Is google rolling out a huge update this week?
-
I am seeing some huge shifts in SERPS at the moment, for some keywords such as web design. Nearly every single result on the homepage is a different company than 2 weeks ago. We are seeing some clients have huge jumps in ranks but also some are dropping.
Seems like we could have a big Panda/Penguin like update rolling out.
-
Something's going on but not determined what yet. I've seem a fair amount of movement in the SERPs for non-US territories (UK, IE, SE, IN, DE, FR, CH, +).
Assuming Google are denying a Pan-guin update of any sort there are a few theories about what it could be.
-
Crawl based link devaluation.
I'm inclined to think that this has something to do with linking but it would make sense that they include Penguin within the main algo if they can do it as they go. Specifically might have an effect on old links as well as spammy links. Alternatively might be ignoring anchor text on low PR sites. Maybe ignoring some directories specifically. -
Disavow data.
Doubt they've had time to sort through the amount of data they've been getting, but they'll have to look at it at some point. -
User metrics.
CTR, return to SERPs within same session, refined searches. I'm not leaning towards this one as most of what I've seen slip has been among the (if not 'the') best result. -
Social signal devaluation
If Facebook can figure out what likes are fake then Google can probably see which 'authors' are fake. They're definitely pushing for authorship, rolling out something to figure out who's legit could have an impact, but I'm not sure authorship rank is a big enough of a part of the algo currently to affect this kind of change. -
EMD update.
Not keen on this as a theory. Not seen anything to back it up and plenty of EMDs still up there. -
Google are telling lies!
Somebody's made a change and they're not letting on or haven't told the people communicating the changes.
Ultimately I'm shooting in the dark here. Although I'm seeing a lot of changes not all of my sites have been effected and I'm doing similar promotion for most.
If anybody wants to chime in maybe we can put our heads together. I'm seeing a bit more clustering again with the same domain showing up more often in the results (though not as bad as it was). Anybody else seeing any sort of pattern?
-
-
Definitely seen that. Some of the most competitive terms out there being hijacked by new domains practically. Seeing huge lifts and drops across many verticals on a number of sites I monitor daily. Changes every few hours when running AWR across a lot of terms yesterday in particular. Deeper pages seemed to be affected more than home pages.
-
Client was a design agency, and it was in the UK. We changed nothing in the 5 days for the result to come back. To be honest in that period we were doing research and did not want to rush things.
Only happened to one client.
-
Hi James,
Sorry was that UK or US or other results? Did you change anything in those five days? What niche was it in? Did it happen to any other client sites? Has it happened again since Monday?
Cheers
-
Hi James,
Sorry was that UK or US or other results? Did you change anything in those five days? What niche was it in? Did it happen to any other client sites? Has it happened again since Monday?
Cheers
-
US results. Very specific regulatory training keywords. I can understand why some HR sites would be ranked but they should be on page 3+. Only helpful to people working for that specific company or going to that university. Totally unusable results right now and these are ranking I've held consistently since 2009-2010. Other updates have never really affected me.
-
Have to agree big change looming seeing sites doing the dance big time.
-
A client of ours who has some really decent links, no directories articles etc. They dropped off for 5 days last week then just bounced right back. But the 5 days they were off the results for their keyword was horrendous. Absolute junk that was not useful to the consumer one bit.
It felt like we were back in 1999 having to search back a few pages to get what we wanted.
-
Hi Gundogs I feel your pain - so for exam related searches you site has declined. Is that in the UK SERPS?
-
My website which has been in the top three for years just slide to page two and the entire first page has been replaced by spammy sites or university HR pages??? Not good.Hopefully it doesn't last.
-
Hi!
My client's listing keywords are safe, but results for my domain name has let only the frontpage in good position, and other bad quality SEO pages, in which we have carried out online test (they generate a page with the name of everysite that do a test with them), has appear in the firsts google results.
If it is an update, why so many spam pages are coming up in good positions?
Update: Less than two hours later, the three sections of my site are ranking in the first three positions for my domain name. It changes a lot today.
-
Not sure myself but as you said they do seem to be changing a good few times a day. Some really poor results on page one that are useless for the user in my opinion.
I am pretty certain whatever change is coming in will be something we will be discussing for months to come like Penguin and Panda.
-
Does appear to be some major swings in the UK SERPS. Lots of rankings changing almost by the hour. Seem some EMD pop up in the top ten. Any ideas whats causing it? What metrics are key?
-
Well, those new sites or the spammy sites usually pop up in the top 10 when there's a bit of a refresh going. Could be a sign.
Unless we're talking about payday loans of course. That's just a shitstorm of spam.
-
Each day I see different results for some big keywords. I have seen sites that are less than 12 weeks old with terrible spam links ranking for highly competitive keywords.
They get in the top 5 but dont seem to last longer than 8 weeks in that position.
-
I can definitely feel a big update coming. Either targeting fake social signals or making a real crackdown on disguised paid links.
