MAJOR Google update. Check out the damage!

Hey everyone,

Google has just rolled out a significant update. They are saying it only affects 3% of search queries on the web, but that’s definitely not the situation from what I am seeing. From my own research and the feedback from around the web, this update is causing havoc with websites all over the world

Here’s the announcement from Google about the update: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/another-step-to-reward-high-quality.html?commentPage=2

Basically this update was supposed to target spam, and give searchers more relevant content from their searches.The word on the Net is that webmasters who were 100% white hat and done everything by the book (rules set by Google themselves) have had sites dissapear from the search results too.

Below are a few examples of the low quality results in Google:

1. “Make Money Online”

Search Google for “make money online” and check out this site that’s currently ranking on page one:

makemoneyforbeginners.blogspot.com

It’s blank. 110,000 exact-match global searches a month for that phrase, and Google’s showing a blank blog on page one. Crazy Stuff.

2. “New Shoes”

This page is ranking high on Google for “new shoes” (it’s bouncing between #1 and #3):

http://www.interpretive.com/rd5/index.php?pg=ns

You must be kidding Google?

3. “Bicycle Wheels”

Search Google for “bicycle wheels” and you’ll see:

#1 – ecommerce site
#2 – wikipedia entry for “bicycle wheel”
#3 – ecommerce site
#4 – ecommerce site
#5 – A book at Amazon (“The Bicycle Wheel”)
#6 – ecommerce site
#7 – ecommerce site for bicycle parts in general (the ranking page has nothing to do wih the wheels though)
#8 – ecommerce page selling bicycle wheel stands — not bicycle wheels
#9 – ecommerce site
#10 – page out of 1995 (literally) that has articles about bicycle wheels

Very poor results indeed.

Link Directories Still Working

For other queries that I follow, I’m seeing things holding steady with sites that use low quality directories to rank their sites. So apparently this update didn’t affect sites using link pages to rank.

Google Turned Up The “Related Terms” Dial

It also seems that Google went a little crazy with their latent semantic indexing (LSI) dial. They’re showing lots of results that simply do not belong on page one because they’re not directly related to the query.

Overall Affect: Old Sites With Less SEO Ranking Better

Lots of old sites are being resurrected into the search results, apparently because they have been less optimized. Google has been saying for a while that they would be going after over-optimized sites. That’s fine, but it’s sadly pushing a lot of really poor quality stuff into the search results, at least for the queries I’m following. Stuff that simply should not be in very highly competitive results is ranking well.

I mean, seriously, THIS page is ranking on page one for “bicycle wheels”?

And it’s not universal, either. Some sites with massive spam links are still doing great. Lots of theories floating around about this one.

Perhaps this will shake out over the next day or two. We’ll see. Updates this large take a while to get fully integrated.

Good news for all our customers is that our rankings have stuck and in the majority of cases actually gained a few spots. We will be keeping an eye on things over the coming days. We are gonna be in for a wild ride over the next week or two, but we will be watching this one develop and see where we sit after everything calms down.

Hopefully Big G comes to there senses and realizes that this has been a disaster in various forms. I suspect that we will see further updates to this algorithm change over the next few days

Let’s talk about it.