"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.
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.
@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?
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.
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.
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.
@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!
@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.
@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.
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.
@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.
@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.
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.
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
@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.
I have been looking into this more today and I think its more of an onpage thing based around how aggressive your ads are or how much they effect user experience.
If that's so, i'm unlucky because before the update I literally just added adsense to my site in every post. fuck.
If that's right do you think removing the ads would help out?
I'm thinking they also hit backlinks, such a simple thing staring me in the face.
I believe that the amount of backlinks VS referring domains, if higher than X amount then it's more than likely spam.
Like 100 backlinks from 8 domains.
One of my niches is still #3 it has 500+ backlinks from nearly 300 domains.
Whereas in the same website, a niche had 2k backlinks from 200+ domains and another with 6k backlinks and 200+ domains and these got de-ranked page 4-5+.
I believe the best way for me to rank is building 1 backlink per domain and not reposting within it.
I make seperate projects for each niche on my website and those projects don't know where others have posted to. So then on my main domain it could be like 36k backlinks from 4k domains.
I'm gonna aim for more a long the lines of 1k backlinks from 800 domains or 900 domains, or even 1 for 1.
When I worked out how many times it meant I'd posted to a referring domain, it was 25 times. For 1 niche.
So the only thing that could do that across 200 domains is automation.
idk, any ideas?
For 6 days in a row, they could of got everything out the way update-wise. Like backlinks, ads, user experience, content, pbns and so on.
I have one adsense site that has stayed steady, its ad placement is less aggressive though. The one that was hit has an display box in the header as well as float left on the content so two ads are visible instantly the one that was not hit only has one floating left, no idea if that's relevant though.
That's not a bad idea actually, I will check my sites later.
There's very little chance that Google will penalize the use of Adsense ... We can see Google's policy at this level. No spam for the user experience as they say, on the other hand it does not bother them to put a max of ad on the search pages.
I hate their hypocrisy.
It just needs to stay in the same theme in my opinion and "think of the user" as they say.
The best way would be a link that does not seem to be one for google...
This is the site I mentioned a few days ago, it is in the finance industry, one of the most difficult. If I could rank for any of those keywords I'd be raking in stupid money. Here's some of the backlinks it's got:
I actually have Adsense on there too, so I'll remove that and see if it makes any difference. Sounds nuts but conversions take time and Adsense clicks are silly money so I thought why not. I kinda welcome G to this site as it's as WH as I'll ever be....well.....it's had some fun stuff going on but G would never ever be able to figure it out.
I think it's over-optimised so that says to me it's a refresh in this particular instance, but I reckon the PBN thing was just a scare-tactic or just P(ublic)BNs same way as they got ALN/BMR a few years back. Easy to find and devalue, which is fair enough. My own PBNs seem to have been found in an indexer, which I haven't done at least I don't think I have, so I'm worried about them. If I Disavow those domains of indexers to the root under a different site, do you think it would make any difference. I don't want to add any PBNs to GWMT but have a list of the offending indexer type domains.
My clients sites are all cool, some drops but traffic increases which doesn't make sense unless rank trackers can't keep up with whatever Google is doing - they're probably building their own rank tracker and stopping all others from working so they can have even more eyes on us....or roll it out in their new UI of Analytics which is coming soon.
Weird. All I'm doing right now is building LSI only keywords, removed the main keyword just to branch out on diversification of my anchors and percentages.
@Anth20 - at this point I'm only using naked urls and generic keywords on SER links that I build direct to a moneysite. I save the exact match keywords for links that I'm reasonably certain will index and won't be taken down. My thinking is that indexing issues + link loss makes it way too difficult to control your anchor text otherwise. Your strategy may very well work too, I just haven't tested it personally.
I'm still seeing ranking and metric drops but traffic is up. Using G as a normal searcher this morning was bringing up USA results, so it's still backwards and shuffling and not finished being fucked about with - as this happens all of the time during an update. Usually I get Australian results as there are cities with the same name in Oz as where I live.
@redrays thanks bro, that's my twitter btw. Randomly surfing this thread and saw you linked to it.
I have several sites that dropped from the March 8th update, and others that didn't drop and/or dropped and then recovered.
I really don't see any pattern. One of my sites that had the biggest drop had a lot of lower quality GSA links, however, the sites that remained also had GSA links.
I do think Google is going after PBNs (at least in the traditional sense) though, as I notice when analyzing some of my old convo / partial anchors that used to easily rank, no longer rank. This makes me think Google is de-valuing PBN domains instead of de-indexing them. Hence why there hasn't been a mass-deindexing in a very long time.
Admittedly I'm a bit stuck on where to go from here. This algorithm is by far the most random thing they've ever rolled out, so it's hard to say how we should execute in the future to avoid it.
I have some ideas but it requires me basically re-vamping much of my PBN, and setting up a lot of new, more relevant PBNs which will be insanely time-consuming but may be required to rank new sites in the current climate.
Does anyone else have any data into the March 8th P4 refresh / "Fred" update? I was analyzing some people that dropped from SERPwoo and surprisingly, some of them had excellent content, and high-quality backlinks from legitimate sites... this was most surprising to me, this algorithm is extremely random.
@seoaddict - my pleasure. You share good information, and your politics are solid too. Think I originally found you through Aaron Wall.
One of my burner sites got absolutely rocked by "Fred". Pretty confident it's due to anchor text. I've shared a bit of information in this thread, and if you want more detail drop me a pm. There may also have been a mini update at the end of February targeting mass page style sites, although those are more difficult to disentagle.
