“It’s official, Google is broken and my career is over. Time to hide under my desk.”
A bit extreme? Yes. But, if you saw what I saw a month ago, your reaction would’ve been exactly the same. Let me explain.
It was 5:55 pm and I was getting ready to go home after a good day’s work at Practice Fusion. “Let’s just do a quick Google search for Practice Fusion so I can give myself a high five before I head home.” That’s when the panic started.
Here’s what my non-personalized search for Practice Fusion pulled up in position #1:
Do you see what I see?! Ranking #1 for the term Practice Fusion isn’t our high-converting, very helpful homepage….it’s our rarely looked at, poor converting Executive Team page! OMG to the extreme! Plus, where the heck did our Google+ page go?
First thought: “Breathe. Crawl out from under desk.”
Second thought: “Maybe this has something to do with the fact that Google knows I’m in San Francisco.”
“Let’s change that to ‘United States’ and see what happens.”
Aww, that’s more like it. Seeing these results is like being reunited with a best friend, or some really good hot chocolate – it’s warm and soothes the soul. PracticeFusion.com is back on top, and our Google+ profile is showing up. Nice.
Then I tried changing my city to Oakland, Palo Alto, Mountain View, and New York. Every time I got my good results. Why the heck was the location of San Francisco giving me such a hard time?
“Are you responsible for this Lou Seal?!”
“Okay. Good.”
Still in a bit of disbelief I wandered over to Google Analytics to check a few things. First, I wanted to see where natural search visitors to our Executive Team page were coming from. Were most of them from San Francisco?
Short answer: yup.
Next, I wanted to see if the natural search visitors to the Executive Team page were coming in from the Practice Fusion keyword. It turns out that ALL visitors to the Executive Team page came in by searching for Practice Fusion.
Clearly, something is happening. Or, as Martin Lawrence would say…
Normally I’m all for Google local results, but this just seems wrong. Why would someone in San Francisco want to see our Executive Team page over our home page? It seems like a really bad user experience, especially since the Executive Team page has less authority (by far) than our home page.
Executive Page
Home Page
Why was Google doing this? Was it something I said?
Apparently, Google thinks that the Executive Team page will be a good result for people in San Francisco. But, why do they think this? The answer to this question is the same as the answer to “How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll pop?”
“The world may never know.”
However, after a lot of research, here’s my best guess. And, believe me, it’s a bit surprising.
Under certain conditions, Google will swap a sitelink for the main search result.
Yup, I said it.
Here’s how I tested it.
On February 7th I went into the “Sitelinks” section of Google Webmaster Tools and demoted the Executive Team page as a sitelink for our homepage URL. I was working a hunch.
After a few weeks went by, I looked at the results.
Visits to the Executive Team Page from San Francisco
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As you can see, about a week and a half after demoting the Executive Team page from sitelinks, it no longer shows up as the first result (even if you’re in San Francisco) and the visits to that page go to zero.
This must mean that Google feels comfortable bumping a sitelink up to the main search result!
But why bump up the Executive Team Page? It’s only a guess, but it looks like it’s because of the sites linking to that page. Of the external sites with links pointing to the Executive Team page, 60% of them have “San Francisco” at least once on the page. Of the sites linking to our home page, only 29% of them mention “San Francisco”. Perhaps this is influencing Google.
Conclusions
- Under certain conditions, Google will bump a sitelink up to the main search result. Potentially, and sneakily, costing you conversions.
- One of those conditions might be the content of the sites linking to you and the location of the person searching.
Suggestion
Look in analytics to find the landing pages for your branded searches. If they’re not going to your home page, it might have something to do with your sitelinks. Check it out, you might just save yourself some conversions.
Best use of a Bad Boys video clip... EVER!
Seriously, though, this is a great study of the impact of demoting a sitelink - which is a valid thing to do when something like this happens. Inspired me to go look deeper into my own sitelinks. Nicely done, Phil!
Thanks Jonathon, I'm glad you found it helpful.
By the way, "Best use of a Bad Boys video clip" totally sounds like it ought to be a teen choice award category :)
That's really bizarre - good catch on the site-links. Makes me curious why Google was doing this particular swap, though. It's always hard to tell if Google is actively preferring a deeper page or, for various reasons, de-valuing your home-page on a given query.
It definitely makes me curious too. I can't see why they would devalue our home page for a branded search, but it wouldn't completely surprise me. Also seems weird that even though I demoted the sitelink, it continued to show up (just not as the primary result).
