For those of you who have noticed significant fluctuations in your rankings – you’re not alone. Across the web people have reported significant changes in their rankings. We at Beanstalk were fortunate on this one in that we had ranking reports running for the past few days and got to watch the changes over the course off the report. A happy coincidence. 
Unfortunately the algorithm shift isn’t particularly favorable to solid site optimization. There was an odd connection is what we’re seeing. Site that had link building that focused on high relevancy and high trustability lost ground and sites who’s links building was focused on volume in recent months have gained ground. This indicated a shift to volume over quality. For obvious reason we’re convinced that this shift won’t last.
This shift in quality isn’t just apparent in the sites we’re working on but as we analyze various sites across the web we’re noticing a larger degree of lower quality backlinked sites ranking.
Now – to be sure we’re always in favor of diversified link building strategies and that includes strategies that focus more on volume and other strategies that focus on trust and relevancy but from everything we can see indicates that this update puts a disproportionate emphasis on volume. I expect to see the rankings shift again – likely over the weekend.
I should note that this isn’t just something we’re noticing but that has been noticed by a wide array of SEO’s. My advice? Don’t react too quickly – corrections are coming and you don’t want to adjust the wrong way.
And in other news …
And also noticeable in the current ranking report we’re running for our clients is the merging of Yahoo! and Bing search results. A couple days ago Yahoo! announced that their organic results in North America were being fed by Bing. This is of course the first set of ranking reports though that have refected this. This is (in my opinion) very exciting news and you can read more about it on Search Engine Journal here.
And stay tuned – I’ll be posting more as the Google update continues.
SEO news blog post by Dave Davies, CEO @ 3:13 am
As of late yesterday afternoon I noticed a few minor hiccups in the Google SERPs. This morning those hiccups escalated into multi-page jumps, old versions of pages re-entering the index, pages being dropped from the index and different results appearing with a click of the refresh button. It is far too early to even try to predict what type of update is underway or what it means but hang on to your hats as it looks like a fairly bumpy ride.
And note – if you see your site drop or jump up in the results – don’t count on that staying as we’re seeing bouncing in both directions and my prediction (the only one I’ll make at this early stage) is that what we’re seeing in both instances is not what we’ll see at the end of the day.
Good luck !
SEO news blog post by Dave Davies, CEO @ 4:49 pm
As of this morning we were starting to see Caffeine results off at least one Google Datacenter. Last week we reported that we’d let you know as soon as we started seeing Caffeine results and where that location is. Interestingly – it is out of a location that contains one of our servers – Seattle. The IP is 74.125.67.100.
Now the interesting thing is that on SE Roundtable they’re reporting (and confirmed by users there) that the IP is 66.102.7.18.
The results appear in-and-out right now and to make things more confusing – they may be moving as a client of ours can confirm seeing different (Caffeine-like results) out of Florida (no confirmed IP though).
We’ll be sure to keep you posted as we find out more.
Good luck and may the SERPs be with you.
And Google Breadcrumbs:
Another big story came out of Google yesterday (but just hit my radar earlier today) and that is the announcement by Google that they are testing showing site breadcrumbs in place of URLs below the description in the SERPs. The illustration they used was:
Their belief is that this provides more information to the searcher when compared with the traditional results:
These results aren’t displaying in my location so I can’t test them (this isn’t worth quite the same effort as tracking down Caffeine servers) but on the surface – I like the breadcrumb results and I do think that once the average searcher figures out how to read them to determine the results that most closely match their search intent.
In short – it’s not revolutionary but it is interesting and I hope it works out.
SEO news blog post by Dave Davies, CEO @ 3:00 pm
For those of you not yet aware, Google has been testing a new algo/infrastructure nicknamed Caffeine. Until a few days ago the general public had a location to go to to watch and monitor how their sites would fare on the Caffeine system. That location has been pulled and it’s been announced that the new system is tested, working, and will be rolled out – though not until after the holidays.
While the fine folks at Google have tested Caffeine, they obviously don’t want to be subjected to the same kind of backlash they received in the Florida update of 2003 when sites and pages were dropped from the index and spam ruled the results right through the holiday season.
In a few days time they will roll out Caffeine on a single datacenter and pull data and stats from a small percentage of the general public. The full launch will occur sometime in early 2010. When we have the location of the datacenter we’ll be sure to let you know.
