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.
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
Does anybody have any idea how often Google reads the disavow file?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
Google Index Constantly Decreases Week over Week (for over 1 year now)
Hi, I recently started working with two products (one is community driven content), the other is editorial content, but I've seen a strange pattern in both of them. The Google Index constantly decreases week over week, for at least 1 year. Yes, the decrease increased 🙂 when the new Mobile version of Google came out, but it was still declining before that. Has it ever happened to you? How did you find out what was wrong? How did you solve it? What I want to do is take the sitemap and look for the urls in the index, to first determine which are the missing links. The problem though is that the sitemap is huge (6 M pages). Have you find out a solution on how to deal with such big index changes? Cheers, Andrei
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andreib0 -
Not ranking in Google - why???
This will be a bit long, so please bare with me. I have a client in the auto parts industry who wants to rank their homepage for 13 different keywords. We are ranked first page for all keywords in Yahoo! Mexico and Bing Mexico, but not ranking first page at all in Google Mexico. My client's competitor, however, is clearly outranking my client in Google. When comparing both pages, my client's, while not 100% optimized, looks better optimized than their competitor's. Looking at all metrics using Moz, SEMRush, ahrefs, etc... my client's site looks MUCH better on all fronts. I know ranking a single homepage for more than 10 keywords is a difficult task. Our competitor is however, ranking for them, so it's not impossible. The keywords are not even that competitive according to Moz's analysis. I decided to create an optimized page for each keyword to try to rank these pages, but still my client wants the homepage to rank (again, if the competitor is ranking, then it's possible to do this) and I am afraid these pages I created could result in keyword cannibalization ultimately affecting the homepage's possibility to rank. My client had a previous SEO agency working for them and basically all they did was create fake blogs and have lots of keyword rich links directed to the site's homepage. I got the complete link profile from several tools and submitted a disavow requests for as many fishy links I could find, but that hasn't shown any results so far. Note: when looking at the competitor link profile, they have basically just a few links and no external links of real value whatsoever. My client is obviously very frustrated, and so am I. In my SEO experience, it shouldn't be such a difficult task to accomplish, however nothing seems to work even though everything seems to point that my client should rank higher. So now I'm running out of ideas regarding what to do with this site. Any insight you could provide would be SO helpful to me and my client. If needed I can provide my client's homepage URL and also their competitors homepage for you to review. i can also give you any extra information you need. Thanks a lot!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EduardoRuiz0 -
Google Fetch Issue
I'm having some problems with what google is fetching and what it isn't, and I'd like to know why. For example, google IS fetching a non-existent page but listing it as an error: http://www.gaport.com/carports but the actual url is http://www.gaport.com/carports.htm. Google is NOT able to fetch http://www.gaport.com/aluminum/storage-buildings-10x12.htm. It says the page doesn't exist (even though it does) and when I click on the not found link in Google fetch it adds %E@%80%8E to the url causing the problem. One theory we have is that this may be some sort of server/hosting problem, but that's only really because we can't figure out what we could have done to cause it. Any insights would be greatly appreciated. Thanks and Happy Holidays! Ruben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
My site rank is not consistent. Once it at first page , then for the next week it is not found in top 100 position. Again two/ three weeks later it ranked automatically without any work. Why this is happening?
Here's the following are available in my site: robot.txt file is included sitemap available Natural link building going on. in a week total 100 links we are creating. 30 social bookmarks, 30 directory submission, 20 blog comments, 20 forum links All the blog and forum links are from relevant sources. Please help me ..
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | coldfireinc0 -
Google Webmasters- Message ID CDO8151
Sorry if this question is asked before, but I dont know how to deal with latest issue in one of my website. I got this warning message today in GWT: The URL (URL) is no longer appearing in Google search results because our algorithms have selected (URL) instead. Please see this Help Center article for more information about this message. Message ID: CDO81511. Please include this ID in any messages you post in our Help forum. Sincerely, Google Search Quality Team
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eddieodriscoll0 -
Google Places Alternatives
Hello, I have been looking into Google places alternatives. Any suggestions? On a related note. I am based in the UK and looking to add a UK business to Bing Local but having read this thread ( - http://www.bing.com/community/maps/f/12264/t/653672.aspx -) I don't think it's possible. Anyone had any luck or experience? Cheers dj
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnW-UK0 -
Could Profanity Decrease Google Trust in a Website?
Could profanity such as swear words or cursing decrease the trust Google has in a website? For example, abusive comments... etc? I'm not talking about the SafeSearch filter, I'm talking about the overall trust of the website. Your thoughts and suggestions are greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter2640