SEO Ranking Upheaval
While there’s no official word yet – SEO nerds around the world are chattering about two large algo updates happening right now. And I’ve fielded no fewer than three chats/emails/phone calls from lawyers wondering whats going on. So what’s going on?
The two different algo updates are impacting both natural and local search (and these two are driven by mostly independent factors.) In the organic search world There’s speculation if this is a Penguin update, or the core algo update – and again, no word from Google confirming anything. On the local side – and this is a bigger deal for lawyers – the overriding sentiment is this is a move to combat what has become a heavily spam laden channel. You’ll remember we reported on the adult webcam site showing up in local for “Seattle DUI Lawyer” not that long ago. And anecdotally, from the inquiries I’ve received, the changes to the local results have negatively impacted spammed locations.
Interestingly, at Mockingbird, we’ve been watching an (almost) across the board, significant increase in traffic for our clients over the past month. Among our larger clients – this has been an average 22% increase in just the past 4 weeks. While this might be a seasonality issue (i.e. people getting back to serious business at the end of the summer) – it does make it hard for us to monitor these changes – but we’ll see what the results look like at the end of this week.
The legal SERPs are always interesting and we watch them very closely – for the most part google does a decent job now of sorting out the good from the bad in the legal sector but a machine can never get it 100% right. We definitely noticed some major flux which just about seems to be settling down now. This included big changes depending on the time of the day. for one important term, we were number 1 in tyhe morning and number 6 in the afternoon every day for about 1o days. I think google is favouring for the most part longer pages also for law sites. Do you agree?
It is always good to see Google updates coming out. For the most part, if people are being honest and not trying to game the system they come out a little ahead. As Google ups its game against spammers it is better for real businesses, at least on the local level.
Google has been upgrading in terms of determining which is real content and which is not. It’s so reassuring that there are a lot of improvements it has gone through the years.
Well, you called it! It was Google Penguin 4.0 now in real time. And it certainly was a big one, still seeing adjustment occurring a week on from it happening, and will do for a bit longer I’m sure.
Yes we are too! so many of our rankings have shifted quite a bit over the last two weeks. It’ll be great once the rollout is complete and a few recrawls are completed, then we should all know where our sites stand.
All in all, this update will benefit those doing great SEO, and weed out the spammy black hat tactics that no longer work!
Between this update and the head fake about a month and a half ago, I’ve seen several sites bounce off the top of page one (our out of the snack pack) into the abyss, only to bounce back to where they were before within usually a week. I understand they need to test, but come on, Google. They have all the money in the world. You would think they could have a whole duplicate internet on their private servers they could test with before rolling it out to the real world. Maybe they do have that, and they just like messing with us!