January 2013 Google update affected my projects ?

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Have a watch of this video from Barry Schwartz and you will see many have found this but nothing has been announced.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=xNplIqrs-Os

Andy

[highwayfive]

I noticed some changes on Monday and the Google dance seems to have been going on ever since. Some keywords are changing positions by the hour. Agree with Ask Hopper than it will be a few weeks before it settles but it looks like a link based issue.

[highwayfive]

I noticed some changes on Monday and the Google dance seems to have been going on ever since. Some keywords are changing positions by the hour. Agree with Ask Hopper than it will be a few weeks before it settles but it looks like a link based issue.

[SanketPatel]

Hi Deepak

Here is the post on "Updated: Stronger Reports Of A Google Update" : http://www.seroundtable.com/google-update-january-16230.html

[MarieHaynes]

There has been no official word from Google about an update.  A lot of people have been grumbling in the forums however about something going on.  When Barry from SERoundtable commented on this Google stated that there was no major update but that the algorithm is always changing.

There is also speculation from the team at Branded3 (see this post - http://www.branded3.com/blogs/google-moves-towards-continual-link-devaluation/ that Google may be changing how they detect bad links.  If I understand it right, the idea is that instead of devaluing bad links in bunches every time Penguin refreshes, Google is devaluing bad links as they crawl.

I have another theory. I am wondering if Google is starting to put into use the information they are getting from the disavow tool.  So, let's say that a whole pile of websites have included spammyarticles.com in their disavow.txt file.  Google evaluates the site and decides that it only exists to provide spammy backlinks and as such devalues all links that are coming from this site.  I have no proof for this, but it's a possibility.

[eBrandz]

Regardless of what Google officially says, there is/ was an update around 17 Jan 2013. We track 50,000+ keywords on weekly basis and we saw 6x times SERP movement than we see every week.

For us, this was bigger than Penguin or Panda. Would take some time for rankings to stabilise after which there can be some consensus as to what happened.

Marie - thanks for sharing the link. I kind of agree with you that google will use the disavow tool data. But knowing google, I don't think they will do manual checking for more than 1000 sites? They can simply calculate top 1000 domains disavowed across all disavow requests and then use that data ? But I think that update will come in future. This looks like a version or penguin ?

[eBrandz]

Google confirms it as Panda. More details over here- http://searchengineland.com/google-panda-update-version-24-1-2-of-search-queries-impacted-146149

[MarieHaynes]

Google did refresh Panda today (the 22 of Jan) but this would not have caused the traffic drop between Jan 10th and 19th that the OP had.

[highwayfive]

I agree Marie it the wrong date and from what i have seen it has impacted too many sites in the UK8% of more than the 1.8%V mentioned in the tweet. Nearly all the verticals and niches we track have had changes in rankings and some very odd results. A search like UK VPN In google.co.uk has seen a number of service providers replaced with details of UK University VPN services and even the University of Kentucky in the top 20 results. I can't for the life of me see how those results would match the broad intent of the search.

[Navneet]

This seems more of a link algorithm with a mix of keyword rich urls update.

We also track around 20,000 keywords on a weekly basis and can see a big flux. This seems more like Google devaluating some of the backlinks or sites in masses which is causing this.

There is no specific pattern which we can see. It seems more of the small business websites getting hit than the Brands.

But again too early to single out specific reasons.