On the morning of December 14th, MozCast registered the largest 24-hour Google ranking flux on record since we started tracking data in early April. The temperature for Thursday, December 13th was 102.2° F (for reference, the original Penguin update was 93.1°):
This was especially striking since I had just rolled out a small fix in our computations for a problem that was slightly overestimating temperatures on some days since the rollout of 7-result SERPs. SERPmetrics confirmed substantial levels of 24-hour flux, and webmaster chatter suggested that people were seeing major ranking and organic traffic changes.
Unfortunately, Google was unable to confirm an algorithm update. So, where does that leave us? It turns out that it’s not an easy question.
The Big Signals
A while back we launched a set of five top-view metrics to help provide an at-a-glance view of patterns across the entire set of rankings MozCast tracks. Only one of those metrics moved noticeably between December 13th and 14th – PMD Influence suffered a sizeable one-day drop. PMD Influence is the percentage of Top 10 results occupied my partial-match domains (PMDs). This includes hyphenated and non-hyphenated domains that contain the keyword phrase but are not an exact match. Here’s the 30-day view:
PMD Influence dropped from 3.73% on 12/13 to 3.54% on 12/14 (about a 5.1% drop in 24 hours). While my gut says that drop wasn’t the full picture, it’s a good place to start. So, which sites lost out in this change?
Across the 1,000 SERPs tracked, this PMD drop represents a change of only 18 partial-match domains that fell out of the top ten. It’s a bit more complicated than that, though. There were actually 36 PMDs that fell out of the top ten, and 18 new PMDs that entered the top ten, for a net difference of 18. Analyzing these domains one-by-one can turn into a wild goose chase pretty quickly, so let’s look at a couple of situations where a keyword lost multiple PMDs.
One query that lost two PMDs was “barbeque”. On 12/13 the following PMDs ranked in the top ten:
- www.springcreekbarbeque.com
- www.qbarbeque.com
- www.barbequeman.com
- scbarbeque.com
- www.waltsbarbeque.com
The next day, domains (4) and (5) fell out of the top ten. Domain (5) had been floating near the #10 spot, so that may be a fluke. Interestingly, for just one day, Wikipedia’s barbecue page fell completely out of the top ten, after ranking in the #1 position consistently. We’ll explore that in the next section.
Here’s another example with multiple PMD losses – the keyword “joannes" had three PMDs ranking on 12/13:
- www.joannesbedandback.com
- www.joannesbb.com
- www.joannesgourmetpizza.com
The next day, only (1) remained. Again, (2) and (3) were taking up the tail end of the top ten, and in this case were bumped out by Yelp and Urban Spoon, so this change may be smaller than it initially looks.
One PMD that lost ranking caught my eye – a query for “gmaps”. On 12/13, the domain [www.mgmaps.com] fell out of the top ten. This turns out to be a shift from a 10-result SERP to a 7-result SERP, and the PMD was sitting at #8 prior to the shift. Interestingly, though, Google Maps, which had been sitting at #2, took the #1 spot and got site-links and a 7-result SERP. We’ll come back to this one.
Sorry - we’re not exactly making the situation clearer, are we? I want to illustrate just how complex the situation really is. I’ve come to believe that not even Google fully understands the dynamic system they’ve created. Ultimately, there were no clear patterns across the PMD changes, so let’s dive into a couple of specific situations.
A Wiki Situation
Wikipedia suffered a rare (albeit temporary) loss of their coveted #1 position for the query “barbeque”. Since Wikipedia holds the largest share of top-ten real estate in our data set, a major change to the site (such as a technical problem that caused temporary de-indexation) could cause very large-scale flux in the rankings. Luckily, we can run these numbers.
On 12/13, Wikipedia had a 4.56% top-ten share in our data set, which dropped to 4.41%, for a net loss of 14 rankings. This may not sound like much, until you recall that that change is on par with the 18 ranking PMD shift (and Wikipedia is just one site). In some ways, this seems to be an anomaly of 12/13 more than 12/14, as Wikipedia held a 4.46% share on 12/12. Historically, the 12/14 numbers aren’t unheard of – Wikipedia had a 4.82% share back in June, for example.
I should also note that the Wikipedia page in question for the query “barbeque” was actually the “/Barbecue” (alternate spelling) page. It’s possible that a spell-check adjustment or other very minor code tweak could have had unexpected repercussions.
This does go to show, though, how a site as powerful as Wikipedia can definitely have an impact on the overall SERP landscape. Like the PMDs, I don’t think it’s the entire picture, but it is a piece of the puzzle.
