyword phrases, such as ‘silver jewellery’ but not ‘jewellery silver’ and how should we over come this?
Additional Information
If you type in our company name ‘Mainly Silver’ or ‘mainlysilver’ were still showing in SERP, however if you type ‘mainlysilver jewellery’ we’re no where to be found.We’ve even checked ‘site:mainlysilver.co.uk silver jewellery’ in google search and it returns with ‘no results found’. If you switch the keyword phrase, all our web pages are showing up
Our website is - www.mainlysilver.co.uk
-
Glad you're seeing the site back in the rankings. I would definitely keep digging, though. A 14-month disappearance is not something you want to chalk up to an error, because you could easily relapse days or weeks from now.
In other words, it's good news, but don't let your guard down.
-
Hello Dr. Peter J. Meyers,
Thank you for all your suggestions in this matter. We would like to update you and let you know that with the recent update to a google algorithm, our keyword 'Silver Jewellery' is back! We believe this was due to an error because our competitors now have the keyword too.
Unfortunately we believe we've lost some sales over the past 14 months due to this error but we're happy we are back.
Thank you,
-
So, first off, my apologies - I completely missed the 2015 and thought this just happened last month. You can tell that I'm one of those people still writing "2015" on my checks
Unfortunately, a 13-month lag makes tracking down a difficult problem even more difficult. Talked to a few SEOs, as this is such an odd case, and we generally agree that the typical culprits are:
(1) A targeted penalty due to link-building (usually, anchor text over-optimization)
(2) A targeted devaluation due to on-page over-optimizationI'm just not seeing evidence for #2, for the most part, and this does not look like a Panda issue to me. Typically, Panda has wider impact now and wouldn't be targeting specific phrases. The profile just doesn't fit, in my experience.
The redirect problem is suspicious, but so many months after you redirected and then reversed it, it's going to be really tough to sort out. I'm seeing something very weird, though. Run the site: operator in Google on your old site (since it's still live):
site:jewellery-collection.co.uk/
There are two URLs for what seems to be the home-page, one http: and one https:. Click on the cached version of the https: site, and it's a completely different site, for elf925 Jewelry. Something very odd it going on there.
Given that reversing the redirect hasn't helped you in over a year, I think I'd either go ahead and re-consolidate these sites or kill the old one completely. You could try a rel=canonical on the old site, if you're concerned about doing another 301-redirect. This legacy site could bite you in more than one way, though, so I think I'd take it out of the picture. After a year, you may need to try some more radical solutions.
-
Hello Dr. Peter J. Meyers,
Thank you for taking an interest into our problem. Unfortunately, we don’t believe that article is the problem. The sponsored link was added a few weeks ago but the phrase specific targeted action happened a year ago in January 2015. Before then, all our anchor text were branded names.
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-update-maybe-19760.html
We previously believed it was due to Panda and we waited for the update. However, the update in July 2015 had no effect on our issue.
We’ve inspected our search console and we’ve found no manual actions or issues.
We’re still ranking number one on all other major keywords such as ‘Wholesale Silver Earrings’, ‘Wholesale Silver Ear Studs’ and ‘Wholesale Jewellery Silver’. The issue is only when silver becomes before jewellery but not the other way around.
Possible Thoughts
We previously went under a different URL (www.jewellery-collection.co.uk). When we moved to our current url (www.mainlysilver.co.uk) we preformed a ‘meta refresh’ on the old url in 2014. As soon as we realised something went wrong with this phrase penalty, we removed the ‘meta refresh’ and added a landing page on the old URL.
Before we joined, the previous SEO guys resourced the link building work to India and as a result, has created us a massive directory link profile to old URL (www.jewellery-collection.co.uk) but they weren’t spamming. The anchor text were all brand names too.
When we did a "meta refresh" redirected from old URL to new, Google forwarded all the inbound links of the Old URL to New URL in the Google Search Console.
This issue has also affected one of our competitors www.925jewellery.co.uk with the specific phrase penalty (silver + jewellery).
I still don't understand why only "silver + jewellery".
We really appreciate your help in this matter.
-
You've got some recent links that are dubious (got a second opinion). Check out this one:
http://www.getgawjus.com/2016/02/fashion-files-springsummer-2016-trends.html
This has the appearance of a sponsored link, it's on the text in question ("wholesale silver jewellery"), and the link isn't highlighted (which makes it appear as if it's more for Google than users).
Are you seeing any manual actions in Google Search Console? This has all the appearances of a highly targeted action (based on specific phrases), and those are quite often related to link-building.
