Google change in late August?

[stellardan]

Have you guys been seeing major changes since late Aug? We made it through Panda with no issues whatsoever but since late August we're seeing some pretty big changes. Lots of links disappeared in the last month too. Been watching the links, doesn't seem to be too characteristic, but major changes on backlinks is the biggest thing I've seen so far.

What have you guys found?

[yesacpow]

I saw a few changes with some of my sites but it wasn't all across the board so it's hard to say. Was reading a few tech blogs the other day and they seem to be saying there was some additional post panda updates going on. Not sure what's up but once you are doing things the right way, there shouldn't be anything to worry about.

Great content and get good backlinks to your site!

[webapex]

There's the report by someone who was slapped down by Panda on Sep. 26 on Search Engine Watch
Yup, I Got Slapped By Google Panda - Search Engine Watch (#SEW)

I have heard it's a processing intensive filter that only let out of the barn every 4 or 5 weeks, each of these "updates" seen to hit new sites.


SEW also reported at the end of Aug. on the effect of the official Europe rollout of Panda with a winners and losers report for Switzerland, Italy & Spain.

http://searchenginewatch.com/article...nd-Italy-Spain

[stellardan]

Thanks for the links. I'll check those out. That is what was confusing to us a bit, we do clean SEO, most of our clients have bee doing great, we rode all the way through the Panda garbage without seeing any issues. but about a handful of our sites have gotten hit, not hard but enough that we're looking into it just in the last few weeks. the main thing I'm noticing is that a lot of the back links have disappeared. but again, in reviewing a ton of sites in the last month or so, I still see lots of competitor sites with garbage forum posts back links and they are still sticking and track able. Pretty weird update.

[gtownfunk]

From the different forums I read, this latest update seems to target duplicate, unoriginal content. A few people who have been hit have recovered already, and I noticed one of my domains floated to the top. So, they're definitely changing things around. It's probably impossible to predict where things be when the dust finally settles.

gtownfunk

[RevSEO]

There's been several "smaller" updates over the course of the past several months, with the latest larger one being rolled out this past week.

I'm still gathering data and will be releasing a public form for people to chime in that were affected and attempt to piece together probable reasons as to how/why they were affected.

From my initial research it looks like content and backlink sources are a large indicator.

[InternetMarketingIQ]

Google tweaks DAILY. As many as 400-500 times per year.

My sites are all content rich and about a decade old so I usually don't get filtered. However some of my smaller sites which are designed more or less around affiliate program content and adsense did get caught up about Mid August.

I also had a site which was consistently pulling $1 per click drop to the 25 cent range and not recover. And this is in a niche that is very well saturated with Advertisers. And the site traffic is NOT down and the click through rate is consistent.

I can believe that Advertisers are spending less for sure, but NOT 75% less.

Google is not pulling the Revenue like they used to... sure they still make Billions but what is to keep them from Shaving a bit on smaller publishers who are already helpless to do anything about it?

[oxfordmoron]

I have hundreds of adsense sites that I use google alert rss feeds as sole content. I built all these sites within a 60 day time frame. Some have identical rss feed. Is this something google does not like? (exact keyword feeds are same as name and title of site in most.)

[stellardan]

From what I recall back in Feb, that is one of the things Google wanted to get rid of. There were just a ton of guys I guess just RSS Feeding different sites for content and they said it was muddying up the filed.

how about with Links? Anyone notice what links are disappearing and why? Apparently Page Rank has nothing to do with it as I still see PR0 sites with no updating content still holding links - obviously very inactive sites. Weird.

[stellardan]

Certainly keep me in the loop on the report, I'm interested.

[gtk29]

I think they are after the duplicate sites which scrape content from everywhere else.

[Greenfatman]

Yes something changed...from last week my revenue has been droped, some links are gone too.

[positivethinking]

Google Keep changing. I've seen up and down for a while. The change term looks like every one or two months.

[Targeted Traffic]

Can't really be surprised guys, as mentioned they do about 500 changes in a year...

[vince04]

I also noticed it.. Some of my rankings drop and totally gone in Google. So still observing and figuring what needs to be implemented.

[philiptrav]

I have noticed that my adsense earnings has dropped heaps in the last 2-3 weeks over a variety of websites.

[MrCrawford]

We got hit in the Adsense part of our business pretty hard with some of our newer sites.

All of these sites had unique and original content. None of that rss feed, duplicate content, scraped content, spinned articles stuff.

Basically, I think their algorithm has determined that if a site is a certain age that it should have a certain number of links pointing to it that are more in line with the average number of links for similar site that same age.

If it doesn't look natural, I think their algorithm is updated to pick up on that and then discount those links to the sites, which then significantly impacts the rankings.

We had one site that had just hit nearly $200 a day within like 4 months get hit like this and the only thing we have been able to determine is that we built links faster than what Google's algorithm deems as "natural."

They did not de-index our sites. They just significantly reduced our rankings all of a sudden for some reason.

It's a bummer in any case, but we try not to focus on having too much of a Google-centric business because it's just not a smart thing to do if you plan to make a living online.

[stellardan]

You're seeing similar things to what I'm seeing. That was the theory I've been testing out too. It seems to have somethings to do with age and somehow they've incorporated Links into this age algorithm. the usual things we test out after each major change just aren't adding up on this one. At first I thought they finally got rid of comment backlinks as those are pretty spammy, but only some of them were gone, other websites still had a ton of them showing up, then in running and comparing backlinks reports, I saw that some websites with like no backlinks were outranking some with thousands, which is funny. We also checkout out frequently updated content as a factor, but we'd reviewed websites that haven't updated content in years on certain pages and they still rank #1 for their searches, no changes in any of the Panda updates at all. One of them I recall had a ton of their backlinks disappear but the rankings didn't move a bit, and lots of them were gone, so that was interesting too.

I've also watched my PageRank go from 2 to 4, back down to to 2, and then up to 3 all in the course of about 5 weeks. That's odd.

[stellardan]

There is a Panda update webinar tonight by Leslie Rohde - he's a sharp dude. Should be enlightening. I can't post the link yet as I'm too new to this forum, but you guys can Google it, it starts @ 9pm tonight. I've followed him and his partner for a few months, I like what they have to say. And I have no vested interests in their company (although I'd love to hire him!)