The Curious Case
Let’s go back to another oddity in the PMD analysis – the query for “gmaps”. On the morning of 12/14, the official Google Maps site not only jumped from #2 to #1, but it got site-links and a 7-result SERP, pushing out three domains. It’s easy to jump to conclusions and assume Google is favoring their own products, except that two pieces of data make that unlikely here.
The first clue is that Google Maps returned to the #2 position on 12/15 (and a 10-result SERP). The second is that we know that something big happened on 12/13 – Google Maps finally re-launched on Apple’s iOS6. Here’s a headline and time-stamp from Forbes:
Obviously, this story had a ripple effect across 12/13, and probably had a huge impact on metrics (CTR, dwell time, etc.) related to Google Maps and the official site. While this doesn’t help our quest to find the source of the update, it is interesting to note that a major news item could not only change a ranking, but cause a 7/10 shift in results. My ongoing investigations indicate that 7-result SERPs are highly dynamic and automatically change based on factors that may include user metrics and QDF (“freshness”).
The Big Movers
Everything to this point came out of just one data point – the PMD shift. Let’s go back to the beginning and ask the other obvious question – which queries changed the most from 12/13 to 12/14? This turns out to be a tricky question, because some queries are just naturally higher-flux than others. Typically, I compare the 24-hour “temperature” for any given query to the 7-day average for that query, to get a ratio. This helps indicate which queries are unusually high-flux. For 12/14, here are ten unusually high-flux queries (with temperatures):
- “knockout roses” (181°)
- “condo rentals” (168°)
- “rosatis pizza” (161°)
- “aerosoles store locator” (158°)
- “bj wholesale hours” (151°)
- “party stores” (143°)
- “kitchen sinks” (137°)
- “millionaire matchmaker” (125°)
- “celiac disease diet” (119°)
- “garnishment” (115°)
Any one query is an anecdote – the web changes. What we’re looking for in the data is a calling card of sorts – a story that ties these queries together. Unfortunately, the patterns are all over the place. Our top mover (1) was just a case of an eHow page jumping up the rankings. Two of these queries (6 and 10) have no clear explanation other than multi-spot shifts. Query (8) seems to be a case of QDF and has high volatility outside of the 7-day window.
Four queries (2, 4, 5, and 9) showed shifts in domain diversity. For three of them, one domain went from a single spot in the top ten to multiple spots. For query (5), though, one domain lost spots (diversity increased). Our top-view metrics aren’t showing any big overall shifts in domain diversity, but there are always winners and losers day-to-day.
Query (3) was another case where Wikipedia dropped out of the top ten, and (7) saw an Amazon product page fall from #1 to #10. In the case of (3), Yelp moved up and went from one ranking in the top ten to two. In both cases, the big sites regained their positions on 12/15, which is certainly interesting. If we look at the MozCast “Big 10” data, though, Wikipedia was still #1 and Amazon #2 on 12/14, and the overall SERP share of the Big 10 didn’t move much.
The Bigger Mystery
So, where does all of this leave us? A handful of people were kind enough to send me evidence of search traffic losses on 12/14, but it’s very difficult to reconcile these specific cases against MozCast’s sampling of top ten SERPs. I can’t pinpoint any single factor here, but it seems clear that the amount of change was unusual, and it can’t be simply explained by any single event (this data was all recorded prior to the tragic events in Connecticut, for example).
It’s possible that Google made a small change – so small that they didn’t even consider it an “update” – that had unexpected repercussions. It’s possible that something non-algorithmic but still under Google’s control happened, such as processing a large chunk of disavow requests (we have no evidence of this – just covering the bases). It could be that a small set of highly influential sites, like Wikipedia, made large-scale changes. Or it could just be a massive coincidence (although my gut still says no on this one).
I’d welcome further data and discussion. We’re actively working to expand the MozCast data set, and the next version of it will include some enhancements, including a keyword set that’s cleanly divided across some major categories/verticals. We’ll also be working in the new year to automate some of the analysis tools, so that we can process large numbers of SERPs more quickly. We’re learning as we go, and I hope the exploration is useful.
13th December is the birthday of one of the most inspirational people in my life: my dear mother. So if you're after an unofficial name for the Google Algo History page, may I propose the Marilyn Update? Would absolutely adore you if you did! :-)
One of my friends experienced a little fluctuation in results and he probably operates in coupon niche. I was totally unsure of what to answer him but now i can assume it was definitely from Google. At first, it seemed panda/penguin as usual but i couldn't find anything nearer to 13th of December.