-
Google confirmed a core update around January 8th in the US, but I don't have data on international roll-out and most of the analyses of what happened at this point are very speculative.
Your "site:" search issue is very odd. As you said, Google is flat-out denying the existing of pages it clear has in the index. It doesn't seem to be a change in query interpretation or spelling. Whether I use the British or American spelling of jewellery/jewelry, I run into the same problem.
My gut feeling is that this looks much more like a phrase-specific penalty. Normally, this would occur if you were abusing exact-match anchor text (linking from hundreds or thousands of sites with exactly the same text). I'm not seeing any evidence of that. Your link profile isn't very strong, and there are maybe a few too many directory links, but most of the anchor text is brand-related and I'm not seeing anything that looks particularly spammy.
I'm going to run it by a couple of people - it's an interesting case and a bit of a stumper.
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
-
Google Images search traffic and image thumbnail issues
Hi MOZ community! Need a little help with a strange issue we are seeing of late on our project CareerAddict.com. We have seen a sudden and significant drop in image visibility in Search Console from the 27th August onwards. I understand that Google has been updating their filters and other bits in image search, so maybe this could have impacted us? I also noticed that the images which are mapped to our articles are not the full featured article 700px wide images which we provide to Google in the Structured Data. They are instead taking the OG share 450px wide images now on many occasions. You can see this by searching for "careeraddict.com" in images. Any insight or suggestions welcome on both of these. Interested to understand if any other webmasters are experiencing other or similar problems with image visibility in Google also. Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | dqmedia0 -
New Google Update - weird ranking
Hi I wanted to get your thoughts on this keyword ranking. This page - https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/albatross-heavy-duty-office-chairs-24-stone is now ranking for heavy duty office chair 30 stone We don't mention 30 in the content anywhere, apart from the USPs at the top of the page - could this be it?! I don't know how to change this, or I guess Google is still figuring things out and maybe this will drop off? Love to get some thoughts on this! Becky
Algorithm Updates | | BeckyKey0 -
Does Google like pricing information?
Over the last year I have noticed a trend in a couple of industries. Google seems to prioritise landing pages with pricing information in the content. This seems more important than it used to. One industry is high end industrial machines. Traditionally there isn't a price list as everything is bespoke for the customer. Low end machines that display an off the shelf price are now ranking higher than they used to. This is frustrating because the different machines meet different customer requirements. However, both sorts of customers are likely to use the same search terms. Has anyone else noticed this trend?
Algorithm Updates | | Brighton-Soundsystem0 -
Same search term shows #1 on Bing but #140 on Google?
Hi, I am using the search term of my website domain i.e. "Series Digital" on both Bing and Google. Bing shows my website as the top most link. But on Google, my website appears on page 14!! Why is this happening when I am using the string within the " "?
Algorithm Updates | | Cloudguru990 -
How to you get a company details to appear on the right side of google searches? For example is you type dr martens in google , the search page shows links and then a snippet of the company on the right. Thank you.
For example is you type dr martens in google , the search page shows links and then a snippet of the company on the right. Thank you. https://www.google.com/search?q=dr+martens&oq=dr+martens&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l5.2176j0j7&sourceid=chrome&espv=210&es_sm=122&ie=UTF-8
Algorithm Updates | | vijayvasu0 -
Google is showing crazy results
Google is showing crazy results in these days sometimes my sites are on top of all keywords sometimes far behind in search engine in same day what is going on ????
Algorithm Updates | | GM0070 -
Google automatically adding company name to serp titles
Maybe I've been living under a rock, but I was surprised to see that Google had algorithmically modified my page titles in the search results by adding the company name to the end of the (short) title. <title>About Us</title> became About Us - Company Name Interestingly, this wasn't consistent - sometimes it was "company name Limited" and sometimes just "company name. Anyone else notice this or is this a recent change?
Algorithm Updates | | DougRoberts0 -
Google changing case of URLs in SERPs?
Noticed some strange behavior over the last week or so regarding our SERPs and I haven't been able to find anything on the web about what might be happening. Over the past two weeks, I've been seeing our URLs slowly change from upper case to lower case in the SERPs. Our URLs are usually /Blue-Fuzzy-Widgets.htm but Google has slowly been switching them to /blue-fuzzy-widgets.htm. There has been no change in our actual rankings nor has it happened to anyone else in the space. We're quite dumbfounded as to why Google would choose to serve the lower case URL. To be clear, we do not build links to these lower case URLs, only the upper. Any ideas what might be happening here?
Algorithm Updates | | Natitude0