I think the SEO community can be grateful that you experienced this, had a correct hunch and then shared it here.
HI Pete,
I am fully agree with you. Its really sometime to toug to expalin Google's Analogy.
Thanks for sharing this. You just dropped some serious knowledge there.
And yes, my immediate thought was this could potentially be exploited for ill-gotten gains by nefarious evil-doers!
A tricky one, to be sure.
"Dropping Knowledge" is my middle name. Okay, not really, but we both know that it'd be great if it was.
Yeah, this is definitely a tricky one. In my mind, there are a million different things that could have caused it...and, yup, some could be used by evil doers. However, I have my fingers crossed that evil doers have better things to worry about than this. And, that evil doers won't be hanging out at SEOmoz.
First of all, props on the Bad Boys clip.
My guess on why Google displayed the Executive Team sitelink:
Possibly, many people from San Fransisco search for members of your executive team. I think it would make sense that San Fransisco would be the highest searching city for members of your team, since they're local.
An example would be "Practice Fusion Ryan Howard" (btw how does he feel about having the same name as this guy?) Then because they were looking for Ryan Howard, the CEO who's obviously on the executive page, they would click the Executive Team sitelink. At a certain CTR, Google decided it was the more relevant page to people in SF.
Just a guess.
Thanks for the thoughts Ryan! That sounds about right to me too. I wish we could know for sure. I also imagine that our careers page gets a lot of local traffic, but I can never get that to move to the top position.
I do agree with Ryan, that may be in san francisco people tend to search for the team member of your company, as they know practice fusion or even this may also happens that from san francisco most of the visitors in past has directly visited your executive page from any other landing page. Thus Google thought that it might have some interest for san francisco people.
Again i appreciate your view too regarding links. Anyways, greate post and thumbs up to your initiative for fixing the thing.
I love posts that highlight little WTF (what the flip) moments - seeing these little "glitches" is a good insight into how the algorithm works, and don't just repeat "quality content, just do it" (as seen in many low quality seo blogs).
We had a similar moment when I realised the cached version of an important page (our blog homepage) showed the CSS to be a disaster (it displayed fine in chrome but not older versions of ie... when this was corrected BOOM the page went up to position 2 from position 6 for its main keyword (as an industry expert would term it - a "ranksplosion").
I've definitely going to start using the term "ranksplosion" from now on. But, don't worry, I'll totally pass along the credit to you.
I'm glad that you liked the post...hopefully there's something actionable here for you.
We have a similar problem but with language variations. Due to the fact the .com receive millions of links with the brand we are having to focus on sending links to the language folders so the french homepage will appear when you search in france, spain etc. We noticed CTR increase from 80% to 100% and conversions even more (for france). We are working on the other countries. I mean seriously Google? How could you think spanish people would want the english version (esspecially when it is set for the united states, and the spanish version to spain)?
Added to the list "Things Google Does To Make Marketers Drink Excessively."
It's on there now, right under 'changing our own title tags for the SERPs'.
I'll drink to that! But, then again, it doesn't take much to get me to drink.
That is why we have to be constantly watching and analysing our campaigns. SEO is a challenging ongoing process..
.. but if it was'nt challenging, would we still be here ? ;)
Insightful. However, I have a small confusion.
I have 50,000 backlinks (50k+pages) to my "aboutus" page and 120,000 links to the home page. How will I find out how many of these pages have "San Fransisco" (or any other keyword, term) mentioned on them? Is there any tool you used? Would you like to share the methodology please?
Thanks,
Vikas Solanki
A really smart guy on our team wrote a script that did this for me. Unfortunately, I have no idea how he did it - but he did say it was really easy. If anyone here knows programming, this would be a great tool to share with the community.
Hi Vikas,
If you can export your back links into Micro Excel, you could try using the "Find" function.
Formula =FIND(find_text,within_text,start_number).
I've just tried it and it worked for a very small list. Excel has a million rows so can easily handle 50,000 back links. One slight disadvantage is that the formula is case sensitive so you may have to use the formula several times to search for all variations of upper case and lower case in your text. That only means creating another handful of columns in your spreadsheet (at most). Once you have your back links in Excel, I reckon it's a 15 minute exercise.
One way of eliminating some upper case and lower case variations would be to search for "rancisco" i.e. drop the F because that halves the number of tests you have to do (because the F could be upper or lower). then search on "RANCISCO" and you should get 98% of results (just a wild guess).
