The March 15 Massive SERP Change

On March 15, I started to notice a huge change in my SERP on 3 of 20 of my sites, only on Google.

I thought it might be a penalty. I only do whitehat SEO, so I thought it was a filter issue. As I investigated more and read more forums, I realized a ton of people are experienced this. Most people who had solid sites and rankings are seeing a 60-75% drop in Google traffic.

I changed anything that could have possible been seen as a penalty. Like old affiliate links and a few pages of duplicate content. I submitted a reconsideration request to google. It was processed, but no change at all in SERP.

So I tried to find a commonality with sites that went up in ranking, in those niches. I am really up on the two niches that my three different sites focus on. I know just about everything about my competitors and what they are doing when. They are not too sophisticated.

These 3 sites have 3x as many links (quality links) than my nearest competitor. So, it can't be links. Most of my competitors haven't updated their web site in 5 years. I mean not a blog post, nothing. I add at least 3-10 pages a week on each site. So, it can't be fresh content.

I'm noticing one recurring theme on my three web sites that dropped ranks only and not on any of the other 17 sites of mine.

1. Loading Time of Website - My 3 sites that tanked are about 150K in size on each page. My other sites are slim in file size. My competitors are all barebones sites, under 40K per page.

2. Markup Validation - My 3 sites that tanked have about 50-80 markup errors on each page. The other sites and my competitors, only a few errors each.

I know everyone always discredits these two factors :

1. The common response if that Load time affects your ranking by 1%.
2. The common response is Validation doesn't affect your rankings at all, if goggle can read your content.

But, my ranking went from page 1 to page 2 on about half my SERP.

Anybody else seeing this or have any other possible causes in their mind? I'm in the process of develop a new lightweight template for all three sites, but while I'm at it any other ideas would be great.

 

I did not see any change to my rankings, but they did drop about two months ago but the traffic not affected

 

I saw some improvements for my websites.

For my forum I got in first page for the kw webmaster forum.

 

I've NOT seen any changes on my end, instead it's been stable and few sites have improved as well.

 

Would you consider your sites high bandwidth compared to your competitors?

 

I think there were several major changes in March - April. We had sites move up and a few move down. I think Google may be able to count links from pages that weren't previously in the index.

 

what we see that some serps we try to rank for (brand names) are one day in the top 10 and then the next day completely gone. For example this Friday we where on place 4 on page 1 in the UK this morning at 9 o clock still on page 1 place 4, on 10 o'clock we disappear completely. It is really frustrating that we don't know what it is. we are open for suggestions.

 

I'm seeing similar things since about March. The best I can tell you to track is ranking of all top 10 results every 6 hours for three days. See which sites are stable and find out what commonalities they have.

In my niches I have found that the low bandwidth sites that have their markup validated are the ones that stay stable.

 

I have had a good solid improvement in my rankings over the last two months. Could not be something you have done but something you haven't? Do the sites above you have something in common that you don't? Have you combed their link profiles to see it there is one link that could be seen as key that you don't have?

 

vikingraider very good point. I have combed their link profiles, but I wasn't looking for commonalities only new links to target. I will get right on that. Thanks for the idea.

 

i will monitor the top 5 for the keyword and i will look in there profile if I can find something different, but we never had these problems before. Thanks for the advice so far.

 

I'm pretty sure the new caffeine update planed to shake things up. They don't want to be as predictable. When you have software out there that can automate SEO pretty well, they have to add additional factors. I also notice they are tracking bounce rates better now too. Really crap content page that is 15 years old with a ton of backlinks are found on page 2 now in all my niches.

 

not all sites have been affected, but i did saw few sites of my clients that had serp change.

 

Have noticed this on a few sites, but no idea why, so I just left them to see what happens in the future.

 

Can you guys find any commonalities between the sites that have dropped rank compared to those that were not affected? The only two things I can identify is:

1) Slow time - Sites with relatively slow load times in Google WMT dropped down in ranks.
2) Site with poor Markup Validation have dropped in ranks.

Any others you guys notice?

 

I don't think slow loading time has anything to do with your problem. I have index page 130K and is doing better than before.

 

Thanks for the heads up zoom. I'm changing my template it's now 14% the total size as before. We'll see.

 

I have not find any special changes in SERP.

 

I'm glad to report all of my rankings have come back and then some. I attribute the lose of traffic to google readjusting how it valued some of my links. Now I'm seeing 10x as many links listed in WMT.