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Many of the tracking tools show signs of a possible Google update on Saturday, June 21st, the first day of summer. But truth is, there is very little chatter in the discussion forums.
I've seen one thread at BlackHatWorld about maybe SAPE links getting hit again or maybe Payday loan really rolling out this time? And I saw a post in the WebmasterWorld thread of an e-commerce site owner saying he lost a lot of traffic over the weekend.
Some of the tracking tools do show signs of an update:
Mozcast:
SearchMetrics:
SERPs.com:
Algoroo:
I'll keep an eye on the forums today to see if anything spikes up in terms of webmasters coming back online and checking their analytics.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & BlackHatWorld.
Comments:
Dave J.
06/23/2014 01:03 pm
An update has definitely rolled out from last week , infact i tend to notice from June 16-17th where 4 of my site were hit , 2 totally tanked down whereas one has drastically lost ranking of some pages and one is showing a downfall in analytics. Terrible days ahead!
Art Linkbetter
06/23/2014 01:05 pm
Saw sharp decline in traffic over weekend followed this morning with some search terms jumping as many as 20 or more pages back and forth. A roller coaster, for sure since end of May.
J_Boch
06/23/2014 01:08 pm
According to STAT, saw a big dip on Sat, and an immediate recovery with some small gains on Sun
alexbalanoff
06/23/2014 01:14 pm
particular niche or non-specific ?
buxshots
06/23/2014 01:32 pm
Yes, I believe that was an update or something special. My traffic was completely cut for 2-3 hours on saturday. After that I got 130% of daily traffic within 6 hours.... o.O sunday and today also with better traffic
Durant Imboden
06/23/2014 03:12 pm
Our Google organic traffic was up about 8 percent yesterday, compared to the previous Sunday, and WMT has shown an increase in average rankings for a while now. For what it's worth, when Panda 4.0 rolled out, Matt Cutts tweeted: "Think of it like P4 is a new architecture. Brings in some of the softer side, but also lays groundwork for future iteration." Maybe the "future iteration" is starting to happen?
Art Linkbetter
06/23/2014 03:28 pm
Particular niche - 'promotional products'. Ironically, the first 4-5 slots for that term have not changed once in almost 2 years, despite every position below it dancing from page to page.
matt_cutter
06/23/2014 03:34 pm
Well to be frank without having you really commented here i had already known that "Durant" is having a up surge in Organic traffic as he always does with any Updates from google . I am not surprised by your comment . You'd think why i am saying like that but i did browse few earlier google update posts here and you always went up and up ... :p , Guess your site/pages might be ranking in the Adwords block by now surpassing the normal #1 rank :p
wertwert
06/23/2014 04:39 pm
Checked my rankings... Nothing moved. I run 15 online retail sites ranging from PR5-8
Antonio del Drago
06/23/2014 04:44 pm
Hi Barry, Could this be a precursor to the long anticipated Penguin refresh? If not, do you have any thoughts as to why there hasn't been a Penguin refresh in almost 9 months? Quite a few sites have undergone thorough cleanups, have had manual penalties removed, but are still stuck in "Penguin prison" with no end in sight. A Penguin refresh is desperately needed. I'd appreciate any insights that you have regarding this.
google-you-so-mean-spirited
06/23/2014 05:27 pm
Google want to punish as long as they can. Most sites would of cleaned up now so the last thing google wants is for webmasters to start coining it again. Don´t expect a penguin anytime soon.
David Hoegerman
06/23/2014 05:55 pm
curious, was the cut in traffic early in the morning? I ask because it sounds similar to a site I work with.
Art Linkbetter
06/23/2014 06:36 pm
For ecommerce sites with high volume traffic - how are they supposed to handle the volatility from day to day with all of these algo updates and tests? I imagine going from 10,000 to 20,000 clicks a day from one week to the next makes it extremely difficult to staff and handle other business aspects.
LinkMan
06/23/2014 06:52 pm
all payday loan sites looking good over here..
Jason Bourne
06/23/2014 06:54 pm
try adwords, it's google recomended.
kjhgkjhg
06/23/2014 07:15 pm
I will never trust Google ever again... That doesn't mean SEO is unimportant... I get 20x more revenue from facebook sponsored stories than organic search. Both require writing quality content. Google organic is still several million dollars per year for me so I can't write it off... After caffeine/mayday/instant Google updates we went from 200 person company to 75. We took our ad spend out of AdWords and put it into social (mostly out of spite) and the company has never been more successful. We had to invest in full time content writers because social needs edgy content to work. Google screwing us screwed Google by twice as much... not that it matters to them... but AdWords is our smallest ad spend... We even prefer buying bing clicks because they convert better and have a larger average cart size.