SEO news blog post by Dave Davies, CEO @ 4:26 pm
Ah, the blessed Google updating – we hate to love it and vice versa. We ran our rankings again for our clients as we’ve seen a lot of movement lately and the latest round of results appears (for the first time in a while) to widen the gap between the Caffeine results and the live Google.com results. For some – this is a moment of joy and for others, panic. For all – it is temporary (and by temporary I mean more than even a standard update is).
This widening gap is (in my humble opinion) a sign that either the Caffeine results have been deemed to be less relevant than the live results and will be abandoned (in which case we’re going to see updating based on a new algorithm here-to-for unseen) OR more likely – the fine folks at Google weren’t happy with the portions they were testing and will resume implementing portions of the Caffeine results in the next few days.
Either way – if you saw your results improve – don’t go counting your chickens and if you saw drops – don’t panic (and yes – I know that’s easier said than done). When in doubt – refer back to a previous article I wrote, “What To Do When Your Site Drops“. We all deal with it from time-to-time and it provides some solid advice on how we here at Beanstalk deal with it – even when it’s our corporate site.
SEO news blog post by Dave Davies, CEO @ 12:09 pm
As expected, this are fluctuations occurring in Google’s results with different rankings coming in depending on the datacenter hit. it appears that they are testing out some additions to the algorithm based on Caffeine results. things should settle down by Monday or Tuesday is all goes as it generally historically does.
Hang on to your hats and hope the update treats you well.
For those of you not yet away – you can view your results on Google’s Caffeine server at http://www2.sandbox.google.com/.
SEO news blog post by Dave Davies, CEO @ 3:56 pm
Some of you out there may have heard about Google’s major algorithm update called Caffeine, which can currently be tested here (they have already revised it a few times, so don’t be alarmed if it is down for a few hours at some point with a maintenance message). This algorithm update is mainly related to how Google indexes websites, but as we have seen here at Beanstalk it has given even better results to most of our clients. For instance we have a client on Page 3 for the phrase Shade Sails (still mid promotion), but on the sandbox he is in the top 10. Another client on the 7th page for California Health Insurance are on the 1st page on the Sandbox. And lastly one of the largest campaigns we are running for the phrase Web Hosting shows only a variance of 1 position (lower on Caffeine).
From what I can see not only has the indexing changed but so has the value of higher numbers of links. We are being out ranked by a company called Rankpay for the phrase SEO Service almost purely by paid links (Sample Paid Link), and links from their clients websites (Rankpay uses the anchor text SEO Service and SEO Services) whereas we rank #1 on the current Google search algorithm. Reviewing the major phrases we rank for (SEO Service, SEO Services, and SEO Consulting), there is no more than a one position difference in our rankings. Needless to say in the long run paid links will get you penalized from the rankings, so we aren’t going to change our tactics.
Below is a video produced by Michael McDonald from WebProNews and Matt Cutts (one of the top Google engineers) discussing the Caffeine update and its affects on rankings.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovbjCsQtfCk]
SEO news blog post by Dave Davies, CEO @ 1:05 pm
It appears that things are settling down over at Google. I can’t get into all the details right now as I haven’t had a ton of time to analyze everything due in no small part to the fact that I’m on vacation in beautiful Whistler, BC (big thanks to Bryan from Whistler Retreats. As always – the Whistler accommodations are awesome my friend.
be sure to check back early next week after we’ve had some time to analyze the events and also monitor to see if there are any aftershocks.
SEO news blog post by Dave Davies, CEO @ 11:51 pm
Well – there’s a lot going on in the SEO world and as such, there’s a lot going on at Beanstalk. Over the past 2 days we’ve published 3 articles. I won’t get into the details of them all here – you can read them on our site. I’ll just summarize them so you know which might interest you:
Google Update – Beanstalk’s Jonathan and Kyle have spent the past few days ransacking the web for information, comments and posts about the current shakeup at Google and then have gone further to going back into the records and rankings of a number of clients to illustrate what we’re seeing as well. A good starting point for those of you wondering what the heck’s going on.
When To Do When Your Site Drops – An article written by yours truly on, well, what to do when yoru site drops in the rankings (see the article above for what inspired this one). It’s broken down into 5 steps.
SEO For Ajax – Daryl Quenet writes about SEO for Ajax and Web 2.0
I hope you enjoy reading them as much as we geeks have enjoyed researching and writing them.
SEO news blog post by Dave Davies, CEO @ 7:47 pm
Older Posts »
Copyright© 2004-2012
Beanstalk Search Engine Optimization, Inc.
All rights reserved.
