Google Update

[DavidL]

Anyone have any sites affected by this from a couple of days ago:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/another-step-to-reward-high-quality.html

Lot of seriously weird results being reported.

Pretty scathing comments in the above post apart from the usual Matt Cutts sycophants

 

[helloworld]

One of my sites that only has white hat has had a massive drops in ranks last few days. I am giving it a few days to see if it's just part of their normal cycle or part of this change.

On the flip side, I am battling a sydney seo agent who has used obvious web spam as described in that article for front page rankings. He is placed 2 spots above me on our main term and has also recently got first page of a term that returns about 10k in local searches a month. So I am watching with great detail to see if this change actually works, because if it does he should be no where.

 

[helloworld]

Just further to my above post. After checking on some backlinks I have found some really weird posted comments on websites I would never visit. I.e. a blog in japanese. The anchor text is not something I use and the link if for a internal page...the user should hit the proceeding page first...

Not sure how I can fix this other than to ignore it and wait for my domain migration to .au to be complete.

But it does raise the point of reverse seo....

 

[soj]

Another article about this on SmartCompany today:

http://www.smartcompany.com.au/inte...s-yet-another-change-to-search-algorithm.html
.

 

[payattention]

I've lost rankings on a few sites which I consider to be top quality and the type where I put a lot of effort into the content I publish. The rankings have been lost on deeper pages, not the keywords ranking the root domain itself but that isn't the case for most people. Some of my own satellite sites which I use to publish duplicate, lesser quality content and drive type in traffic to my main sites have taken the #1 spot but even I would agree they have no purpose being there. They usually fill up some of the lower spots on the first page so it's a 2nd shot at traffic if people bypass my top of the page rankings.

I'll give you an example.

One site I've been slowly building over the past year or so is a Diablo 3 theorycraft site. The site - diablo3builds.com has inner pages for each class. If you're a gamer (or even if you're not), builds are a major part of playing the game. If you don't understand the lingo, you can google stuff like sc2 build orders, dota builds, etc to get a feel for build niche for games and gamers.

This page below contains the sort of information a gamer would want (the sort I'd personally want) if searching for "wizard builds" and was previously #1 for that term plus a bunch of related ones.

diablo3builds.com/wizard-builds

Now wizardbuilds.com is #1 (my satellite site) but it doesn't actually have any wizard build information and my own forum is #9.

That sort of strategy has served me well through the Panda updates and I've never had issues with Panda even though my satellite sites share the same content and all point to the main site which always has unique, well researched content.

I've also noticed the top 10 rankings for various keywords changing every couple of hours so they're probably still tweaking it. I'd give it a fortnight before making any drastic changes, things are just as likely to bounce back. That results are just too shitty for them to leave them as is.

 

[kate]

This Whiteboard Friday from Rand at SeoMoz has a few things to say about over-optimizing and the associated penalties:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/6-change...r-optimization-penalty-hits-whiteboard-friday

Worth a look for those in the biz

 

[findtim]

i'm seeing no change in the rankings for my sites , i did a random check of just 10 and no hassles. ( thats different business sector websites on different IP's with differnet browsers so its a pretty good test whihc i do often)

i've got a few NEW sites "bouncing around" but that has been normal for me in the past and i do not pay attention to that until @ 3 months time.

i've read a bunch of articles lately that suggest google "hates SEO" and want to PUSH more into social media eg: google + as the method of ranking sites.

just search "google panda" and a bunch of opinions will come up.

but "panda" hasn't effected any of my sites or my clients sites, i think if you build a site with good honest content then google still respects that.

NOTE: most of my sites are LOCALLY focused/targeted within 50klms and i think that google likes that as well,......... just my opinion.

tim

 

[AlexBailey]

NOTE: most of my sites are LOCALLY focused/targeted within 50klms and i think that google likes that as well

Yeah definitely the case Tim. I think everyone will start to see a bit more quality attributed to websites that are socially engaged, have authorship and have local attributions.

the usual Matt Cutts sycophants

Couldn't have said it any better myself David.

The Penguin & Panda 3.5 updates were released fairly close to each other, so I believe the causes will vary site to site.
Danny Sullivan gave a fairly decent summary of the releases here.

In fact if you believe your site has been unfairly targeted by the Penguin update (penalising spam), you can submit an appeal over here.

As far as rankings go I have seen keywords and phrases I barely mention shoot up, while others I maintain a focus on have been shredded.
Oh well, in comparison to last months datablock debacle (thanks Firefox), I am doing okay.

 

[fcdoms]

Too much SEO is what this update is supposedly about.

Confirming, there has definitely been a huge surge in negative SEO. Probably disgruntled people going out of business because they didn't pony up for a real domain portfolio.

I have had some sites get way more searches than usual. They have a faster moving turnover of relevant but ephemeral content. Less static pages, more dynamic. What I have noticed however, is that older "non seo'd" content is still un-crawled.

Best performing sites? Real sites - seriously pegged so much better these days IMO.

I wonder if some sites with meticulous SEO (and strategies) are obvious to Goog these days.

 

[findtim]

Too much SEO is what this update is supposedly about.

Confirming, there has definitely been a huge surge in negative SEO. Probably disgruntled people going out of business because they didn't pony up for a real domain portfolio.

politely, you lost me with this statement , can you please expand on it for me.

