Google Webspam Algo Update 24/4/12

[ifluidmedia]

Having just checked our clients rankings 95% have not been affected, in fact many have moved up rankings. 1 or 2 have had big drops

Who has been effected by this? The forums are full of people talking about sites being floored from the serp's.

it will be interesting to follow the aftermath of this and get some insight into what exactly has changed!

[vforvinnie]

Looks like we posted this at about the same time!  I will just close mine and discuss it in yours.

A few references:

http://searchengineland.com/google-launches-update-targeting-webspam-in-search-results-119295

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/04/another-step-to-reward-high-quality.html

Cheers,

Vinnie

[AdamThompson]

So far, I see two sites that we work with that have notably dropped. Hopefully over the next few days we'll start to figure out specific causes and solutions.

[vforvinnie]

Something to note is that the problem could fix itself.  Out of that 3-5% of the queries impacted, some sites are gonna get hit incidentally.  Google seems to be decent at spotting these over time and fixing it.  Sometimes people get the short end of the stick though.

There is one thing I always do in the week or two following an update: nothing at all

Let the fallout happen, and see what other people are saying.  While we know they did the update, we don't have a ton of metrics yet on what bigger sites got hit.  Once you do you will be better equipped to assess the situation.

I see a lot of people panic when they drop.  They want to build links, change the title tags, tweak the KW density and change their menu structure all at once.  Even if these were all practical, how could you know which one was the most effective if you did them all within a few weeks of each other?

Cheers,

Vinnie

[JarnoNijzing]

@Adam,

did you apply any Seo methods that aren't white hat? Perhaps bought links for a couple of bucks? What efforts did you take for optimization?

If you could let us know perhaps we can give some direct advise on how to change the rankings for you again.

kind regards

Jarno

[ifluidmedia]

"Something to note is that the problem could fix itself.  Out of that 3-5% of the queries impacted, some sites are gonna get hit incidentally.  Google seems to be decent at spotting these over time and fixing it.  Sometimes people get the short end of the stick though."

Thats a very good point. We have often notice websites take a hit after an algo date, only to come back a few days or weeks later.

One thing is sure- this seems to have affected quite a lot of sites. The site we have seen drop has a very natural link profile and no "over optimisation" in terms of keyword stuffing etc.

There seems to be alot of poor websites that have benefited, as mentioned- blank sites now ranking #1 on google! Lets hope we some further tweaks in the near future as currently it seems that there have been a lot of "incidental" hits!