With the recently completed Caffeine update Google has once more clearly demonstrated it’s power to make or break a business to many affiliates.  The initial update at the start of May was followed by a final adjustment to the algo between June 4th and 2nd which hit many sites whose owners were breathing sighs of relief that they had escaped this latest shake up.  Those affected lost up to 60% of their site traffic – a huge blow.

There’s lots of chat about large e-commerce sites largely being the ones affected, but I know that a lot of affiliate sites have also been hit.  What I wanted to do in this post was show you guys different sites that I own which were affected in different ways and share with you some of my early feelings about what’s been going on here.  Anyone needing a refresher on the joy of Google Caffeine can read my previous post talking about it here.

My Winners and Losers…

The Winners

Blokes Undies – Traffic has increased by around 30% since the start of May.

Lingerie Brands – Up there and rocking with a lovely 25% boost.

The Losers

Personalised Gifts UK – 70% reduction

Fragrance Brands – As above.

Fortunately for me, the sites affected were not at all key to my business. That in itself is probably a bit of a clue – they’re all sites I probably haven’t really done “properly” for one reason or another.

What The Sites Have In Common

• All 4 have either exactly the same or similar basic structures.
• All have reasonable cross linking and no real issues with orphan pages.
• All have completely unique content.

Features of The Winners

• Both have had extensive work done on generating good quality links. This has either been through quality exchanges or spontaneous links to bits and pieces of my content from sources such as blogs, forums, and other online publications because people have found them useful or interesting.
• Both are relatively large sites.  One around 1,100 pages the other around 500.

Features of The Losers

• Some are long neglected sites I’ve been meaning to get back around to working on (there are more than listed above!).
• Some are niche sites which I took to a certain stage and then left alone, updating infrequently.
• Many had a low number of pages. The largest had around 280.
• None of them have had much time at all put into generating links beyond the usual round of mailing some friends with relevant sites and cadging links from them. Very few links go to internal pages (although there are some).
• All the affected sites were slapped in the second part of the algo adjustment at the start of June.

My Conclusions

• My traffic boosts have come from the shift in the SERPS caused by the downgrading of larger sites’ quality signals. Happy days
• My own quality and relevance signals for sites that benefitedwere a-ok with Google.
• Those signals were related to good unique content, decent cross linkage, very few orphan pages, and decent inbound links to many different parts of my sites.
• Ranking value of domain names remains strong, I didn’t lose any traffic within affected sites which was related directly to the domain.

What Does This Mean For Affiliates

Cutting through lots of algo related jargon about quality and relevance signals, it does come back to the type of frustratingly bland statements one always finds in Google’s webmaster guidelines.

Try to add value, create a site with unique and compelling content, and don’t make it all about earning money. I think the last one of those is probably key to affiliates.  Understandably we want to channel our time into creating traffic with the strongest possible chance of generating a sale for us. However, I think affiliates ignoring this latest warning shot from Google and not thinking about whether they need to change their strategy will be very ill advised indeed. Lets face it, this won’t be the last algo adjustment. How close were you to the cut off this time? Do you think you’d make it through the eye of Google’s algo needle next time??? Are you sure?

Incidentally, Matt Woods mentioned in an article on A4U that this update might see a mainstream return to the micro niche site in affiliate marketing.  He’s absolutely right that those sites will still work. I’ll certainly still be popping the odd one up here and there.  However, I’d say that anyone building a business on them is creating wealth propped up by a house of cards.  I predict their days will be numbered in the longer term. Looking at them from Google’s viewpoint they’re often thin on content, add little value, and are designed to funnel people straight through to another site. If you think sites like that aren’t already on the big G’s radar you’re deluding yourself.

My Own Next Steps

In an attempt to add a little more value than handing all those slapped affiliates a report card type statement reading “must do better” I’ve popped my own recently written “to do” list for all my sites. Some of it will never happen but it’ll all be thoroughly investigated and I will apply bits of this (and some other stuff I think of along the way) to all of my sites – not just the ones with problems.