------------

"older "non seo'd" content is still un-crawled"

sounds like a robot.txt or .htaccess issue ?

--------

"I wonder if some sites with meticulous SEO....... " , i think you are right, everything i am reading is saying google is systematically disliking SEO strategies AND its brain is growing in knowledge rapidly.

I am now getting websites to rank 1,2 or 3 within 5 hours or so simply by blogging about them on MY aged domains ( 10yrs +) google is indexing soething like 1Million domains a SECOND i read, highly active domains like mine must be being indexed every few hours !, not that i did anything to make that happen but it might be my longevity of the sites that is why its happening.

I mentioned this on a different post so i'll keep it short: ACA, "a current affair" did a report against one of my clients business sector ( not them) the next day i created a blog post rebuttal of the broadcast and within 9 hours it ranked 4th , the first 2 were ninemsn dot com dot au and then a competitor that did exactly the same thing as us then our post.......... 9 hours !!!!!

so the moral is, if you have old pages that aren't crawled, there is something going on. Maybe google using a "sunset" system for pages ( for those who don't know sunset means anything prior to a certain date is no longer supported )

tim

 

[Blue Wren]

This Whiteboard Friday from Rand at SeoMoz has a few things to say about over-optimizing and the associated penalties:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/6-change...r-optimization-penalty-hits-whiteboard-friday

Worth a look for those in the biz

Thanks kate; that was useful.

 

[helloworld]

f/up to yesterdays post. I just hit front page for 'australian domain names' been a long time coming.

 

[James]

New update in my opinion has brought even worse results to page one for some very big terms, I notice a website ranking for a specific term and it only has a limited amount of content and pages and around 87,000 Xrummer comments and no real quality links and very poor quality content.

This latest Algo update in my eyes has targeted people who target link building within low quality content heavily, but the funny thing is Google seem to forget all the other poor quality tactics people seem to use.

 

[helloworld]

New update in my opinion has brought even worse results to page one for some very big terms, I notice a website ranking for a specific term and it only has a limited amount of content and pages and around 87,000 Xrummer comments and no real quality links and very poor quality content.

This latest Algo update in my eyes has targeted people who target link building within low quality content heavily, but the funny thing is Google seem to forget all the other poor quality tactics people seem to use.

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport

 

[helloworld]

...don't want to be a dobber or anything, but war is war, right?

 

[James]

...don't want to be a dobber or anything, but war is war, right?

Well according to Google Search Quality employees I have talked to in the past at events they do weekly checks on the top 100 highest value terms, high competition terms, this term would fit into this group 100%.

Where it seems to be a free for all over the last 48 hours, with around 4 new spammy results showing.

I am not in the business of dobbing people in, In my eyes it is just a matter of time before they are picked up.

 

[fcdoms]

Tim, sorry to be unclear - hastily worded. Here's a decent article explaining where I was at when I posted:

http://searchengineland.com/google-launches-update-targeting-webspam-in-search-results-119295

You are probably right Tim, about sunset re the old sites not getting crawled. It's good to hear your good experiences.

Re the negative SEO - someone else quietly mounts a campaign against a website by doing black-hat SEO-like tactics - the idea is to make it look to the engines as if YOU did it and did a lot of it and badly at that. Your site suffers but you can't tell Google how to handle that - only ask for re-submission etc. and that's the crux of that prob. It's too small of a problem to be a brand issue unless you have teams of lawyers wanting to go fight things in foreign countries.

Having said that, it's an arms war of sorts. The more Google pushes quality and adherence to guides, the more danger there is of exploiters.

The old web 1.0 days seemed so much lovelier when I was a user learning html!

I'm going to start using the rel=author tag. Good article on that here:

http://www.virante.com/blog/2012/01/08/how-to-show-your-author-photo-in-google-search-results/

 

[findtim]

Re the negative SEO - someone else quietly mounts a campaign against a website by doing black-hat SEO-like tactics - the idea is to make it look to the engines as if YOU did it and did a lot of it and badly at that. Your site suffers but you can't tell Google how to handle that -/[/url]

thanks i'll read that link shortly, "negative SEO" yes i'm aware of that but funnily haven't heard much talk about it in years ! its a VERY nasty tactic and one thats almost impossible to solve ( kinda like dealing with the ATO )

--------

rel=author tag, WOW... thats a lot of hoops to jump through to set it up properly especially if you have a bunch of people in the business creating content, but i do see its value.

tim

 

[Rhythm]

http://www.warriorforum.com/adsense...my-observations-re-penguin-google-update.html

Also: http://too2web.com/web411/150-solut...hm-update-for-over-optimization-and-more.html

 

[Rhythm]

Feedback on our recent algorithm update ("Penguin")

If you think that Google missed some spam, please go to https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?hl=en and submit a spam report. Make sure to use the word penguin in your spam report.

If your site was affected by the "Penguin" webspam algorithm update on April 24th, 2012, and you don't think it should have been affected, please give us more details below:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dEVxdmdRWFJRTjRoLWZVTHZkaTBQbkE6MQ

(Although I'd use a dummy EMD site first to see what actually happens when one explicitly points out to Google what keyword your domain ranked for)