Holly Cow! I'm so gonna test this right now! If it's true for every single case our there, this can have massive impact on many SEOs out there! Gosh, this discovery is disturbing... If it's true in many cases, then Google has a lot to fix.P.S: +1 to "Best use of a Bad Boys video clip"
I really hope this isn't true for every single case out there. I suppose that would make things more interesting, but also a bit disturbing.
If this whole SEO thing doesn't work out, then I'm going to change my title to "Bad Boys Video Clip Specialist" :).
Hi Phil, as you know I've also noticed some adverse "ranksplosion" from fickle assigned Sitelinks with a possible bias towards blog Author pages with G+ links on them. Unlike you I have not meddled enough to draw conclusions but I am working on it. (It might require adding author links to main parts of website (not just blog) although that is not the route I wanted to take.)
If you'd like any help meddling around looking for conclusions then just let me know. I'd be glad to help out. Also, if you find anything interesting then please report back. I'd love to get to the bottom of this.
You, sir, make SEO fun. Great post. After reading I checked my local results to make sure we're in the clear.
Thanks Patty. Not only did you compliment the post, but you also called me sir. I feel so regal now. I'm glad you found the info helpful.
Informative article. Thanks for sharing! I noticed Sitelinks mentioned a couple of times in the search quality updates Google announced last month. You say this happened about a month ago, so I wonder if it was before or after those changes hit.
Not only did I enjoy this post immensely (Bad Boys was on late last night!), but it definitely shed some light on my recent efforts with clients' websites. Thanks a lot!
Interesting, I didn't know google would ever show a site link over your main site. Good information to know!
Darn that Google! It's like the ring of power in Lord of the Rings. You think you have something of an edge, but it deceives its keeper and slips away just at worst opportune moment leaving you exposed to danger.
--crap Google is always pulling on us--
+1 checking this now - good spot as many others have already put and thanks for highlighting this to the community it is a very helpful insight with a comical twist!
This is great practical leaason in trouble shooting. Your description of the process is as valuable as the problem's solution.
This is a great example of the Venice update in action. The localization findings of this mini case study are way more interesting than the sitelinks IMO. Great post Phil, thumbs up.
Thanks for the great post Phil. You've answered some questions I had just today about localization.
Wow, I was having this problem with one of my client's sites and it didn't occur to me that Google might have promoted a site link to the main SERP result. Epic fail Google!
Bad boys video use was really targeted indeed! This moment should be really awkward.. Seeing sitelinks above the home page in serps is really a bad experience.. What has happened to me is just seeing different rankings when thinking my cache memory as clear while not, but this scenario is thankfully out of my activity range.
Really interesting post, and the Bad Boys video made me laugh tea over my keyboard, so thank you for that! ; )
Prompted me to go and look at my own site in a bit more detail - thanks for the excellent and well researched post!
Not sure if anyone is still reading these posts... but I came across an instance where the sitelinks to a particular website were links to a different website.
They were subdomains to sites similar to <sitename>.wordpress.com & <sitename>.blogger.com... but google found this particular site to be connected to other sites with the same subdomain... Sorry I can't give the specific example... because I'd like to keep their confidentiality.
Has anyone else seen this before?
Thanks
Jaime
Great post. Thanks for sharing.
I'm curious what the coming weeks may bring. Am wondering if you eventually see another sitelink take the home page's place.
Have you noticed any of the other sitelink pages with "San Francisco" as a key phrase in the back links?
yes, it happens when google foms any of new website with the website's internal structure & content , they also told us to demote some page we don't want to stick with sitelinks.
Great info and a good test to back it up. I like the links as well. Time for me to do some research on my site.
Very nice!
Well writed and easy to understand!
The best post about Geolocation!
Thank you! I really appreciate your kind words :)
Great study! I'm going to do my own sitelink investigating as well. I really like the use of the "Bad Boys" clip. Very humorous presentation, thanks. :)
Great Post, especially the Lou Seal bit, well I mean not especially in the sense that that was the best part, it's just not every day you laugh at an actionable SEO post.
Now to check my landing pages!
Thanks
Thanks for the kind words. I'm glad the post made you laugh...and even more glad that it was actionable.
Thank for sharing your results and study, a good reason to noindex your team page pretty sharpish!
I hate that sinking felling when the SERPs through a wobbler.
