At the beginning of 2018 one of our SEO specialists noticed huge spikes in organic traffic for many of our websites. It was also confirmed by our hosting providers Good news, we thought, but we still had to investigate the fact.
You see, in SEO & digital marketing business, not knowing what you’re doing good is equally worse with not knowing what you’re doing wrong… We HAD to know what was going on…!
First stop? Google Search Console!
Google Search Console can tell you, to a certain extent, if your project has just optimized for new keywords – it’s enough to check the results for the latest period possible compared to the previous one.
We searched for any improvement or new long tail keywords which might have appeared in the our console but, as we guessed, it wasn’t the case. Besides, we check Google Search Console quite often, at least a couple times a week for each project, and we hardly noticed any changes since our last visit…
The second stop? SERP checker!
As you’ve probably noticed, Google Search Console tells you the search engine position for each one of the keywords your website has optimized for. The naked truth though is that those positions are far from adequate and, as every SEO specialist has noticed, they are more optimistic than realistic, let alone exact!
So, in order to identify the exact position for the keywords we track, we turned to a SERP checker. Thus we noticed that our websites have climbed like a cliff hanger, for lots of keywords for which they were already on the first page, on top 5 positions!
For example we had lots of former 7th to 10th positions which now have got to 2nd to 5th but also lots of former 4th which have got to 2nd or even 1st!
This was the reason for which, right from the very first day of the New Year, we noticed the spikes in organic searches…and yes, we DID work during holidays (don’t ask us why!!!).
The explanation – Google Algorithm Updates
Google has implemented two big algorithm changes at the end of 2017, in December (you can read here A History of Major Google Algorithm Updates from 2000–Present. ) As the changes are not announced by the online giant nor they are named for the public, the forums and the specialized websites named them in funny ways – the most common name used being “Unnamed update”.
Funny, isn’t it?
Anyway, the SEO analysts agree upon the following two big characteristics of these two “unnamed updates”:
- They penalized the PBNs (private blog networks) & link spam or unnatural links
- They penalized the famous brand sites (personal or company brands)
The PBNs & link spam penalization
PBNs have long been one of the most argued issues between SEO specialists, may them be white hat SEO or grey tactics adopters. The truth is that, while Google have been threatening website masters that it will penalize the PBNs which have been used for years for artificially increasing the authority and SEO score of certain pages, the PBNs have been constantly developing. Meanwhile, there are PBNs gurus like Mathew Woodward who teaches the other way around – not only that PBNs are not penalized by Google, but they are even favored by its algorithm!
Anyway, this time it seems it has started a dark period for PBNs and digital agencies like Barracuda Digital noticed this important update, saying that…
“Google seems to have released an update that targets private blog networks (PBNs), link spam and other unnatural link acquisition.”
Anyway, as they have admitted afterwards, it is too early to tell if just a mass set of manual penalties being issued, or something algorithmic (or both!).
Only time will tell what was it, but for certain it was something major and something who influenced SERP for other websites like ours – if one PBN is targeted by a Google penalization, then all the websites which were part of that PBN are penalized or influenced by the mass penalization.
Lots of these websites, due to the PBN system help, used to occupy certain high ranking positions but after this major update they were penalized – this is the reason why lots of our projects took their positions and experienced a traffic boost.
Famous brand sites
The problem with these pages is well known for ages – Google favors brands just because they are brands. So, it is hard to penalize Coca Cola or McDonlads’ websites, even if they’re not SEO optimized, while they’re paying huge for Google Adwords campaigns. On the other hand, the brands are favored just because they’re brands and Google knows that when a person is looking for Vaio laptops the chances are he or she will be happy if the first website in the searches is Vaio.com.
Now it seems that Google is testing what the online world will look like without big branded websites on the first position in SERP rankings; it doesn’t mean they will leave it that way, though…
Instead of conclusion
The year has just started yet the guys from Google have already implemented major changes in their algorithm.
What should a SEO specialist do in 2018?
Our opinion is to follow the path of the white SEO tactics and never play around for a quick win – a quick win of today may bring the drastic failures of tomorrow, as we have seen above.
