Organic and Local ranking changes UK

[SEOBirmingham81]

Hi,

Has anyone seen any major fluctuations in local and organic rankings over the last week?

I'm recording some significant changes, cannot fathom why at the moment other than Pigeon is still maybe rolling out...

Dan

[Toddfoster]

Hello Dan,

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your viewpoint) I haven't seen any major fluctuations with any of my clients - most changes in the rankings I can explain with factors other than potential algorithm updates.

I assume you have taken the standard steps - observed link profile for potentially harmful links, assessed sites for duplicate content, checked on competition levels and performed checks on all known on-site factors?

Have you made any changes to your sites in the recent past?

[SEOBirmingham81]

Hi Robert thanks for your reply,

It's only one site that seems to have been affected and I've checked all the usual signs, no site changes have been made of any note.

Rankings had actually notably improved over the last few months and now all of a sudden seen some dramatic changes in the last few days.

Main changes have occurred on location pages - Google appears to have opted to use the home page now to rank for the target terms which is strange. My first thought was that Google had dropped the organic listing for the pages as the same URL appeared in local results, but there seems to be no real pattern of this occurring and is inconsistent with competitor rankings.

Dan

[Toddfoster]

Dan,

The first thing that came to mind was something Pigeon-related. I have spoken to a few people in my office regarding the updates and the same trend seemed prevalent - several months of boosted performance followed by a quick decline perhaps 2-3 months later. However, if you optimize all of your sites in a similar fashion, they should all be getting the same negative downturn (unless you did something different with this one). This might be of interest to you:

http://moz.com/blog/pigeon-advice-from-local-seos

Specifically: "After doing lots of Pigeon analysis, I'm almost positive that Google is testing at least 3 versions of Pigeon on different datacenters and rotating results - maybe for AB testing."

More details here:

http://www.localsearchforum.com/google-local-important/21886-pigeon-analysis-new-insights-about-crazy-google-local-algo-constant-flux.html

I don't know if this is still an on-going process, but it sounds as if it might be a factor.

Are your locations geographically near to each other? Are they in different nations/state/provinces? It's possible for this site Google has interpreted these locations as being "close enough" to be centralized, or "distant enough" to not hold any significant relevance.

Hope this helps with some insight!

[SEOBirmingham81]

Thanks Rob,

This is more or less the conclusion we arrived at.

The locations are all in the South of the UK apart from one but are all in separate towns/areas and each location is optimised as such (We're not targeting multiple locations on one page).

Hopefully we may see an up-turn over the next weeks if the A/B testing theory is valid.

I'll post again if I notice anything further.

Dan

[LindaBuquet]

Yes Pigeon hit the UK back in December.  BrightLocal started noticing changes around Dec 18th and asked me about it.

I told them it sounded like Pigeon and spotted some telltale changes that made me pretty sure it was, so I called it as an official update. Then SE Land announced it with confirmation from Google on 12/22.

[highwayfive]

We have seen quite a few ranking changes in the UK SERPS across the weekend. For both local terms with geographical qualifiers and those without. Not huge swings either way maybe + or - 5 places but enough of a pattern to think it is more than just coincidence. Niches include legal, B2B, consumer goods, fashion, web design, home and gardens and recruitment. Mainly positive movements for us.

We keep a close eye on them across the week.