• Perform an audit and decide which sites I’ll leave “as is” and which I will try to “rescue”
• Create more newsy articles of relevance to the industry I’m promoting.
• Investigate social networking angles so that Google can see me in lots of different places.
• Look at ways of helping my users more.  Maybe a section on some types of sites offering to help locate hard to find items or answer questions?
• Investigate creating some unique product browsing tools for my sites. The ipad generation really do love their visuals.
• Work consistently on all key sites on ethical link building (hopefully the above will generate a lot of this!!)
• Look at site speed (Google has warned us all!!).

Food For Thought?

I hope I’ve given you at least a tasty little nibble.  Whether you are affected or not, I think bearing in mind that Google can and does raise the quality bar for affiliates on a regular basis is a jolly good idea. Despite having no real impact on my income, this update has given me the proper willies and no doubt about it. I’ve been sitting still for too long and not innovating.  I can visualise all too clearly how easily I could have been on the other side of the fence with this update. The difference between my affected and unaffected sites is uncomfortably small.

Onwards, upwards, and always… Forward!!

This week Google confirmed that the much speculated upon Caffeine Update has finished and is here to stay. This new search index has been hot gossip around the interweb for quite some time now. There’s some confusion about what current changes are related to Caffeine and which are down to an unrelated algo adjustment over at Google HQ which has been referred to as the “Mayday” update.

With that in mind, I thought I’d do a bit of a post about what’s happening, who it’s happening to, how its impacted me personally and include a bit of wild conjecture about how affiliates will be affected for entertainment value.

So What Is Google Caffeine?

Fortunately Google saw fit to release a concise diagram which explains it all.

Clearly the forecast for Google searchers is cloudy with a chance of  cyclonic outbursts of random information and images.  Do please use the new index with caution if searching in an enclosed space, or a subject area with sharp edges.

*ahem*

Alternatively it could be that the above indicates that users can now enjoy the following: -

• The new index will be continuously updated, and will deliver fresh content faster than ever.  Delays between the time Google finds new content and includes it in the index have been eradicated.
• Google can now index staggering amounts of data, giving them the ability to add more all singing and dancing features to their search engine offerings.
• Real time web here we come!!

Changes to Longtail Search – Caffeine or Mayday?

• Current site ranking changes being experienced by some webmasters aren’t related to Google caffeine. Apparently they’ve just been rolled out together and current traffic changes are just part of one of the many hundreds of updates the big G makes every year. Well, that’s what Matt Cutts said anyhow.  So caffeine = quicker search, Mayday = quality adjustments.
• The changes are based around a re-assessment of how the best quality pages to rank for long tail searches are determined.
• Until now, the internal pages of many large sites with good authority were ranked well for long tail searches. We’ve all seen these results in the SERPS and greeted them with a wry “Urgh, these guys have such good authority they can put any old shit up and rank for it”.  The changes mean that this authority will now no longer be enough to make Google believe sites are the best quality match to be returned for long tail searches.
• Most likely to be affected are large sites with many internal pages which are buried deep within a site’s structure and which don’t attract much in the way of external links and aren’t terribly well linked to from within the site either. The buzz around internet town is that ecommerce sites are most likely to be affected.
• The pages containing  individual products on ecommerce sites fit the above profile and also often do not contain unique content, and may be populated by descriptions and information from manufacturers databases.  i.e. duplicate content. There have been lots of reports from hard hit merchants verifying this.

So How Does This Affect Affiliates?

I can only speak for my own sites with any sort of surety, but I seem to have fallen heir to a lot of long tail traffic since the start of May.  For example, my mens underwear site has had a 25% increase in traffic and my lingerie site is enjoying a boost of 30%. Some of this is attributable to swimwear and holiday season, but I’m definately seeing a sudden glut of longtail traffic and an increase in the number of search phrases referring traffic to my sites. Happy days for me (touch wood!)

I’d have thought I might fall victim to the “isolated page with poor linkage” syndrome with many of my blog posts, particularly on Lingerie Brands which has had terrible linkage between blog post pages up until about 10 days ago when I finally got the site sorted with a pagination plugin. However, it seems that the unique content on these pages combined with the internal cross linkage from related posts has been enough to give Google a good “quality signal” about my content.

