If you’re looking at your rankings this month, you might be scratching your head and saying “WTF Google?”
Since the beginning of September, the SEO community has been watching some of the weirdest search results changes we’ve seen for a while.
Sites tanking and resurrecting, local results shakeups, 404s in search console, and more.
Here at Blitz Industries we usually don’t respond to updates immediately – you can’t.
Anyone proclaiming they have the solution to lost rankings immediately plain and simple does not, unless they are a fortune teller.
Instead, we look at the data. We talk to our customers (many of which have hundreds of sites), we look at our own sites, we ping our high level SEO friends and put it all together for you.
Today we’re going to be breaking down exactly what has been happening in Google over the last month so we can catch you up to speed.
Let’s get into it!
What’s up with Google?
1. Google updates & fluctuations start at the beginning of September
At the beginning of the month, many of the Serp fluctuation monitoring tools displayed a large change in the search results. This happened around September 1-3 2016.
These tools generally measure how much change happens on a daily basis. Obviously serp results shuffle multiple times per day, but if there is a higher amount of change than normal these tools will show it.
Here’s what they looked like:
These seemed to correlate mostly with a change in local search results, however also we saw achange in results worldwide in core search starting on September 2nd.
Usually Google rolls out updates by country, but immediately we were hearing about different results internationally.
In regards to the local piece of this, Joy Hawkins published an article on Search Engine Land detailing what happened with what they are calling “Google Possum”
(I know, when I read that I was like… are you fu^%ing serious with the animal names??)
Basically the gist is:
- Businesses that are not in the center of the city got a boost: For a long time it was important that you had an address near the center of the city, now that seems to have loosened up a bit.
- Filtering of local results that share the same address: If you share an office with other people, you may be subject to filtering. This may also be a way to prevent false local business verifications.
- Searcher location / IP is more important (Results Customization): Different results are being served up based on locations. If you’re tracking your rankings in any kind of rank tracker, you’ll want to use the localized feature.
- Long tails provide more variation in results: Different results are being served up for variations of keywords, city and state combos. This may also just be shuffling of the serps, but it’s a good idea to have all these variations in your link building and on your site.
- Local and organic became more disconnected: Google seems to be going back and forth on this. We’ve seen previous updates where if you rank well organically, you would rank well locally in maps, but with this update it seems to regress a little bit back.
Overall, things got shuffled for local and we’re seeing how it will shake out.
2. Near the middle of the month there were more fluctuations, even big ass drops AND resurrections.
The talk of updates fired up again around the 14-16th. However, the entire month of September has been seeing abnormally large search fluctuations.
(See how the ENTIRE MONTH is orange?):
We kept asking Google whats up and they just kept denying it as “normal fluctuations”
Yeah, right. Come on man.
Google obviously has been testing something this entire month, as we’re seeing big search results shakeups over and over.
Just a few days ago Charles Floate came out with a video of his analysis of the update claiming it seemed to be a Penguin update and it turns out he was right.
All this was really Google testing out Penguin 4.0 and making adjustments, which is why we were seeing big drops and resurrections.
This all led to today when:
3. Google Penguin 4 was officially announced today (September 23 2016)
Google officially announced it today on their Webmaster Central Blog, confirming that Penguin is now a part of their core algorithm.
There are a few differences in this update that are important:
1. This will be a continually rolling Penguin update.
In the past, if your site got hit with Penguin, you would have to wait until the next iteration of Penguin resurrected it after you cleaned up your changes. The last big Penguin update was actually around 2 years ago.
“whoops… sorry about that guys” – Google Team
Now, we should be able to see improvements in real time (as Google re-crawls your links and re-evaluates). Nice.
2. Certain pages on your site can be affected, as opposed to a site-wide penalty.
This is good because that doesn’t mean your whole site is screwed if you are over-optimized on your anchor text.
What this all means
With that said, looking at the sites we tracked, there was no widespread penalties with our customers.
This is good news, which means as a community we have done a really good job about keeping up with best practices and beating Google.
This was not an update like the original Penguin where there where we saw widespread losses and the recommendations that had been given for SEO instantly changed.
More and more, Google is looking for naturally good sites that match the user queries.
What to do if you were affected
If you were hit by this update or you have seen massive fluctations, it may not be doom and gloom.
First, we’re seeing lots of ups and downs – Google is still rolling out this update so it’s not over yet. We’ve seen some cases of big drops, only to see a total recovery in an overnight fashion.
Second, if you do have over optimized anchor text, then it should be even faster to see a recovery after you clean up lower quality links and naturalize your anchor text profile.
This would be a good time to take a look at your anchors in ahrefs site explorer and either clean up any links that shouldn’t be there or build some new high quality links.
What else should you know about going forward?
Recently we’ve been seeing a few trends in Google.
The first is that they want more money. (But we already knew that).
Secondly, in terms of local, Google is still playing with the relationship between local maps and organic. So you need to focus not only on improving your map ranking by getting nap citations, but also make sure you’re fully optimizing your main website and continuing to build links.
Third, mobile is always becoming more important, so make sure your site runs well on mobile.
There has been an announced update that will punish sites with popups on mobile, so make sure to disable any mobile popups (desktop is still fine).
And lastly, it’s important to continue to keep your link building natural. Don’t be afraid to under-optimize. Really change up your anchors and add in lots of brand, benign, and variations!
Conclusion
Google is always changing and we’re here to keep you updated (and we’re keeping an eye on Penguin for you).
If you ever have any questions about these changes or your site, were here to help – Just hit us up at support@blitzindustries.com.
This update is not over yet, so we’re looking forward to seeing more data as we go forward.
What are you seeing on your end?
We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