Yo Mamma
06/23/2014 07:36 pm
Durant Imboden is quite a guy. Listen to the interview and hear about his work with Playboy Magazine http://www.ontravelradio.com/pods/afn20703durantimboden.mp3 I must say Durant, when it comes to content, travel is a topic anyone can write about and make it sound exiting. Seriously, you don't have to have a writing background or have been an editor, but needless, its an easy peezy sale and topic. You like to talk and you like to write about the stuff YOU do so its a good match. Looks like Europe for Visitors had a collection of linking sites like writing.org, quickvenice.com, Venice for Visitors, Switzerland for Visitors and Austria for Visitors, which makes for a nice small network of follow links all sharing Google juice. Even now writing.org shares follow links with others - Ouch Durant, I always thought Google wanted just one major domain and not to share juice between the same domain owners sites. Hey, maybe I am wrong
Art Linkbetter
06/23/2014 07:47 pm
Ha. We do, but are competing against the sites on top (organically) of page ones who now can afford to pay extra per click just to block other sites from infiltrating their market share. In many cases, the first 3 ads are the exact same sites that are 1-2-3 on the serps.
Greg Beddor
06/23/2014 07:52 pm
Shake up on isle #5. I'm seeing two dentist office websites I've work with for about 6 months gone. poof. From several search terms we have maintained for months. Hopefully things will shake out, and they'll come back. I'm came here to SEroundtable looking to see if anyone else experienced similar situations from last Friday till now, and apparently there is.
GrayHatDying
06/23/2014 08:19 pm
I've been alerted by http://www.rankranger.com/rank-risk-index about this update and I can say is that I drop in my rankings. I am really upset about the latest "pandas", how come I see drop in rankings while I'm not doing bad SEO, I have a strong website and I only post new quality content on my blog while other websites that are competing on my keywords do old school Black Hat Technics and rank first??? The website that is ranked #1 for some of my keywords is using new link farms that automatically generates random posts on ugly wordpress sites with obvious links with targeted anchor texts. Where is the panda in all of this??? how come Google is so blind? I know that a year ago other websites tried to do the same and failed, they got penalized after a month but now after all these updates a new competitor doing black hat still get ranked #1, seriously I don't know what to think about Google at this point.
blackhat
06/23/2014 08:25 pm
Google's economic lever is to deliver frustration and pain to webmasters because every time they do a large number compensate by spending more in AdWords... Google is not blind. Nearly all of it is very intentional. The only balancing force at play is that Google can't change the rankings so much that it hurts natural search volume which is what they sell to frustrated webmasters.
dfgjfjh
06/23/2014 08:31 pm
Not defending Durant.... but bounce rate is more of an indication of the type of content or site than the quality. You could have the best daily comic strip online and most people will still read today's and leave. Bounce doesn't account for the likelihood of repeat visitation (which I also think would be low on Durant's blog.)
Yo Mamma
06/23/2014 08:32 pm
Thats why I removed it. 56% isn't that bad, but interconnecting shared FOLLOW links is a no - no
dfghdfgh
06/23/2014 08:41 pm
Don't be narc-ing on Durant's black hat link wheel... We all know its there... It just impolite to point it out. :)
Yo Mamma
06/23/2014 08:43 pm
OK, I just thought link wheels were so old school. Jeez I know a ton that were hit hard with Penguin for that. He obviously hasn't, but yes, lets keep it secret
captaincaveman
06/23/2014 09:18 pm
I would expect Google not to allow a new website to rank #1 after 2 months doing only blackhat. Google lost the integrity of the results, it is horrible to look at the SERPs for several keyword niches. I'm sure that in the past the SERPs showed much better results, check 'captain caveman' and find the crappy results at the end of the page and on page 2,3... then check 'Matt Cutts' and see that all the top 100 results looks artificially tailored... weird how they are extremely selective
Durant Imboden
06/23/2014 10:03 pm
There are other user metrics that could come into play, too: "Bounce back to search" (including how quickly the bounce occurs) is likely to be a more useful quality metric than simple bounce rate. Engagement statistics could be useful, too: If a site has a decent number of visitors who stick around for more than 20 pages or 30 minutes (the maximums used by Google Analytics), especially in comparison with other sites of the same type, that's a pretty good vote of confidence from users. As for "link wheels," I think Yo Mamma has a poor understanding of what Google might regard as a "link wheel." A small number of related domains owned by the same people or business (and clearly identified as such) aren't likely to be a problem from Google's point of view--especially when most of them are simply "vanity domains" for the convenience of users who want to access a major subtopic of the main site.
