Major SERP Shakeup?

[skitzzo]

While doing my weekly check of our SERPs I noticed today a LOT different set of results at the top of many of our phrases.

Our rankings stayed relatively constant but I'm seeing 5 or 6 new sites in the top 10 of some fairly competitive phrases. I'm used to seeing 2 or 3 sites moving around swapping seats but it's been a long time since I saw 5 newcomers shoot to the top of the list.

Has anyone else noticed anything similar recently?

[Lynne22]

I have, it's as if they have changed the algo's again......

[SEO_AM]

I checked our top 100 keywords this morning... unless something changed this afternoon... I see no major movement. Wiki is moving up across the board though.

[mvandemar]

Things look normal for me. Slight rise on [intro psychology], but all of the others that I track seem normal. None of my normally #1 spots have dipped, which has happened on algo changes in the past.

I am in the 300's now for [american civil war], and I think that's a climb, but since that's so deep I don't watch it as closely.

-Michael

[rmccarley]

I'm checking now but I don't see much. Up a little here, down a little there...

*everflux*

Could it be your industry? Who is behind those sites? Are they all about the same age (getting out of the box?)? Did they all pick up SEOs in the last 6 months?

[pops]

I am in the 300's now for [american civil war], and I think that's a climb, but since that's so deep I don't watch it as closely.

So are you a Civil War buff?

[mvandemar]

So are you a Civil War buff?

Actually, yes, although not why I made the site. It was one that I started ages ago and never had the time to work on. Needs revamping.

-Michael

[pittbug]

I'm #50 for [online marketing consultant] from 950+... I guess something did change last night....

[jadibones]

Yes. In a major way. This is actually the reason I haven't been around much this month. As of the beginning of FEB, the site I work for got Nailed. We lost almost 70% of our traffic from Google. I won't give exact numbers, but lets just say its a lot. This loss of G traffic resulted in our traffic on a whole dropping by 1/2.

We've dropped from #1 down to #6-8 for tons of searches. I also think the new local chunk that takes up 1/3 of the serps page now may have also affected us.

There wasn't really any noise from the major forums either. A few from WMW, and DP talking about the recent "gbomb" algo update affecting sites, but dates were not the same, and a lot of those said it only lasted for 1 to 2 weeks.

I'd be interested to hear any other opinions here, but we of came to the conclusion that the site had probably triggered some sort of flag. This is a site that is old, and has pretty much could do no wrong for the past few years. The picking was so easy, that I think we just got a bit too careless.

So we've been spending the last 2 weeks cleaning up the site. Fixing bad internal links, getting rid of some un necessary words here and there. It's been over 2 weeks now, and we've seen a slight increase, but nowhere near the past levels.

The bright side of this is that even though we lost about 1/2 of our traffic, it turns out that traffic Google was sending us wasn't converting nearly as well as the other sources of traffic, so the revenue loss was only about 40%.

[pittbug]

jadi: When I see things like that happening it usually comes down to dupe content/redirect issues.