January 2016: Massive Rankings Fluctuations

[DmitriiK]

Hi guys.

For past 2.5-3 weeks We've been experiencing lots of changes in our rankings, unfortunately, mostly going down. Our website is regexseo.com. I Know there was a January 12 "core update" in Google Algorithms, but there is no any specific information I can find.

Now, here is what doesn't make sense to me and it's the same reason I'm worried if we are doing something wrong (or not doing something right? - we've been rankings for "web design houston" in positions 2-4 for years, and recently after months of work we finally got to positions 4-6 on "seo houston". But during last two weeks we got down to beginning of the second page

Our backlink profile is growing, traffic to website is growing over all and stable to main landing pages (+/- 5%), new content is being released/updated every week, nothing stupid or drastic is being done. All the metric tools are saying we are "supposed" to do really good.

Now, while we are going down, our competitors have some fluctuation (+/-2 positions, but not anything close to what we are experiencing).

Any ideas, thoughts, suggestions?

[Mobilio]

Same here... first goes up and now (this week) goes down. Probably they tweak something like fine-tuning algos.

[EGOL]

From the recently updated Google Quality Guidelines.....  section on Link schemes.

• "Widely distributed links in the footers or templates of various sites"

In reference to these.

[rootwaysinc]

Yes, I am also facing this for 2 weeks its like roller coaster ride, very much ups and downs for most of the keywords, as per tracking tools like mozcast, algoroo and other matrix shows the fluctuations.

[ClaytonJ]

Have seen it on alot of sites. The drop in rankings we are seeing is on less substantive sites generally.

Traffic signals are what we think has been impacted most plus some sort of sub domains/exact url impact. Not sure on the latter yet. We think the google update has upgraded how it is looking at traffic and how it interacts with the site. Where did it come from (did it enter via a search term), how long did it stay and what did it do next (did it share your content on social sites)?. Google seem to be giving maximum value to what we call High Domain Authority Referral Traffic. They seem to have upgraded their view of the quality of traffic being referred via backlinks.

The perfect backlink may now be one from a high Domain Authority site which refers traffic that stays on and interacts with your website.

We are getting ranking results via maximising the use of traffic signals. From maximising interaction and time on site to using traffic to turn previously dormant backlinks into ranking assets, there seems to be a range of ways to use these signals to generate ranking increases.

Anyway early days, but the fluctuations are absolutely there...  we are seeing double dips and even double upswings, before it settles.

Hope that helps.

[donsilvernail]

Peter,

I have experienced the same.

[GastonRiera]

Hi Peter,
The same have happend to me.
I'm really concernd about some fluctuations that are drivign my clients crazy

GR

[DmitriiK]

Would this be a problem if all those links are nofollow? Cause they are. Or at least 95%+ of them.

P.S. Also, if I compare our backlink profile to our competitors, they got 98%+ do follow backlink profile, from their clients footers mostly.

[DmitriiK]

Thanks everybody for responses.

Now, so what do I/we do? Is it just timely issue?

[EGOL]

If they are nofollow, that eliminates the problem.

The ones that I looked at were...  (1) keyword rich (2) site-wide (3) do-follow and (4) in the footer.   Each of those 4 items are listed in Google's "Link Schemes" document that I linked to above.

[DmitriiK]

However, if most of backlinks are nofollow, then it shouldn't be a problem, right?

And I attached the backlink comparison. There is a huge difference in do/no follow profiles between us and competitors. It can't be that 2% of backlink profile (and it's been like this for long time) all of the sudden made us drop 10 positions.

VekTF8l

[DmitriiK]

My question and worry why in the world it happened to "web design houston", for which we have been ranking in top 3 forever. And we haven't done any changes to pages recently.

[Mobilio]

And this would be $1M question... even $1B.

As i said - it's core algo changes that's out of our control. I believe that top SEO experts (include Moz one's!) are trying to disassemble what's changed. So far there wasn't news that someone share it.

[DmitriiK]

I'm so sad now

[DonnaDuncan]

I'd take a look at your content. Identify your most popular landing pages and look at the their bounce rates and time on page. Is the content delivering as promised? Has it earned any links? If not, consider deleting, retiring or updating the content with the goal of improving its engagement metrics.

I've experimented with this a bit and noticed improvement. Nothing scientific, but it's worth a try. Pick a couple to start and see what happens.