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Feb 2017 G Algo Update

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  • Not my quote but one that stuck with me:

    "If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold."

    Adsense will be the same I would think.

    Would one way to test the theory be to take a low traffic, semi dormant site and stick their GA code onto a high traffic site and measure the effect? If GA has no effect on a site you would see no change.
  • redraysredrays Las Vegas
    Apparently there was an update yesterday related to link quality: http://searchengineland.com/new-unconfirmed-google-fred-update-shakes-seo-world-270898

    Looks like the consensus is now that the early February update that @viking noticed was targeting content quality.
  • shaunshaun https://www.youtube.com/ShaunMarrs
    I read most of the thread over on BHW about it last night and there are multiple people reporting mass deindexing of Public blog networks they use and a few reporting private blog networks being deindexed.
  • @redrays Thanks for that. Guess it's time to up my content game then and push spun articles out to a tier 3. On my side, my traffic came back, ranking are meh, some kw's are still MIA, and some came back nicely. More anecdotal observation, the ones that came back nicely were 'older' kw's and the mia ones are 'newer' ones. Not sure what that may mean...older ones have more mass in link profiles, are more aged, may have better content. Not sure.

    @shaun yep. I heard same things. my pbn's are 100% without footprint so I would not call them a network. The only commonality is me, the owner. Separate everything else. I just find it hard to believe that G would broadly penalize/de-index massive amounts of the internet, even the stuff that is aggregated and obviously manipulated. Just from a mathematical probability perspective some of that stuff is legit web content, and every single website has less than perfection in its link profile.

    I will share this one. I have a site. About 7 years old url. I wrote 30+ articles myself. About 2 years ago I did an SER tier 1, high quality, about 500 article links. That is it for seo. The main kw I track is a 'business' related keyword. About 1M serp. The site has been #1 for years. It ranks ahead of huge corporates and well-known media companies. I literally do nothing to it.Just watch it. As an experiment, once a month I write an article about something business-related with a KW in mind. Then I sit back and watch. Within 48 hours, that webpage/kw is ranking in top 4 pages. Every time. I have no clue what this data is telling me and I am not going to experiment on the site as I am not monetizing it yet and don't want to screw it up. Here is an interesting nugget, there are zero outbound links. It is an end-of-the-line site. Is this what G likes to see? Does that indicate it is a legit content expert site in their eyes? A site with no overt agenda and with 100% original content. Don't know. It is also self-hosted and a WP template. 

    IMO at the end of the day, I think the future for seo is doing exactly that. Whether one site and many. Rather than trying to engineer, or reverse-engineer, what one think's G would like to see, maybe it makes sense to just get on with building out original content sites where one doesn't have to stress out non-stop about algo changes. Ultimately that has been what G has been saying all this time. Original content. And that is what we have been trying to replicate with software like KM. The issue then becomes, as I have said on other threads, an arms-race. We can never ever win a content war against the Wall Street Journal by self-writing content. The game is rigged against us. 

    Finally, on the future, I am transitioning more over to social media. Not for seo. As I just said, my seo will evolve into original content. But rather for traffic generation. Consumer engagement is still a very big thing for building a business. As @redrays has been kind enough to nudge me to IG, I have managed to build my ms presence there to about 10,000 followers already. I think the 'seo' benefit from that is that G sees the activity through watching chrome data. But that is secondary to getting real traffic and converting it. And guess what, there is no algo issues from driving social media traffic. Anything goes.

    Sorry for the long post, I just polished off my morning coffee and am a bit wired. Times are changing and we need to as well. Good luck all.

  • redraysredrays Las Vegas
    @shaun - I think it's either that or more aggressive anchor text filters. Still trying to work everything out.

    @viking - Interesting story on that site. I've also had quite a bit of success doing in depth, original content, but I share your concerns about the arms race. Once someone with more authority takes notice of your niche, it's probably just a matter of time before you're toast.

    Those are pretty awesome IG results. Have you just been doing follow/unfollow?
  • edited March 2017
    Just checked the same for me over the previous month. Hope it won't chnange in future .
  • Looks like another algo rollout hit yesterday. definitely targeted at 2.0's. i am seeing some serious downward movement on some of my 2.0 linked test sites. Looks like G reads through these forums for targeting ideas...
    and they are getting more aggressive on frequency of changes. 

