Could this be the smoking gun, the SEO equivalent to ‘CCTV’ evidence of Google’s manual intervention? I’ll let you decide. My place is only to present the evidence.
Without wanting to sound sensationalist, I found this evidence quite shocking because as we all know, Google would never hand manipulate a SERP… would it?
Yesterday we took a retrospective look at the ‘Vince’ update, exampling the ‘Poker’ and ‘Life Insurance’ SERPs, and how Google has cleverly managed to identify and apply corrective adjustments to a small number of rankings for big brands.
Today we’re looking at the ‘Holidays’ and ‘Betting’ SERPs and the possible methods behind these adjustments, as well as introducing data from the Stickyeyes data set, enabling us to dig deeper into the back-link profiles of these movers and shakers.
Four months after Google’s so called Vince update, and there’s still talk amongst SEOs of brand building being the new link building. The following three-part blog series aims only to present evidence for you to draw your own conclusions on what really happened, what Google is now looking for and how to effectively deploy your natural search campaign post Vince.
There has been some discussion lately on Twitter and elsewhere, about Google’s UK SERPS being ‘broken’, with some anomalous results appearing, and non-UK sites ranking higher than they perhaps ought to for some search terms.
I’ve been asking the opinions of a few SEO agencies on the issue, and the consensus is that there are some issues here that Google needs to look at…