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We're definitely seeing similar reports about the bad dates, and it has been brought to Google's attention at reasonably high levels (i.e. I'm confident they know about it, but it's hard to say what they're doing about it).

Unfortunately, it's unclear whether this was connected to a ranking drop in some cases or was a coincidence. We did see substantial movement in the algorithm right around November 10th (the date you posted this question), but, unfortunately, we have no confirmation.

Sorry, wish I had better info right now, but I'll try to find out more.

Ranking an inside page higher could be a sign of a page-specific or term-specific action. This may tie-in to anchor text over-optimization, since a lot of those links may be pointed at the home-page.

I find social comparison of link profiles, so to speak, is rarely useful. We all overestimate the mischief or our competitors and underestimate our own. At the end of the day, though, your link profile is the only one you can control.

That said, obviously, adult site link-building is very competitive, very difficult, and often spammy, and the reality of any given industry doesn't always match "best" practices. Unfortunately, I don't have much experience with how to build links in your industry. You've got the advantage of some novelty and a growing interest in VR, but I'm not sure which sources talk about those developments. In many ways, it seems more like a PR challenge.

You seem to be ranking for more exact-match brand terms, so I'm not seeing signs of a broad penalty, but I do suspect something a bit more targeted. You've got a lot of links with variations of "VR porn" in the anchor text, and quite a few links that appear outright spammy to me, such as blog spam like this:

http://glutendude.com/celebrities/rachael-ray-ignores-celiac-disease/

Post Penguin 4.0, it's possible you're just looking at a lot of devaluation, which is making your link profile weaker than it might appear at first glance.

It's possible it's just a targeting issue, too. You seem to be ranking well for terms that include "mobile", but the broader terms, like "vr porn", may just be too competitive. If you're also seeing some link devaluation, then you may just not be competitive enough for those terms at the moment.

I'm not seeing any signs of technical issues or index issues. Google seems to be caching major pages and returning them for long-tail terms.

I'm trying to get a second opinion (since I'm not an expert on this markup), but the tough part on these is that the markup is only half the battle. Google's decision to display the social profiles is a bit more complex and may depend on authority, query intent, and other "brand"-like factors. It's possible to be doing nothing wrong, technically, and still not get those options in you Knowledge Panel.

It would probably be better (and more likely to get you responses) if you started a new question - this one is three years old. Generally, I think it depends on your scope. If you need some kind of separation (corporate, legal, technical), then separate domains or sub-domains may make sense. They're also easier to target, in some ways. However, you're right that authority may be diluted and you'll need more marketing effort against each one.

If resources are limited and you don't need each country to be a fully separate entity, then you'll probably have less headaches with sub-folders. I'm speaking in broad generalities, though - this is a big decision that depends a lot on the details.

There was noticeable algorithmic activity in early June and again around June 27th (right in your timeline). No updates were confirmed, but Glenn Gabe did some analysis around a "Panda-like" update:

http://www.gsqi.com/marketing-blog/june-2016-google-algorithm-update/

Glenn tracks a set of sites hit by previous penalties (including Panda and Penguin), and while he, like all of us, is forced to speculate, is data is generally pretty solid, IMO.

Could you clarify if you mean the right-hand Knowledge Panel, top-left Knowledge Card (no attribution), or top-left Featured Snippets (with attribution). There are examples of all three here:

https://moz.com/blog/google-glossary

Is this an informational query, commercial, or brand?

Sorry, I'm confused about the setup. Hosts routinely run multiple sites off of shared IPs, but each domain name resolves as itself. Users and search bots should never see that redirection at all and shouldn't be crawling the IPs. This isn't an SEO issue so much as a setup issue. Likewise, any rel=canonical tags on each site would be tied to that site's specific domain name.

Since it's one page and doesn't even exist anymore, I honestly wouldn't lose sleep over it. There's no way to add/patch that return tag, because there's no page to add it to. Your tags on the German and Dutch homepages all seem consistent. I'd consider this a warning at best and not one likely to cause you trouble.

My only caveat - if, for some reason, Google is still indexing a bunch of AJAX-style URLs that don't exist, you may have some general crawl oddity. If this really is the only error like this you're seeing, though, it's more likely something Google just hasn't let go of yet. As Britney said, try to kick Google to reindex/recache, but otherwise I think it's likely harmless.

I empathize with your frustration, and we certainly take it seriously. Let me first say that I've been involved in the Keyword Explorer project for a while, and I assure you that this was not about releasing a new product just to have something to do. Our goal was to really reinvent and help automate the keyword research process. We did re-work Keyword Difficulty as part of that, but there are many more features that we sincerely believe help simplify a difficult and time-consuming process. I'd encourage you to check out lists and Keyword Potential, as it helps balance Difficulty w/ Volume and other considerations.

The changes to Keyword Difficulty were carefully considered and tested. That's not to say they're perfect, and we are evaluating them based on large-scale customer data as we collect it. There were issues with V1, though, that we felt needed addressing. The original Keyword Difficulty score tended to bunch up on the middle values, didn't take into account the disproportionate impact of the top of the SERP, and handled missing data poorly. We may have overcompensated on the bunching up problem, based on what we're seeing over a lot of data, and are looking to address that ASAP.

I'm not clear on what tool you were comparing, but it's important to note that Keyword Difficulty isn't like volume, which has a real-world answer (Google won't tell us what it is, but there is one, in theory). So, every tool measures difficulty a bit differently. It doesn't really make sense to compare different tools - that difference won't be meaningful. Keyword Difficulty, in our design, isn't meant to be used in a vacuum - it's meant to be used to compare target keywords to each other. In other words, it's not so much that Keyword X scores a 30, but how it compares to Keyword Y. Our goal is to help you pick the best target from your list of potential targets, but any given score out of context isn't very useful. No single keyword tells the whole story.