@pete do you think Google has been giving so much favor to its own products?
I think Google is just out there to do business just like rest of us and they would definitely take full advantage of their popularity. But i don't see any concrete proof of that yet so if you can experiment with a little more detail on specifically Google's product favour then it would be great.
Hi Peter,
I confirm you that also in Spain and Italy we saw big fluctuations...
But there's something not quite right...
PMD Update (let's call it so, even if it's not official) at first could recall is elder brother EMD. But EMD is not yet rolled outside of Google.com, hence the reasons why PMD were hitten should be searched somewhere else.
You pointed to freshness and user metrics, but I would look also to others factors as "entity consistency" and Domain Authority.
From what I see in the not google.com SERPs, where - I repeat - EMD is not rolled out yet - the crowding of the SERPs seems strongly depending on those factors, and the effect of PMD was that some sites (especially old and, most of the times, apparently dead), coped an abnormal visibility in middle and long tail queries.
Finally, I'm glad to know all the news about Mozcast... but they - and events like the one you described - make even more pressing to plan its regional versions.
So do you think this PMD is a precursor to EMD crack-down or independent of it?
I think it's different, not really connected.
Thanks for the quick reply. Good to get your take on things :)
Hi Gianluca,
Is that 100% confirmed that EMD hasn't been rolled out across outside of Google.com? I haven't found any other evidence to support, but in one particular vertical I work in we are seeing ridiculously poor quality EMD's still ranking.
Google itself said it was rolled out just in google.com
Thanks for getting back to me.
Crowding/diversity have been really tough to measure lately, primarily because of 7-result SERPs. When a query shifts from 10 to 7, it tends to gain diversity - in that the #1 site just gets one listing. On the other hand, that diversity is only spread across 7 results. Add to that that queries are shifting both directions daily (it's not static), and there are numerous factors impacting and broad view of diversity right now. It's been tricky to tease apart.
Classic Google cloak and dagger, I know they have a business model to protect but for us seo newbies they aint exactly helping, this kind of thing can make businesses suspicious and it tends to be us seo guys who get it in the neck when stuff like this happens!
This is VERY true, esp. When putting all of your eggs in one basket, and ESP. With a schizophrenic sociopath like Google. Building a pier and beam foundation with a twig is disaster. What, something like 2.5% of buying clicks come from social media, BUT dangerous and possibly fatal to discount when done right (coming from someone who hates sm in a biz delivery context). SM is highly useful for driving clicks to landing pages as are a gazillion other places. You can make fortunes online (I have ) totally circumventing the se's. ironic thing is, when you start to do this u often get picked up by the bastards, which will further line the pockets of your clients, and thus yourself, or Your aff pages , whatever your angle. Video, guest blogging, shadow domains ( one if my favs), and on. Also numbers game, more links, content, etc more results - whether machines generated or English major written. Play with grammerly.com and see what u can get away with... It's divine comedy what crap u can get away with and succeed handsomely. But just because you can doesn't mean you should....have to weigh risk/reward. Our black hat sites have always been churn and burn, and from the tone of this thread, sounds like maybe some people will finally realize that so called white hat sites experience this also, albeit a bit differently, with different cycles. In almost 15 years of seo, I've learned the HIGHLY cliched phrase the only thing that is certain is rapid, unrelenting change. White hat and black hat is bulls**t, only profitable and non profitable sites. Made very good money with both. Also, no such thing as too big to fall or fail... David and Goliath anyone? Alta vista? Aol? Once industry titans, they've fallen hard, much like Google is about to. As well as meteoric rises, like Apple over past 7 or so years, from nothing to most high capitalized comp. as well, good things take growing nurturing and time - Microsoft? 15 YEARS for their first 50mil in sales, then BAM, then irrelevancy for theist part, a "me too" except in the enterprise sector, where it stii takes it in....
Love you all!!!!! Coolbubba Mike ,
Google is known to test everything. They certainly beta test their refresh and updates before "officially" releasing them. Could this simply have been a beta test gone wrong or a beta test of something big coming up? Thus explaining why Google couldn't "confirm" any refresh or update.
Few big brands we work with have noticed a nice jump in rankings on this date. It could be a brand related change or another tweak to Penguin. Just my thoughts based on the work we have been doing and the results we are seeing.
I'm seeing a lot more brand distinction in some of my clients during that timeframe as well.