And It’s Really All About The Signals Baby…

I have read nothing about affiliate sites being affected, but I imagine there are a few that could fall victim to the current changes. Sites heavily reliant upon feeds and not adding value through the addition of unique and compelling content could very well be affected.  Perhaps voucher code and offer sites that pull in and publish feed based content without any alteration could see a reduction in Google’s willingness to rank their pages well. If you auto generate content, it may well be search engine brown trouser time.  And of course, there’ll be the usual outbreak of innocent bystanders who have done absolutely nothing wrong, just to add the appropriate levels of confusion to the mix

Feed affiliates and those using automated methods to build sites could be on a sticky wicket with this, but I think a lot of affiliates could use these changes to their advantage. If you’re prepared to put in the time and effort to create a well structured, content rich, and unique site you’ll have a much better chance now of getting valuable long tail traffic to your site that was previously being hoovered up by large sites you were unable to compete with.

It’s going to be a bit like dating I reckon.  If you can give the right quality signals with your website’s “body language”, there’s every chance Google will hook you up with a red hot love match in the form of some beautiful traffic.

Further Reading

Google Confirms Mayday Update Impacts Longtail -  from Searchengineland.

Webmasterworld Disaster Thread – lots of people chat about how their sites have been affected.

Google Sends the Long Tail Screaming for May-Day by Kieran Flanagan

Official Google Blog on caffeine update

Paul’s site vanished from Google over a month ago.  Dropped like the proverbial hot stone into the cold abyss of Google-blivion.  Is it a penalty or is it just a natural phenomenon?

You seem to have had plenty of experience of dealing with penalised sites in the past, so I’m hoping you might be able to provide a little bit of advice for me regarding one of my sites – http://www.preschooltoysandgames.co.uk/

I started the site late November 2008 and it did okay over the Christmas period, then around late February early March virtually all traffic from Google stopped. The site is still indexed in Google but it doesn’t seem to appear in the serps till at least page 4 for any keywords.

It used to be on page one of Google for a number of phrases such as -

Charlie And Lola Toys
postman pat toys
postman pat special delivery service toys
Sylvanian Families Willow Hall

Now you can even do an exact search for the domain name “Preschool Toys And Games” and the site doesn’t appear till the bottom of page 3 – and with only 8,760 competing sites surely my site should be on page one given that the words appear in the domain, title, and on the page itself? It used to be on page one for that phrase even without doing an exact search.

Iv’e only been building affiliate sites for about a year so there’s a good chance one of the following newb mistakes has led to it being penalised -

I did pay to have the site submitted to about 50 social bookmarking sites, it turns out that some of the sites it was submitted to aren’t the best quality in the world. My understanding was that Google devalued these types of links though rather than penalise a site though.

It’s a wordpress based site and I was unaware that every time I made a minor change on a page I was pinging the site, but that was early on when the site was still ranking ok. I’ve since disabled pinging using a plugin.

Of course theres always the chance that it’s just not ranking very well, but do you think my site has been penalised?

And if it has, would it be worth putting it under another domain?

It’s not the end of the world if I can’t get the site ranking again, but more than anything I want to make sure I don’t make any mistakes with other bigger sites.

I’ve had a look through your site and can’t see anything wrong with the content or WordPress structure. Google is behaving mighty oddly towards your site though. I can’t get it to rank for your own unique snippets of text without quotation marks around the phrase.  Grab any bit of text from your Postman Pat page and you should generally be on page one.  Here’s what’s happening with your site: -

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=Originally+set+in+the+gentle+but+busy+village+of+Greendale&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B3GGGL_enGB249GB249

As compared with a similar sized snippet from my mens underwear site, BlokesUndies.co.uk:-

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=Latino+men+are+well+known+for+their+love+of+underwear+&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B3GGGL_enGB249GB249

Based on my own experiences, that’s pretty ominous from a Google penalty point of view. You’re absolutely correct when you say your site should be ranking better for its own name. You’re currently hanging out at result 63 from the term “Preschool Toys and Games” without quotation marks: -

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=preschool+toys+and+games&hl=en&rlz=1B3GGGL_enGB249GB249&start=60&sa=N

As for your supposition that Google will ignore low quality links, that’s right but alas they sometimes don’t ignore what they see as spammy link building techniques.