In one of my other projects, I've seen a lot of volatility in the top 10 for a keyword - with all the major dancers having a huge amount of paid blogroll and homepage links in their link profile.
If Google is cracking down on them, I'd seriously love them.
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 Disavow File Format and MOZ Spam Score Updates
Hi, Is there a defined file format for Google disavow file name? Does it has to be disavowlinks.txt or can we do this like domain-name-date.txt ? Also, since Google does not share their data with Moz, how does MOz updates its spam score after we disavow the bad links? Do we need to connect Google search console with Moz?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sunil-Gupta0 -
Google Update
My rank has dropped quite a lot this past week and I can see from the Moz tools that there is an unconfirmed Google update responsible. Is there any information from Moz on this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots0 -
Product Pages not indexed by Google
We built a website for a jewelry company some years ago, and they've recently asked for a meeting and one of the points on the agenda will be why their products pages have not been indexed. Example: http://rocks.ie/details/Infinity-Ring/7170/ I've taken a look but I can't see anything obvious that is stopping pages like the above from being indexed. It has a an 'index, follow all' tag along with a canonical tag. Am I missing something obvious here or is there any clear reason why product pages are not being indexed at all by Google? Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Update I was told 'that each of the product pages on the full site have corresponding page on mobile. They are referred to each other via cannonical / alternate tags...could be an angle as to why product pages are not being indexed.'
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RobbieD910 -
Google Indexed my Site then De-indexed a Week After
Hi there, I'm working on getting a large e-commerce website indexed and I am having a lot of trouble.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W
The site is www.consumerbase.com. We have about 130,000 pages and only 25,000 are getting indexed. I use multiple sitemaps so I can tell which product pages are indexed, and we need our "Mailing List" pages the most - http://www.consumerbase.com/mailing-lists/cigar-smoking-enthusiasts-mailing-list.html I submitted a sitemap a few weeks ago of a particular type of product page and about 40k/43k of the pages were indexed - GREAT! A week ago Google de-indexed almost all of those new pages. Check out this image, it kind of boggles my mind and makes me sad. http://screencast.com/t/GivYGYRrOV While these pages were indexed, we immediately received a ton of traffic to them - making me think Google liked them. I think our breadcrumbs, site structure, and "customers who viewed this product also viewed" links would make the site extremely crawl-able. What gives?
Does it come down to our site not having enough Domain Authority?
My client really needs an answer about how we are going to get these pages indexed.0 -
Lost rankings in the last week
In the last week, my website's rankings dropped for a number of keywords. This is the first time I have seen a net drop (and it's significant) in my SEOMoz rankings report (been climbing consistently since January), and I haven't changed my strategy at all. Can anyone shed some light on this? I noticed that my two major competitors have both lost domain rank as well.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HeatherBakerTopLine0 -
Why am I not ranking in Google, but I am in Yahoo and Bing?
The website in question is: www.stbarthexclusives.com Our keywords are currently ranking for both Bing and Yahoo, but we're not appearing anywhere on Google. The website is being crawled successfully, but we still don't have any results. I hoping somebody can point me in the general right direction to fix/correct this problem. Additionally, there's a decent amount of "rel=canonical tags" on the website. If that helps your evaluation. Any advice would be greatly appreciated
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Endora0 -
Adding Orphaned Pages to the Google Index
Hey folks, How do you think Google will treat adding 300K orphaned pages to a 4.5 million page site. The URLs would resolve but there would be no on site navigation to those pages, Google would only know about them through sitemap.xmls. These pages are super low competition. The plot thickens, what we are really after is to get 150k real pages back on the site, these pages do have crawlable paths on the site but in order to do that (for technical reasons) we need to push these other 300k orphaned pages live (it's an all or nothing deal) a) Do you think Google will have a problem with this or just decide to not index some or most these pages since they are orphaned. b) If these pages will just fall out of the index or not get included, and have no chance of ever accumulating PR anyway since they are not linked to, would it make sense to just noindex them? c) Should we not submit sitemap.xml files at all, and take our 150k and just ignore these 300k and hope Google ignores them as well since they are orhpaned? d) If Google is OK with this maybe we should submit the sitemap.xmls and keep an eye on the pages, maybe they will rank and bring us a bit of traffic, but we don't want to do that if it could be an issue with Google. Thanks for your opinions and if you have any hard evidence either way especially thanks for that info. 😉
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | irvingw0 -
Google indexing issue?
Hey Guys, After a lot of hard work, we finally fixed the problem on our site that didn't seem to show Meta Descriptions in Google, as well as "noindex, follow" on tags. Here's my question: In our source code, I am seeing both Meta descriptions on pages, and posts, as well as noindex, follow on tag pages, however, they are still showing the old results and tags are also still showing in Google search after about 36 hours. Is it just a matter of time now or is something else wrong?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ttb0