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The new Difficulty score gets pretty aggressively scaled, because we found that the distribution of PA/DA was bunching up a bit, and fell almost entirely in the 25-85 range (looking across an entire SERP). So, a 25 gets scaled down to nearly zero, to give the new metric more granularity.

It looks like the CTR-adjusted PA for "Naturmode" on Google.de (for example) is right around 26, so it may be that the PAs have gone down a bit over time as well. Even by the non-weighted metric, I'd expect that to be a solid 10 points lower than the old difficulty score.

We're going to dig in and try to find out if the rescaling is too aggressive, once we have more data from real-world KWE usage. In general, though, you're going to see a bigger range of difficulty scores with the new metric. It's pretty tough to meaningfully compare the old and new scores.

I've seen some reports in the past couple weeks of similar tests here in the US, but it only seems to be testing for now. Google is also testing new link colors, new "Ad" marker colors and a wider left column in the past two weeks, so they must really be running out of things to do

Glad you're seeing the site back in the rankings. I would definitely keep digging, though. A 14-month disappearance is not something you want to chalk up to an error, because you could easily relapse days or weeks from now.

In other words, it's good news, but don't let your guard down.

I'm pretty much 100% on board with Everett, but just adding a couple of things. I do think it's worth experimenting, and a good time to do that. That said, there's a lot we still don't know.

You do have to rank on page 1 for the queries in question. So, if you're not clearing that hurdle, this won't be time well spent. If you are clearing it for a solid % of pages, then excellent. Move forward.

We have a pretty good sense of how to change a "Featured Snippet" (Google's term for attributed-link answer boxes) and how to take one from someone else, but not how to get Google to show one when they don't currently. So, if you make your page more answer-like, it will increase your odds of getting an existing Featured Snippet, but we're not clear if it increases your odds of the query being interpreted as a question. In other words, can well-organize content get you from no Featured Snippet at all to Google showing one? Initial experiments suggest "no", or at least, that it's not easy. That said, the percentage of Featured Snippets has been increasing steadily.

I think, done right, this could have user value and actually drive down bounce rates. Try to make the result something that site visitors would find useful as well. I think these kinds of answers can be win-win for both SEO and CRO.

If you want to see if your page would be eligible for a Featured Snippet (and what text Google is seeing), use "site:yoursite.com query". If you have pages eligible for a Featured Snippet for that term, you'll see which page Google is choosing and which text on the page they're selecting. That can be a big help, since this is otherwise a black box.

Ah, got it - the "A/B testing" in your questions threw me off. I was wondering if you were looking for a different type of service than they used to sell.

If you're looking for structured interviews, it definitely can get a lot more expensive very quickly. It used to be that this stuff ran $10K+, before companies like UserTesting.com came along a couple of years back.

I've occasionally heard good things about UserBrain (https://userbrain.net/), but I haven't used their service personally. UserLytics (http://www.userlytics.com/sitepublic/) also used to be a lower-priced alternative, but again, it's been a while since I've dug into their service offerings and prices.

If it's something you plan to do a fair amount of, it may be worth training someone in-house and getting a basic set up. Steve Krug's more recent book (http://www.amazon.com/Rocket-Surgery-Made-Easy-Do-It-Yourself/dp/0321657292) is a great starting point. Some time and equipment investment up front may be enough to get you a lot of insights. The nice thing about in-person testing is that it's really exploratory - you don't have to be an expert to get at least some results.

I'm still showing a basic pricing package of $49/video on UserTesting.com:

https://www.usertesting.com/plans

You mentioned A/B testing, though. Are they doing custom test set up now? I've only ever used them for qualititative testing (user videos, basically). Conversion consulting does tend to get more expensive fast. If you can give me a sense of the type/scope of your project, I can check out some of the companies I used to use and see if they're relevant.

