[CanadianDave]

After getting hit hard this week, I was reading an interesting post over at WMW.

It looks like Google did a minor Pnada update on the 13th.

Any other unlucky ABWs get mauled?

It sounds about right - 80% of traffic gone.

Any one wanna buy some websites?

[superCool]

superCool has been kicked around quite a bit lately. different sites getting great increases for 2 or 3 days (100%+ per day) and then back down to nearly nothing. other sites gaining slowly and steadily and then smacked down. it's ridiculous

superCool was going to post a pic of his analytics graphs, but it's too much of a pain to post an image here - peaks and valleys galore

looking good for the holiday rush eh? somebody is hoping you'll get out your credit card and ring up some big adwords bills.

[CanadianDave]

Sorry to hear that! It is just plain depressing how fickle this game can be... Hopefully it will turn around sooner than later.

[Convergence]

This is unbelievable! Well, not really.

Just checked our list of keywords / phrases for a handful of our sites where we ALWAYS were on page one of the SERPs. One of our web properties we were always either number one or number two. Swapping back and forth with WildWestDomains. Neither of us can be found in the first 10 pages of results - stopped looking at that point. Yet on Bing/Yahoo! we are #1.

The Google's search results are GARBAGE. All replaced with spammy, unrelated blog pages...

[superCool]

Originally Posted by Convergence

This is unbelievable! Well, not really.

tru dat! it looks like the days of semi-stable SERPs are over.

Originally Posted by Convergence

The Google's search results are GARBAGE. All replaced with spammy, unrelated blog pages...

tru dat! it looks like the days of semi-useful SERPs are over.

Congrats to the google anti-spam team (or whatever the hell they call themselves)!!! JOB WELL DONE!

[simcat]

G posted record revenue this quarter, Almost 10 Billion.

All during the time of a horrible economy, their search share is stagnant.

G is just sending searchers to the places on the web that make G the most money. Bad results, oh well, just click on an ad...

The golden cow has been built, now it's time to milk it dry.

[davidh]

"Google should rank my pages higher than the other billion pages. How dare they not list my pages on page one of their search results!"

[Convergence]

Originally Posted by Convergence

One of our web properties we were always either number one or number two. Swapping back and forth with WildWestDomains. Neither of us can be found in the first 10 pages of results - stopped looking at that point. Yet on Bing/Yahoo! we are #1.

Originally Posted by davidh

"Google should rank my pages higher than the other billion pages. How dare they not list my pages on page one of their search results!"

Not quite that extreme David - WildWestDomains and our site are two of the most relevant sites for several search term/phrases. The new results were poorly associated with the queries...

[davidh]

Relevance is in the eye of the judge. And Google is the judge of what Google considers to be relevant. We can all cry "spam", but if we are not the primary and original source of the products we are pushing, then we are spammers too. You're a spammer. I'm a spammer. Every affiliate marketer is a spammer.

Who is to say that your spam is better than my spam, or that anybody else's spam is better than your spam? Google, that's who. At least when it comes to Google's search results.

If somebody's domain name is cowboyboots.com and the only thing they have on the site is cowboy boots, the argument can be made that their site is "the most relevant site for the search term". But a gazillion others are just as relevant. Differentiation is, always has been, and always will be the best SEO strategy. Keywords and keyword optimization do nothing to differentiate a page or site from the millions of others that are just as relevant to any given search term.

[teezone]

Every affiliate marketer is a spammer.

What a ridiculous statement... original content is "spam"..? I spend 2-3 hours writing daily.. original ideas & thoughts.. commission is a form of advertising to support a website. There ARE sites out there that simply recompile datafeeds, and yes, those can get hit hard.

The issue is inconsistency.. a few months back, google's webmaster blog had a lengthy list of bullet points that were deemed relevant, content-wise. I think everyone jumps up & down when they see a list of sites at the top that adhere to ZERO points on the list.

Let's hope this is just a shaking-out of the algorithm..

[Trust]

The results are crappier than usual. Do a search on cyber monday, look at first page results. The .biz doesn't even resolve, the .ws is something I can put together is less than an hour. There are many better sites for that term. There are some other terms I checked with parked pages on page 1. Sometimes they'll try something, then check the results, read the forums, get input etc. and make adjustments.

