Google SERP Seeing Significant Changes This Month!

May 19th, 2008 | RSS Feed

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Webmasters around the world been reporting a drop in traffic as a result of the pages dropping in terms of their rank due to recent changes in Google SERPS. In a forum thread at Webmaster World, there are suggestions of link buying and link exchanging with off topic or poor geolocation websites that some sites seem to be resorting to. This has led to dropping down of many sites indexed pages! The shuffle seems to be continuing as many sites lost sitelinks after a few days. Some of the excerpts from the forum thread are given below:

“I'm seeing similar signs this morning but I think that this is in reaction to the effect Internetheaven reported above. ie a devaluation in internal links caused an overvaluation in low value external links. I've seen a few sites rise to the very top of Serps that seem to have done it through link buying and link exchanging with off topic and/or poor geo location sites. Those now seem to be dropping.

Also one site that, out of the blue, got sitelinks for a very competitive 2 word term where there is no way it should be top of serps never mind be given sitelinks for that term. I'm pretty sure that this was an indication that external outgoing links, with the right anchor text, was given an undue boost. Today they have lost sitelinks. Lets hope they don't get them back!

What I'm seeing this morning looks like they are either tweaking down the weight of external outgoing links and incoming links or turning internal link anchor weight back up a tad.”

“I am seeing a large drop in traffic today that I first started noticed yesterday afternoon. I was hoping it was a fluke yesterday, but there is definetely something changed as this is our lowest traffic levels since December.

I have noticed about 20,000 indexed pages have dropped out. Last week we has a severe decrease in the amount of visits by Googlebot for 3 or 4 days. Googlebot activity has increased a great deal since then, almost back to normal levels.”

“Not sure if its relevant but my google serps seem directly correlated to my natural traffic. By that i mean for X% increase in natural traffic i get x% boost in serps ratings. As soon as the natural traffic lowers the serps lower.

My guess is there is a new link for some hot deal site that has decent pr and i get that PR boost when googlebot finds that link however when the "algo" or "filters" actually process that link the position is re-evaluated.

It could also be reduced for sandbox/site age. We re-did the entire backend/site in february so it may be fluctuating on that note as well.

Either way, it seems very much trended against natural traffic for us. Yes, i also run google analytics.”

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