May 2020 Core Update: Help me with my analysis

I know it's a running joke about people asking is SEO dead.

But could it be now?
 
I know it's a running joke about people asking is SEO dead.

But could it be now?

No not at all.

It's not really possible.

For everyone down, others are up.

You'll just see more of the "My site got hit" people. If your site went up 20-30% you wouldn't come on bhw and create a thread "OMG, latest update increased my traffic by 30%". You'd just get on with your day with a smile.

My study is just to laser in on some of the things that the sites that rose have in common, and some of the things that sites that dropped have in common so we can better build our sites going forward.
 
The more I read about the update from peoples experiences it makes me think that something is wrong with the serps.

I feel like a lot of this carnage will be reversed soon and many people will see there traffic come back.
 
I have a website which get hit in this update, I can send you the data you need, how can I get touch with you? PM?
 
Pm'd two website which might be useful for this.

Curious what you might find, personally haven't seen a clear correlation with anything I look at yet.
 
Interesting, I've a site that lost 80% in traffic with last updates.
Can I submit to you?
 
The more I read about the update from peoples experiences it makes me think that something is wrong with the serps.

I feel like a lot of this carnage will be reversed soon and many people will see there traffic come back.

Sometimes it reverses a bit, like nov update was reversed for a lot in jan, but I remember the nov one was AWFUL. I was searching for things and getting pure spam sites coming up. This one has produced a clean serps, so I don't think it'll reverse, but some sites may start popping back up.

I have a website which get hit in this update, I can send you the data you need, how can I get touch with you? PM?

Interesting, I've a site that lost 80% in traffic with last updates.
Can I submit to you?

Yes please. Just pm me just now. I'm going to create a form with a bunch of questions for everyone so I can gather all the data points I need.


Pm'd two website which might be useful for this.

Curious what you might find, personally haven't seen a clear correlation with anything I look at yet.

What type of analysis did you do and what were your IV's and DV's?

One of the main ones I'll do is an anova with the DV of traffic as an ordinal ranked from -10 to +10 where each step represents a 5% increase or decrease in traffic and different IVs where that IV can be tested more independently, like "native vs non-native content", "rank of how commercial intent oriented a site is" etc.

Then you could run an aged vs expired vs fresh to see if there are more aged/expired that had problems, and if so, you'd do a two-way anova to see if there's an interaction between having an aged or expired domain and how closely the content is to the backlinks(ie does it match what the site was previously about) to the increase/decrease in traffic from the update.

You could also run a factorial anova taking 5-10 different aged domain factors into account as IVs and run an analysis with the DV of success of the domain to see if you can pin point any factors that are statistically significant in producing money sites that rank from aged domains. You can do some really interesting things that no one talks about in SEO. Usually people only know how to do spearman correlation testing :-) The aged domain one is hard though because you would need about 15-30 of each type of domain, ie 15-30 with data point A, 15-30 with data point B, and then you would also need to account for multiple potential covariates like content quality, link building and the experience of the person running the domain, but even without the covariates you would still gain some really strong information about which domains to choose for money sites.

You could build a machine learning algorithm out of this too after you've identified which data points have an impact on success with an anova test, so you'd end up with a machine learning algorithm that could look at every domain in the auction houses and tell you which ones will succeed and which ones won't, and for what niche.
 
@splishsplash

My site grew before the update and has stayed where it no been no effect for me APART from one KW that I'm ranking on page 1 for and compared to all the listings I have no right to be there! I'm not sure that's because Google is trying to change what that KW means or what BUT that's the only one big change I've noticed since the update.

Everything else has been normal. Welcome to share but I doubt would provide much insight however during your course of research if you see a trend or pattern with this and want to see from what I would consider to be a "clean site" I'm happy to provide.

Good luck with the case study.
 
@splishsplash

My site grew before the update and has stayed where it no been no effect for me APART from one KW that I'm ranking on page 1 for and compared to all the listings I have no right to be there! I'm not sure that's because Google is trying to change what that KW means or what BUT that's the only one big change I've noticed since the update.

Everything else has been normal. Welcome to share but I doubt would provide much insight however during your course of research if you see a trend or pattern with this and want to see from what I would consider to be a "clean site" I'm happy to provide.

Good luck with the case study.

