Increased importance given to spammy/educational domains in SERPs!?
-
Hey guys,
Can anyone shed some light on these bizarre and confusing SERPs which Google seems to be producing following their latest update??
For example, we have a client who targets "payday loans" with another targeting "IT services".
However, since the update, the former keyword brings back a host of spammy domain results while the latter seems to have given all focus to educational institutions like universities.
This just seems utterly ludicrous considering that if I'm searching for "IT services" I don't want the help desk of a local university - that's completely irrelevant, right?
Can anyone provide some information on what seems to be going on?
Thanks
-
I think I remember reading something about Google toning down the impact of their EMD update.
-
There also seems to have been an increase on the prevalence of EMDs - anyone else picked this up?
-
This is what I was thinking of: http://mozcast.com/ - you can't check your own keywords, it's based on 1000 that MozCast selects.
Here are a couple of blogs related to it:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/a-week-in-the-life-of-3-keywords
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-bigfoot-update-aka-dr-pete-goes-crazy -
Thanks for the reply - i've not seen the stability tool, where is this in the pro account?
Getting some strange results, yes the it services results of the last few days do not make any sense whatsoever. Will have to see what happens with these....
-
[payday loans] is probably one of the most competitive, spammy keywords there is. Page 1 probably often has significant changes, there are loads of black hats who set up a new site and spam it to hell to the top of Google, only for them to disappear a few weeks later when Google catches up with them, with the same process repeated again. Hopefully Google will get better at combating this. SEOmoz has a tool for checking SERP stability for a particular keyword, though I'm not sure if it is public?
The [it services] one is crazy. I even get the same problem if I search [it helpdesk services] and [it helpdesk] - though not all are universities. Something to point out to Google I think!
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
-
Descriptive domain vs business name domain
I originally set up my domain as "overlandparkphotographer.com" and then have my "jpshots.com" pointing to it. What I recently discovered is that even though the pages of my I set Yost SEO Title to be "JPShots Senior Pictures | Wedding Photographer" When you search "overland park photographer" the snippet tile is just "overland park photographer" which sounds super sketchy. I don't know if this is something to do with yost, or if my sneaky Domain isn't worth much, and I should simply use my regular jpshots.com domain as the primary. I know it works like a charm with yahoo, but I'm not sure how much the domain name factors google these days.
Algorithm Updates | | JPRichardson0 -
Ranking drop after sub domain to sub directory migration. Usual?
Hi all, We had our help articles on sub-domain help.website.com. Then we moved it to sub directory website.com/help/. We expected ranking improvement of website.com as there is a wide saying of benefiting from sub domain to sub directory migration. We have noticed that ranking improvement of new sub directory pages (website.com/help/) but not for any main website pages (website.com). I presume that link juice from main website has benefited new sub directory pages but main website lost ranking due to the page rank dilution. Do you agree? Any ideas? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Fresh content..how important to SERP position?
I've heard that fresh content helps boost your position in the serps. If i wrote all new unique content on some of my pages that havent been changed in several years, would i see a boost in the rank? If so, how many positions?
Algorithm Updates | | Ron100 -
Organic SERP CTRs and Universal Search
We have a keyword that we show up in the #1 position for organically. However that number one position is a Maps blended search result and we are the first listing with link, address and phone number. This is a high volume keyword but we receive little traffic from it. Looking in Web Master Tools this is corroborated in showing that for this keyword our average position is 1.7, high volume of impressions but click through rate is 0.04%! Is it possible that people scroll past the first result when it is a Maps blended search result to go to the first "true" organic listing? Has anyone else seen this? Is there anything a website owner can do in this situation to increase CTR for your listing?
Algorithm Updates | | IrvCo_Interactive0 -
Redesign, new content, new domain and 301 redirects (penalty?)
We merged our old webshops into one big project. After a few days we received our rankings back and traffic was coming in. Then suddenly we lost almost all rankings overnight. We did not use any wrong seo techniques and have unique content, written by our own writers. Is this a penalty or do we have to wait longer?
Algorithm Updates | | snorkel0 -
Google has indexed a lot of test pages/junk from the development days.
With hind site I understand that this could have been avoided if robots.txt was configured properly. My website is www.clearvisas.com, and is indexed with both the www subdomain and with out. When I run site:clearvisas.com in Google I get 1,330 - All junk from the development days. But when I run site:www.clearvisas.com in Google I get 66 - these results all post development and more in line with what I wanted to be indexed. Will 1,330 junk pages hurt my seo? Is it possible to de-index them and should I? If the answer is yes to any of the questions how should I proceed? Kind regards, Fuad
Algorithm Updates | | Fuad_YK0 -
If we are getting clicks from a local one box as a citation in the serps's would we see this as the referrer in GA?
If we are getting clicks from a local one box as a citation in the serps's
Algorithm Updates | | Mediative
would we see this as the referrer in GA?0 -
If Google turns down the weight of keywords in domains then what will they be turning up?
Per Matt Cutts video "We will be turning that keyword in domain down." http://youtu.be/rAWFv43qubI So what will they be turning up?
Algorithm Updates | | Thos0030