Official Google Update Thread - April 2012

[Cricket]

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Do you have a speculation about when Google will update?

• Do you think there has been a backlinks update?
• Do you think there has been a PR update?
• Are you seeing Google fluctuations?
• Do you think there has been an algorithm update?

+ YouTube Video

You may want to start with a basic understanding about Google updates before posting in this thread.
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/whats-an-update/

[HTMLBasicTutor]

I haven't personally noticed any changes but some people apparently are:

I am seeing a significant uptick in complaints in the forums about downgrades and delistings of rankings in the past 12 hours or so. Most of them coming early this morning in the past hour or so and more and more reports coming in via the Google Webmaster Help forums.

I've spotted several threads, here are just a handful of them, one,two, three, four, five, six and many more.

The ongoing WebmasterWorld thread has an increase in activity from webmasters noticing fluctuations in Google. A senior member said, "having the biggest traffic morning in months. Since the smaller data set seems to be good for me, I wonder what that will bring....good or bad?" This is followed by a bunch of other complaints about increases and decreases in rankings.

This may be a Panda update, it may be a penalty, it may be a bug like last time or it may be the over optimization filter rolling out. I do not know but there is something going on.

Significant Google Changes: Is It The Over Optimization Filter? - Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Roundtable

[HTMLBasicTutor]

Further to the above, Danny Sullivan (Search Engine Land) just posted this:

...Google says the new update will impact about 3.1% of queries in English; 3% in German, Chinese and Arabic. The percentage might be higher for languages where spam has been slipping through even more, such as in Polish, where 5% of queries are expected to change.

Google Launches Update Targeting Webspam In Search Results

[HTMLBasicTutor]

and Matt Cutts just tweeted this:

Google just pushed an algorithmic ranking change: goo.gl/At3SB Coverage at Search Engine Land: goo.gl/TISZ1

2:50 PM - 24 Apr 12
http://twitter.com/#!/mattcutts/stat...06294669426688

[Brave7]

As mentionned on their blog, I find this very subjective, and it seems like Google algorithm cannot recognize webspam from regular internal linking products or articles which may provide a better user experience if people are looking more than one product or other articles in the same topic. Fine, we will comply to their new update. It is just another waste of time and money before to find what to fix in the middle of the Mother's day. Thanks for that.

Sites affected by this change might not be easily recognizable as spamming without deep analysis or expertise, but the common thread is that these sites are doing much more than white hat SEO; we believe they are engaging in webspam tactics to manipulate search engine rankings.

After this useless update, I bet that spammers will spam with internal anchor text links.

[fran09]

Boy, my website took a big hit, going from 3000-4000 uniques a day to just over 1000 the past 2 days. It's also affecting my adsense revenue, from 50-100 a day to just above 10.
What I don't get is after ranking high for my term for a while, all of a sudden my website drops off the face of the earth for most of my keywords.
I see everywhere this is to "attack spam" or "over optimization" and my website is not guilty of either. I believe this update is meant well, but is hurting webmasters like myself who put hard work into our websites as well.

[dutedracu]

I had the same problem. Google's updates threw my site off the first page onto ... the 11th... Since then I am working full time to get it back on its feet

[Cricket]

What impact has the Penguin update had on your site?

Have you seen improvements?

Have you lost positions in the search results?

Has your overall traffic changed?

[indybail]

I got nailed pretty good on my main site. It's been slowly coming back. I don't know why. I consider myself white hat.

I have never bought a link
I have never traded links
I have never used automated means to generate links
I have no redirects
The site is listed on DMOZ
It is a simple HTML site. Webmaster tools says the code is good
One crawl error in last 3 months
SEO Moz gives it an A grade for on page SEO factors.
Speaking of SEOMoz PA is 44 DA is 52 mR is 4.66
No ads
Per Webmaster Tools 18,000+ links over 780 domains and 250+ anchor text variations (the most common anchor text variations don't not even include my keywords)

I have a lot of links from communities and blogs that are in my professional niche, personal interests and of course online marketing and SEO related.

My conduct and behavior in these communities and blogs is consistent with how I participate here on v7n.

I cannot believe the number of sites that are ranking ahead me. Some are for businesses no longer in operation. One high ranking site openly solicits link exchanges on its home page. There are other sites I consider to be of the highest quality (much better than my own) that have been effected more severely than mine.

Fortunately, because I am a l brick and mortar business, the local factors dampen the pure organic results decline to a large degree so my traffic decline are not nearly as drastic as my organic SERP decline.

I am at a loss to explain why Google thinks this a better search product.

[Manish Pandey]

Tried the form Matt Cutts was talking about? https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/...bkE6MQ&ndplr=1

[indybail]

No, not yet. I'm afraid it would get lost in the shuffle at this point. It would be different if my traffic was being blown up.

At this point I am content to see if Google is going to make any adjustments. In my niche anyway the results quality is just awful. They are highly ranking listings of folks who had their professional licenses yanked years ago.

I posted because Cricket asked for any experiences people were having and I thought it would be a good opportunity to to tell my story in a place where it would be heard.

[Manish Pandey]

Yeah, waiting for some adjustments us the best choice one can make. Cheers to you.

I've also had a fair share of luck and bad-luck with this particular Penguin Update. What I see in the rankings now is, the highly competitive terms are going down but the long tail keywords still manage to rank well. One-way links from any source, topical or non-topical for that matter, are getting top positions. Directory links, article links are not performing well, maybe because they are too low-valued.

I think this link based algorithm of Google itself is the culprit for the spam. They need to fix it to make the web cleaner.

[nathan.joshua]

A few of the websites I usually browse have suddenly jumped up a pagerank or 2, including my own website.

Did we just get a pagerank update?

Edit: I created a new thread before seeing this one, thanks for moving my post! I should really utilize that search function

Another edit: My blog is PR 2! *nerdy fist pump*

[Cricket]

http://www.v7n.com/forums/google-for...ay-2012-a.html