Google apparently updates its algorithm around 600 times a year. Most of the updates are minor with little effect, however every so often a BIG one hits and you either rise or fall in rankings. If you’re lucky or not., it’s important to know what update affected you and why it affected you. This way you can go on and either fix the issues of your site, or replicate the good practice elsewhere.
Tip 1: for a more detailed view of updates and affect on your site there is a great app you can use in conjunction with webmaster tools from Barracuda digital. It gives you an overlay of updates and traffic from search. http://www.barracuda-digital.co.uk/panguin-tool/
What does this mean? You can see the corresponding relationships between updates and traffic on your site.
Tip 2: Bookmark http://mozcast.com/ and follow this site on twitter @mozcast
Mozcast tracks 1000 keywords and rank checks them daily. It looks for fluctuations in the rankings and based on the volatility of the rankings it will give a temperature. The higher the figure the greater the volatility. The site also lists major updates the public knows of.
There are 5 tabs on the report and each will have a information that may help you
Domain Diversity measures the percentage of unique sub-domains across the URLs in the data set. The less diversity there is, the more domain “crowding” we observed.
What does this mean? recently Google have been allowing more unique domains to be listed in the search results. This is good for affiliates because there should be gradually less dominance from big domains being listed multiple times on certain keywords.
SERP Count tracks the recent trend of SERP “shrinkage” – Google results with less than 10 organic listings on the first page. In most cases, these are 7-result SERPs.
What does this mean? In March there was an update which meant a far higher number of search results shrunk from an average of 9.58 search results per page down to 9.53. Whilst its not a significant amount, it shows Google’s bias towards shorter results pages for certain keywords. if you rank on these – great! you should get greater click through rates.
EMD Influence measures the percentage of top 10 results held by exact-match domains. This only counts domains of the form “keyword.tld” (e.g. buywidgets.com, buywidgets.net).
What does this mean? At one time exact match domains were seen as really valuable because they ranked really well. This is because at one time anchor text was used as a ranking signal i.e. of you had a site called bonus.com then most of your anchor text would have been ‘online casino bonus’ and Google wold have upweighted this domain in the rankings because of the anchortext weighetings as you see from the data, EMD rankings have been consistant for the last 90 days. Tip from this: don’t worry too much about having an exact match domain since only 2.45% of the top 10 rankings in this list have EMD’s.
PMD Influence measures the percentage of top 10 results held by partial-match domains, excluding EMDs. These include any sub-domains that contain “keyword” or “key-word” (e.g. buy-widgets.com, webuywidgets.net, buywidgets.store.com).
What does this mean? It’s very like exact match domains, just with longer phrases i.e. online-casino-bonus.com
Big 10 Influence tracks the percentage of page one results held by the top 10 sub-domains. The top-10 domain list is dynamic and re-calculated daily.
What does this mean? the higher the percentage, the greater the dominance of the search results by the top 10 domains in the analysis. If the dominance of these domains drops, it means there is a greater likelihood of other domains ranking in its place. If you are not a strong domain, it means there is a greater likelihood of ranking top 10.
SERP feature Graph shows the changes in the various features on 10,000 google search results over the last 30 days.
What does this mean? If there are certain trends happening on the search results, you can capitalise on it and change your site around to adapt to the new circumstances or in the case of carousels – accept that Google is trying to help users navigate to the best search results from a main generic result like ‘disney channel movies’. If there are carousel searches for a relevant iGaming phrase, then I guess it makes sense to work on ranking where the traffic is distributed to.