Here’s an example of what’s happening on searches conducted on your content: -

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&rlz=1B3GGGL_enGB249GB249&q=%22Children+will+especially+love+acting+out+stories+with+Peppa+Pig%22&btnG=Search&meta=

As you can see, a scraper site is ranking and yours only shows up when you ask Google to show omitted results. This is something I’ve seen before on my own sites when an automated filter had been applied. This is not widespread however, in most cases it’s your site turning up which does sort of rule out the scrapers being to blame.

I do think a penalty has been applied to your site.  You should be showing up for unique snippets of text from your own pages, and you’re not. Your site is still showing for those searches with quotation marks around them and will eventually turn up for its own name, albeit on the 3rd page of results, which suggests it is some form of automatic filter rather than the dreaded manual penalty. The fact that your site has now been down for over a month makes it look like this may not be a blip as a result of a mistake when Google updated (although you can never rule that out!).

You mentioned pinging Google every time you updated your site – this will not negatively impact your rankings and wouldn’t have incurred a penalty.

Given that you have said you paid for link activity and had this penalty befall you soon after I think we should focus on that as the most likely cause. It seems like your site is being suppressed in the rankings rather than being blown totally out of the water. I’m reluctant to use terms such as -30 penalty or similar though, because these penalties / filters are never straightforward and don’t seem to have any hard and fast rules.

I think the best thing to do is to see if you can get the links to those naughty sites removed, and submit a reinclusion request. If you can’t, you can always try to submit a reinclusion request and tell them what you did, say sorry, and that you’ll be good from now on. It certainly won’t do you any harm.

Other than that, I’d add some more unique content, get some decent quality links and see if the situation improves with time. Alternatively, you could start again with a new domain – the choice is yours!

I think it would be a mistake to participate in any kind of mass submission scheme in the future with new projects. The general rule of thumb you have to follow with SEO is that if it seems to easy or good to be true – it is!

Greetings Google penalty fans, and welcome to another thrilling update on my all too frequent tangles with the Google algo cops!

So on March 30th I wrote a post complaining that once again I’d fallen victim to the whims of dear old Google and had been handed a right old royal slapping on my new mens undies site.  Refresh your memory here if you need to.

My site was so badly slapped it wasn’t ranking for it’s own name    The hunch I spoke of in that post proved to be correct.  As soon as I removed the plugin that was causing oodles of hidden text to be displayed on each and every page was removed I saw an immediate “bounce back” in organic traffic.

This Told Me A Few Things: -

• The featured content plugin was definately to blame – the other scraped content was still alive and kicking at that time.  NB – for users of this plugin I believe there are settings to prevent this, I’m just a lazy affiliate who never reads instructions.  What can I say?!
• The penalty might have been for the hidden text, but could also have been for dupe content.  Now it seems that sometimes when I talk about duplicate content penalties someone jumps up and tells me there’s “no such thing”.  However, I contend that there is… but not for single incidences of dupe content. Not even for the odd wee issue here and there.  In my experience, Google tolerates this to a certain extent and does what it says it will.  It chooses the “right” content to rank. However, should you go beyond what Google thinks of as acceptable you’ll soon find yourself winging your way to Google-blivion.   As with all things algo related there will be a threshold over which you really should not go! Worth bearing in mind.
• This penalty is taking a while to lift. Despite a return to search engine visibility, there are still many pages of my site affected.  You can see this from the gentle increase in search engine traffic over the months of April and May despite me not having added much at all in the way of content.  Pages are only ranking again once Google has been around and spidered them again.  Hence I deduce if you have had a penalty of this nature it is a dashed fine time to start posting fresh content like a madman and thinking up as many ways as possible to get Google respidering your entire site to speed up your recovery process.

