Any more info on potential Google algo update from April 24th/25th?
-
Apart from an article on Search Engine Roundtable, I haven’t been able to find anything out about the potential algorithm update that happened on Monday / Tuesday of this week. One of our sites (finance niche) saw drops in rankings for bad credit terms on Tuesday, followed by total collapse on Wednesday and Thursday. We had made some changes the previous week to the bad credit section of the site, but the curious thing here is that rankings for bad credit terms all over the site (not just the changed section) disappeared. Has anyone else seen the impact of this change, and are there any working theories on what caused it? I’m even wondering whether a specific change has been made for bad credit terms (i.e. the payday loan update)?
-
Honestly, we've seen such high flux in April -- including that week -- that it's really hard to pull anything useful apart. We have no confirmation of an algorithmic event (other than the usual "There are events every day" line).
There was talk last week about "Project Owl" -- Google's multi-pronged attack on fake news, but it appears that only a part of that is algorithmic, and that part has been rolling out over the past couple of months. I don't think the flux from the week in question is related to Owl.
Hopefully, someone in the community has some more insight on the vertical-specific data you're seeing.
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
-
Does building backlinks help improve Google rankings? If so which links work nowadays?
Hi Guys, Please only reply of you have real experience.... So as the title implies does building backlinks work in improving the rankings in Google? I know they are not on the same level as some are spammy, in blog networks etc but how about other backlinks that are of higher quality? If yes, what sorts of backlinks work nowadays in boosting rankings but not risking getting penalized? So should you build backlinks ongoing? If so how many per month? I have a real struggle trying to get backlinks on really high quality sites. Any advice? Cheers John
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | whiteboardwiz1 -
Pharma Hack/Grey hat SEO. Cannot get site to rank, tons of incoming bad links
I have been working on a website trying to get it to show up in the SERPs again. It is being indexed which is great, it has some errors that I'm fixing now. But for the most part it should be ranking. It don't show any penalties going on, but when I did a backlink search we keep getting the cialis, viagra etc inbound links. First thought was Pharma Hack. But it's not a WP site and I recently rebuilt it. So whatever bad code could have been there it's not anymore. It doesn't show up in google either for the search site:www.mysite.com viagra cialis etc... So I'm wondering if anyone has any insight in a direction to point me? I don't understand what would be causing this to still not rank. Only thing it ranks for is it's name. Any suggestions would be very appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WeBuyCars.com0 -
2015 Bing Disavow, should i copy and paste from Google?
So I just submitted my 2nd disavow file to Google, but what about Bing? I know i would have to submit one url at a time, but is it worth it? Is it safe yet to submit the same file from Google? I know Bing measures quantity of links and submitting the same file might hurt my rankings, but anything new in 2015?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Shawn1240 -
Keywords in Google Local results
We have a client in the moving business and I'm absolutely flabbergasted by the "local" results and the number of them that are not following Google's guidelines for Google Local accounts. 3 of them are using exact match keyword strings as their company names. I've reported all 3, every week for the last 2 months and have not seen a single dip in the rankings. Meanwhile our client has a duplicate listing we've verified and "suspended" and it hasn't changed for 4 months! Any tips? I've attached a photo of the listings as well. xwWZWyT.gif
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SmartWebPros0 -
Is this website being punished by Google?
Hi, I just took over the SEO for a friend of mine's website. Is this website being punished by Google? It has a strong link score, the homepage needs work as far as Key wording goes but it does not appear in Google's top 100 for any keyword. I am not sure that the last SEO company did some harm. Can anyone give me some tips on getting my friend back into the mix? www.wallybuysell.com
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CKerr0 -
How The HELL Is This Site Ranking So Well In Google Places?
When I do a search for this site it ranks number 2 on Google just below the official federation of master builders website for the keyword phase "builders in london" this is the site http://bit.ly/Lypo8E which is a nasty looking blog which has nothing to do with builders and they don't even have an address anywhere on the site. The only thing I can see is that they are sharing there address with a lot of other businesses and all of the citations from those other businesses are causing them to rank higher on Google places, but surely Google can't be that stupid right?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | penn730 -
Improve CTR with Special Characters in Meta-Description / Title Tags
I've seen this question asked a few times, but I haven't found a definitive answer. I'm quite surprised no one from Google has addressed the question specifically. I ran across this post the other day and it piqued my interest: http://www.datadial.net/blog/index.php/2011/04/13/special-characters-in-meta-descriptions-the-beboisation-of-google/ If you're able to make your result stand out by using stars, smiley faces, TM symbols, etc it would be a big advantage. This is in use currently if you search for a popular mattress keyword in Google. It really is amazing how the special characters draw your attention to the title. You can also see the TM and Copyright symbols if you search for "Logitech Revue" Radioshack is using these characters in their adwords also. Has anyone found any definitive answers to this? Has anyone tracked CTR and long-term results with special characters in title or description tags? Any chance of getting penalized for using this? As a follow-up, it looks like you could also put check symbols into your meta-description tags. That has all kinds of interesting possibilities. http://www.seosmarty.com/special-symbols-wingdings-for-social-media-branding-twitter-linkedin-google-plus/
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | inhouseninja0 -
How much time do you think Google employees spend reverse engineering what we do?
Lets face it, it's the corner stone of SEO, reverse engineering sites to guess at what big G does. It would just make sense they did the same to learn all our tactics.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | naffhampton1