Beanstalk's SEO News Blog

For those of you who haven’t noticed – there’s an update going on over at Google. It’s lasted about a week and I first reported it back on Tuesday.

What appears to be happening is that they’re trying to react to some aspect of backlinks but unfortunately the house of cards is teetering and cr@p results are climbing to the top for many search queries. I liken it to pulling a loose thread on a sweater only to find that that threat was holding together the entire cuff.

Basically – it appears that a small adjustment in the algorithm has created undesired affects elsewhere. Let’s use an example of how this happens though admittedly – I don’t know or even have a good guess yet on what they changed in this case – this is JUST AN EXAMPLE. I am NOT suggesting that this is the change or even the logic behind the change, In fact, I can guarantee it’s not.

OK – now that that’s out of the way – let’s say for example that Google wanted to decrease the value of reciprocal links and in doing so setup an internal filter that checked for links to domains and from domains and where there was a positive match that the domains each linked to the other – that in such a case the value of those links would be zeroed out. This seems like a logical way to negate recip links HOWEVER if a Harvard professor find a thesis document posted on the MIT website valuable and links to it and an MIT student in their blog finds a research paper on the Harvard site to be relevant to their subject – should these links be negated and if we devalue both the Harvard and MIT websites – will the results for queries relevant to these studies be better?

This is just an example but a clear one as to how efferts to address one area can have undesired affects in others and of course – at this stage in their evolution they’ve got far more subtle aspects to their algorithm and so very many of them that a tweek in one area can have totally unpredictable affects on other areas.

At the end of the day however the results are worse than they were previously and thus, a change will come. I will put myself out there and predict further updates this evening or tomorrow (Friday) that will likely last through the weekend as Google works to address whatever issue they were originally working on but reducing and/or eliminating the undesired results in the form of lackluster sites improving in the rankings.

I will be monitoring and blogging about this update as it unfolds.

I should also note that I don’t get an email from Matt Cutts letting me know when these updates happen (no really – it’s true). My guesstimates are based on past patterns and thus – I may be off by a bit but Google tends to follow a similar pattern about 70 to 80 percent of the time.

Enjoy the ride and have a great long weekend !!!

SEO news blog post by Dave Davies, CEO @ 1:16 pm

I’ve had to call a few clients to proactively talk them off a ledge and I thought that perhaps I’d do well to post some recent going’s on at Google up on the blog for everyone. There is an update underway over at chez Google. There appear to be at least 3 sets of data going around and a simple Refresh can provide different results for the same search depending on the datacenter you happen to hit.

In general the differences appear to be minor however I have seen a few cases where a site that is in the top 10 on one isn’t in the top 30 on another.

This updates seems to be a little more major that we’ve seen in a while. I haven’t had time to analyze what’s going on yet and honestly – I’ll probably wait until later in the weekend when things start to stabilize before I look into it too much (why try to study a moving target when you can wait for it to rest?) If there’s anything interesting to note after the update has settled you can be sure I’ll be writing about it here.

I wish you all luck through this update (unless of course you run an SEO company

SEO news blog post by Dave Davies, CEO @ 2:24 pm

There’s been a lot of shuffling around in the SERPs on Google over the past few days as many of you have undoubtedly noticed. I got my first wind of it 2 days ago from a client who dropped from #4 for his primary phrase to #5 (then to #6 – then back up to #5). Others have witnessed larger moves and this update seems to coincide with a recalculation of PageRank (visible) for many sites.

The Beanstalk site felt the affect starting yesterday when I first noticed that we dropped from our #1 spot for “seo services” to #2. Of course as an SEO I just had to spend a large part of the evening trying to get to the bottom of it and unfortunately I did. On the down side, I don’t like the update (and not just because of where we ended up) but in large part due to what I found. The page that took over the #1 spot was www.bitwiselogic.com/website-optimization-services.aspx (I’m sure you can appreciate that I’m not going to hyperlink that URL.

We’ve always tried to follow the best practices of link building using ethical methods. It’s generally slower but it kept us in the #1 spot for well over a year. So what had changed?

When I looked into the keyword densities I found that the BitWise site had abnormally low densities for the targeted keywords (hovering at around 1%). So we know it isn’t keyword density. Their internal linking was good, I’d go for higher densities but this revealed that what it was coming down to was links. So where are their links coming from? (I asked myself in hopes of some great revelation of a new and superior link acquisition tactic)

A counter. Ugh.

BitWise had managed to get a counter that linked back to them put on thousands of sites. No anchor text – just an image link with an alt tag, likely (though not necessarily) established through either building blogspot templates that included the counter or “sponsoring” one.

And so I have to say to my friends at Google, there was once a time when we would jockey for #1 with WeBuildPages. Jim Boykin and crew are talented SEO’s and link builders and I could feel OK with being #2 (though of course, worked hard to take back the #1 spot when we slipped to them). But this? Somehow being beaten by a hit counter just doesn’t feel right. Something is wrong with this update.

So What Changed?

Now, while I don’t love the effect, the cause shed great light on the current update. It is obvious that Google is giving weight to sheer link numbers. There were definitely some good links in the BitWise mix including a couple .edu sites but overall the quality of the links was low so it’s pretty clear that they’re winning by sheer volume. The new algorithm favors volume.

So What To Do?

What are we doing about it? Very little. Knowing that Google can and will occasionally weigh volume more highly is a good reminder that for ourselves and our clients we need to take this into account when we’re doing our link building however an algorithm like this can’t hold. It’s too susceptible to sp@mming and thus, it must be readjusted.

So if you too have watched your site fall to a competitor that appears to have poor backlinks I would recommend to take our lead, build links – that’s always a good policy – but don’t panic (as hard as that may be – trust me I know). There will be another update. If we were to follow the lead of the site that jumped to #1 we’d build thousands of low-quality links overnight and drop our keyword densities down to 1%. And where would we be a few weeks from now?

SEO news blog post by Dave Davies, CEO @ 12:44 am

Last Monday we reported that Google was in a state of flux. There was some minor stabalization late last week (i.e. there was still some up-and-downs but things were mainly quiet) and now we’re seeing an odd bag of results.

As we’re located up in the “Great White North” (an ironic name given that Beanstalk is in Victoria, BC and we had all of 5 flakes of snow this winter) we’re used to putting ≷=us (standing for: Geographic Location = US) after a search query to mimic US results. Well that isn’t working today and we’re getting different results out of Canada with our own geographic specifiers, our US specifier and results from logging into our California servers. Normally a search with ≷=us and a search off our California servers will yield the same results – but not today.

I’ve also checked the same phrase with a client in Seattle who’s seeing a totally different set of results and Boston is seeing the same at in California.

And so the flux continues …

Ahhhh that days of the Google dance when once every 4 to 6 weeks there’d be a major shake-down and then stability for another month. Of course, if you got kicked in the butt in an update back then you had to wait out the month before you could expect to see any adjustments so there are pros and cons to both environments.

I’ve only had the opportunity to do a cursory analysis of this update. it appears (non-conclusively) to be related primarily to links. Site with large link growth aren’t being credited with those new links and sites with fewer links that are older are seeing a boost. This is always the case but we’re seeing it to a much larger degree on some of the datacenters. And in the end, the truth will likely lie somewhere in between. Again, this is based only on a preliminary analysis and should not be considered conclusive in the least.

Good luck you you all during the update. (unless you’re competing with our clients

SEO news blog post by Dave Davies, CEO @ 12:41 pm