Great post and discussion.
There are a couple of outbound links on that page - not sure if he wants to send the juice on to EHRbloggers.com etc. but that might prevent a desire to no-index the page.
It is interesting that the demotion of the sitelink hasn't removed it. I have some that I removed based on the previous sitelink management system in WMT. The demotion system doesn't seem as effective, which is a shame. Be nice to have the choice to "remove" or "demote" so the webmaster can have more influence over what Google displays as sitelinks.
With PPC we have the option to suggest pages for Google to select as sitelinks. It seems fair to have the option to remove what is shown in organic.
BTW nice page 1 domination for your brand and great post
That's pretty funny man, oh google....
Phil, Honestly from My side, I was not giving much attention to the Sitelinks demotion!! But after going through your experiences about your Practice Fusion, I have made my ears and eyes alert for it! Thanks!
I try to make every page a converter :) I do small business SEO Copywriting so I focus on every page being it's own landing page, even about us etc.
This can be difficult sometimes, to keep the website looking nice and informative - it's a very good point that keeping your eyes on the bottom line (profits) is vital, but I think this to too great an extent can harm it. For example, this post is going to make me buy seomoz software, but it will keep me coming back for more in the long run, and maybe to buy it in the future.
I know your focus was on the site-link and the demotion, but I fear that as localization gets stronger that this could resurface. Or worse yet, this knowledge could be used for evil. Yikes. I am glad that you including the why behind the localization. Thanks for sharing.
I'm glad you found the post helpful. I definitely worry that this will resurface. Every morning I do a good ol' search for "Practice Fusion" just to make sure things are still A okay.
I have demoted the same site link on more than one occasion. ...I really just need to remove the page as it's a "Coming Soon" feature. I guees that the good news is that the feature is in demand.
Awesome First read of the Day! Very Informative... And that Bad Boys vid Cracked me up!
Thanks for sharing, will always check links in snippets from today.
I have seen this happen to one other client recently, yet it seemed to be only a SERP test.
Thing is Google is always doing random tests to see what users favour, obviously this was an instance where it was never going to work, so it is good that the main version is now showing once more.
Very interesting post - thanks for sharing. Can you tell me how I access the page to change my location?
After performing a Google search take a look in the left hand column toward the middle of the page. You should see your location there. Click on "Change Location" and enter wherever you'd like :).
Good post, however the link you had pointing at your page was most likely from a site that is based or hosted within San Fransico, CA. Correct? I have also had many heart stopping moments from mistakes like google location or forgetting to clear a cache.
I just had something similar to this happen with a client's sitelinks, but the results for the location/search term combination were only like that for about 24 hours. I've not been able to duplicate it since. Thanks to your article I now a hint as to where to start looking to get a better understanding of what happened.
Thanks!
Great analysis and good of you to report it here. Nothing Google does or deems appropriate surprises me anymore ;0
Hi Phil ! great post, and it has some very useful and actionable information for us Webmasters. I was actually researching Sitelinks on Google and the factors affecting them, and in the process came across your post. Never had a clue that Goolge has been upto its sneaky activites in relation to Sitelinks too. Good you spotted it and alerted all of us too.
While its a little off the topic, but since its related to Sitelink still, I would like to ask that do you think domain age is a factor in generating/ not generating sitelinks or certain websites?
Great article. Hope this hasn't created too many headaches for webmasters everywhere. Thankfully in Australia the locality based searches does not seem to be changing things as much - or so I believe!
Nice article, thanks for the information.
If you look, you will notice that the Executive Team page url is purple. This means that the link was clicked on and accessed by the searcher. You have to A: log out of your gmail B: clear your history and/or cache. Then you can trully see the real search results displayed. The same goes for a manual keyword search. if you are logged into your email you will see a page 1 resutls when you may actually be on page 7. Redo you test after following my steps and you will not see a purple link nor your Executive Team page. I just did the same search and do not see what you see.
Hi Keyserholiday,
I think if you read the post and take this in context it will make more sense.
Thanks for the great post. Anthing that sheds light on the Google algorithm mystery. i will check my site and note their SERPS.
Hey Phil this is Interesting area that you actually talked about something that is highly neglected by webmasters in general (That includes me as well).
Site-Link is something that most webmaster doesn’t care about or this is the less focused area. This actually reminds me to give a second look to our site-link and see if there is anything that is messy and I can fix!
Thank you!