Take The SURVEY: March 6th Google Update.....Let's find out what caused it!

12 years ago

Originally Posted by John Moore

So we all know now there was a definite google algorithm update on the 6th of March, many people have reported ranking drops, there's been speculation it's tied to SAPE links, however many that have been hit claim to not have any SAPE links.

In the interest of serving us all, I've created a short 10 question survey for those hit by the recent update to fill out. I'm hoping we can get at least 100 people who have been affected to accurately fill out the survey, then I'll continually update results here.

To help us all identify certain characteristics of this update, I ask that only people who have experienced noticeable drops in their keyword rankings around the 6th of March to fill out this survey, please be as honest and accurate as possible.

The survey will take less than 1 minute to complete, please click the link below to start the survey;

http://kwiksurveys.com/s.asp?sid=cu1c0trrbfh4yk9108676

Thank you,
John.

If I am honest the update done me a favor. My rankings shot up and my Google traffic increased by over 40%.

Just be careful with backlinking, I do manual linking methods and it work, stop using unnatural link building.

Thanks

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CTRTheme

Banned 12 years ago

[DELETED]

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JSProjects

12 years ago

Originally Posted by CTRTheme

Is this a CPA offer?

Clearly not a CPA survey.

Thanks
1 reply

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LiftMyRank

12 years ago

Originally Posted by larryboy03

If I am honest the update done me a favor. My rankings shot up and my Google traffic increased by over 40%.

Just be careful with backlinking, I do manual linking methods and it work, stop using unnatural link building.

Me included, in fact over 95% of my clients came through positively too, however a few experienced drops and I'm trying to identify the characteristics of hit sites, so far 22 people have taken the survey and already some trends are emerging, however I'll wait until I have 100 participants before I offer some conclusions.

Originally Posted by JSProjects

Clearly not a CPA survey.

Correct, I'm not selling anything, no aff link, OTO, etc.....purely for research that we can all benefit from in.

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Bambu

12 years ago

Re: Question 1
You should include an option for no penalty or an improvement in rank.

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honnas

12 years ago

John thank you for doing this, I am looking forward to the results.

My site is a bit of an anomaly in that the domain is 3 years old that had 10 quality articles. I never SEO'ed or had any affiliate links on it. In fact had not changed it at all in 2 years, it was just there. But it was an aged domain with no bad history. A change in business plans and goals I decided to shut down a personal business PR 3 site and 301'ed it to this domain. For the last 3 months the juice and PR carried over to the new site.

It has about 100 high quality articles, all written by me on a specific subject. The affiliate links are in the articles and are all related to the subject. I think I may have gotten too aggressive with the affiliate links.

Something I want to throw out there...An associate also had a great site on the same subject, her site is 4 years old. Another has an 5 year old site on a totally different subject that has ranked well for 3 years that suddenly tanked. The two things we all have in common all three site are WP (all hosted with different hosts),the majority of our links are Amazon and we are all using Amazon Simple Admin. Of course that could be coincidence....

Thanks
1 reply

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rsto95

12 years ago

All my Amazon affiliate websites have had no effect by this update. Traffic never dropped. If anything, I saw the slightest increase in traffic.

Thanks
1 reply

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LiftMyRank

12 years ago

Originally Posted by Bambu

Re: Question 1
You should include an option for no penalty or an improvement in rank.

Actually that would negatively skew the results, I'm trying to determine the characteristics of sites that negatively got hit from the update, what may be interesting is conducting another separate survey for those sites who didn't get hit, then compare results of the two survey's, that could provide some interesting insight.

Originally Posted by honnas

John thank you for doing this, I am looking forward to the results.

My site is a bit of an anomaly in that the domain is 3 years old that had 10 quality articles. I never SEO'ed or had any affiliate links on it. In fact had not changed it at all in 2 years, it was just there. But it was an aged domain with no bad history. A change in business plans and goals I decided to shut down a personal business PR 3 site and 301'ed it to this domain. For the last 3 months the juice and PR carried over to the new site.

It has about 100 high quality articles, all written by me on a specific subject. The affiliate links are in the articles and are all related to the subject. I think I may have gotten too aggressive with the affiliate links.

