Google "waiting period" after May 14 payday update?

[JournoNick]

I'm going to make a guess: that site had been indexed in the few months prior May 14, and had been ranking on page 1 for less than a month?

It had been indexed for over 1 year and 4 months prior to May 14, however it didn't hit page 1 until Feb - March this year.

 

[tony_d]

It had been indexed for over 1 year and 4 months prior to May 14, however it didn't hit page 1 until Feb - March this year.

Assuming that you'd built more links in order to get it to hit page 1, that supports the theory that the age of the links is what matters - and if the ranking-delay algorithm was applied retrospectively to the current index, rather than just new sites, and your links were 'too young' to earn a ranking under the new algorithm, that would perhaps indicate that the 'link age' needs to be more than 3-4mths to earn a ranking.

 

[happyguy2420]

i can confirm that as i created my website after the update and i cant go over the page 2 it just keeps going back and forth. from page 2 to page 4, mr cutts should be laughing at us right now. well done google

 

[reallife]

I had been using a churn n burn method that worked up until April/May which has been patched by this "update". It still works but is limited now. Don't know if google targetted it specifically, but surely it is no longer as effective.

Don't know if it's the same method, but my trusted churn and burn method stopped working after the update as well.

 

[JournoNick]

that would perhaps indicate that the 'link age' needs to be more than 3-4mths to earn a ranking.

I agree with you there. This would explain the drop into a "almost" 2 month waiting period and the ranking bounced back up. I should clarify that I did build links to get that page 1 spot but did nothing after the drop, with the bounce back happening automatically.

 

[thanhclix]

If link age is the case, what about sites get normal back links from real site? I think there are many factors. Maybe a combination of site age and link age. Or maybe it is only back link's site's age. If a site has been established for a while, its links to other sites are also counted fast and strong.

 

[fc-dh]

Build a site on a domain that i registered on 2014-06-20, created 154 pages of spun content, structured it in a silo, promoted the silo with a 3 tier contextual back-link scheme (250 submitted per day per silo, 100 links per silo submitted to the inner-pages), every tier has been supported by kitchen-sink links, anchor text is 15% exact, 25% LSI 25% partial and the rest is random/general keywords.

I have 3 key phrases in the top 10 since this morning, outranking yelp and angie lists

Don't know if they stay up there, maybe they don't, but it made me $60 in leads anyway lol

 

[Knasper]

What do you think, will there be a delay on all links that are built from now on? So that if you have
a page that has passed the 'waiting filter', will it still be 2-3 months until the new links that are built
are taken into consideration?

I am curious about the 'bounce back' some people are talking about. Have a 'white hat' domain that
has gotten good links steadily (2-3 per day) from mid April and onwards, and it climbed till spot #18
for the very competitive main keyword, now that domain is found in no man's land, between #30 and
#40. Will let you know if it jumps back, because many of the links are of good quality.

 

[myopic1]

I would like to add my own anecdotal evidence that just fits so perfectly with what you're all saying.

I have a new domain that's main goal is to target a 10k a month search term but I've also optimised it for some long-tails for good measure. Now the first thing I did was link to it from a brand new web 2.0 site that had thousands of back-links pointing to it but this 2.0 site was only 2 weeks old and built perfectly, 6 pages of original niche related content, social media profiles etc etc.

For the main term that I'm targeting, the site is located around the page 20 mark and has been for the past 2 weeks. For my long-tail search terms though that are 500< searches a month, I'm hitting page one with the very same page no problem. The long-tail terms that I'm talking about only differ from my main search term by adding the term 'buy'. My thinking here is that the monthly search numbers are greatly impacting the delay (again this is anecdotal).

Now here's where it get's even more interesting, that new web 2.0 site I used rank my money site, ranks 2 places behind my money site for the main search term (on page 20). It's as if Google has decided to treat the new pages almost identically and ranked them almost next to each other. The links to the web 2.0 do vary so drawing parallels between the types of back-links is difficult, I've redirected aged domains and heavily hit it with a GSA campaign. Nonetheless, the web 2.0 and my money site are roughly the same age.

The web 2.0 in question also ranks on page 3 for the same long-tails that my money site does, so the delay has not effected it here.

Now I also built links to my money site from a scribd post. With no back-links pointing to it, this scribd page is ranking on page 4 for my main search term, significantly better than my money site. This tells me that parasite pages are not effected by this seemingly new delay (anecdotal alert).

Something else I found bizarre. I had redirected a brand new domain to my new money site for the purposes of building links through it and being able to redirect the middle site to another source should the need arise. This redirect got indexed (how!?) and showed up on page 3 for my main search term while my lowly money site remained on page 20...BUT here may lie a key factor. The redirect only had links from AGED domains pointing at it. Aside from the fact that it got indexed at all, it ranked perfectly fine and caused me somewhat of a head-scratching moment.

I find this delay, if that's what it is, fairly irksome. I'd like to hear what you all think about this? I may remove the web 2.0 link and see if it get's me out of this SEO purgatory, any thoughts or evidence that that may work?

 

[mahnazkut]

They must be thinking there is no competition for faster indexing and ranking viral sites or fresh information anyway.
No rival search engine doing that, Bing and yahoo even much more slower to rank everything, even old sites .

So ggl is slowing down to process and let small players suffer. This way they may reduce spam in their opinion...

 

[Penelope Stardust]

With that in mind it also further crushes the chances of SEOs railroading ppl even more into adwords. The authority sites are invincible and everyone else is fucked. End of story.

They must be thinking there is no competition for faster indexing and ranking viral sites or fresh information anyway.
No rival search engine doing that, Bing and yahoo even much more slower to rank everything, even old sites .

So ggl is slowing down to process and let small players suffer. This way they may reduce spam in their opinion...

