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
-
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 -
Google's Presentation Yesterday
We hired a new website/marketing company that is a Preferred Google Partner (one of two in Charlotte according to them) and they hosted a presentation by Google at the Google Fiber office in Charlotte yesterday. As expected, there were lots of self-promotion by Google, accompanied with a plethora of data they created to support their PPC Marketing. It was an impressive performance with Molly Dince and Celena Fergusson, presenting Google Marketing Solutions: "Making the Web Work For You" and the keynote speaker Tim Reis, Director of Performance Agencies at Google: speaking on "Mobile Micromoments: Why Your Biggest Opportunities Are In The Smallest Moments" They ended with 15 minutes of Q&A and my question was answered with "I don't know" which I found surprising. So, here it is Thursday morning and I'm asking the same question to my Moz Family for some feedback: "Since the removal of Ads from the right column of a SERP, what percentage of Google traffic comes from Ads vs. the Organics?" I look forward to your comments. TY,
Algorithm Updates | | KevnJr
KJr0 -
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 -
Google Rankings Dropped in Past Few Weeks
Hi All, I work for an online appliance retailer and over the past weeks, we've seen a drop in our google SERPs. This time last year we were ranking in the top 3 for our top converting key terms, but now we are ranking towards the bottom of the first page or even on the top of the second page with the big box stores now dominating for our key terms. Needless to say traffic for these pages has dropped off considerably. We still have quite a bit of traffic coming in for other key terms, but they don't convert as well. Is anyone else seeing the same thing? If so what are you doing to combat this? Do you have any suggestions? Thank you!
Algorithm Updates | | airnwater0 -
Authorship Photo Not showing in for last 6 months now
Hi - Early last year we activated Authorship Photo which remained in SERP till Nov'12... However, post that the Authorship Photo is not showing, neither the schema rating tags are showing in Search engines We tried a lot by changing lot of hits and tries, still to no avail.. We have written to google twice for it (they had a link for which author whose photo now showing after everything is right can send site links )- but to no avail.... The Rich snippet shows Authorship Photo, Schema rating. Even, Google custom search on our own site own page showing it... However, this does not translated into any of these shown in actual Google Search Engines. Our Site is :- http://www.mycarhelpline.com/ Sample Links of rich snippet http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mycarhelpline.com%2Findex.php%3Foption%3Dcom_easyblog%26view%3Dentry%26id%3D94%26Itemid%3D91&html= http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mycarhelpline.com%2Findex.php%3Foption%3Dcom_latestnews%26view%3Ddetail%26n_id%3D467%26Itemid%3D10&html= Even google custom search showing schema rating tags for searched keywords like :- Ford Ecosport, Tata Nano Diesel .... However, on actual search the schema tags are now shown Can anyone suggest - what am i missing, actually lost on this...... Worse - our SERP are somehow also slowly coming down for some of the main keywords too
Algorithm Updates | | Modi0 -
Organic Search Result in google
Hello! Actually, I would like to know the major check points which decides the organic search result[Google]. I see many of the sites in first page which are not even having good level of page and domain authority. I am a beginner but i have done all the score card checkpoints and issue free pages 🙂 Some where i dropped on organic search result. Ex Keyword : blikkenslager Targeted page : http://www.nortekk.no/vi-utforer/blikkenslager-15/ Search Engine : Google.no [norsk (nynorsk)] Thank you for your help!
Algorithm Updates | | Webworld_Norway0 -
New Zealand rankings - Is Google taking city into account now?
I've just noticed over the last 24 hours that Google New Zealand seems to be taking city into account with the search results - when I search from Christchurch - I get CHCH companies and Auckland results when searching from Auckland. I would like to rank my client nationally - any tips? Has anyone else noticed this? I need to be the top of Google for my keyword throughout the country. Any articles that could help? Kind regards, David
Algorithm Updates | | David_Buckingham0 -
Google's not indexing my blog posts anymore! Why?
Google just recently stopped indexing my blog posts immediately after being published, why could this be? I would usually post a blog post and it would be in google results within 45 seconds, now they don't show up until 6 hours later, if at all (a few never even showed up). Also, my home page doesn't even refresh when I make a change to the site. My site is CantStopHipHop [dot] comI have all in one SEO, xml sitemap generator, and webmaster tools and nothing seemed irregular in the settings.I appreciate any thoughts/help/suggestions.
Algorithm Updates | | bb2550