[Convergence]

Originally Posted by davidh

Relevance is in the eye of the judge. And Google is the judge of what Google considers to be relevant. We can all cry "spam", but if we are not the primary and original source of the products we are pushing, then we are spammers too. You're a spammer. I'm a spammer. Every affiliate marketer is a spammer.

Except the sites of ours that we were checking on/referring to are not affiliate sites.

The search results did not have a single major player in the industry. The results were all poorly constructed WordPress blogs.

At the bottom of the search results is a "Give us feedback" link. Which I did. I questioned how can their search results be "relevant" when not a single result was a major player in the industry.

I explained I was not interested in socializing, giving feedback on a blog, "plus" signing anything - just wanted businesses and websites pertinent to what I was looking for.

Just now I did the same search, in the same browser without clearing any cookies, changing IPs, etc. Completely different search results.

WildWestDomains was #1, GoDaddy #2 and we were #4. That I can accept and will work on getting back up to the top - as we have always done.

Every single search result was a well known name. No Blogs. No reviews. No social sites. There was one video in the search results and it was self hosted (no links to youtube) and the content of the page it was on was perfect.

The Google is trying, testing different search results to see what they can get away with. Weighing any repercussions from the backlashes from both users and webmasters. All to promote how they want to display search results - they want more of the social market.

It's their website. It's theirs to ruin...

Best Search Engine
Worst Search Engine

[darrenz]

I lost 50% of my traffic on my main (original content) site. Even my duplicate content datafeed site is now outranking my main (original content) site. It makes no sense.

But I noticed one very strange thing. Even though I lost all that traffic, it was all lost from my blog posts, my traffic is up significantly on my blog pages.

[CanadianDave]

I am going to wait a few days to see where the dust settles. My main campaigns are all drastically down but I am still making some sales. I am seeing some new possibilities cropping up in my analytics so I guess it's time to roll the sleeves up again and start over. Time will tell... One thing is for sure, I am now looking for less volatile sources of traffic!

[Kevin]

If you're using Google Analytics, see if your big losses (SEO Report section) are from Web Searches or Image Searches. My kayak fishing site lost 50% of its traffic, but most of the organic impression share loss was from the Image portion, not web searches.

[johnmethew]

It was not a minor effect,it was a major one.You have to read the latest blogs on seo round table...

[CanadianDave]

Originally Posted by johnmethew

It was not a minor effect,it was a major one.You have to read the latest blogs on seo round table...

I agree. When I titled this post I was quoting the title of a post from WMW. A week has past since the algo update and the title has become sadly ironic. I am surprised that there is not more talk about this here...

[superCool]

yesterday: 1 site up 109% / 1 site up 67%
today: ?
tomorrow: ??

yesterday on the +109 site started with crap traffic with terrible stats (bounce, time on site, etc.) - then got better. mostly chrome users for the crap traffic, then evened out to normal levels. hmmmm?

[CanadianDave]

@superCool

I have been reading about Google "throtting" sites. Could this be an example of throttling?

[Herb ԿԬ]

throttled? this is a year and a half of hits at a directory site of B&M shops in North America.

[Herb ԿԬ]

and there were no changes in structure during that period.

[Convergence]

Originally Posted by superCool

- then got better. mostly chrome users for the crap traffic

Did you notice the referring UA for that Chrome traffic?

Did it look like this?

Http Code: 200 Date: Oct 18 10:12:13 Http Version: HTTP/1.1 Size in Bytes: 25224
 Referer: -
 Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/534.51 (KHTML, like Gecko; Google Web Preview) Chrome/12.0.742 Safari/534.51

If so, that is the Google's website preview. When your site comes up in their SERPs, each cached image (hosted on their servers) triggers the above.

On first look it would appear that many users to your website are using Chrome - but it's all smoke and mirrors.

Do a site:your-domain-name.ext on the Google. Then hover over the site preview. Then go to your server/hosting stats (may have to wait until they update) and you will see...

[superCool]

thanks Convergence. will check that out tonight. wonder if piwik would treat those as unique visitors? will try to figure out what the deal is on those.

does the referrer for these previews show the google query like normal googles do?

[Convergence]

Originally Posted by superCool

does the referrer for these previews show the google query like normal googles do?

Only if someone clicks on the SERP. Otherwise it has been showing the referring URL as the cached page...

[Trust]

So far the 3 sites I'm mainly working on at the moment, a year round site, 2 Q4 sites. Year round site took maybe a 20% hit, the other 2 are looking good right on time. So for me the usual, something goes down, something else goes up.