By the way another piece of depressing news for you guys is Ive been working on a domain which I had since January and that C*NT is also stuck. I even boosted up the onpage SEO with yoast and the G cache updated but not a molecule of difference.

What a sh*t existence this life is.

 

[Penumbra]

Will this update continue or it will be cancelled in future what do you guys think?

 

[Penelope Stardust]

Will this update continue or it will be cancelled in future what do you guys think?

Yes we have just receieved inside information form matt himself, and we can be 100% sure that in exactly 4months and two days time it will be cancelled and rankings will become super easy.

 

[tomsko]

If this shit is for stayz than many legit viral sites will be impacted in a negative way. I think there will def be some adjustments in the near future that we will be able to exploit

 

[myopic1]

Assuming that you'd built more links in order to get it to hit page 1, that supports the theory that the age of the links is what matters - and if the ranking-delay algorithm was applied retrospectively to the current index, rather than just new sites, and your links were 'too young' to earn a ranking under the new algorithm, that would perhaps indicate that the 'link age' needs to be more than 3-4mths to earn a ranking.

Firstly Tony_g, I've read every single post of yours, I think your rational and reasoned approach to SEO is inspiring and you've given me a lot of ideas.

With regards to link age being a factor, I find that a difficult logic to follow in the sense that relevant and viral sites would be penalised (that is if you're referring to how long your link has been on a site). If by 'link age' you mean the age of the site that a link is coming from then I certainly think that is plausible, I'm wondering whether my newly created web 2.0 is what tripped the Google's 'delay algorithm' for my site (you can read about the site in question in a post further up this thread).

In an attempt to verify this, I'm getting rid of the Web 2.0 link in question to see if this has any effect as all my other back links are from aged domains. Failure to rank after getting rid of the link wont necessarily mean I was wrong about the web 2.0 being the issue because it's possible that once this delay algorithm has been tripped then recovery may be a drawn out process. I'm giving the experiment 5 days to run as that should be sufficient time for both my money site and the web 2.0 to be crawled.

 

[howdy21]

Yes we have just receieved inside information form matt himself, and we can be 100% sure that in exactly 4months and two days time it will be cancelled and rankings will become super easy.

This is good to know, I can have hundreds of sites ready to launch on that day, thank you for this great information!

 

[b520fp0]

Build a site on a domain that i registered on 2014-06-20, created 154 pages of spun content, structured it in a silo, promoted the silo with a 3 tier contextual back-link scheme (250 submitted per day per silo, 100 links per silo submitted to the inner-pages), every tier has been supported by kitchen-sink links, anchor text is 15% exact, 25% LSI 25% partial and the rest is random/general keywords.

I have 3 key phrases in the top 10 since this morning, outranking yelp and angie lists

Don't know if they stay up there, maybe they don't, but it made me $60 in leads anyway lol

This post has given me hope that the delay can possibly be bypassed. Thanks!

I have a couple of questions I hope you don't mind answering.
1) How well spun is the content? Are talking about just changing up the City keywords on each relevant service page? Or are you actually spinning a good bit more content on each page?
2) Do you find that the silo structure actually helps the site to rank better? I tried a silo plugin on a couple of expired domains, and was not generally impressed with the results a few months ago. I might need to retest this with a new fresh domain.
3) Are the ranking phrases for example the main keywords like "chicago plumber" or more long tail like "affordable chicago plumber"?

Thanks again, I always appreciate the knowledge you share.

 

[InsanelySane]

I've noticed this since about March

In my experience:

• It effects homepage keywords regardless of search volume
• It effects inner page keywords as well, possibly what tony_d says is right, though more search volume typically = more ranking difficulties anyway
• You typically shoot up to a great place to start, then in a few days shoot way the fuck down for 1-6 months
• I think google initially shoots you way up to "test" your site, therefore a viral site would "pass" due to all the CTR and time on site and would stay or actually rise in SERPs. Most sites however, (ours) will shoot down because they dont "pass the test", and then are sandboxed for the foreseeable future

my 2 cents

 

[Penumbra]

I've noticed this since about March

In my experience:

• It effects homepage keywords regardless of search volume
• It effects inner page keywords as well, possibly what tony_d says is right, though more search volume typically = more ranking difficulties anyway
• You typically shoot up to a great place to start, then in a few days shoot way the fuck down for 1-6 months
• I think google initially shoots you way up to "test" your site, therefore a viral site would "pass" due to all the CTR and time on site and would stay or actually rise in SERPs. Most sites however, (ours) will shoot down because they dont "pass the test", and then are sandboxed for the foreseeable future

my 2 cents

Do you think that we can pass test with blasting social signals?
Also how google can know visit duration on site if i didn't added analytics or WMT.

 

[superslikuzi]

Firstly Tony_g, I've read every single post of yours, I think your rational and reasoned approach to SEO is inspiring and you've given me a lot of ideas.

With regards to link age being a factor, I find that a difficult logic to follow in the sense that relevant and viral sites would be penalised (that is if you're referring to how long your link has been on a site). If by 'link age' you mean the age of the site that a link is coming from then I certainly think that is plausible, I'm wondering whether my newly created web 2.0 is what tripped the Google's 'delay algorithm' for my site (you can read about the site in question in a post further up this thread).

In an attempt to verify this, I'm getting rid of the Web 2.0 link in question to see if this has any effect as all my other back links are from aged domains. Failure to rank after getting rid of the link wont necessarily mean I was wrong about the web 2.0 being the issue because it's possible that once this delay algorithm has been tripped then recovery may be a drawn out process. I'm giving the experiment 5 days to run as that should be sufficient time for both my money site and the web 2.0 to be crawled.

be sure to come back and let us know what you find. I would be interested in knowing how your small case study goes