Did Your SERPs Take A Nose Dive?

[jacksonlin]

I think some of my SERPs came back up again?

RANDOM!

[mpx305]

I noticed that some of my wordpress sites took a hit and other sites not using wordpress remained unaffected - I don't know what this means if anything...

[Mike Antoni]

I actually found an example of MayDay in action. I was doing some keyword research with a longtail keyword. I only got 5200 results for the broad search. I thought I had hit something special lol.

Then I did a search for the exact phrase and more than 1 million results came up. It's then I figured this must be part of Google's new algorithm.

I wrote a post about it on my blog with screenshots on the search and a few links to some good SEO guys talking about it all and what it could potentially mean.

If you want to read it, here's the link:

Death Of The Long Tail Keyword? Mayday Alert... | Mike Antoni's Blog

Mike Antoni

PS - I'm just being dramatic with the title. I don't really think that.

[searchnology]

Same here....rankings are mixed for keywords...up, down, unchanged....but much higher conversions from Google....almost double.

Originally Posted by dvduval

I'm not seeing much difference. If anything, it is starting to improve on conversions. I think before google was not as good at targeting long tail keywords, but now I seem to convert visitors better with the algorithm change.

[examineseo]

Originally Posted by mpx305

I noticed that some of my wordpress sites took a hit and other sites not using wordpress remained unaffected - I don't know what this means if anything...

Wow that's kind of scary! Anyone got any insight on this? Has the wordpress affected others?

[fortony]

My Wordpress sites when up, down or stayed the same. Do not think this change will affect WP for better or for worse.

[terryd]

Originally Posted by examineseo

Wow that's kind of scary! Anyone got any insight on this? Has the wordpress affected others?

It's not wordpress based, I've got wp sites that stayed the same while others plummeted.....no idea why!!

[dvduval]

Originally Posted by searchnology

Same here....rankings are mixed for keywords...up, down, unchanged....but much higher conversions from Google....almost double.

What I am finding also is the stickiness of pages matters more. I'm not sure how google could be getting the bounce rate algorithmically, but I almost feel like google is saying:

Show pages built for keywords that people bounce right off of and we will not rank those pages so well.

I can't say for sure, but I think this is their intention. How successful they are becoming at this remains to be seen, but I do believe they are working on it.

[misterkailo]

During the first week, my traffic was horrible, but then it improved again now.

[jacksonlin]

My SERPs have improved only a little.

Let's say if I lost 100 rankings, I got back 50.

My old sites (1.5 years old) have no problems though, just my newer sites (sites newer than 1.5 years old) have this issue.

[jacksonlin]

I'm sure this is not the Mayday update.

Read this:

Over Optimization June 2 Penalty - steps to reverse it

This happened to me exactly pretty much.

[Rolliesworld]

Originally Posted by jacksonlin

My SERPs have improved only a little.

Let's say if I lost 100 rankings, I got back 50.

My old sites (1.5 years old) have no problems though, just my newer sites (sites newer than 1.5 years old) have this issue.

Is this site one of the sites which got affected?
how-to-get-your-ex-back-today dot com/how-to-get-her-back dot php

I think the "May Day" update was aiming at long-tail keywords and in particular those sites with long-tail domain names...

Your site seems to have way too many of these kinds of links and pages (3 dozen to be exact), all aimed at promoting the same two affiliate products. Looks way too spammy and the content just a masquerade. The content is probably not the real problem, it could be those long-tail links, or the pure concentration of them.

No offence, but if I was looking for information on this topic, I'd be put off by your site to be honest.

[-Jericho-]

I'm having some odd changes. Up until about 2 weeks ago I was steadily going up in ranking for a site. I was at number 11 and then all of a sudden the main page is ranking somewhere over 600. I stopped looking after that. What's weird is I have some pages in the website that are just WPRobot posts from amazon ranking higher then the main page. How the hell is that ranking above my site when that page isn't even optimized for the keyword?

Very odd.

I also was ranking well for 4 other sites all keyword rich domains, all of which are a couple of months old and none have adsense. They have a 3-6 of pages of unique content and are wordpress blogs. Up until about a week ago 2 were on the first page and still moving up. 1 was on the second page and the other on the fourth page.

