It would appear that Google are today (and have over the past 24 hours) been rolling out an update to their algorithm which is causing significant problems for webmasters and site owners. Initially reported by Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable Barry highlights that the Google Webmaster Help forums have seen significant activity from panicked site owners where rankings and site traffic appears to have fallen off a cliff. This has occurred not only for non-brand organic search traffic but also for many websites that have historically been ranking for their own brand names.
Receptional are no different in this respect where we have observed some clients losing in excess of 70% of site traffic today. The root cause of these issues are unknown at this stage and although the traffic drops mentioned in the forums are in some instances being suggested as symptoms of a Panda update, our initial research has suggested that this is unlikely to be the case.
In recent months Google have been making noises and various announcements via Matt Cutts about an impending "over optimisation" penalty being applied to websites (read the transcript or listen to the audio on search engine roundtable here). There has at this point in time however been no official announcement from Google that this algorithm update is live so again this may or may not be the cause of site problems.
Historically with Google algorithm updates these are often rolled out gradually therefore the full extent of this latest algorithm change is yet to be seen. Receptional will certainly be monitoring the situation over the coming 72 hours to assess the extent of the issue.
Has your site experienced a huge drop in traffic and rankings over the past 24 hours?
Comments
Back on track
Hi Nick,
I'm from Holland and one of our main websites got slapped by Google. It was on monday in the afternoon. So weird and we didn't know what we had done wrong.
It is very frustrating, because Google didn't left a message in Google's Webmaster Tools. We were very upset, because it is rediculous that an search engine could throw sites away. Sites that really rely on Google.
This morning I saw my site back where it belongs. The things I did yesterday were:
- De optimizing some of my pages
- Try to remove some low q backlinks
- Send a request via Google's Webmaster Tools
I hope our site will stay on the rankings for now. You never know.
I read that Google gives heavy weight to bad backlinks. But since anybody can make bad links for any site it isn't fair. So they are reversing the penalty.
Hi CowboyTim, At this stage
Hi CowboyTim,
At this stage as far we aware, no-one in the industry knows for sure what this latest Google update relates to. There are however many decent educated guesses flying around relating to backlinks which incidentally we have also seen some evidence for which could reinforce these theories. Still a bit too early to know for certain right now though.
We at Receptional are certainly putting a lot of time and resource into investigating cause and impact right now to see what we can identify - could you post the site you mention that was impacted and any keywords that were most affected? This will greatly contribute towards our overall research.
Best regards,
Nick
Yes seems to be a few
Hey Nick,
Yes seeing this also across a few sites we manage, very distinct sharp drops, and a lot of garbage replacing them.
Will be interesting to see if this is merely a flux in rankings or what the end result from this is.
Hi Marc, Thanks for your
Hi Marc,
Thanks for your reply. There are a lot of webmasters concerned about this right now and we are working hard to pin down any potential associated issues. We're also working to establish the behaviour of the change and whether this was an instant algorithm change on the 16th or if it's staggered, being rolled out over a number of days.
Could you send us your affected domain(s) and any keywords affected for our research?
Best regards,
Nick
Thanks for the quick update,
Thanks for the quick update, i recently faced a huge drop in traffic and rankings. Can you tel me about what should i do now.
Thanks for your reply, could
Thanks for your reply, could you post the domain in question and any keywords that were primarily affected?
Nick
Traffic actually seems to have picked up!
Hi Nick,
For a couple of very large niche B2B portals that we manage, we have seen a sharp uptick in organic traffic, which is a welcome change after close to a 10% drop from around March 23-24 --- when I understand there was some version of Panda rolled out. We reckon things are yet to fully stabilise-- and the drop/ rise in traffic will continue to see some oscillation in the coming weeks.
Best,
Manoj
Google was supposedly going
Google was supposedly going to be more transparent with these updates. But recently all of the rumors about an "over-optimization" penalty have gone unconfirmed or the information hasn't been great. We're still just left guessing.
Hi Nick, Google has always
Hi Nick,
Google has always been very cagey with information about algorithm changes and this time around it's certainly business as usual from Google with the exception that Matt Cutts has remained very quiet. Whether or not this recent change is related to their stated 'over optimisation' penalty which is 'coming soon' remains to be seen. What our research over the past two days has shown thus far however is that this recent change is looking very much like a backlink-based penalty so it could certainly be related to the recent noises coming out of Google.
Nick
One 2-3k visit per month blog
One 2-3k visit per month blog I manage dropped something like 70% of traffic starting this week... I remove some outbound links (to link exchange partners) and we saw somewhat of a bounce back, although not fully.
The site authority was basically built off of link exchanges, so it wasn't any surprise. We shall see...
It was a bug
Matt said yesterday what it was
I saw a recent post where several sites were asking about their search rankings. The short explanation is that it turns out that our classifier for parked domains was reading from a couple files which mistakenly were empty. As a result, we classified some sites as parked when they weren't.
Re: It was a bug
What actually is the criteria
What actually is the criteria of Google to measure websites? If known then we would have avoided the techniques which the algorithm does not wants. Even using white hat techniques websites are getting hit by google.
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