Same thing on Google.it. Big brands experienced a remarkable jump in rankings indeed around that date.
If you visit SERPmetrics or serps.com's volatility index, you'll find that MozCast isn't the only index that's experiencing odd SERP fluctuations.
I'm on the camp of "there were small changes that you can't call updates" in terms of what's happened on the 5th, 10th, and 13th. Anyone remember Vince? We felt it, and Google thought it was a small change.
When I took a look at the different types of content that we were experiencing losses in traffic, there changes in the SERP landscapes which suggested different factors - EDM, domain crowding, QDF now being considered for specific terms - so if Google says there's no "update," I believe them 100%.
If Google says there weren't multiple changes in the algo, I'll call BS.
Totally agree, I said a similar thing on the seroundtable.com post the other day. Lack of a 'named update' does not mean there were no algo changes that day and I think sometimes these tweaks affect a lot more SERPs than Google initially estimate; and especially so with the compounding effect of 2 or more algo tweaks in a single day.
I see no changes in our analytics.
Its very nice, Seems you are very Experienced in this. I am new here and i am happy to be here with such expert people. :)
From Areesh.
I also noticed fluctations in SERP-s of my website. Ranks fluctated from first on page 1 to mid page 2 position on almost hourly basis. Fortunately for me, when fluctations stopped, my website was on better position than before.
Thank for your useful information
I've seen some very odd results since December 13th. One of the terms my client ranked for we dropped from 5th to first on the second page.
One of our competitors who is ranked 6th also appears:
1 time on page 2
9 times on page 3
9 times on page 4
3 times on page 5
So out of the top 50 ranking they are occupying 23 spots. There are over 62 million results for the term. If I include omitted pages on page 3-15 they are occupying 6-7 spots each page.
Thanks Dr. Pete for your analysis. It definitely did hit Partial Match Domains. My friend had a non-english (dutuch) domain calls www.heliumpakketten.nl .
Before 14th, It used be on 3rd position with keywor "helium ballonnen" and now it went down to 13th 2nd page.
I think Dr.Pete Every measurements are organic and static data with influence, so we have to trust on these data. we all know very well, capabilities of Dr.Pete.
We actually saw rankings go upwards during this time. In fact more keywords were ranking for our clients than ever with this refresh / update. Read more about it here https://www.seo-hop.com/google-updates-december-best-google-update-2012/ We write about every major google change in the serps
Interesting take that you think this may be a ploy for Google to bait other websites into turning to Adwords for business.
Similar to some of the observations above, branded keywords seemed to jump up to no 1 from out of nowhere, noticed this on one client in particular. On the flipside, numerous terms they had been ranking in the top 3 for in the mobile home industry in their city suddenly fell off the map on SEO Moz(greater than 49 place changes down by the SEO Moz rank tracker on my dashboard; disappeared from the rank tracker completely, though still holding no. 1 slots on yahoo and bing for the same keyword). But interestingly, when pulling the SERPs for these keywords manually they were still number one for their region-specific keyword (I mean the general keyword with the city tagged on at the end) but showing in the Google Places results above the general SERP results... Looks like the same thing happened with the other local competitors, guys with places accounts for that city who had been fighting for those top 3-5 slots with us in the SERPs all fell off, and an out of town company with no places account for the city now holds the number 1 spot for the SERP results that show under the Google Places results for those keywords. Also noticed an increase in rankings for this client in non-location specific keywords for their industry, which was nice, though admit I was initially troubled by the seeming rank loss for all the location-specific keywords in the SERPs.
Anyone else noticed anything similar to this? I'm not sure, but in the SEO Moz rank tracker it doesn't seem to account for your placement in the keyword SERPs if you show in the Places results? Correct me if I'm wrong on these observations or missing the obvious, am new to the SEO Moz community, and SEO in general (photographer/writer turned web design guy turned SEO/SEM). Appreciate you all out there, this community has been quite helpful so far.
From 120 daily unique visitors to 20/25. That's an 85% drop. My job is in danger :(
Dr. Pete.
'Google is favoring their own products'. So He is making fool to all of us??
Thanks for the great insight in this post! We have noticed 5 sites of ours jump in the rankings very positively now we know part of the reason. I wonder what the emphasis/importance is with the update that gave us a boost in 20+ keywords on just 1 site.
I was one of the ones who saw a climb in the serps, so I for one am happy. Especially since I didn't do anything new to achieve this increase in ranking. I like what Google is attempting to accomplish with the latest update, but we are seeing strange sites climbing and more recognized sites plummeting.
