I don't think this update is about Anchor Text percentages. We've seen sites with higher than normal anchor % be untouched, while sites with very diversified anchor % become hit.
I think it all boils down to link sources. Many of us are being hit, and we're all obviously using vary similar link sources to rank our sites.... hmmmmmm
IMO - I think blog comments, guestbooks, and image galleries and any other pages with 100's of OBLs to unrelated sites has been devalued. I still see people ranking with contextual link spam, but the ones that threw the kitchen sink at their sites, have been hit the most.
Almost everyone got hit, its not only GSA users, most of the white hat sites got hit also and droped in ranks hard and are replaced with shitty sites that do not offer any content at all... I think the shuffle button is still on so its still to early to jump to any conclusions.
All my penalised sites (which was only 6 out of 200+ anyway) are slowly climbing back up the rankings without me doing anything, so Mr. Cutts really needs to try harder.
Mr Cutts has no involvement with the algorithms or filters etc anyway. He's just the fall guy, the public face. Being paid to browse black hat forums and post videos, nice work if you can get it.
My own personal opinion is that as I didn't get hit much, they have shot themselves in the foot as I'm spamming harder than ever. It hasn't been fully applied yet I assume and anyway it is too early to guess, any guessing is clutching at straws.
@gooner 200 sites? That must be a headache Do you have individual stats accounts for them all? How do you check the ranking drops for all of them. I have less than 10 and hate checking them all.
@spunko2010 there is no need to check every kw. Check your profits and download visitors statistics once in week or month. That will give you spare time to create some new sites.
@spunko2010 - Yea around 200, although some are client sites. It is a headache but i've streamlined every part of the process from kw research, site building, seo and tracking to keep it all to a minimum.
It was more of a headache when i was outsourcing the SEO, but SER has saved me from that nightmare
I track rankings with serpfox, i don't really bother with analytics or anything else unless clients want it. As @rayban said i focus on the profits and rankings only.
they have shot themselves in the foot as I'm spamming harder than ever
Too right - I'd hazard a guess that a fair few people using BH methods today are would-be WHers of old who thought they were safe yet still got burned by Penguin. I'd far rather be building long term, in depth, well researched sites but having lost my investment of time and money multiple times due to Google's over zealous policing I'm afraid I have no qualms about breaking the rules now.
@gooner thanks will check it out. I'm also of the 'focus on profits rather than rankings' school of thought. As I've said in my case at least some convert better in position 2-3 than position 1 anyway. Depends on the competition, with Google's last few updates they've given priority to crappy sites. I would never visit them as I know they are irrelevant - I think my customers feel the same.
@spunko2010 - You're welcome, yes i think you are right with regards to sites sometimes converting better in positions 2 or 3.
As i got more and more sites, i had less and less time to spend analysing or implementing certain SEO principles and from that i realised that less is more in most cases. So i just try and focus on the most important things and the rest takes care of itself.
The search quality seems REALLY bad now on Google, I'm considering a switch to Bing. Anyone else found this?
Example: I am looking for land to buy in the UK, a small plot. Wanted to get some opinions etc on a popular Forum caled Moneysavingexpert about this.... After googling 'moneysavingexpert "land for sale" ' this brings up...
A Wikipedia article for a musician... The homepage of a national newspaper... The homepage of a bank... An Italian estate agent... Two results for 'Zillow.com' which is US only.. And a California Bank...
If this gets any worse people will leave in droves surely. I have to use 'exact match' quotes otherwise it's just so useless, but even with these it's hardly any better.
I switched to duckduckgo.com long ago. I can't stand how Big G. is trying to be a big player in all fields. They are so much into making money (logical as it's controlled by the usual ppl there to make money) from everything that they forget about there main business...a good search engine.
namdas exactly. I would not be here if WH was viable. I've been in web stuff since literally the beginning - I remember when Mosaic came out. "Just build great websites and we will take care of the rest" tried it, now I use SER and let them take care of the rest.
