Anyone else spotted / heard of some fairly drastic changes in serps around 13th/14th?
Looking at data from 3 sites, 2 related and 1 not, that took a significant dive around then. Losing anything up to 100 places on a commercial KW.
Had this on a site or two.
A few thin sites dropped slightly, but that could be due to a link drop off as they were only ranking on automated spam :D
My 2 are retail sites. Very white backlink profiles. The two are closely linked (sister sites) and interlink a bit, so theoretically one being hit might have taken the other with it. Trying not to add up the £££ value of this happening the week before xmas. Never thought I would say it, but praise be for Amazon and Ebay.
Spammy tosser of competitor still hitting #1 spot for most of the money terms. Makes you wonder. Particularly annoying as it isn't even clever spam - just obvious blog network stuff.
A few observations:
1. Page and h tags have received a boost
2. New domains have an even more difficult time gaining trust
3. Google has been devaluing related keywords for a few months now, ie, you don't automatically rank for a related keyword on semantic rules alone
Just personal thoughts and observations though. Client sites are doing fine, but a couple of new domains I've been developing for personal use have been proving very difficult to position, even for longtail. Guess I'll just have to minimise work on them for a couple of years.
Had one site dropped like a rock on the 8th.
These blog networks are working fantastically at the moment. Maybe find some not so spammy private ones to invest in? Oh and isn't this what Google Chrome Store was just caught doing?
The 2 sites I were looking at bounced back. Really odd behaviour. Dropped like stones for about a week.
Still struggling to compare against those using blog networks. Does seem to be the defacto method for this vertical... and most others! Definitely looking for ways of getting good links from more blogs without moving too far in to the spammy content arena.
Yeah, that's the problem with blog networks - too many public ones I've tested just have no quality control and end up as FFA's. Not the sort of place I'd put client links.
Yea and the blogs aren't themed at all, so it's just a completely random blog. If Google turn up the relevancy of the links these sites will surely drop.
I recently used scrapebox to find a few thousand blogs related to health and fitness. I used guy on Odesk to email each blog and ask if they would be interested in some free content related to their site with a link back to my clients site which sells health and fitness related products. It was very expensive. The cost of finding and emailing was around £40 but high quality articles were £10-15 each. We only found 30ish from memory, it was a lot of effort for not much returned... Well maybe it's secured their top3 ranking behind the 2 big brands. Compare that to BMR where its only around £90 per month and then £0.30 per 150 word blog post, it's cheaper and seems to give better results.
Sounds like I am not the only one struggling with this. Desperately trying to keep things clean, but it puts you at such a disadvantage.
My argument used to always be that the payoff of such tactics was short term and walking a darker path meant more frequent change of methods to stay ahead. Doesn't seem to be the case any more.
The example I used above the main player (who others are now copying) is now taking on high street chains in a profitable industry off the back of 3 years benefiting from the crappier end of blog networks.