Mozcast: 5th & 9th May - what's shaking up?
-
What's going on at the moment, i can't find any info on the 5/9th May but Mozcast is showing some movement.
Anyone have any info?
Cheers
-
We saw the May 5 spike across multiple data centers, but we don't track a ton, so it's always tough to tell (our larger system was down for testing that day - it's not public yet). I feel like this is more than a test, though, and some relatively big changes are coming.
-
Thanks Peter,
That's makes the situation clearer.
Do you think it could be small sample tests for something much larger? it seems strange we sore this flux then 2 week later Matt Cutts notified the world of there algo plans over the summer.
Then the next day this happens - http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2268438/Google-Takes-Manual-Action-Against-Thousands-of-Link-Sellers
I get the feeling something large will happen soon.
-
Sorry, had an email glitch in Q&A. I'm pretty confident there was some kind of update around 5/5-5/6, and I'm equally confident that it wasn't Pengun. Panda is in "everflux" now, so I don't expect we'll see any more typical Panda updates (although it's hard to say).
There were some change reported to local search, and Google also rolled out or at least tested a number of new features. My gut feeling right now is that there are a lot of small things going on that, collectively, had a sizable impact. Unfortunately, the data isn't very clear. Overall, though, I saw enough reports from webmasters, industry people, and other flux-tracking systems, that the volatility during this period seems real.
-
Best I can tell, its a lot of crazy speculation. I've seen comments and articles where people are stating its a Penguin refresh or their traffic is all over the place or pages that previously ranked position 3-10 dropped to 50 while ranks 1 & 2 stayed safe.
Looking at my own analytics data... just another normal week. We'll get more info as the days go on.
-
I've seen some people on a few forums say that they have seen huge drops in rankings! Now, some of these people were leaving comments and including links back to their websites so might not be anything major.....i hope!
-
Uh ok, thanks for feedback.
-
Google won't confirm anything, and they gave their typical "we do 500 changes a year" response.
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's stand on LSI keywords?
Hi all, So the keywords which appear while typing some keywords and suggested keywords at the bottom of the search results page are refereed as LSI keywords. I been noticing some of the LSI keywords for years related to our industry and Google now suddenly changed them. I wonder why it would be. I can see competitors are started using those LSI keywords widely, is that the reason Google changed them? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Does Google’s Algorithm Populate Answer Boxes with Its Own Independent Research?
If you search 'best games to play for youtube' you get an answer box with answers pulled independently from the article at hand. Here's an image: http://imgur.com/a/S0j9B Here are all the games from my article, in the order in which they appear. Google's chosen games for Answer Box are bolded: Battlefield 1 Bloodborne GTA V FiFA 16 TrackMania Turbo Garry’s Mod League of Legends Call of Duty: Black Ops III Tom Clancy’s The Division Overwatch Just Cause 3 Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Brawlhalla Rocket League Dark Souls III Unravel Firewatch GoldenEye 007 (this was put in as a joke, but coded as an H2 nonetheless) Destiny Dead by Daylight Fallout 4 Undertale No Man’s Sky Minecraft As you can see, Google is choosing which games to display to its searchers. My Crazy Egg data shows that these were not picked by click volume (each of these H2s are hyperlinked), which means Google must be using some other popularity metric, such as its own search volume data or external sales data. I wrote this up in a post on my site, for anybody who's curious.
Algorithm Updates | | Edward_Sturm1 -
What do you think of SearchMetrics' claim that there are no longer universal ranking factors?
I agree that Google's machine learning/AI means that Google is using a more dynamic set of factors to match searcher intent to content, but this claim feels like an overstatement: Let’s be quite clear: Except for important technical standards, there are no longer any specifc factors
Algorithm Updates | | AdamThompson
or benchmark values that are universally valid for all online marketers and SEOs. Instead, there
are different ranking factors for every single industry, or even every single search query. And these
now change continuously. Keyword-relevant content, backlinks, etc. still seem to be ranking factors across pretty much all queries/industries. For example, I can't think of a single industry where it would be a good idea to try to rank for [keyword] without including [keyword] in the visible text of the page. Also, websites that rank without any backlinks are incredibly rare (unheard of for competitive terms). Doubtless some factors change (eg Google may favor webpages with images for a query like "best hairstyle for men" but not for another query), but other factors still seem to apply to all queries (or at least 95%+). Thoughts?0 -
Any SEO thoughts about Google's new Data Highlighter for products?
After searching around on the web for a while I couldn't find any case studies or interesting posting about Google's new feature to highlight structured data. In Google Webmaster Tools you can now tag your products to be displayed as structured data in Google's search results. Two questions that rose immediately: 1. What effect will Google's new Data Hightlighter for products have on your SEO? Can we expect better CTR's for productspage results in Google? Better conversion rates perhaps? Any case studies that show KPI improvements after using structured data for products? 2. I would love to see some examples in the search results to see what productpages would look like after Data Highlighting it. Your thoughts or input about this subject will be much appreciated.
