Here is the summary of what we discussed in the hangout today…
1) Google Panda/Penguin refresh and update occurring this weekend. Scheduled for Friday, as late as Monday, however, Black Hatters are reporting they are having a ton of sites getting completely wiped out in the SERPs. Not a ranking drop, but complete annihilation. While there is no testing data to support this as the rollout hasn’t happened across the board yet, but if your rankings dropped on March 6th and your rankings came back yesterday or today, the chances of you getting hit with this update are very, very good. In other words, they did a slight rollout on the 6th to test a portion and then will unleash the entire update.
2) Domain Stuffing is High – this is one of the areas Google is looking to target. Domain Stuffing refers to lots of results from just one domain…usually starting around page 3. There are some keywords where the same domain goes from page 3 to page 8. This has been like this for years, but has become especially bad as of late.
3) Take a look at your Search Queries and Author Stats in GWTs. What is the “updated” date? If it is March 3rd or later, that could also be a flag that the update will negatively affect you.
4) Google is doing personalization search not just based on your login criteria, but based on the IP address you are using.
5) Personalization “purge”. It seems that Google has purged their personalization information sometime after November of last year. Doing so “resets” the system. For example, if you ranking #2 for a keyword term and then were hit with a Panda refresh and dropped to page 4, if a visitor who had already visited your site does a search for your main keyword, you would still show up #2, maybe #1 for them based on past association. So, even though your ranking dropped, this user would still see you at the top. Thus, your “return visitor” numbers would be strong. When the purge of the personalization happened, your site would no longer show at the top and your traffic levels would go down. Most webmasters looked at this and came to the conclusion that at that moment they received a penalty from Google, when in reality, they had a penalty weeks or months prior, but now it is just finally catching up to them.
What To Do: In your analytics, compare the month of November 2012 with the last 30 days for New Visits vs. Returning Visits. If the number of returning visits is much lower than it was in November, that means you were probably getting traffic from personalization and since it has been reset, it is no longer occurring. You will need to treat this issue as a Panda update and not a manual penalty.
6) Google “okay” with ranking scrapers above you. This is what is most frustrating about this. Google publicly states that you need good, original content that communicates benefits to users and communicates effectively. However, when they rank web pages, they don’t take “original” into consideration. They put the issue on the original author to submit a DMCA request, and even that isn’t enough at times. One of our members had their titles (not content) scraped and filed a DMCA request. Google denied it saying “the content of the page is blank, nothing is in violation” … so why then does it rank!!! Google continues to be a mess and a complete frustration.
Some have stated what you need to do is analyze the site that scraped you to understand why Google is showing them as the authoritative site and not yours. While this can be helpful a handful of times, the majority of the time the site that outranks you completely sucks. This is the frustration. Will it get fixed? That’s unknown. The only thing that is for sure is since we have been doing the personas with Google+ and authorship we haven’t had an issue with being outranked by spammers.
We’ll keep an eye out on things and report anything new.
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