Google Update: Affiliates and Spammers Aimed
In the last week, we have uncovered some additional details which sheds light on the latest Google update. We reported last week that Google was taking an “anti SEO” stance. According to the continued testing that we have done this past week that doesn’t seem to be the case. It looks as if Affiliates are the ones that Google targeted the hardest, and usually Affiliates are the ones to use aggressive SEO practices (i.e Black Hat SEO and Spam).
Google updated their index again yesterday, after performing a deep crawl last week. We saw some positive movement with the changes we did for our sites. Most notably, we moved back into the top ten in Google for the term “web marketing”. While a one position move may not seem as much, when you move onto the first page, it is. For example, we saw a 42% increase in our visitors through Google after the update went live yesterday.
The reason for the increase were the changes we implemented into our sites based on what we have reported thus far. While every industry seems to be affected differently, by making slight changes to our pages, we are seeing positive results.
According to our test results, 42% of the top 30 results, and 31% of the top ten results in Google before Nov. 15th have been dropped in the new update. That is the definition of aggressive algorithm change. More than 80% of the sites that dropped out that we tested were Affiliate sites or sites that violated Google’s Terms of Use. What of the rest? Unfortunately, there was collateral damage.
Spam Triggers
Affiliate sites are known to be very aggressive in SEO marketing tactics. They usually buy a domain that is keyword rich, have a network of sites with links pointing to various pages in attempt to artificially boost their Link Popularity, and other methods. The main problem is, many commercial sites, fell into the category as either a Spammer or an Affiliate and were hit with the penalty. This being caught in the “cross fire” has hurt many sites, but with Google continuing to tinker with their new algorithm, sites may return.
Guaranteed Protection
While there is no absolute guarantee, especially with the search engines, there is one common characteristic among the sites that did NOT receive the penalty from Google – high PageRank. Sites that had at least a 6/10 PageRank were not affected at all. It is very possible that Google could point to the difficulty in getting a 6/10 PageRank and if a site is ranked that high, they must be a top quality site based on their own criteria.
We highly recommend to step up your efforts in boosting your PageRank to a 6/10.
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