Many of the emails I've gotten in the past week have been concentrated in the area of real estate. These are the standard post-update panic attack type messages, but the focus made me think. Then I was pointed to this thread at SEOChat by EGOL (who's sadly too busy to post on this himself) and also wandered over to DigitalPoint, where I found an 86 page thread on Jagger that includes several members complaining about real estate site issues.
Luckily, I received some PMs on the subject that will allow me to showcase some of the specific results in SERPs for:
- real estate studio city
- real estate carlsbad
- real estate oceanside
- real estate oahu
- real estate honolulu
As noted in the SEOChat thread, the site HomeGain.com has gained extraordinary visibility during this past update, as have many large, multi-city and state real estate sites. This has come (according to my informants) at the expense of smaller real estate sites and pages operated by local agents or companies. Two questions come to mind:
- If you're a Google engineer, how do you tweak your algorithm so smaller real estate sites are pushed out by the bigger players?
- Are bigger real estate conglomerates more relevant to local real estate related searches?
I assume that much discussion is taking place at REWebmasters forum, but it's been inaccessible to me all morning.
UPDATE: Morgan has it back up and had this to say regarding the update:
We do recips on all our sites and none were negetively effected (That I have seen yet) from this update. What we did notice, is that our sites that ranked well with internal pages that we didnt build links for, lost some ground (Some cases a lot) - what this tells me is that overall site authority is not a strong as it was before - solution we will build links to the internal pages that dropped and see what happens
Sadly, this seems to contradict the findings of our own small examples. Perhaps we can work it out more in the comments.
Keijo - I'm actually looking into systems that would measure large sets of SERPs consistently to help understand these updates better. My programming team needs a bit of growth, however, so it could be 3-6 months before we have this in place. But, I'm excited to give it a try.
My brain is mush, which is why I tried to spam SEOmoz with a link to columbia.inside-real-estate.com/
What? Is it St. Spammy's Day now?
Kenny - look at the link, amigo - there's a link condom on there.
I'm a spammer who tried to post a link to clarkston-washington.inside-real-estate.com/
But Rand edited my post...
Do it one more time, Kenny, and I'm posting your IP address.
Let's put up a few links to the sites right below his in the SERPs.... better check the whois first he might own some of them too.
Google is not after anyone, or any industry. They just do their work and try to improve quality. Same should IMO apply to SEOs/webmasters. Working with content, code, backlinks, marketing etc. levels that define website quality equally has so far never failed me ;)
In order to review Jagger in more scientific manner, we would need a thesis like (to quote rand):
"smaller, regionalized and niche-focused sites are losing out to internal pages at larger, more general-focus sites"
Alone anyone has no changes to research issue in full scale, but let's make it once again a community effort. Let's build a simple quostionaire of 20-30 issues, like
"I represent a smaller site" - true/false
"I represent a regionalized business" - true/false
"I represent a niche-focused business" - true/false
"The results for the keywords I follow regularly have not changed at all because of Jagger" - true/false
"The results for the keywords I follow regularly have not changed somewhat because of Jagger" - true/false
"The results for the keywords I follow regularly have not changed a lot because of Jagger" - true/false
"The sites in top3 for my keyword have in general more backlinks than other sites in top10" - true or false;
etc.
The questions must be simple (so everyone gets them right) and ask precisely the right questions.
Then publish quostionaire online, and ask webmasters/SEOs to answer the questionaire (you need to allow multiple votes per user because especially SEOs track many sites and keywords)
In the end, we need to sum up the results. And we would have more precise image of what updates are really made of (for the first time in SEO history) and what they target if enough (hundreds) fill in the questionaire.
Is anyone interested ?
I track several high dollar websites in the real estate industry and have seen them go UP with this update and it has nothing to do with backlinks.
As I've screamed from the mountain top many a time...
CONTENT IS KING.
The sites that aren't being hurt are the ones with hundreds (or thousands) of high quality pages full of content written for the reader, not for the search engine.
Addited: (And I posted this as well on SEOChat).. Looking at millions of referrals and only about .1% search for real estate [city] -- they search for [city] real estate... do that with the examples above and you get completely different results -- lot of the same sites, but different rankings and some different sites as well.
Definitely not something people should get too worked up about yet (I know, it is extremely difficult to be patient when you see the money sliding down the drain). The Florida update was exactly the same in some respects. I remember having a conversation with Googleguy about the real estate field during the Florida update. He asked me to send him some examples of SERPs that had gone wrong. The examples I had were real estate oriented (although I did not have any real estate sites of my own), and they showed the same kinds of things you are mentioning. All the relevant niche sites were wiped out by the mega blockbuster national sites. GG, after seeing the examples I sent him, admitted that the SERPs for those searches were wonky. However, not long after, the national sites disappeared again, and the niche sites reclaimed their spots. Its the nature of the Google update beast. Don't make assumptions about anything until the fat lady has sung. Things most likely WILL change drastically over the next few weeks. What you see now is not likely what you will see soon.
I just love updates. :) I have several clients in the US real estate sector...none of their rankings have moved except up. Besides the Florida update, I haven't had a bad update and even Florida wasn't that bad. Does anyone know SEO anymore? These updates seperate the mice from men, i guess.
I don't mean to boast, hardly, but i mean, c'mon, what are people doing? Vary anchor text. Authority links. Internal anchor text management. Friendly SEO internal URLs. Titles, h1, etc... All basic stuff now.
Michael,
I didn't mean to make it out to be update Jagger vs. Real Estate; I'm simply using this niche as an example. Obviously, many of our own sites and those SERPs that I monitor have been heavily affected as well.
What I did want to point out here is how the update affected the niche and what sites are currently ranking vs. those that have lost out. I think we can observe this type of phenomenon across the board - smaller, regionalized and niche-focused sites are losing out to internal pages at larger, more general-focus sites.