Ok, here's one in Brazil/Portuguese, thanks to Pedro Dias:

https://www.google.com.br/search?q=como+jogar+mega+sena&hl=pt-BR

So, Gary Illyes is telling me that Featured Snippets are available in 10 other locales beside the US, but I'm not sure which languages, and I can't actually find any examples. Does that help?

I can find some non-English terms that show them, such as "ayurveda" and "hajj", but they're English answers on Google.com. They seem to disappear when I switch to the origin languages.

Unfortunately, I've seen a lot of opinions on what happened and not a lot of solid evidence (including my own, which is inconclusive, sadly). Google tightened up on something content-related, it seems, but we're not sure what.

It's hard to speak in generalarities, but if I had to start somewhere, I'd be looking for Panda-like signals. Do you have content that could be considered thin, and/or are you facing duplication either within your site or across competitors sites? Is your site generally too big, in terms of indexed pages, for your authority (i.e. the strength of your link profile)? It may simply be that Google turned up the volume on a few factors.

If this is content-related, the good news is that fixes should generally impact your rankings fairly quickly. This doesn't seem to be a Penguin-like situation.

Unfortunately, the industry has developed very little insight into what happened in the January "core update". Multiple tools recorded historically high rankings flux, but Google would only say that it wasn't Penguin and the patterns in our data are unclear.

There were claims that, while it might not have been a Panda refresh, sites impacted by Panda previously were also hit by this update (sorry, I know that's a little confusing). This would suggest that the target of the update was more likely on-page factors and general content quality factors than link-based factors. That said, "quality" is a very nebulous and subjective term. We're not sure what specifically Google targeted.

Have you seen specific types of keywords and/or specific pages drop, or is the drop happening across the entire site and all keywords? Step 1 is always to isolated the targets as much as possible. Have your rankings continued to drop since January 8, or was this a single-day drop that then leveled out (I'm interpreting "have been in freefall" as still dropping)?

I know it's not always the answer people want to here, but Matt's right - this is basically where we're at. OSE tends to focus on higher-authority links and quality over quantity. Unfortunately, while this works well for tracking the strengths in your link profile, it doesn't always do as well at tracking the weaknesses. We're very much interested in expanding the quantity as well, but it's a balancing act and, in the interest of full transparency, there are many engineering challenges.

People have compared our index to Majestic and Ahrefs on the blogosphere. Since I can't claim to be unbiased, I'd welcome you to read those posts and make your own judgments. In fairness to Majestic and Ahrefs, all three of us are somewhat transparent about sources and at least our general methodologies. Unfortunately, Google is not very transparent about how they sample links or choose which data to show. So, direct comparison with any of the major SEO tools to Google Search Console proves to be a lot trickier. We're also not clear on Google's update cycle for that data.

It used to be that titles only came from two sources - the <title>tag and DMOZ. If the organic result title didn't match the title tag, then you'd check DMOZ. Unfortunately, now Google pulls data from all over the place, including Google+ listings and the Knowledge Graph. Google has become very interested in understanding brands as entities and is bringing a lot of data into play, sometimes poorly.</p></title>

So, first off, my apologies - I completely missed the 2015 and thought this just happened last month. You can tell that I'm one of those people still writing "2015" on my checks

Unfortunately, a 13-month lag makes tracking down a difficult problem even more difficult. Talked to a few SEOs, as this is such an odd case, and we generally agree that the typical culprits are:

(1) A targeted penalty due to link-building (usually, anchor text over-optimization)
(2) A targeted devaluation due to on-page over-optimization

I'm just not seeing evidence for #2, for the most part, and this does not look like a Panda issue to me. Typically, Panda has wider impact now and wouldn't be targeting specific phrases. The profile just doesn't fit, in my experience.

The redirect problem is suspicious, but so many months after you redirected and then reversed it, it's going to be really tough to sort out. I'm seeing something very weird, though. Run the site: operator in Google on your old site (since it's still live):

site:jewellery-collection.co.uk/

There are two URLs for what seems to be the home-page, one http: and one https:. Click on the cached version of the https: site, and it's a completely different site, for elf925 Jewelry. Something very odd it going on there.