One of the biggest fallacies about White Hat has maybe finally been blown open. Most of us know from first hand experience. @Sven I will give DDG a shot thanks
Totally agree with you @Sven . Just get a good damn search engine first. I also can't stand how it now a days favors GPlus. It literally tries to throw shit on FB and Twitter's face lol.
i am not seeing any affiliate or niche sites ranking in top 10 off google..All i see is wikipedia, webmd, some forums etc.. I dont see any site that are optimized for a particular kw ranking. Everything is totally messed up.. Whats the way forward now ?
When these updates happen the first page or two of Google goes crazy and has many weird results, then after a week or two the sites you expect to see on page one will return.
Some of my sites that got penalized are slowly rising again - Must be the same for thousands of other optimized sites too.
Now that the dust is beginning to settle I'm noticing something weird. This may not have any affect on the rest of you guys who are doing SEO for affiliate marketing but for me (who does website design and a bit of SEO on the side for local businesses) I noticed something kinda crazy.
Prior to the update I was ranking for long tail phrases like "santa cruz website designers" or "new york graphic designer" ***not those cities ****
After the update I'm still ranking locally but all the city identifiers are gone. I'm noticing traffic and rankings on "website designers" and "graphic designer" and even the word "designers" is my site on the front page for organic search results. I've tried from other IP's around this area and its the same. I tried from my VPS in the UK and when I type in website designer it pulls up local search results over there. When I type in "CITYXXXX Website Designer" I'm still at the back of the bus.
Originally I thought I'd just have to bite the bullet and change my domain and company name. But in light of this should I keep the domain name? Should I start fresh still? Why do you think I should or shouldnt? Is it possible to get rankings back on those other long tails with the city identifiers?
I think it still has a bit more to do before everything settles down. The results are starting to look a bit more normal but not anywhere to where i'm sure google would like it to be. I'm still seeing datacenter(s) showing different results at very weird times. I would give it one more week before you start to explore those options.
"2) The second method (which I use because I have seen google's spider ignore blocks) is to take down all content, stick in something different (crap, spin, videos, etc.) and spam like crazy. Get google there basically to see the new stuff. The google cache takes about 2 weeks to clear and start showing new content. Then you start up your new website with the old content."
Would you then turn the "old" money site into a Tier 1? And start linking the new content to the new money site - or just make it completely worthless?
Secondly, the Tier 1 links pointing to the "old" money site; would you change these (if you have access of course) to point to the new site you are setting up?
@Enano - No, I would never want that site associated with my new site (like as a T1) because then all of its links will flow to the new site, and it would probably tank the new site. So I never use it for a new property. However, a few times now I have kept the old site because it ranks well in Bing and gets traffic. In those cases, I keep the same site structure, and I put up some new content, and I ontinue building links to it to keep it ranking in Bing.
On the second question, no. The whole reason my site got hurt were because of those links. So I wouldn't want to point those same links to the new site. It just doesn't make sense.
@enano- Agree totally with what @ron says in his above post.
However, there may be situations where you could use the old site to power up the new site, either by using it to link to the new site with a nice exact match anchor text, or by 301ing it across and spamming the hell out of it, but just be aware that you will only rank for a shorter time if you do this (maybe 1 month, give or take?), so I guess the approach would depend on the niche.
@saintdilbert - Yea @hunar is right, wait a little longer. I do local SEO too for UK, US and AUS clients mainly and i agree some markets are showing weird results, but on the other hand some page one results are almost identical to before... so hang in there mate and see what happens.
Would it make sense to collect some basic data and try to correlate why some sites got hit, and some didn't? For example, did certain types of links, PRs, Anchor %, Content Sources, Web 2.0s, etc. trigger it?