All we can really do is keep an eye on things and read Moz, just as we're doing now! :)
Happy New Year!
Dr Pete - just revisiting this because, as far as I'm aware, no one has provided an answer to this as of yet and Google seem to be denying anything happened at all (much like Fat Tony from the Simpsons - "What's a truck?")
From the results I'm seeing here in the UK, I get the sense that this is a change to how likely it is that a local listing is displayed in the SERPs. Just for clarity, I don't mean how likely it is that the 7 pack or the map will be displayed, I mean in the traditional-10-organic-listings-per-page results.
For example, if I'm in incognito mode and I Google a generic term that is likely to trigger local results such as 'wedding photographers', I get 2 generic wedding photographer sites but the rest are all London based photographers (I live at the opposite end of the country to London btw).
If I come out of incognito mode and Google the same term I now get the same 2 generic sites and the rest of the top 10 are filled with local listings related to my actual location (well one is randomly located about 200 miles to the South of me, and 200 miles to the West of London but hey-ho).
I have no evidence to back this up because I haven't been storing and recording the data, but this feels very different to the sort of results I'd have got a few months ago. A few months back I'd have expected to see the 7 pack present still, but I'd have expected to see the majority of the top 10 flooded with generic sites, with maybe the odd one or two local results in there.
Is there anyway you can slice your data to analyse and look into this any further?
Kind regards and Happy New Year
anyone have any updates as to what happened? are you all seeing your rankings come back yet?
Seems like Google is changing the algo back a little for the guys that got caught up in the shotgun pallets
Hello Dr. Peter! I just love reading this article of yours. I belive that Google is trying to test everything. I guess they just beta test their updates before "officially" releasing them. Thank you for this post and I am really looking forward to read more of your latest articles.
Google has recently changed its instant preview to pages to highlight their ads
you can see here https://www.searcheccentric.com/google-instant-previews-gone
Dr. Pete,
A good way to know if changes are caused by algos or website changes is to monitor the other engines as well. When I saw an issue for my site on Google and Bing, and that was a strong indicator to me that the issue was on our sites since, for the most part, Bing and Google have not entered themselves into the Olympics under the synchronized algo update event.
I wonder if Google would ever incorporate time-related factors such as time of day, day of the week, etc into the SERPs. I could see it happening if they were able to prove that CTR changes depending on time, for example, with shopping queries happening on the weekend and buying queries on weekdays or bill payment occurring near the end of the month.
The article says Google "was unable to confirm an update."
Not so. Google went far beyond that.
It explicitly denied there had been an update.
That's a big difference.
Fair point - this was a bit more emphatic than their usual. I hate to say "Google denied..." because, at any point in time, we're dealing with only one contact. They've reached a point where one hand often doesn't know what the other is doing over there. So, I suppose the de-emphasis was intentional on my part. I didn't intend for it to be misleading (but you're correct).
Thanks for the gracious reply, and I meant no disrespect.
I guess this is colliding worlds issue.
I am a former journalist. In my world, when a company representative says something on the record it's perfectly normal to characterize it as a company statement. (Best practice is to also give the name and job title of the person making the statement.)
If the company has internal issues about who's authorized to say what, that's their problem.
Oh - didn't really take it personally. I realized that I was probably over-intepreting. I think I'm probably spending too much time trying to get in Google's collective head :)
Thanks for the post Dr. Pete, I had an odd situation happen to us on the morning of the 14th. A new client of mine (started in December) has a PMD and called me to find out why their listings had dropped completely off the first 3 pages of Google. Previously (for about the last 5 years) they had dominated the rankings for "Keyword1 + City Name" on maps and "Keyword2 + City Name" organically. Both of these keywords dropped completely.
I've been monitoring the situation since the 14th and the client has jumped back up to the #2 spot on the maps for both keyword variations. However, since this most recent change, their organic rankings are now dominated by companies such as "Angie's List", "YP" and "ELocalPlumbers".
I initially chalked this up to the release of the new Google App for IOS, but it would make sense if that was also coupled with an update devaluing the PMD's.
I'd be happy to email more specifics if interested.
I am seeing a fair amount of positive jumps from sites with ratings and reviews such as Yelp, Angie's List, etc. Perhaps this was a ratings/reviews update. Perhaps it was an update that somehow favors user submitted content (reading level, length, authenticity, etc)
Thank you! Google threw me under a bus in mid December (2nd time in 3 years during my busiest season) but couldn't figure out what had happened since I hadn't heard of any major updates after 12/4 and that one I survived just fine. Not fun but good to know something actually did happen around that time. Does seem to be coming back over the past week or so.