    @redrays thx. used seo tactics. follow/unfollow with a few of my accounts, use those to cross promote to ms presence, time of day works too. big time. 5:00pm est weds + fri for some reason. money time for me. also did a few giveaways, who doesn't like free stuff...that bumped it pretty good. not really monetizing yet, just growing the audience. struggling a bit with engagement but will sort it out.
  • edited March 2017
    Yep 3 amber strikes in a row on algoroo. I seem alright at the moment nothing happened to me apart from gains so far.

    Also for mobile 9th & 11th amber strikes, didn't realize much happened from 1st - 8th Feb on mobile.
  • @Anth20 thanks for that data. Yep. This update is a major one zero'd in on 2.0's. I confirm on my end it is still ongoing.
  • shaunshaun https://www.youtube.com/ShaunMarrs
    image

    This site was what I was using to test a PBN concept. It has no web 2.0s and has been hit.

    @Viking whats making you think it is targeting web 2.0s?
  • @shaun what were you doing with that site?

    I'm seeing ranking drops but traffic and conversion increases (so I'm not bothered but clients are weirdly worried...makes no sense) and this is across a few ecommerce sites.
  • @shaun let me introduce you to 'Fred'....http://searchengineland.com/new-unconfirmed-google-fred-update-shakes-seo-world-270898

    From what I am seeing, this is aimed square at spam/2.0's/content/whatever you want to call it. I have a few 2.0 test projects where I was rather conservative, and they have been spanked pretty harshly. 

    I am surprised at your PBN site though. That actually has me worried as I use my PBN as the last line of defense supporting my MSites. I haven't had any negative movement on my PBN related stuff, but now will brace myself. March 9th links up exactly to the Fred rollout FYI. 
  • redraysredrays Las Vegas
    @viking - have you thought about doing outreach to diversify and 'legitimize' your link profile a bit? It sounds like you operate a pretty legit business, so I doubt it would be that hard for you to do.
  • @redrays :-) I do that. But, I am up against b-r-u-t-a-l competition. Global corporates and my own customers who are major chains and e-com monsters. The easiest KW competition I have is over a 1M serp. The only way I compete for direct-to-consumer business is by leveraging tools like SER. I know there is a body of evidence that suggests deep, rich, content and legit white hat links are the best practice. But in reality, it just isn't so in my vertical. Someday when I make it to LV we'll have a chat about it all. I am sure you have way more ideas about how to do this than I do and I will be all ears. Think of us back in NYC tomorrow when we are hit with 24 inches of snow. Enjoy the 90 degree weather!
  • shaunshaun https://www.youtube.com/ShaunMarrs
    @judderman it was just sitting, had been for a few weeks without me changing anything. I have seen a few people on the main BHW thread about this saying their PBN sites were hit too.

    The domains are from a totally different niche though. I saw some Google employee comment about how they were thinking of turning off the link juice if the domain niche changed or something but I never really looked into it as PBNs aint my thing.

    @viking I had a read of that Fred page and the SEO round table one it links to and it just links to the BHW thread lol. They seem to just be reacting to what the forums are saying, they havent shared any data from there own sites. Curious if they even have any tbh.
  • redraysredrays Las Vegas
    @viking - yeah, you pretty much have to get creative to compete in big, profitable niches without huge piles of cash. That said, there's quite a bit of room between what you're doing now and pure legit white hat links, but you're right that's better kept off a public forum :)

    And if it makes you feel better it's only about 85 here :P
  • @shaun yep. not much in the way of evidence in that post. just refers to people like me who are squawking about. I am spread out across a number of niches/verticals so tend to see the ripples a little in advance. I think most people are scrambling right now to sort out exactly what the update was all about. 


    @redrays it doesn't :-)

  • One of my sites was hit severely. It was a PMD (bestkeyword,com). I'm thinking my anchor text was the cause. I had around 30% branded anchors (Best Keyword) and around 40% naked url (which includes the keyword). 

    I've begun to deoptimize my internal anchors, take the main page to around 1% KW density, and build links to deoptimize the anchors of incoming links. I've already seen an improvement. I went from #6 to #70 and now up to #20. The keyword got 1 million searches in January and the site was doing $400-$800 per day in sales. 

