Over the last week, Google has been testing
what appear to be some significant algorithm changes, which have
cause significant changes in ranking for a variety of sites.
There are some facts and opinion below, but
first I want to make sure you have some tangible actions.
Check to see if you’re affected, and by how
much. Do a quick search
on Google for your brand name, domain name and for any high-volume head terms.
If you find that you are not ranking on the first page for your brand name, or
if other terms have significantly slipped in rankings, then it’s a likely sign
that you’re suffering. Looking at your analytics will give you more insight
into how your total organic traffic is looking. This will also help you find
out when your site first suffered. Don’t panic, and
don’t make any sudden movements. It might feel like the sky is falling
around you right now – particularly if your traffic for a particularly valuable
term has just slumped to zero – but an immediate response isn’t likely to be
helpful. Also, any changes you’ve made to your site in the last few days / week
are unlikely to be the cause of your particular issue; don’t worry too much
about them or try to ‘undo’ things. As discussed below, there’s a chance that
Google has been overzealous and made mistakes here; if this is the case, then
we would expect to see some of the impact reversed in the coming days.
Be prepared to clean up your SEO. If you company has benefited from
‘shady’ SEO techniques, then this is a perfect time to persuade people internally
that a more honest approach will be better for the future. Now would be a good
time to put the brakes on any low-quality link building practices, and to start
cleaning up any poor-quality techniques you’ve been using, either on-site or
off-site.
A Short Timeline /
Background
During March and April, Google has been
sending out a significant number of messages to webmasters (via Webmaster
Central) – many were ‘Unnatural Link Warnings’, telling the site owners that
Google recognized ‘artificial or unnatural links’ in their backlink profile.
Google also issued warnings to the SEO community about penalties for ‘over
optimization’, but with scant details on what factors they were assessing.
Patrick Altoft from Branded3 blogged about his experiences with
these warnings. One of his insights: “If you get this message in your
Webmaster Tools account then it is likely that the site will receive a penalty
within weeks”.
At the same time, Google has
been aggressively trying to penalize large link networks.
(SearchEngineLand covered this story in March) Sites that
relied on using these kinds of services for linkbuilding suffered from the drop
in link equity to their site.
On 18th April, Google tried rolling out an
update to recognize parked domains (and presumably reduce their rankings or
remove them from search.) Matt Cutts publicly announced that there was a
bug in this change, which mistakenly impacted some sites. However, it’s clear
that some sites are still suffering significantly lower rankings, indicating
that either this update’s issues haven’t been fully reverted, or that another
algorithm change has come into effect.
Examples
One SEO consultant that has been very public
about issues with his own site is Wil Reynolds fromSeerInteractive.
Searching on Google for [seer interactive] shows that their site
doesn’t rank until the bottom of page 3. (As of the morning of 19th April.)
Wil rightly points out that his site
has links from a variety of authoritative sources as well as strong
‘social’ signals, in the form of RSS subscribers and interactions on Youtube
and Google Plus.
Our Thoughts
These effect of these changes certainly looks
like it may have been an update targeting exact match domains (EMDs) that got
out of hand. If I launch a bunch of domains such as CheapCarLoansInSeattle.com
with thin content and a lead gen form, then Google is probably quite right in
trying not to give the site much credit. Buying EMDs is a pretty cynical
tactic, that’s definitely been used as a ‘quick and easy’ way into the top
results.
However, it’s impossible to characterize
something like ‘SeerInteractive.com’ as an exact match domain. The phrase was
completely unknown when the company launched; Wil & his team have spent
years building brand recognition, and they have driven search volume for the
term.
One theory is that Google is not
miscategorizing sites, but actually misunderstanding search
phrases. It seems like they might be making an incorrect assumption that
phrases such as ‘seer interactive’ are not navigational queries but
informational/transactional queries; this could then lead them to avoid ranking
EMDs for those terms.
There’s also a strong feeling (among SEOs
talking online as well as my colleagues at Distilled) that Google may
well admit a mistake here, and undo or dial-back the impact of some of the
recent changes. (There is precedence for this: in the days after the
Panda Update, some sites saw their rankings return to roughly their pre-Panda
positions.) It is with this possibility in mind that we made the recommendation
above to not panic. If you are confident that your site has
a clean link profile, and there’s nothing murky or egregious in your site’s SEO
history, then it might be best to lie-low and see what changes over the coming
days.
For sites that have used any questionable
tactics in the past – particularly if you have any ‘gray’ links in your profile
– now would be an appropriate time to take action on that. There’s good advice
about cleaning up your SEO in a post from Paddy Moogan (scroll down
to section 4) and a recent YouMoz post from Modesto Siotos gave
advice about checking assessing the risks of your backlink profile.
After doing the work to make your SEO
whiter-than-white, you should make sure you get credit for it. Submit a
reconsideration request to Google, with full details about the links you’ve
removed and other steps taken. Link to spreadsheets if necessary.
Sharing is Caring
The SEO industry has long benefited from
people being honest and transparent. If you find that your site has been
affected in the last couple of days, we’d encourage you to share this. At the
very least, it adds more data points to help us all figure out what is going
on. Better still, it’s an opportunity for people to take a closer look at what
might have happened in your specific case, and try to offer advice
that will help your site regain its rankings and traffic.