Something I want to throw out there...An associate also had a great site on the same subject, her site is 4 years old. Another has an 5 year old site on a totally different subject that has ranked well for 3 years that suddenly tanked. The two things we all have in common all three site are WP (all hosted with different hosts),the majority of our links are Amazon and we are all using Amazon Simple Admin. Of course that could be coincidence....

Yes, I would say all being on WP is a coincidence, however having a lot of affiliate links on your site may not be, I'm starting to see that reflected in results of the survey, I've always advised my clients to try and have at least 200 unique words per outgoing/aff link, also not having any links above the fold, they're really targeting doorway pages, so you have to come across as a destination.

Originally Posted by rsto95

All my Amazon affiliate websites have had no effect by this update. Traffic never dropped. If anything, I saw the slightest increase in traffic.

Congratulations.

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honnas

12 years ago

Originally Posted by John Moore

Yes, I would say all being on WP is a coincidence, however having a lot of affiliate links on your site may not be, I'm starting to see that reflected in results of the survey, I've always advised my clients to try and have at least 200 unique words per outgoing/aff link, also not having any links above the fold, they're really targeting doorway pages, so you have to come across as a destination.

I am close to the 200 words per link, I don't have any affiliate links above the fold and the site was/is a 150 page information site. Then I screwed it up by switching domain names and monetizing. LOL

Hoping more take the survey!

Thanks
1 reply

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jovykhan 12 years ago

What is the update was on March 6? My client website's impression dropped from 4,500 to 320 today. He's asking what happened and all I can tell perhaps is this "update" on March 6.
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LiftMyRank

12 years ago

[UPDATE:] Thank you for everybody who has participated in this survey, so far I've had 33 respondents and already trends are emerging, however I'll wait until I've had over 100 responses before I offer some conclusions.

To anybody who experienced significant ranking drops around the 6th of March, please fill this survey out so we can all determine characteristics of this update.

http://kwiksurveys.com/s.asp?sid=cu1c0trrbfh4yk9108676

Thanks.

Thanks

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chrisv24

12 years ago

From what I am reading so far, it looks like the update has clamped down on sites that look like they offer paid link positions. Also seems like blog links have been devalued a bit.

Thanks
1 reply

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LiftMyRank

12 years ago

Originally Posted by honnas

I am close to the 200 words per link, I don't have any affiliate links above the fold and the site was/is a 150 page information site. Then I screwed it up by switching domain names and monetizing. LOL

Hoping more take the survey!

Yep, I've got 76 responses so far, getting close to the target of 100, will release results either way this Sunday.

Originally Posted by jovykhan

What is the update was on March 6? My client website's impression dropped from 4,500 to 320 today. He's asking what happened and all I can tell perhaps is this "update" on March 6.

That's why I'm conducting this survey, to see if there's any patterns to affected sites, as per above I'll release results soon.

Originally Posted by chrisv24

From what I am reading so far, it looks like the update has clamped down on sites that look like they offer paid link positions. Also seems like blog links have been devalued a bit.

Maybe, however several affected sites I've been shown don't have any outgoing links that could be construed as paid links.

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paulgl 12 years ago

Why not do surverys for the rest of the people?

That is, those that replaced the so-called sites that "dropped."

For each person/site that goes down, one takes its place.

I wonder what it's like to just sit there, do nothing, then BOOM!
Someone else (supposedly) does something stupid and
rockets ME to the top!

Then, to make things even stranger, I see my site drop. Again,
doing nothing. But hey! Those other people must have fixed the
problem! And now I'm crying about some penalty...

If people actually stopped, thought logically, and researched
how google and the internet work, these threads would be
gone. Check that. They would probably multiple.

Oh well...

Paul
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nik0

Banned 12 years ago

Funny that you had 95% of your clients shot up in rankings, while all my clients remained the same or slowly increased as always.

I bet there wasn't an update at all.

Things get fabricated easily, one person starts to yell, there was an update there was an update, and then a ton of noobs start to say: yes my rankings dropped as well, and some others, yes my rankings increased. Heck every day there are thousands if not millions of sites that experiences drops in rankings (especially at IM forums) and obvious there are tons of sites that increase in rankings on daily base. And those people are always the loudest yellers.

Perhaps I should start to fabricate a Google update on the 1st of April myself.