Given that reversing the redirect hasn't helped you in over a year, I think I'd either go ahead and re-consolidate these sites or kill the old one completely. You could try a rel=canonical on the old site, if you're concerned about doing another 301-redirect. This legacy site could bite you in more than one way, though, so I think I'd take it out of the picture. After a year, you may need to try some more radical solutions.

If Google detects both http: and https: versions, they've started to automatically pick the https: version, but that's not consistent yet. In general, I think it's still important to set strong canonicalization signals. Google still separates your http: and https: sites in Google Search Console, too, so even they haven't quite made up their minds.

In general, Google is pushing sites toward https:, but that's a somewhat complex decision that depends on more than just SEO. If you're using https: and the https: URLs are indexed, then you should treat those as canonical and suppress the http: URLs, in most cases.

Hmmm... I'm seeing the Knowledge Panel for your brand for searches on both "tacticalgear.com" and "tactical gear" (which is generally a good sign), but, as you said, no Google+ (just Twitter). This is a bit of a black box, unfortunately, and a couple of networks disappeared a week or so ago. Many others seem to shuffle.

Your structured data looks fine, and your G+ page is successfully linked to your site. So, you've got the right signals in both directions. Your "sameAs" data even checks out on Google's own structured data testing too.

Unfortunately, this may be a weird query-time phenomenon that doesn't have much to do with what you have or haven't done. Everything looks by-the-book to me. As Christopher said, you could try to put up a couple of text posts (and not all videos), but at this point it's probably going to come down to some trial and error.

Sorry, I know that's not really an answer, but I suspect you're in that frustrating territory where you've done everything you're supposed to and Google is either midway through changing the rules or making some real-time decision that we can't see.

You've got some recent links that are dubious (got a second opinion). Check out this one:

http://www.getgawjus.com/2016/02/fashion-files-springsummer-2016-trends.html

This has the appearance of a sponsored link, it's on the text in question ("wholesale silver jewellery"), and the link isn't highlighted (which makes it appear as if it's more for Google than users).

Are you seeing any manual actions in Google Search Console? This has all the appearances of a highly targeted action (based on specific phrases), and those are quite often related to link-building.

Google confirmed a core update around January 8th in the US, but I don't have data on international roll-out and most of the analyses of what happened at this point are very speculative.

Your "site:" search issue is very odd. As you said, Google is flat-out denying the existing of pages it clear has in the index. It doesn't seem to be a change in query interpretation or spelling. Whether I use the British or American spelling of jewellery/jewelry, I run into the same problem.

My gut feeling is that this looks much more like a phrase-specific penalty. Normally, this would occur if you were abusing exact-match anchor text (linking from hundreds or thousands of sites with exactly the same text). I'm not seeing any evidence of that. Your link profile isn't very strong, and there are maybe a few too many directory links, but most of the anchor text is brand-related and I'm not seeing anything that looks particularly spammy.

I'm going to run it by a couple of people - it's an interesting case and a bit of a stumper.

This happens more than you'd think, and it can be frustrating. It can, on occasion, be a sign that Google is on the fence about your category page. In other words, it could signal quality issues, although that's not always the case.

Could you tell me what search you were running when this originally happened? There are ways to see how Google is viewing the pages on your site that match that search.

This is an increasingly common, and often frustrating, problem. Google will take liberties with title tags, especially to show brand information. This most likely explains the second result. You could try shortening that home-page title a bit, removing the duplication of "Flower(s)" and putting the brand at the end. Google might be seeing that title as a little bit keyword-heavy. It's not a penalty sort of thing, but it makes them more likely to rewrite.

The other example, though, for the French site, is definitely odd. Could you tell us what search you're running when you see that? Is it on Google.fr?