Now, 3 of them are between pages 12-15 and the fourth is on page 35. Nothing has changed. I've been building backlinks to them and next thing I know they just got crushed. I have anywhere from 150-200 links to each site, nothing crazy and yet I look at the first page and they have significantly less links and nothing spectacular about the links.

I don't get it.

[jeswarrior]

It's not a Google dance. This is permanent, caffeine. Google is not the same ole Google anymore. Also, what was number 1 organic listing before, now it is number 4 thanks to Google Adwords ads at the top. So even if you are number 1 on Google organic, amount of traffic will never be the same. Also Google lately is an irrelevant mess and very unstable!

It is time to end the Google love affair my lovely big G. fanboys. Google is very evil. It is time to give big G. the ole Microsoft treatment. I see Microsoft now as Mother Theresa compared to evil Google. God, I've never liked ole Billy so much! My site is getting more traffic from Bing than Google! Amazing!

[Rolliesworld]

Originally Posted by -Jericho-

I also was ranking well for 4 other sites all keyword rich domains, all of which are a couple of months old and none have adsense. [...] I've been building backlinks to them and next thing I know they just got crushed. I have anywhere from 150-200 links to each site, nothing crazy and yet I look at the first page and they have significantly less links and nothing spectacular about the links.

I don't get it.

Jericho, I can't speak of experience but 150-200 backlinks ... are these in relation to the sites you mention that you created a few months ago? If so, how did you create those backlinks? What type of sites are they coming from? Any authority sites, i.e. what page ranks do these sites have? I think if you created that many links for each sites within a couple of months, that could be a problem, especially with that type of mini/micro sites...Google's new (permanent) changes seems to crack down on those, Matt Cutts (Google) has made this pretty clear just a few weeks ago.

Originally Posted by jeswarrior

It's not a Google dance. This is permanent, caffeine. Google is not the same ole Google anymore. Also, what was number 1 organic listing before, now it is number 4 thanks to Google Adwords ads at the top. So even if you are number 1 on Google organic, amount of traffic will never be the same. Also Google lately is an irrelevant mess and very unstable!

It is time to end the Google love affair my lovely big G. fanboys. Google is very evil. It is time to give big G. the ole Microsoft treatment. I see Microsoft now as Mother Theresa compared to evil Google. God, I've never liked ole Billy so much! My site is getting more traffic from Bing than Google! Amazing!

Well, I agree with your first paragraph, as caffeine and may day will still take some time to settle. However, I would not call them evil. To be honest, look at it from an Internet user's experience point of view:
Someone types in a certain keyword combination and gets all these crap sites, just because they happen to be EMD's or near EMD's that more times than not do not provide a great deal of value. So they are trying to improve the chances that more quality sites with *relevant* content make it to page 1. It's great to be able to get to page 1, but from now on I would not count on staying there for long, at all just because you have managed to buy an EMD and done some backlinks. If you have a flimsy 5-10 page website, with weak content, potentially stuffed with keywords and plenty of affiliate links - then this is not exactly the best user experience and all that Google is doing is protect their asset, which is a high quality search engine predominantly.

You may have seen the interview with Matt Cutts (Google) from a few weeks ago - but if not than go to the second post in this thread, and after watching you may conclude that it's essential to:

-build quality sites
-provide valuable content
-show that you are an authority in your market
-provide regular updated content (a 5-10 page mini site will no longer work)
-don't stuff your site with too many affiliate links
-build your links naturally over time

[Tom Goodwin]

Originally Posted by Rolliesworld

Jericho, I can't speak of experience but 150-200 backlinks ... are these in relation to the sites you mention that you created a few months ago? If so, how did you create those backlinks? What type of sites are they coming from? Any authority sites, i.e. what page ranks do these sites have? I think if you created that many links for each sites within a couple of months, that could be a problem, especially with that type of mini/micro sites...Google's new (permanent) changes seems to crack down on those, Matt Cutts (Google) has made this pretty clear just a few weeks ago.