- Step 1 we post some rumours at every single IM forum
- Step 2 we start a survey about it
- Step 3 we throw in a paid press release so that the first 10 pages are full of the news
- Step 4 the ball starts rolling and all the fake authorities like SEOmoz / Seroundtable and SearchEngineland start to pick it up and it becomes a fact.

Now let's predict the outcome of the survey:

- terrible content and other onpage issue's
- spammy (automated) back link profile
- excessive use of affiliate links

All things that were already covered in the Penguin and Panda updates.

Thanks

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nik0

Banned 12 years ago

You know what I am thinking, John Moore is creating a nice list of affected webmasters or wannabee IM'ers might be more appropriated, and then after a month or few weeks, he starts mailing his list solutions to recover.

Cause it's very simple, if there was a decent enough update then Matt would have mentioned it in his last communications. And guess what....

Thanks
1 reply

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LiftMyRank

12 years ago

Originally Posted by nik0

Funny that you had 95% of your clients shot up in rankings, while all my clients remained the same or slowly increased as always.

I bet there wasn't an update at all.

Things get fabricated easily, one person starts to yell, there was an update there was an update, and then a ton of noobs start to say: yes my rankings dropped as well, and some others, yes my rankings increased. Heck every day there are thousands if not millions of sites that experiences drops in rankings (especially at IM forums) and obvious there are tons of sites that increase in rankings on daily base. And those people are always the loudest yellers.

Perhaps I should start to fabricate a Google update on the 1st of April myself.

- Step 1 we post some rumours at every single IM forum
- Step 2 we start a survey about it
- Step 3 we throw in a paid press release so that the first 10 pages are full of the news
- Step 4 the ball starts rolling and all the fake authorities like SEOmoz / Seroundtable and SearchEngineland start to pick it up and it becomes a fact.

Now let's predict the outcome of the survey:

- terrible content and other onpage issue's
- spammy (automated) back link profile
- excessive use of affiliate links

All things that were already covered in the Penguin and Panda updates.

Aren't you clever!

Originally Posted by paulgl

Why not do surverys for the rest of the people?

That is, those that replaced the so-called sites that "dropped."

For each person/site that goes down, one takes its place.

I wonder what it's like to just sit there, do nothing, then BOOM!
Someone else (supposedly) does something stupid and
rockets ME to the top!

Then, to make things even stranger, I see my site drop. Again,
doing nothing. But hey! Those other people must have fixed the
problem! And now I'm crying about some penalty...

If people actually stopped, thought logically, and researched
how google and the internet work, these threads would be
gone. Check that. They would probably multiple.

Oh well...

Paul

Good idea Paul, thanks for your contribution

Originally Posted by nik0

You know what I am thinking, John Moore is creating a nice list of affected webmasters or wannabee IM'ers might be more appropriated, and then after a month or few weeks, he starts mailing his list solutions to recover.

Cause it's very simple, if there was a decent enough update then Matt would have mentioned it in his last communications. And guess what....

You caught me! My panda recovery system RC3000 WSO is coming out next week, (just joking), ah yeh that would be possible if i were actually collecting email addresses from this survey but it's actually a free survey online with no details required, and penalized sites are the last thing I want to work on. I'm doing this because I had a client who was affected and I wanted to confirm a possible theory I had to as why and share my results with others to hopefully gain from. And yes there was something on March 6, maybe the start of the panda update Cutts has confirmed is rolling out this week, it's been discussed on a wide range of forums, I'm not making this up. If this thread upsets you, I have a simple solution; don't return.

In any case, thanks for your contribution to my thread, more people have taken the survey since you posted.

Thanks

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nik0

Banned 12 years ago

Your welcome but the fact remains that there was no update. IM forums is just a tiny world, when such rumours get posted at 1 big site and it gets some attention, especially cause the topic is hot cause Matt tweeted about SAPE, then it gets spread like an oil stain.

Pretty typical sheep behaviour.

Good to hear you have no email optin though.

Thanks
1 reply

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dennis09 12 years ago

Originally Posted by nik0

Good to hear you have no email optin though.

You missed it, it's in the sig :p

edit: and he's selling SEO services lmao
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- nik0 Banned 12 years ago
  
  Originally Posted by dennis09
  
  You missed it, it's in the sig :p
  
  edit: and he's selling SEO services lmao
  
  I saw it later indeed as well but these days I'm just a one shot guy, I say something when I don't like something and leave it at that, not interested to make long discussions about things that people would never admit any way.
  