Yo Mamma
06/23/2014 10:13 pm
I must laugh at your smugness Durant. Seriously, you're as blackhat as the rest and maybe more so because you're so smug that you haven't been slammed for a link network. #1 Most of your sites can be meshed into one. #2 The sites use FOLLOW links and should use NOFOLLOW links to avoid search engine manipulation #3 I know many that have done less than you in establishing a private link wheel and were badly damaged by Google updates. You have yet to be hit by Google. #4 By using PRIVACY in link wheel domains isn't an intelligent way to outsmart me. But it sure outsmarted Google thus far. #5 The tourism market is not a hard sale. Its fun, its exciting. Try your tactics in selling pencils or rubber bands or maybe even cars. It won't work. #6 By being so smug here and having little to no empathy for those hit, yet having deployed the same blackhat tactics, is deplorable and void of good moral fiber #7 I didn't first call it a 'link wheel' dfghdfgh, did, which can be a highly technical formation of interconnecting sites even with hidden ownership and different C Classes, I called it a 'collection of linking sites' which it is #8 europeforvisitors.com it appears to be the main site, hasn't spent a dime on Adwords, and u know Google hates people having a small business without paying for advertising. Can you for one minute think what will happen to your business and that of your wife if Google slams all your sites? I can and many here can because it happens
buxshots
06/23/2014 10:58 pm
Right. And the traffic came back with lunch time
dfgjfjh
06/23/2014 11:05 pm
Link wheels aren't defined by who owns which domains... its a cross linking scheme. Most link wheels use web 2.0 sites. Good guess though!
Durant Imboden
06/23/2014 11:37 pm
Actually, most of our sites ARE meshed into one via 301 redirects. (If you knew more about publishing, as opposed to failed SEO techniques that apparently have gotten you into trouble, you'd understand the value to users of targeted "vanity domains" for important subtopics. It's a lot easier for someone to remember something like Romeforcruisers dot com than europeforvisitors dot com slash rome slash civitavecchia (the section of our site about Rome's deepwater port of Civitavecchia) As for domain privacy, I'll have to check our registrar's settings for some of our newer domains (I know the older ones are in the open), but in any case, our names are plastered across every page of the site. We have nothing to hide--unlike people who hide behind aliases when posting angry diatribes or insulting other commenters when they aren't bragging about being anarchists and revolutionaries who "are on the side of God" in their wars against Google.
DaveKeys
06/23/2014 11:58 pm
Some people are speculating that Penguin is live and will simply get you as soon as it sees you over optimizing anchor text- no refresh needed. They're also getting more tight lipped about confirming many updates and probably are presenting us with a very partial view of what they're doing. Looking at algo-refresh rates is probably a short sighted way of evaluating what's going on at G.
Yo Mamma
06/24/2014 12:28 am
lol - I like to see you mad durant You call them 'vanity domains' - Look up the definition. Those are keyword specific domain names, another old school technique. I want you to learn about life durant instead of laughing at it, and for that you must get hit by Google to understand and learn, to your benefit and compassion
Durant Imboden
06/24/2014 01:20 am
No, domains like veniceforvisitors dot com for europeforvisitors dot com slash venice aren't an "old school" technique. They're good publishing practice, because they make it easier for users to reach the sections of the site that interest them via simple type-in domains. They're a user-friendly shortcut, in the same way that example dot com is a user-friendly shortcut for [ip address]. (Next you'll be telling us that domains, as opposed to IP addresses, are a "blackhat technique.") Try building a site that serves users, and that doesn't use SEO tricks to rank. You might be a happier person, and you might even find that Google doesn't hate you after all.
dfghdfgh
06/24/2014 03:22 am
Lots of keyword rich domains is the opposite of proper branding Durant... The only reason you are doing it is for SEO gain ... asking your users to remember lots of domain instead of just using intelligent navigation on one domain is asinine and black hat. Romeforcruisers ... europeforvisitors... you web spamming hypocrite.