Sorry about the frustration with the before/after. In the case of Keyword Difficulty, we may have adjusted it too aggressively and are testing a few changes that could soften that a little. I still believe the new score is an improvement in many ways, but we're looking to make an adjustment that will bring the new scores a little closer to the old ones.

For volume, it's a bit trickier, because we really feel that the new scores are better and based on richer data sources. We are working to adapt volume to other markets, as well. More on volume is in Russ's post:

Sweating the Details - Rethinking Google Keyword Tool Volume

In both cases, though, our keyword metrics aren't intended to be like ranking or authority. Ranking is something you measure over time, relative to itself - you care whether it went up or down. Our keyword metrics are intended to help you compare two keywords to each other. It's not so much about whether a keyword is more difficult today than last week (we expect that to be fairly stable over time, at least for most keywords), but whether Keyword X is a better bet for you to target than Keyword Y today.

For a while, Google has been auto-appending brand names (or their best guess) in that "Title Goes Here - Brand" style, even when "- Brand" isn't in the title tag. There's no way to tell them not to do that, unfortunately. When they launched the redesign to the wider column, it seems like title rewriting increased, IMO.

So, the weird question here, clearly, is why does Google think your company is called "0 Reviews"? It could be an old legacy bit of bad data somewhere, like DMOZ (as Russ said), or it could be something they're seeing on-page or in inbound anchor text. Unfortunately, without being able to see the site, this kind of thing is really tough to diagnosis.

The old tool is still active temporarily, and I'm not sure if we've finalized the shut-off dates. We hear your concerns regarding the new limits. The new Keyword Explorer collects much more data and is quite a bit more resource intensive, but we're trying to balance out the needs of users of the old tools as best we can.

Some load balancing hardware might be able to do this, too - basically, instead of splitting up requests evenly across multiple servers, they'd be configured to send some specific requests to one server and other requests to another server.

Unfortunately, this gets very technical very quickly, and depends completely on your own hardware, OS, configuration, etc. (and, frankly, I'm no expert at all, other than knowing it's possible). There's typically also some added cost involved.

We've had a few questions regarding the new Keyword Difficulty score used in Keyword Explorer, and how it compares to the old score in our stand-alone Keyword Difficulty tool. Specifically, people want to know why some scores are much lower using the new tool.

There a general discussion of the math behind the tool in this post:

​Keyword Research in 2016: Going Beyond Guesswork

One of the problems we had with the original Keyword Difficulty score is that, because it's based on our Page Authority (PA) score and PA tends toward the middle of the 0-100 range, Difficulty got a bit bunched up. A Difficulty score in the low-to-mid 20s (via the old tool) is actually very low. So, we set out to re-scale the new tool to broaden that score and use more of the 0-100 range. We hoped this would allow more granularity and better comparisons.

While the logic is sound, we're concerned that we may have been too aggressive in this re-scaling, given recent feedback. So, we're going to be analyzing a large set of keywords (anonymously, of course) that people have run through the tool to see if too many Difficulty scores seem too low. If they do, we'll make some adjustments to the math.

In the meantime, please be aware that low scores may appear lower in the new tool and very high scores may appear higher. We wanted to address some of the limitations in V1 and feedback over the years, and so the old and new scores really can't be compared directly in a meaningful way. We're sorry for any confusion that has caused, and we will re-evaluate if necessary.

If you want to DM me a couple of sample keywords and the domain, I could take a quick look. Unfortunately, these things are very hard to diagnose in generalities.

I'm not aware of an algorithm update around April 24, but that's just one piece of the puzzle. It is possible for individual pages to be penalized. It's also possible for individual pages just to be heavily filtered. A penalty might occur to an individual page if you were targeting bad links (paid, anchor text abuse, etc.) at just that one page. A filter might hit you if the page was seen as highly duplicate or thin content. I believe the "Top Heavy" ad penalty is also page-specific, but I'm not 100% sure.

The pages dropping in and out of rankings is a bit trickier. It could indicate that you're on the border of having a problem, or it could just be that the pages are just starting to get strong enough to rank.

Unfortunately, both are tough to pin down without specifics. I'd start with the two pages that don't rank at all. Not ranking for their main keywords could simply mean they've been devalued in some ways and not outright penalized. Are they ranking for long tail terms, including exact-match title terms? If you can't get them to rank for any terms at all, that starts to look more like a penalty or possibly a severe technical problem. The fact that they're being indexed, though, generally rules out some of the technical problems.

I assume you're not seeing any messages in Google Search Console.

We've had a few questions about the line labeled "Update" in Google Search Console on the Search Analytics timeline graph (see attached image). Asking around the industry, there seems to be a fair amount of confusion about whether this indicates a Google algorithm update.

This is not an algorithm update - it indicates an internal update in how Google is measuring search traffic. Your numbers before and after the update may look different, but this is because Google has essentially changed how they calculate your search traffic for reporting purposes. Your actual ranking and traffic have not changed due to these updates.

The latest updated happened on April 27th and is described by Google on this page:

Data anomalies in Search Console

Given the historical connotations of "update" in reference to Google search, this is a poor choice of words and I've contacted the Webmaster Team about it.

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I'm hearing similar reports. It's been a crazy week. We're seeing massive algo flux, Mobile-friendly 2, Google testing new column widths, etc. Odds are, though, that this really is just a bug and nothing to worry too much about.

Honestly no idea at all. We're starting to process some true CTR (clickstream) data at Moz, but it's tough, and nearly impossible for something that's in testing.