I hope this update has helped.  As always, I didn’t like it but I certainly learned something from it!  Will it be the last time? Probably not, but I’ll tell you guys this here and now, I will NEVER let a Google penalty get the better of me.  Come hell or high water I will ALWAYS solve it.

I hate search engines getting the better of me

Imagine if you will, a 70′s style gameshow complete with host in spangly Gold Lame jacket, permatan, and gleaming white teeth….

“Hello ladies and gents, boys and girls and welcome to another fascinating episode of… “What’s my Google Penalty!!”

“This week’s contestant is a familiar face here on What’s My Penalty and she’s really wondering how the hell she got here again.  Please welcome… KIRSTY MCCUBBIN!!”

*Crowd goes wild, insert Hammond organ medly, Cue Google Robot Dancing Girls…*

Yep, It’s Happened Again!

Over the past few days my brand new site Blokes Undies has been on a bit of a downward spiral in the organic traffic stakes.  Over the weekend it stopped ranking for its own name, which is usually a strong penalty indicator.

So What Is It THIS Time Kirsty?

Well, at first I found THIS when I searched for D&G Maxi Logo Boxer Shorts (opens in new window) and was fairly convinced that these nasty scrapers had gotten me a Duplicate Content Penalty with their scurrilous spamming activity.

After a quick consult with the kind people over at the A4UForums I filed various Spam reports, shortened my feed content to stop people nicking content that could knock me from the SERPS, and generally stewed in my own juice.

But Was it That?

See, one thing you have to remember about trying to work out a Google penalty is that the first thing you find, compelling as it may be…. isn’t necessarily your issue!

I had also found another funny little issue with my indexing, where content on the site seemed to be attributed to lots of different pages by Google, despite only appearing on one. Example Here (opens in new window)   but as it had been present for a while I’d put it down to “a bit of a Google glitch” and a couple of people said they’d had similar in the past.

“Can’t be that then.”  I thought.

And I Reckon That’s The Nasty Little Game Show Type Trap These Situations Can Pull on You!

I’ve seen lots of “Google Penalty Checklist” type posts, and in not one of them does it say “NEVER rule out anything.”

Fortunately, the indexing situation was nagging away at the back of my head.  I don’t like leaving issues and expecting them to fix themselves.  Earlier, I finally thought to view the source of one of my pages… just in case there was an outside chance there might be some odd thing on there.

And What Do I Find?

Arrghhh!! The featured content gallery plugin I posted about previously doesn’t only post nice pictures and titles… it features content excerpts from each post as well.  On my site, they were within the source code of each page, not visible to users, and indexable by Google.  Not good.

Having checked out some other sites using the plugin I think I must have gotten something wrong with the install as I’m not seeing the same issue on any of them!

Ho Hum…

Well, all I can do is wait and see how it all pans out now.  Honestly, how many penalties can one girl just trying to “get it right” actually create!  I think WordPress is great, but the amount of issues that can happen without you knowing about it because of how automated and brill it all is are many and varied.

It’s never dull is it?!

As many of you will remember I had a bit of bother in the middle of last year with a Google Over Optimisation penalty on my Lingerie site.  I documented the trials and tribulations of the whole thing, and was delighted when all my lovely traffic came back.

Or did it?

I was quite happy that my traffic had returned to previous levels and set about fixing up some other sites and starting a few new projects.  After a while, I noticed the odd page that should have been ranking, still wasn’t. But every new page I put up seemed fine and I disregarded it. In typical style it has taken me ages to get curious about it.  However, just before Christmas I decided to analyse the extent of the issue.

And I Was In For A Bit of a Shock!

Out of 109 site pages I looked at, no less than 49 yes you heard me right FORTY NINE still had some kind of ranking issue related to the same Google filter I described all those months ago.  Despite me thinking all my lovely traffic had returned 45% of my site was still in the rankings doldrums.  Some were nowhere to be found, others were only ranking for more obscure term variations (one of the reasons I thought things were a-ok again!).

So, I set to and went through the whole 49 pages. This time I added in lots of new content and removed any term repetitions that still looked “awkward” In the last couple of weeks the results have been steadily growing: -

My organic referrals from Google have increased by around 30%.  Once again, I’ve learned an important lesson about never leaving a job half done with Google.

