Jun 5, 2007
As always, tweaking and quality control involve a balancing act. "You make a change, and it affects some queries positively and others negatively", Mr. Manber says. "You can't only launch things that are 100 percent positive."
It is common to find websites getting big traffic fluctuations as the search engines continually change the algorithms. Over months, a search engine results position will be steadily increasing as you get additional inbound links. Then all of a sudden your ranking will disappear. A quick visit around the forums will often give you the answer. That its not only you that is hurting, that there are many others that have been effected. More to the point, you may find that people have a diverse range of reasons for why they think their website rankings have dropped. Then as often as not, your rankings and traffic will appear again.
The answer? I consider it is in a large part due to Google collateral damage of new parts of the algorithm that are again tweaked to bring deserving websites back again. And what if your websites rankings do not come back!....
One of the latest parts of the algorithm effecting many websites has been the change in the way inbound links are dealt with. There has been a big push from Google against paid links (April 14th, with extra added May 12th, 2007 - over 660 comments), and link spam. This has in my opinion hurt many websites and had collateral damage. It has been one of the most fundamental shifts in Google in the past year.
Our existing algorithms had already discounted these links without any people involved. However, our manual spamfighters had detected these links as well (Matt Cutts).
My opinionThe Google collateral damage is in any link that is exchanged that is slightly off theme, and does not have enough unique descriptive text around it.
Where a pages rankings has been based on anything like the above, it is likely to have lost positions in the last month.
There has even been an SEO website that has fallen from grace. Found Agency is a large Australian SEO firm that can no longer be found on Google for its business name (Found Agency). It is well known that you can overdo your linking, enough to kill a domains rankings. Whether or not this was a manual or algorithmic cause, the result is clear - not being able to be found by your business name is not the best for an SEO agency. My take on the matter is that it has happened at the same time as links have been in the news at Google.
And have any of my websites been effected - the best way of knowing the edges is to explore the edges.
<< SEO Articles < SEO Expectations - Does every website benefit from SEO? | Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy >
1 Comments
Post Comment
We welcome comments on this article, provided they have something to contribute. Please note that all links will be created using the nofollow attribute. This is a spam free zone. HTML is stripped from comments, but BBCode is allowed.
Michael Brandon - Feb 4, 2008
As of around December 2007, and confirmed Feb 2008, there has been a "ranking 6 penalty". Pages that have been ranking number one for years, have suddenly been relegated to 6th. Many pages have been effected.
Jan 23 2008 - Aaron Wall announced how he had got back his number one rankings by some deoptimisation of his pages.
There was a lot of talk about it, people refusing to believe that the filter existed - see sphinn - How I got my rankings back
Now in February 2008, Matt Cutts has confirmed that there was in fact some collateral damage that had the effect of minus five in the rankings - Google's position 6 penalty. The algorithms have now been changed, and such effected sites should see their rankings return.
Matt Cutts says
It is interesting that he also mentions the following in the same breath:
Google is in general able to see the algo effects that there are on particular sites. It is able to remove such flags.
Google Collateral damage is a fact that we have to live with. Searchmasters have to be very aware of rankings of client websites as it is an ever moving landscape.