All I know is that my Spirithome.com site appears to have lost another 15% (more than the annual holiday drop, and this additional drop had an onset at a specific point instead of the usual slow drift). And just as all the explanations of Panda's hit did not and do not seem to apply to the site, the same happens with the above explanations. I won't really know if it's coming back until mid-January.
I hope something more helpful comes along.
There IS no MYSTERY to this... These are simply more cracks in the ground in what will shortly be the downfall of Google search as we know it. 5000 give or take engineers working in this "soup," high numbers of arbitrary tweeks to the algo daily and throw on top an icing (yes,I am hungry as hell, just woke up) of manual review and tweeks and the correspondingly low "engineers" managing this slop doesn't make for either good user experience OR do no evil....slack, irresponsible, and hipshot stupidity is evil in my book.
We have one dual Phd on our SERP smack down squad, but he is a responsible Rockstar left alone to do what he does best. Sounds like Goog is trying to do this with thousands and.thousands and thousands, just because they can.
Last I checked, google SERP pages don't appear in bing, probably won't in the next contender, and sure as hell won't appear in the engine we"re about to start working on...
Google is about to tweek it's search relevancy into the apocalypse, and, ironically, tweek themselves right out of the SERPS and off the throne... It is about time. Their s**t is broke, and its judgement day...
Couple extra thoughts - there MAY be salvation for Google if they actually don't CARE about the SERPS and are looking forward to the so called mobile device market and what shows up on mobile, maps, and their suite of app, some of which blow, and some of which are OK, but you are selling your soul ( and mortgage data, friends, and anything and everything about yourself by using the... Sheep and cattle get led to the slaughter 99% of the time, we're rolling off using ANYTHING big brother, er, Google. There is NO SUCH THING as online security or privacy, period, and minus the context of the Internet, 20 years ago you wouldn't have put your filing cab with you banking and all personal information out on your curb for all to see, so what in the hell is wrong with you now? Same thing. Google wallet is about as secure as a call girl in Vegas' virtues, if someone want in.... ;)
Happy merry new year ;P
This is a great analysis. I really get frustrated with Google sometimes, being so ambiguous with their updates and algorithm changes.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm seeing a change today similar to what I saw on 12/13. Its hitting a local smb, one of ours. We are ranked first for two phrases with a certain geo modifier, wherein we've been 2nd forever. On one of them we are seeing an accompanying onemap.
For us its a change in scope similar to what we saw around 12/13 only in this case its a positive result for our smb versus a negative result.
I'm still seeing movement on a lot of our maps as well, but I have also noticed a few keywords break away from the map pack and have one map listing on the top separated by a couple of "YP" type sites. I think the rankings are still dancing a bit!
In my niche the change on Dec 13th resulted in a parked EMD (which I had never seen before) ranking in top 5 for a competitive keyword, Pinterest scoring #1 for many of the terms I'm targeting (even though none of them are supposed to return image results) and several VERY old crappy 10-page sites coming up on the first page for the same keyword. Two days later the crappy sites disappeared but the EMD stayed. I lost about 10 - 15% of traffic that day. SERP quality went right down the drain for my niche...
Thanks for the analysis Dr. Pete - I responded to a question in the Q&A of someone seeing a major drop in Google for their keyword, which has now recovered. Looking at Search Metrics data, this isn't the first time this fluctuation and recovery has happened - could it be Google testing the SERPs with changes, and then restoring the results based with minor tweaks based on performance of new results - mini live experiments where they test algo updates, but don't actually push them live - I could see the terse Google guys (see their monthly we updated a feature that influences rankings updates) not calling this an algo update because it's not one that's permanent but only a test to see user reactions and performance. They could be testing algos for PMD ranking and not rolling it out permanently, so they aren't calling it an update - Barry's article says Google says there was no update - doesn't say anything about a test of a potential update.
If we see a test, it's usually just on one data center, and Google has implied they tend to run each test on <1% of users. That's not to say they couldn't roll out a change and then roll it back due to problems, but that would probably be a last resort. I really wonder if it was some kind of data glitch, akin to what happened with parked domains back in April.
I hear ya - thanks for clarifying!
Fwiw we also had a client seemingly fall off the SERPS for many phrases and big drops for a few others (though not all) on/around 24 nov, all of which (thankfully) recovered on 23 dec.
What a great christmas gift from google!