WebTwit
06/24/2014 04:49 am
As we have noticed that most of website owners suffer from last couple of years due to frequent Google Update. Even We are from Webtwit - Digital Marketing Firm,India noticed that lots of website have same issue "Google Penality" either by Google Panada/ Google Penguin or Google's Hummingbird" and we suggest due to old fashion still consider by most of online marketing firms it happens again and again. WebTwit Digital Marketing Team to its Client's for trying to focus on Brand Reputation, Engagement and Creating Influence over Social Media Channels, as this is now helping according to current scenario. We suggest do promotion only but not focus on back link creation. Use Trendy Digital Marketing Tricks for increasing ranking,Traffic and focus on content quality as well as relevancy, because Google now focus on user relevancy and want to give good user's experience during searches.
Dilip
06/24/2014 08:55 am
Yesterday, i was seen my website at 35 in google.co.uk,Today i seeing it 139 position. Does happen any update from google end. Anyone saw this type fluctuation in keyword (specific) raking.
loansharkwannabe
06/24/2014 09:12 am
Here's what I find really funny ! We've been throwing money at a very reputable SEO company for about 6 months (and trust me they don't come cheap) working on 2 websites (loans / 'how-to' niche) – they're working hard, my team and I also working hard for 6 months, genuine content, usability, relevant content, presentation, logos, graphics, etc. 4-5 months into it, we start picking up traffic and rankings and start getting decent revenue. After about 6 months of solid work Google slaps (both of these sites) back to the stone-age (pages 5-10). Separately another website that we have put no work, time, or effort into 'payday' niche.. is ranking #1 WTF (facepalm)
Jon Russell
06/24/2014 09:42 am
This is great
Rank Ranger
06/24/2014 10:44 am
We noticed this on Saturday, but things quickly went back to normal. https://twitter.com/rankindex/status/480699243372773376 http://www.rankranger.com/rank-risk-index
Yo Mamma
06/24/2014 11:34 am
Jeez where do you get this 'good publishing practice'? You're not in hard copy mate. You're interested in attracting visitors to Europe right? But you also want visitors to Venice ... visitors to Switzerland visitors to Rome visitors to Amsterdam visitors to Sweden visitors to Spain Why not create a domain for every country in Europe with VISITOR in it? So using your logic you create domains for each one and either 301 redirect it or use it as a juice domain with a FOLLOW link to feed your main site Europe for visitors. This BH technique has been slammed by Google. Each one of the above can be under ONE DOMAIN. By creating backlinks in your own link farm IS AN UNNATURAL LINK. Think of another business: Selling used Cars. Toyota Preowned Boston Ford Preowned Boston Mercedes Preowned Boston Jeep Preowned Boston Honda Preowned Boston Hyundai Preowned Boston Why not create a domain for every CAR with PREOWNED and BOSTON in it? I am amazed you don't realize this. What is worse is that because you haven't been 'labelled' as a SPAMMER, you continue unaffected with your unnatural link building. Everyone else who has been hit and labelled, are pushed farther down in ranking with every unnatural link they add. You Durant have not lived yet. Google will shut you down and you will disappear from the first page and your lifestyle and income will evaporate like millions of other small businesses. Then I will give you a big hug and wipe away your tears.
F1 Steve
06/24/2014 12:02 pm
lmao WHY didn't I see this yesterday, Durant you old dog you!!! I must look deeper into Durants backlinks, maybe there is a case study to be made here!! People in glass houses Durant, people in glass houses!!!
George
06/24/2014 01:18 pm
Hi Barry, Please change the Google update image. It seems a bit irritating to see same image for 10s of posts. Please change it like you changed the panda coffee mug. George
Barry Schwartz
06/24/2014 01:19 pm
really?
George
06/24/2014 02:18 pm
Yes please.
Sean Murray
06/24/2014 10:09 pm
When I used to do pay-per-click on search, the Bing conversion rate crushed Adwords. The only reason I let Adwords run was because it would generate so many more impressions so I felt like I was tapping into a much larger market. A much larger market of crap is what it was though.
John Romaine
06/25/2014 01:36 am
It should be obvious. The sites you're focusing on must be over optimized.
Chris
06/25/2014 01:31 pm
So whatever come of this? I saw the same kind of fluctuations yesterday.
Prime Aque
06/26/2014 12:29 pm
Thank you. I am excited for the next Google PR Update.
Imtiaz Ahmed Shuvo
07/06/2014 06:25 pm
@rustybrick:disqus Do you think, a massive Google update is coming this month?
Barry Schwartz
07/06/2014 06:26 pm
I don't know.
nitesh
07/11/2014 12:04 pm
@barry schwartz : am doing work on http://kiteducation.com since 5 months. But no changes in the position of website on google searching on a particular keywords. am doing all type of work on this website but no changes after all can you tell me why??