My experiences are in direct contradiction to this philosophy. For my new sites, I typically start them on a stead stream of profile backlinks and some automatic blog commenting. It's not uncommon for a new domain of mine (in tougher niches) to get maybe 2-5k links show up in Spyglass in the first month. Some of my microniche sites of course only need a few backlinks to rank well. Guess what happens? Every single time they rank well. If I'll feel like they need it, I throw in some higher page PR links (I own >200 PR3+ domains as I do a fair amount of high PR domain buying as well), and after a couple of months if I feel like they need the boost and they are already on the first page of google for their desired term.

That's what I was doing 12 months ago, and that's what I do today, with the same exact good results. In my experience, updated content is certainly not necessary to rank well, neither is "great" content. Heck, I can take a crappy 300 word article, ram it through the best spinner, and put up that crappy spun article on a 1 post WP blog and get it to rank well. Of course, I don't really recommend that, but a double-indented ranking of 13/14 for "backlinks" says that it can be done ;-).

Tom

[Rolliesworld]

@Tom Goodwin

Interesting. So you have not been affected by Google's algorithm changes in recent weeks, with any of your sites?

[Tom Goodwin]

Originally Posted by Rolliesworld

@Tom Goodwin

Interesting. So you have not been affected by Google's algorithm changes in recent weeks, with any of your sites?

Not one bit. I continue to pound Google and will continue to do so
I love keyword heavy domains, keyword heavy post titles all focused heavily on one targeted keyword, I only backlink to a given page using ONE anchor text (my experience has been than randomizing the anchor texts only decreases your overall rankings), etc.

My newest sites i'm continuing to backlink like I normally do and they continue to improve at crazy rates in Google (in fact, I would say at better rates than before...but of course the sample size is way to small to draw any conclusions from that).

I also check my sites religiously at least once a week using link-assistant's Rank Tracker so I log all of my site's rankings over time.

Tom

[mistyone]

Tom

Are your domains hosted on separate IP addresses?

Viv

[Tom Goodwin]

Originally Posted by mistyone

Tom

Are your domains hosted on separate IP addresses?

Viv

My "money" sites are hosted between 1 standard bluehost account and 1 standard hostgator reseller account. I personally don't feel IP diversity is necessary on a money site basis, assuming that one is not using these sites for backlinks and you aren't interlinking them too much.

I have a dedicated server with hostgator that at the moment only hosts backlinksforum.com, as I was maxing out the juice on the HG reseller account with the forum.


I do have have about 150 c-class unique IP addresses that I have through a combination of seo-host.com and seohosting.com, but those host my high PR domains that i use solely for backlinking power to my money sites.

[mistyone]

Well that blows that possible explanation then! I thought it may have been attributing to your sites not getting the collywobbles

Mine have been on an "all mother of a roller coaster ride" larger than any ride available on the planet

I am now just sitting waiting for things to settle and then I will try and work out what to do next

It's certainly been very interesting!

[fortony]

Originally Posted by marksmanruler

The last 48 hours have been absolutely disastrous. I have experience big drops in my type sites "XFactor. none of these places use the model Xfactor are all individually decorated with their own themes WP, all unique content. All whitehat.

I have not seen any unusual fluctuations in mine. I would not sweat 48 hours regardless. It is just too short of a time period.

[Dan B Rusu]

Originally Posted by marksmanruler

It also happened to me last week. I hope this is just dancing by the fact i backlinks. Not a huge amount of backlinks. The place was then page 2 on page 10, then at 3, 55, and so on, and it is yet? It can be fun for the whole week in advance for all of us try to see what happens.

Originally Posted by marksmanruler

The last 48 hours have been absolutely disastrous. I have experience big drops in my type sites "XFactor. none of these places use the model Xfactor are all individually decorated with their own themes WP, all unique content. All whitehat.

What kind of backlinks are you building and how are you varying your anchor text?

[paulgl]

Remember, for each site that drops, a new one takes its place.

So, the other people are jumping for joy...

When one person says my SERPs are dropping, a corresponding person is
saying my SERps are rising.

We can never say that everyone is experiencing drops. In fact, all things
being equal, half are dropping, half are rising.

Paul