I have a client in the B2B space that I had just recovered from the wrath of the penguin - only to be kicked back down on the 13th.
I don't get it - do we think this was a mistake by Google?
The SERPs in my industry have drastically changed over the last week.
Thanks for the confirmation. Just to add my sites to the statistic. Almost across the board I saw a spike in traffic from December 12th-14th. Then on the 15th the traffic fell back to the "normal" levels. Since then it has remained mostly stable for the last week or so. Whatever they did on those days did not seem to have affected my sites in any meaningful way (good or bad).
Hey Doc,
Very interesting observation about the 7-pack serps being highly dynamic and seem to change based on user metrics and freshness.
I would be curious to know what type of queries these are. It feels to me like this is the rise of an "evergreen" serp and a "deciduous" serp. In other words, information that is highly consistent and relevant over time, versus that which changes constantly and is variable. From an information organization perspective, I could see why Google would want to identify and segment these two distinct forms of data, much like they do for local trigger queries. Thoughts?
An excellent analysis, on-going study of evaluating/dissecting every minutest details. Well done Dr. Pete and entire SEOMoz team to remain on top of smallest of turbulence's observed in online marketing arena. (There has to be some year-end awards for biggest, noteworthy contributions by an individual or a company in SEO/SEM/Social Media, etc.)
Luckily, none of our clients seems got affected recently which gives a great sigh of relief!
I never really thought about it, but I think Dr. Pete's comment "I’ve come to believe that not even Google fully understands the dynamic system they’ve created." says alot. Could it be that there is so many algorithm factors that even Google's team has to play catch up? I'm sure they run tests but nothing could be like the real thing. I'm also pretty sure there are plenty of safe guards so that the whole thing doesn't die but there also has to be room in the data for automated SERP adjustments.
We saw a lot of 'Google Dancing' last week, but didn't want to do anything 'knee-jerk-ish'. Some keywords gained, others lost (as is fairly normal around Google updates). We're still working on the fall-out of it for our clients. We're looking to Moz, SE Round Table and others who have the man power for the research to help explain this more, especially given Google's relative silence on the matter.
Yup - drop of about 20% on 4 B2B news sites. Not really a niche but it is very long tail stuff.
There is something happed that’s for sure but why Google hiding is a million $ question. They pretend to be transparent but what happened now. We assume SERP analysis is showing wrong data due to some miss calculation but what about the webmaster world chatter are those guys are wrong as well!
All of my sites survived the 13, 14 December but 1 of my sites traffic is 45% down from 17 December and onward. Are someone facing any Flux in 17 December? None of the SERP analytics describe any unusual change on 17 but my traffic graph show.
Thanks for the great insights. I have one specific question about MozCast - do you track key phrases with local elements (Google+ Local results) or you just watch for changes in the organic results.
Checked analytics of my 3 active sites, didn't noticed any change, (gladly).
One of my eCommerce client is getting steady organic traffic in a day something around 2000 but on Dec 13 I saw some hike in traffic & it was something around 5000. When I checked the traffic on Dec 14 it came down to normal 2000. I checked my analytics & found on Dec 13 that traffic from (not provided) keyword was little bit higher than the other days.
Definitely, something was happened on either Dec 13 OR 14 but it's a big mystery why google is not disclosing?
I hope they'll disclose it soon as they won't keep us in dark.
I work with some tradesmen, I saw some big jumps in Yelp, BBB and Superpages listings. Some have taken the top spots in some markets for certain keywords and were virtually invisible prior.
Seen a couple of hits with my clients. One was in the fashion industry who went from close to 400 visits a day to 100 or less and dropped off the SERPs for a few keywords.
A couple of them have begun to recover, but others are still hiding off the SERPs altogether almost.
13th was the day it all started going down too. Strange Week and not a great time for it to happen just before Christmas!!
Great analysis. If it was just Mozcast that spiked you could maybe put it down to your data set of 1K sites but with the other tools fluxing too there must have been something...
While we're on the subject are you planning to expand the dataset soon?
In statistic size of data set have some influence but data set collection process is more important than size. I am 100% sure that Dr Pete follow the rules to collect the data set that provide best possible answers.
If only mozcast show some spike we will still trust on it because we know the capabilities of dr pete.
Dr. Pete: How do your analytics take in the impact of changes created by via google maps results?
For instance for one of our local industries (actually a niche vertical) we saw changes in SERPS rankings that were a reflection in a change in probably the "location prominence" as affected by Google Maps. It showed externally in google.com and was probably initially reflected in maps.google.com.
