Yesterday, Google began rolling out their Panda 4.0 update designed
to punch low-quality content. That’s generated both “winners” who have
moved up in rankings as “losers” have dropped down — and eBay might be
one of the big losers.
Searchmetrics gave us their initial winners and loser
charts, based on rankings they continually monitor. These show that one
of the biggest losers was eBay. According to the data, eBay lost a
tremendous amount of traffic from Google, much of it from the
ebay.com/bhp/ area of its site.
Another huge loser was Ask.com,
yes, the search engine, that lost a tremendous amount of traffic in
their Questions section at ask.com/question/.
The Losers: Ask.com, eBay, Biography.com & Google-Backed RetailMeNot
Among the top losers include Ask.com, ebay.com, biography.com and
retailmenot.com. I should note, retailmenot.com is venture backed by
Google’s venture arm. Here is the top list of losers from the
Searchmetrics initial analysis:
Here is a chart showing eBay’s UK drop by their main root domain versus the directory from Searchmetrics:
Dr. Peter Meyers from Moz also documented
with their analytics how much eBay lost with this update. Pete said,
“over the course of about three days, eBay fell from #6 in our Big 10 to
#25.” Meyers digs deep into the analysis on the Moz blog.
Refugeeks looked
at early SEM Rush data, which also showed a steep decline for ebay’s
web site in Google. Note, SEMRush will be sending me more data as they
work it up at their office. Here is a chart from the UK data:
The Winners
With all algorithm updates, there are also those who win and gain
rankings. The big winners seem to be glassdoor.com, emedicinehealth.com,
medterms.com, yourdictionary.com and shopstyle.com.
The SearchMetrics data is sorted by increase in SEO visibility in absolute numbers, but sorted by percentage (relative).
Only Losers Really Know If They Lost
As we said with the Panda 3.5 Winners & Losers
report, lists like this aren’t perfect. The sites above may have had
gains and drops for other reasons; less visibility this week because
last week they were visible for different news stories, for example.
It’s also worth remembering that this is a sample of search terms.
The only way to really know if any update has hurt or helped you is to
look at your search-driven traffic from Google, rather than particular
rankings or lists like this, which have become popular after Google
updates. If you’ve seen a significant increase, you’ve probably been
rewarded by it. A big decrease? Then you were probably hit.
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