To be honest all data is valuable, including sites with no positive or negative increase. There are so many different ways I can run analysis and look at data, so the more types of sites I have the more I can do. Feel free to pm me.

For everyone that's already pm'd, I'll reply soon. Just need to get come up with the data points then create the form so I can get the information systematically from everyone.
 
If you want to analyze the May 2020 update take a look at 'Winners and Losers of Google’s May 2020 Core Algorithm Update'

https://www.pathinteractive.com/blo...rs-of-googles-may-2020-core-algorithm-update/

And see my comment in another thread:

<a href="https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/g...ge-update-today.1228452/page-41#post-13248250">Google releasing a large update today</a>

Some types of analyses are possible with data like that, but not on the same level as having access to the real data from site owners. Real traffic and real answers like "is the content written by an expert in the field", "is the writer native or non-native", "is the domain aged, expired or fresh" etc, and traffic values from ahrefs etc are VERY unreliable. The analysis is already hard enough without a ton of bad data. Ahrefs can show a 50% increase in traffic, when in reality it's a 5% increase.
 
Some types of analyses are possible with data like that, but not on the same level as having access to the real data from site owners. Real traffic and real answers like "is the content written by an expert in the field", "is the writer native or non-native", "is the domain aged, expired or fresh" etc, and traffic values from ahrefs etc are VERY unreliable. The analysis is already hard enough without a ton of bad data. Ahrefs can show a 50% increase in traffic, when in reality it's a 5% increase.

You make no sense, and
"is the content written by an expert in the field", "is the writer native or non-native", "is the domain aged, expired or fresh" has nothing to do with it.
If you actually read my comment and visited the link, you'd have known that that content was written by EXPERTS, PH.S's, and yet they suffered a massive traffic loss. How do you explain that?
I was tempted to give you my details, but I'm glad I did not.
 
You make no sense, and
"is the content written by an expert in the field", "is the writer native or non-native", "is the domain aged, expired or fresh" has nothing to do with it.
If you actually read my comment and visited the link, you'd have known that that content was written by EXPERTS, PH.S's, and yet they suffered a massive traffic loss. How do you explain that?
I was tempted to give you my details, but I'm glad I did not.


That's a bit of a quick dismissal, and was there really need to throw in the insult?

I don't quite understand where the anger at me is coming from.. I didn't say anything offensive towards you.

There's nothing to explain. You just need a better understanding of inferential statistics.

Just because you have a tiny sample of authority sites doesn't mean you can draw conclusions about the potentially 10-15 factors or more that may be playing a role in the update.

You're also drawing faulty logic conclusions, ie, just because we want to look at native vs non-native content as a potential influence doesn't mean that all native content is going to be a winner and all native content a loser. That would be ridiculous. We want to see if there's a statistically significant difference between the native vs non-native written sites in the losers and winners.

Also, no, the content on all those sites were not written by experts and Ph.D's. That's an absolutely and utterly outrageous statement to make, that out of 500 sites, every article on every site is written by an expert/Ph.D.

One of the losers is
buyphentermineonline247.com

You're telling me that's written by experts and Ph.D's?

Or crackhomes.com?

What about ayurtimes.com? You really think that's written by experts? I only see some random "Dr Jagdev Singh"

That means nothing. It could be by some blackhatworld member who's hired anyone and probably is.

Look at this article

https://www.ayurtimes.com/coronavirus-disease-symptoms/

That's low quality and basic.

https://www.ayurtimes.com/yoga-asana-for-weight-loss/

Also low quality and basic, with ads splattered throughout.

You accused me of not even reading the article you post, but in all honesty, have you read it? Or did you just skim it and make some assumption that even quality sites got hit with the update, so there's no hope?

Also, if you look at a site like investors.com that lost apparently 25% of traffic. They've lost very little in terms of page 1 ranking and top 3's. We really can't say unless we see their real traffic figures what they've lost. It could very well be 3% in which case that public data will completely screw up the analysis.

It's also interesting to know WHICH pages lost traffic, and you can only get this data by speaking to a site owner.

If a site has 500 pages, and they lost rankings on 20-30 of them, then becomes far more interesting and we can do different studies.
 
I've worked with Tom for a while now and I trust this approach. I'll be adding my sites that meet the criteria to the data pool.
 
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