If anyone is interested, I'd be willing to do it off-line. It's not something we would want to publish. I'd put together a spreadsheet and get it back to all involved (with conclusions) in a couple of days. I'm really good with crunching numbers in excel. We wouldn't be collecting deep, dark secrets, just basic settings on your campaigns. I won't ask for URLs, KWs, or anything that would identify your sites. If we could get a decent amount of responses, it could really help all of us going forward. I will only distribute findings to those that participate.
If you are interested, PM me, and I will get it organized. If you are concerned about me working for the enemy, I can give you my personal info offline.
If you think this is a bad idea, feel free to flame me.
One thing that i've noticed, of the sites that got hit, those with around 10-20 pages of content seem to be climbing again, for them it was almost like a bounce in some cases. One kw went from 120-ish to 3 overnight!
Those thinner sites, 5 pages or less are not showing anything like that kind of recovery.
So @Satans_Apprentice, if you go ahead with the study i would suggest you include number of site pages and take into account recovery rate of sites.
Comments
I think it all boils down to link sources. Many of us are being hit, and we're all obviously using vary similar link sources to rank our sites.... hmmmmmm
IMO - I think blog comments, guestbooks, and image galleries and any other pages with 100's of OBLs to unrelated sites has been devalued. I still see people ranking with contextual link spam, but the ones that threw the kitchen sink at their sites, have been hit the most.
My own personal opinion is that as I didn't get hit much, they have shot themselves in the foot as I'm spamming harder than ever. It hasn't been fully applied yet I assume and anyway it is too early to guess, any guessing is clutching at straws.
@gooner 200 sites? That must be a headache
It was more of a headache when i was outsourcing the SEO, but SER has saved me from that nightmare
I track rankings with serpfox, i don't really bother with analytics or anything else unless clients want it. As @rayban said i focus on the profits and rankings only.
I'd far rather be building long term, in depth, well researched sites but having lost my investment of time and money multiple times due to Google's over zealous policing I'm afraid I have no qualms about breaking the rules now.
As i got more and more sites, i had less and less time to spend analysing or implementing certain SEO principles and from that i realised that less is more in most cases. So i just try and focus on the most important things and the rest takes care of itself.
Example: I am looking for land to buy in the UK, a small plot. Wanted to get some opinions etc on a popular Forum caled Moneysavingexpert about this.... After googling 'moneysavingexpert "land for sale" ' this brings up...
A Wikipedia article for a musician...
The homepage of a national newspaper...
The homepage of a bank...
An Italian estate agent...
Two results for 'Zillow.com' which is US only..
And a California Bank...
If this gets any worse people will leave in droves surely. I have to use 'exact match' quotes otherwise it's just so useless, but even with these it's hardly any better.
When these updates happen the first page or two of Google goes crazy and has many weird results, then after a week or two the sites you expect to see on page one will return.
Some of my sites that got penalized are slowly rising again - Must be the same for thousands of other optimized sites too.
@Ron after you have done what you posted here;
"2) The second method (which I use because I have seen google's spider ignore blocks) is to take down all content, stick in something different (crap, spin, videos, etc.) and spam like crazy. Get google there basically to see the new stuff. The google cache takes about 2 weeks to clear and start showing new content. Then you start up your new website with the old content."
Would you then turn the "old" money site into a Tier 1? And start linking the new content to the new money site - or just make it completely worthless?
Secondly, the Tier 1 links pointing to the "old" money site; would you change these (if you have access of course) to point to the new site you are setting up?
However, there may be situations where you could use the old site to power up the new site, either by using it to link to the new site with a nice exact match anchor text, or by 301ing it across and spamming the hell out of it, but just be aware that you will only rank for a shorter time if you do this (maybe 1 month, give or take?), so I guess the approach would depend on the niche.
Maybe run some tests and see what works for you?
Those thinner sites, 5 pages or less are not showing anything like that kind of recovery.
So @Satans_Apprentice, if you go ahead with the study i would suggest you include number of site pages and take into account recovery rate of sites.