  Take Mike Anthony for example, he also posts stuff when he doesn't agree or like it, but he can go on for ages with it cause he truly loves to discuss it till people give up, right Mike
  
  Anyway, for the last time, I have quite a few clients with crappy sites and terrible bounce rates and not a single one lost like 100 positions in the period of 1st March up until now. I think a sample of 100 sites should be enough to verify such thing. Besides that, no freaking way that Google would give you a -100 penalty purely cause you have a poor bounce rate, there are millions of sites where people find their answer within seconds and then leave instantly. For example when you need a phone number from a company or a site where you can calculate valuta or for example Google Translate.
  
  Thanks
  
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LiftMyRank

12 years ago

[SURVEY FINISHED]: 124 People Took the survey regarding their fallen rankings on March 6. Attached is a report of the survey results.

A few points from the survey;

1) It wasn't caused by SAPE links as was widely believed (88% weren't using them)

2) Most people's rankings fell more than 100 spots. (43% did)

3) Anchor text over-optimization wasn't the cause. (84% had less than 30% optimization)

4) Having high PR links or blog network links wasn't the cause. (69% didn't have any)

In light of the survey results, I'm pretty confident to say what happened on March 6 was the initial roll-out of this weekend's confirmed panda update, i.e...the target was thin low quality websites in google's eyes.

Also what I found useful, was that it wasn't anything highly in particular that caused it, i.e....not finding strong patterns in any of the answers rules out the possibly something specific caused it, so it's fair to say google's creates an overall quality profile of your site, and when it scores under a certain level then you cop a slap.

A few local trolls will probably come on here saying something along the lines of "we're all wasting our time, why don't you all be like me, blah blah blah i've got nothing better to do with my life than lay turd's in people's threads", however ignore them, they just need attention and approval from others to feel good about themselves, many of you have thanked me for doing this survey and hopefully have gleaned something positive from it.

Best of luck going forward!

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TheAdsenseGuy

12 years ago

Originally Posted by John Moore

[SURVEY FINISHED]: 124 People Took the survey regarding their fallen rankings on March 6. Attached is a report of the survey results.

A few points from the survey;

1) It wasn't caused by SAPE links as was widely believed (88% weren't using them)

2) Most people's rankings fell more than 100 spots. (43% did)

3) Anchor text over-optimization wasn't the cause. (84% had less than 30% optimization)

4) Having high PR links or blog network links wasn't the cause. (69% didn't have any)

In light of the survey results, I'm pretty confident to say what happened on March 6 was the initial roll-out of this weekend's confirmed panda update, i.e...the target was thin low quality websites in google's eyes.

Also what I found useful, was that it wasn't anything highly in particular that caused it, i.e....not finding strong patterns in any of the answers rules out the possibly something specific caused it, so it's fair to say google's creates an overall quality profile of your site, and when it scores under a certain level then you cop a slap.

A few local trolls will probably come on here saying something along the lines of "we're all wasting our time, why don't you all be like me, blah blah blah i've got nothing better to do with my life than lay turd's in people's threads", however ignore them, they just need attention and approval from others to feel good about themselves, many of you have thanked me for doing this survey and hopefully have gleaned something positive from it.

Best of luck going forward!

Yes, you're absolutely right about it being related to a Panda update. Based on what i found it had to do exclusively with bouce rate and time on site.

I had 10 very large blogs. Each had less than 10 backlinks each. 6 of these sites were penalized on the 6th and lost all traffic. The other 4 sailed through with no problem. The difference? Bounce rate and time on site. The ones that tanked had bad numbers. The ones that are ok had good numbers.

I know G is running a new Panda update this weekend, but it seems like they ran it on the 6th. Maybe more lies by Matt Cutts??

Thanks

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kilobytestechnologies

12 years ago

many of my clients gained their rankings after 6th march update..

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TuNguyen

12 years ago

One of my sites lost half of its traffic, but I think that was largely due to the Google Dance which I was expecting.

The other site more than doubled in its traffic.

Other sites increased in traffic overall.

They all used the same model and SEO work.

Overall: Positive (traffic doubled from all sites)

Thanks

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Take The SURVEY: March 6th Google Update.....Let's find out what caused it!

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