Algorithm Updates | | SDIM0 -
Impressions & Traffic WAY Down. Where to start?
Beginning around November 1st, I began to notice a continual, gradual drop in impressions and traffic. During the holiday season we typically see a decline in business so I initially passed it off as that, but there has been no rebound and I'm really confused on where to begin looking to figure this out. Daily impressions have now dropped from 20,000 all the way down to 5,000 and it has taken a major toll on the business (see attachment for graph of this). Some Background Information: My Site has been very static for the past 8 month's (since April '12). Admittedly Overly static with very little other than a blog post here and there added. However, during these 8 month's traffic jumped 30% so we were riding that wave and feeling confident that our past efforts built a great foundation. I'm not aware of anything even remotely black hat that has ever been done. Everything is very much on the up and up and done with the user in mind. I'm unable to track anything to a Panda update due to the consistent, gradual nature of the decline. However, with some important search queries completely falling off the map, it feels to me like we are being penalized or affected by a permanent algo change. In GWMT that are a variety of important search queries that show a change of -100%. These terms do show an average position, but when I manually search for them they are no where to be found in Google search results. This is very strange to me. It feels like we've been blacklisted for some of our more important keywords. We had a major site relaunch on January 20th (a week ago). However the downward trend was in place well before this. The site is www.mycreativeshop.com To sum it up, I'm extremely confused and very concerned with what this drop is doing to the company. I've never been in this position as we've worked very hard to lay a solid foundation and have always seen a continual, positive traffic increase. It then seemed to just start turning downward one day and won't stop. If anybody has some suggestions of how to try to get to the bottom of this and learn what is really taking place it would be greatly appreciated! Thanks, -J Wdab7Sk
Algorithm Updates | | cre80 -
Vanity URL's and http codes
We have a vanity URL that as recommended is using 301 http code, however it has been discovered the destination URL needs to be updated which creates a problem since most browsers and search engines cache 301 redirects. Is there a good way to figure out when a vanity should be a 301 vs 302/307? If all vanity URL's should use 301, what is the proper way of updating the destination URL? Is it a good rule of thumb that if the vanity URL is only going to be temporary and down the road could have a new destination URL to use 302, and all others 301? Cheers,
Algorithm Updates | | Shawn_Huber0 -
Client's site dropped completely from Google - AGAIN! Please help...
ok guys - hoping someone out there can help... (kinda long, but wanted to be sure all the details were out there) Already had this happen once - even posted in here about it - http://www.seomoz.org/q/client-s-site-dropped-completely-for-all-keywords-but-not-brand-name-not-manual-penalty-help Guy was a brand new client, all we did was tweak title tags and add a bit of content to his site since most was generic boilerplate text... started on our KW research and competitor research... in just a week, from title tag and content tweaks alone, he went from ranking on page 4-5 to ranking on page 3-4... then as we sat down to really optimize his site... POOF - he was gone from the Googs... He only showed up in "site:" searches and for exact matches of his business name - everything else was gone. Posted in here and on WMT - had several people check it out, both local guys and people from here (thanks to John Doherty for trying!) - but no one could figure out any reason why it would have happened. We submitted a reconsideration request, explaining that we knew we hadn't violated any quality guidelines, that he had less than 10 backlinks so it couldn't be bad linking, and that we had hardly touched the site. They sent back a canned response a week later that said there was no manual penalty and that we should "check our content" - mysteriously, the site started to show back up in the SERPs that morning (we got the canned response in the afternoon) There WAS an issue with NAP mismatch on some citations, but we fixed that, and that shouldn't have contributed to complete disappearance anyway. SO - the site was back, and back at its page 3 or 4 position... we decided to leave it alone for a few days just to be sure we didn't do anything... and then just 6 days later, when we were sitting down to fully optimize the site - POOF - completely gone again. We do SEO for a lot of different car dealers all over the country, and i know our strategies work. Looking at the competition in his market, he should easily be ranked page 2 or 3 with the very minimal tweaking we did... AND, since we didn't change anything since he came back, it makes even less sense that he was visible for a week and then gone again. So, mozzers... Anybody got any ideas? I'm really at a loss here - it makes zero sense that he's completely gone, except for his biz name... if nothing else, he should be ranking for "used cars canton"... Definitely appreciate any help anyone can offer -
Algorithm Updates | | Greg_Gifford0 -
Google's reaction to site updates
Hi, Is it safe to assume as soon as Google indexes updates I've made to my site that any ranking changes the updates effected will happen at that same time, or is there ever a lag time before these changes ( if any ) take effect?
Algorithm Updates | | minutiae0