If you’ve had any filtering issues and think they are resolved, I thoroughly recommend that you take a closer look.  DIfferent search terms seem to have different over optimisation thresholds which means you’ll only find out where those lie by analysing and re-analysing affected pages.  If, like me, you simply assume everthing is A-OK you might just be wasting some of your own hard work!

My next step will be to wait another 4 or 5 weeks and then repeat my manual analysis of all site pages, followed by whatever content alterations are required.

It’s never dull being an affiliate!

In yet another “never a dull moment at Google” development, they’ve decided that they will allow advertisers to promote hard alcohol in the US with plans to roll out to other countries in the coming weeks.  A few weeks ago they loosened the rules on beer also.  Of course, this has absolutely nothing to do with their ad revenues being down during these tough times. Not at all.  In fact, when Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Land asked Google what was behind the decision he was told its as a result of “advertiser feedback”.

Well, that’s alright then isn’t it? I’m quite relieved really I was just picturing Larry and Sergy down to their last billion, and the staff canteen at Google HQ running out of Fillet Mingnon.  Oh, the humanity!

One Proviso Though…

The new rules don’t allow for the direct promotion of hard alcohol. i.e. “Buy One Get Three Free on Vomitikov Vodka”.  Rather the relaxation allows you to highlight features of the alcohol.  So therefore you can only use Google ads to promote the “branding of alcohol”.

I Don’t Understand The Reasoning

Perhaps I am foolish and uninformed, but I can’t see the point of the half measure (boom boom).  If its the generation of alcoholics that they’re concerned about, alcohol branding will create them just as readily as letting them find a site which will actually sell them a drop of the hard stuff.   And why is beer now considered so much less of a damaging substance than spirits?  They should visit any UK high street at 3am to see exactly how wholesome beer is!!

And Finally…

Its NOT OK to sell spirits, but  It IS OK to sell naughty adult DVDs, access to porongraphic content and all sorts of other exotic goodies.

Which is actually the naughtier of the two?  I reckon that’s how you can tell its a company run by loads of men.

“Alcohol?  Ooohh, no.  We can’t have that.  People might get addicted to it.”

“Porn?  Totally harmless.  Chuck the ads up!!”

I wanted to wait a little while longer to make this follow up post about my progress with the Google filter my affiliate site has been suffering from. I’d have liked to gather a lot more data before declaring the process I’ve been through a success. However, I’m moving house on Friday and going home to the UK the following Tuesday, so if I don’t make this post now it might never happen!!

OK, so for those of you that don’t know about the issues you can catch up here, here and here on the Google filter fun I’ve been having with my site.

To Cut A Long Story Short – It’s Working!

I’ve just spent the most boring 4 weeks of my life visiting each and every page of my site and reducing the mentions of product brand names and other key search terms. I was starting to think it was all for nothing as there wasn’t a lot of improvement. Paranoia and stress are the companions of the Google filtered affiliate! This week, I have really started to see the benefit of those changes. In my previous post I was starting to see a few pages popping back into the index. This few pages have turned into several, and this increases every day. Basically I’m now seeing a lot of the pages I altered right at the start of this process returning to the index.

What Have I Learned

• Unlike the duplicate content filter, the over optimisation filter takes a few weeks to be lifted. Whether this is because of any time penalty Google applies to your site (which Matt Cutts has more or less said can apply in certain scenarios) or is simply reflective of the time it takes Google to spider and re-evaluate your site content – I don’t know. I read somewhere that when there has been a filter such as this applied to your site, it will be re-calculated the next time Google decides how much optimisation is too much. If you have a filter like this on your site, I would say allow 6 to 8 weeks for your changes to be taken into account.
• This is an algorithmic filter, not a manual penalty.
• This filter was in relation to on page factors rather than off page factors such as link building.

My site has now already returned to getting roughly 30% of its traffic from organic sources. This was the proportion I was getting before the initial problems manifested late in May. This is terribly exciting because the majority of the affected pages have not yet returned. Hopefully what this means is that my site will be better and stronger than ever because of the revisions I have made.