The simplest description seemed to be that Google had narrowed the geographic sense of "prominence" to city borders as opposed to city plus suburbs. It was reflected internally in the Maps index with changes in the Maps Serps.
It also manifested itself in the google.com serps.
Clearly that shouldn't impact something like wikipedia directly for BBQ, but it could have impacted a variety of sites many of which could clearly show up prominently and could be subject to impacts from Maps and the "7 pacs" for local queries for those phrases.
BTW: While google has generally changed "location prominence" on and off for different verticals in different cities, the changes seem to last for about 1 month. In this case though we've only seen the change lasting about 5 days.
Our measurements are currently organic only, which may include blended results (if Google tags them as organic), but not maps or "true" local. It's entirely possible that there were local changes as well (and it's certainly an interesting question), but they generally wouldn't show up in this data.
Its possible Google "filtered" on the vertical (or phrase) thereby also impacting wikipedia for a day or so, while simultaneously impacting the vertical on the maps side
Its just an idea. I was discussing this w/ Mike Blumenthal who monitors these things far more closely than anyone. As I understood him he referenced changes that impacts the "PACs" as showing up sometimes w/ "location prominence" limited to w/in a city, sometimes within a larger area, and sometimes it appears to hit just some verticals and not others, or just some metro areas and not others.
Maps Serps seem to have some reflection of strict seo besides Maps oriented impacts. Of course my thoughts are simply "wild assed stabs in the dark". Its simply we got hit w/ a maps generated change over the same days...and I thought I'd throw out some ideas...especially as BBQ is a word that will generate various types of local serps changes...and its possible those changes could show up in your measurements.
But who knows??? :D
Many did report of ranking fluctuation on the 13th, It would be good if Google did provide some transparency on this date. I did see some ranking movements for several niches I have been monitoring. We will wait and see if Google provides a follow up comment.
I saw a tremendous impact on Dec. 13 for some furniture related queries.
I know that before that date, I was coming up at around position 6 or 7 when you typed in my name 'Nathan Peters'. Now my personal web site dropped onto the 2nd page, so I lost at least 5 spots.
We had some websites with a lot of positive movement during that week, so I took a lot of interest in this article. However, I checked the Analytics of all our web properties and didn't see anything unusual.
I'll keep following this development to see if there is any connection to this and our sudden ranking improvements.
Peculiar indeed.
Hmm....not much fluctations noticed up here in Canuckland, Doc....course, we're "in" google.ca world....perhaps our change is just a bit further down the pike, launch date wise I mean...
We had our site drop from page one number 6 for key word ATV parts to page two number 4. then yesterday it went back to 6 and today it is at 10. Also we saw that a large portion of our key words with ATV in it did drop a little. This might be due to the PMD. Thoughts?
New Homes and New Condo Niche Site...
We saw a 10% drop on 14th, 12% drop on the 15th and 18% drop on the 16th.
After the 16th it slowly corrected itself to a 3% difference.
Had a client go from page one on multi-terms to page nowhere. We had published a limited amount of content with a good anchor spread and they rose very quickly in a local search result. However, they site is very lean on content. There is no stuffing, but they have 5-10 pages and little content per page. This lead me to believe it was a panda action to counter content issues.
Seen a lot of fluctuations with our clients throughout that week in December, Thursday 13th was the biggest though. Luckily, a lot of it was for the better, however, one of our firms within the recruitment industry took a huge hit, still trying to figure out why!
Matt.
Garbage in = garbage out. Google insiders must love reading these spastic articles. Its part of their quarterly earnings strategy to mess around with the heads of the peons who do SEO work. (and move the herd towards pay per click)
When will the SEO industry learn that Lord Google has contempt for what they do?
If any other industry were to control over 60+ % of a product it would be declared a monopoly. But anti-trust rules don't apply to Google. Even more startling is that most people who do internet marketing think they can cooperate and partner with Googles policies and be successful.
Google doesn't want any partners they want the whole enchilada.
If you are playing poker and you don't know who the patsy is... you are the patsy. We are all patsies.
Good observation
I think there's a big difference between lack of definitive conclusions and "spastic" - every time I do analysis, I'm learning a bit more about how and why Google makes changes. The why is the big part - if you understand their motivations, that's when you can start to predict what's coming next year. I think their market share is exactly why we need to do this. We can't let the algorithm become a black box.
One of the best posts I've ever read on here. Very few people are willing to speak the truth like this.