Yea I haven't seen anything positive on the site I removed the ads on. It was a potential quick fix to try but it doesnt seem to be panning out.
A friend has linked me to a of his sites that have had a fair few of their pages drop while some held steady so just going over what is different about the pages. Going to put more time into it this weekend. From what we have checked so far we have only seen a disparity in the number of T1s indexed.
For example, 1000 T1 SER links to two pages, the one that was hit has 100 of the links indexed while the one that was not hit has 700 of the links indexed. I have checked the anchor texts of the pages and both were over optimized while only some of them were hit.
@shaun that is very interesting. Was this an issue on your friend's side where he did not create that number of T1's for indexing? Or is this an issue where G may have removed certain types of T1 links from the index?
No idea mate, I havent had much time to look into it but he is putting most of his time into trying to work it out. The shit thing is I can't think of a way to see the index history of the links to workout if those links all dropped during Fred or before.
The links are direct from his T1 project that we checked out so he intentionally built them.
i suspect its the on site metric. try using pandabot to improve your metric (bounce, time on site etc) to improve things.
this update didnt hit me at all and i have g codes in my money sites in tough niches, perhaps pandabot is helping me? haha
never give this a tot till i read this thread.
PS: not affiliated to pandabot but i use them to increase ctr from serp, give my competitors bounce and use their instant traffic for visiting the MS's backlinks to make google think the backlinks are good. :P
btw, dont overeact and make changes to your content or link building, could be one of google's trick to see which sites are doing "seo".
if u do natural link building, your backlink profile shouldnt change drastically after ranking drops. sit back and relax and see how things go for another week or 2.
The site of mine that was hit has the highest on page time of every site I currently have getting traffic other than my personal blog so I don't think that is a major factor.
Also you can change your content as you please, google even provide guidelines to help you optimise your sites for SEO.
@hardcorenuker on a different thread I brought up PandaBot. Works like a champ. But my issue with them was that their installed user base was a bit small, making my ability to scale or sustain traffic risky. Absolutely, it improved my onsite in GA while I had it installed. Interestingly, I stopped using it in January, so perhaps this may have played a part in my decline from Fred. I am wits end trying to sort this out. But PandaBot slipped my mind. Going to re-activate it today and crank it up again. See if that does the trick. I lost a sweet kw that I had top ten that I never SEO'd so they hit me for something other than my seo.
On a side note. After deleting GA from my MS, I received a cryptic email from G about how I was losing out on a bunch of benefits. That email pre-dated Fred. Interesting timing I must say.
I am holding steady on no GA script, but if I can't sort out anything else, then I may have no choice but to reinstall and see if the big G will forgive me.
@viking i dun usually do this but i have a network of blogs with GA installed (100 blogs) and i send no follow links out. they work
i think its fishy for a modern site NOT to have GA. GA is like so basic.
also, for panda, honestly dun overdo it, i did and it affected ranking negatively.
what works for me is around 5 searches per day (serp) + bounce to competitors
i also do a lot of brand searches in panda
more importantly is the instant traffic from backlinks.
btw i noticed in panda while the pool isnt big, the number changes quite a bit, i guess its becos different people in diff timezone run for certain timing and not 24 hrs. so the actual number is probably bigger (just a guess)
btw personally i feel u should use panda to do branded searches (yourdomain.com) at this point,
Just wanted to share a bit more on this whole Fred thing. Maybe it syncs up to someone else and we can get more clues as to what is happening. I decided to give in and put GA back onsite as I spoke with someone who ran me through the pros/cons decision matrix. Bottom line better to have it than not. So keeping in mind it has been off for over a month. I was shocked when I started digging into the data.
After linking GA to WM accounts.
I went to WM>Search Traffic>Links to your site. 99% of my links are wiped. For example, I had hundreds of WP 2.0's built and aimed at the site. It is showing 15. Same all the way down the 2.0 platform list. Moving across the column to the right for most linked content, pages that are never seo'd are listed, indicating that all of my seo efforts for the last few years have been removed from this MS. Interestingly my PBN links are there, so G sees them as legit, for now.
No manual actions. # of indexed pages is the proper number. So nothing obvious for any wrong doing.
So the conclusion I am drawing right now is that Fred is aimed at 2.0's+Content on some level.
In ahrefs, my metrics continue to climb.
Given that my PBN's stayed active in WM, I am going to add a few per week going forward and see if this works for me.
Anyone else experiencing anything similar or I am the only lucky one?
@viking are the web 2.0s still alive and indexed or have they been deleted by the web 2 site?
The guy I was on about earlyer in the thread doesnt have WMT installed for the site so we can't check what Google are showing as pointing to his site but the majority of the T1 links on his hit pages are not indexed by Google where as the ones that were not hit have a large amount of the T1s indexed.
We might be onto something here. I have a few hours set aside over the weekend to try pick the site appart.
My own personal site that was hit has been recached by Google for a few days now with zero affiliate links and there has been no possitive movement in the SERPs for it. Come next month when I pick up a VPS again I am considering just throwing a few hundred links to it.
Comments
"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.
mobile: http://puu.sh/uFkJs/8b1593fb14.png
desktop: http://puu.sh/uFkKk/d57678c418.png
mobile: http://puu.sh/uIhQ9/33d5b6710c.png
desktop: http://puu.sh/uIhPr/fd70053b48.png
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.
That, and mix up your links. People over-relying on PBNs cannot expect to get away scot-free forever.
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
\m/
Hide all sensitive information if any. If it confirms my theories I'll share with everyone.