A Side Effect of This Process Was..

That I realised the cross linkage between a lot of the pages on my site was really poor. I had written over 200 product based articles to compliment the main sections of the site. For the last 3 months not one of them has been generating traffic. I realised this wasn’t big bad Google, but the fact that the previous / next links within the article categories hadn’t been working for a while. This means a lot of them have been de-indexed and those that remain are linked to from perhaps only one page on the site. I implemented improved cross linkage and a sitemap on the blog, so I hope that means further growth is still to come when Google re-includes them.

Anyhoo…

The whole point of this post was – those changes I’ve described in all my posts did the trick.  I’ve gotten out of Google jail and am back on the SEO highway.

This has been a very positive learning process for me. It is very important to me that I get a significant proportion of my traffic from organic sources to protect my income from the ever increasing competitiveness in the PPC arena and all those other margin squeezing factors affecting the industry today.

Thanks to everyone who has commented or sent me a message, they all really helped me focus on what the issue was.

Woo hoo!!!!! Getting married, moving house, and escaping from a Google Filter in the same month?  What a charmed life I lead

People who’ve had apparently endless issues with the Google Adwords quality score might get quite excited by this headline. However, in the usual style of our good friend Google, they will be replacing the current system with one they say will create a fairer basis for evaluation.

Basically, they are going to tinker with the quality score once again. The new system is an attempt to create a more accurate quality score. As all us affiliates know, the QS is less than perfect and I’ll welcome an improved version. However, forgive me Google if I silently quake in my PPC boots in case you’re about to knock down my affiliate house of cards once more! It’s difficult not to get anxious when the big G-meister announces an all singing and dancing shake up to the status quo.

The Changes in a Nutshell: -

• The new quality score is calculated each and every time an ad is served in response to a Google search query. Google will use this data to work out which queries your ad is performing best for. Google says the data collection will mean your ad is more likely to show for relevant queries and less likely to turn up for irrelevant search strings.

• An end to keywords being marked “inactive for search”. This won’t mean a PPC free for all, so try not to get too excited. Google says that despite this, keywords which have been previously marked inactive for search are unlikely to get much traffic. According to them, their combined per query quality score and bid levels are unlikely to result in a good placement.
• Minimum bid is also up for the high jump. As Inactive for search is being scrapped, there’s no need to display a minimum bid for ad activation – that will already have happened. Instead, there will now be a “first page bid”. This will do what it says on the tin. Tell you what you need to shell out to get your ad on the all important first page.

What does this mean? Well, at first glance it just seems like Google is tweaking things to try and tighten up the relevance of their results. I also welcome the first page bid metric being clear, it will help me to judge how much I should be bidding over large groups of keywords and ads.

However, I’m interested in what will happen in the scenario where there are very few or no ads in response to an extremely niche search query. If I were Google, I’d recognise that accross all the millions of keywords falling into this category there’d be a significant hike in ad revenues from making sure Adwords ads were more likely to be served. Paranoid? Well, perhaps… but I will be really interested to see what happens with this one. I’ve often read anguished tales from affiliates who have had keywords of exactly this nature switched off who said they had excellent ROI from some golden niche they’d stumbled upon, only to have them slapped.

More reading here in this article on the subject by Barry Schwartz

I promised I would keep a bit of a log on this blog about the process I’m going through to try and sort out some Google filter issues my lingerie website has been suffering from. I’ve now spent almost a week working my way though the site and have altered about two thirds of the content. As I’ve gone along I’ve made loads of test searches which helped focus on the issues that were present.

Some interesting developments have happened in the last few days. I’ve got screenshots of this, so I thought it was time for another post!

My (Slightly Revised) Theories on The Causes

As I worked my way through the site I discovered a distinct pattern to those pages that were still ranking – they had 100% unique content on them. These would have been the pages that immediately bounced back into the index after my initial problems. I found that loads of the pages filtered out had inadvertently used the same or very similar content via a combination of the blurb I place on each page and similar post excerpts that were also on many other pages.