    I'm going to fire up GSA and build some niche relevant blog comments in addition to the web 2.0s. I don't think this is specifically targeting web 2.0s as I use them as part of my core strategy and none of my other sites tanked. 

    I'm thinking:

    Internal Anchors
    KW Density
    Incoming Link Anchors
    PMD/EMD related??

    I use Piwik but I did install GA back in Dec. because I want to sell the site and thought more people would trust GA. Bounce rate is low (~30%). Social presence is solid. It's a real business, not a throwaway site. 

    That's my input in case it helps.
  • redraysredrays Las Vegas
    @arc323 - of course it helps, thank you for sharing :)

    I had a site that was hit, and I agree with you that something changed with anchor text filters. I have another site that used a lot of the same link sources that was not hit, and I have been feeding that site naked url links from SER for over a month now. I wouldn't recommend you do exactly what I'm doing since mine is a throwaway site, but I bet you'll do well continuing to deoptimize the anchors.
  • @arc323 I have a very similar site PMD that has always been 'stuck' in the #20s for the biggest keywords I've ever gone for. As a result I only get 60 visitors a month from some longtails. My thoughts are this exactly, over-optimised. It didn't get hit in the updates, just stagnated. Think it's accidentally optimised for the same keyword over a few pages, simply as it's too difficult not to mention the main keyword on every page of the site.

    However, as you've done something during the update time, when many people sit and wait, you can't be 100% sure your site wasn't going to bounce back to #20 if you hadn't done anything as that's the usual route that G takes, it throws sites out, thinks about it and brings them back. Sorry, playing devil's advocate but speaking my mind. Please update us over the next week or so with results though, keen to hear.
  • Funny you mention this, on the day these updates started I went from #1 > #42.

    As I constantly have GSA running, I noticed it back to #1.
    It's been back and forth for days now, looking like it's gonna stay #42+

    So now, for this niche and some others in similar situations, I've checked and have kinda high main anchor %

    So now I've took the main keyword out of ser, put in more related ones to give a lot of diversification.

    Will see how it goes. Makes a lot of sense to why it's bouncing after being #1 for weeks/months.
  • shaunshaun https://www.youtube.com/ShaunMarrs

    Just stripped all affiliate links from my site that has been hit. I will check back in if anything changes.
  • @Judderman - Yeah, I did move a bit fast. I just can't think of any reason for the site to come back. Although, you very well might be correct and maybe I should I have waited.



  • spunko2010spunko2010 Isle of Man
    The answer is, as always, don't bother building a "brand" unless you have deep deep pockets. Just 301 it and take a few days off, sit in the garden and do some gardening. Then come back to the computer and your rankings will be where they were a week ago.

    That, and mix up your links. People over-relying on PBNs cannot expect to get away scot-free forever.
  • @arc323 thanks for the share. please post an update as you work through your situation. I have been off-line for 48 hours thanks to getting slammed with a snow storm. On my side, I found this morning a kw that i have not seo'd, that was a top ten kw for two years now just disappeared. I didn't seo it because I actually make the product and it has a rather unique name, so I am the source for the content. I will take the time this a.m. to write fresh content and let it sit for a while to see if it re-appears. This seemed to work a few weeks back when G dropped the Feb. update that started this thread. 

    Overall, still seems like downward pressure is being applied by G, and I haven't seen clear evidence of what is causing it.


  • donchinodonchino https://pbn.solutions
    Good advice @spunko2010 lol.
    I've been busy for a week and just saw the topic about last update.. overall i've seen traffic increase across sites, only a few decrease a bit. I'm not worried about my Pbn as it's too good to call a network, but should run index check for paid links...
    I'm off to vacation to get out of the office.. think dust will settle by the time i get back
  • redraysredrays Las Vegas
    @spunko2010 could not agree more. Go really big or go as cheap as you can get away with. Going in the middle is a sucker bet.
  • @spunko2010 I got a good 9 months from relying on PBNs only :)

    @viking that just sounds nuts man, Google needs to undo their stupidity. I have a friend that manufacturers stuff and will see if any of his keywords have been hit.
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