However, I am now sure there was a second filter being applied… perhaps one for keyword stuffing / over optimisation. If it had been entirely dupe content, I think I’d have seen a more even spread of Google “picking” inappropriate pages to rank. However, a number of pages were also behaving in a different way and were either not in sight in the index or were ranking Waaaaaaaaayyyyyyy back.

There’s also the small matter not mentioned previously – I have a second site affected which has no duplicate content. It’s just been shoved right back in the results as per some of the lingerie pages, and shares the same site structure. This is what convinced me two things were happening on my lingerie site.

So Here’s What I Did

I am visiting each and every page on my site and: -

• Removing the similar output from the top of every page and replacing it with a paragraph of unique text which then links to the brand description further down the page via a named anchor (not an optimised one I might add!).
• Making sure that each and every brand description is completely unique.
• Removing any pages that don’t need to be there. i.e. if one page can cover the swimwear and lingerie lines for a specific brand, I’m consolidating my content.
• Manually altering each and every similar post output so that each post excerpt is only ever featured on one brand page.
• Removing any unnatural looking repetitions of my target keywords in the body text.
• Reducing the amount of header and anchor text that mentions target keywords.

Now For The Interesting Bit. What Effect Has This Had?

Well, it’s still early days as Google’s cache for the pages I’ve altered has still not updated. And yet I’ve started to see something very odd over the last couple of days. Something that MIGHT back up my keyword stuffing / over optimisation theory OR could just be a Google funny that has coincidentally happened this week. I can see other sites showing similar symptoms today including ASOS… so I’m not totally sure this is related to my filter issues.

Some Pages Have Started To Rank Again – But Not All The Time… and Still Not “Properly”

This is really fascinating actually. I first noticed this yesterday and have been grabbing a few screenshots. I know it was not happening prior to my changes as I have analysed each and every Google referral I’ve had for the last two weeks!

OK. Here’s my site ranking for “Manstore Mens Underwear“. This page was not ranking at all a couple of days ago, regardless of which search string used.

As you can see though, Google is not showing the title in bold which I’ve never seen or heard of before (which makes me think it may not be entirely penalty related – but it sure is interesting!) The same page also ranks for “Manstore robot strip string” and “Manstore Underwear”

*update- I am now seeing this “title not in bold” issue manifesting itself all over the place – so its clearly Google fiddling around generally that is causing this rather than any kind of penalty.

For the search term “Manstore Boxers” which you could logically assume I should be ranking for, this is the page Google has chosen to place at result 50: -

*update – this has changed over the weekend.  I’m now ranking number one for the term “Manstore Boxers”

I’m seeing this time and time again over many pages. Some suffer from the “Non Bold” issue I’ve described above, others are fine. Here’s another interesting example that made me think a keyword specific penalty has been in place on the following page alongside a dupe content penalty (which again had previously been knocked out of the rankings altogether).

Here’s the page being ranked for “DKNY Nightwear” at result 10 (hurahh!)

But here is the search result for “DKNY Sleepwear” waaayyy back at result 82

I’m seeing the same on a Calvin Klein page I altered a few days ago. I’m ranking 15 for “Calvin Klein Nightwear” and again a “wrong page” is popping up for “CK Sleepwear”

*edit - I’m now seeing the right page ranking for CK Sleepwear, around result 35.  Progress!

I’m seeing similar on other pages, but at the moment it is in a constant state of flux. Some that I checked right before writing this article had changed by the time I got to the end here, with the “right page” popping back up. So that makes me think: -

• Some of my pages are being slowly forgiven.
• Some of the pages are exhibiting a penalty for particular search phrases i.e. those containing “Sleepwear” because the page content was too tightly aligned with them.
• I’m going totally and utterly mad and its time to move into the “Sunnyvale Home for Knackered Old Affiliates”.

Finally….

Well, that wraps up my thoughts for now. I hope it is helpful to anyone who is interested in this kind of stuff. This on its own is great fun actually. However the other site thats just been bumped to the end of the results worries me a fair bit, there’s much less to go on with it. All I’ve learned here will be a good place to start though.

Wish me luck