GUESTS & RESOURCES
Episode Overview:
In today’s episode host Ben Shapiro speaks with Searchmetrics’ Director of Services Tyson Stockton about August’s edition of winners and losers in search. Google experienced a rough August after two bugs occurred on their platform causing widespread indexation issues. Although Google was able to quickly fix the bugs, the effects of them were felt industry wide.
Google’s bugs caused fluctuation in URL rankings, elevating URLs with negative SEO ranking factors while tanking URLs with positive ranking factors. Although the short term issues were quickly fixed, it created a period of confusion in datasets that documented inverse URL rankings. Strong sites like Healthline and Mayo Clinic saw dips in their rankings but quickly returned to their original levels due to the relevance of their content.
Despite issues caused by Google’s bugs, Facebook and Yahoo experienced substantial gains. However, Linkedin experienced a significant 13% loss after de-indexing their website. In the editorial sector Dailymotion, BuzzFeed and News Break have experienced continual gains since March and April. News Break is August’s big editorial winner, exceeding 200,000 visitors in August compared to the spring where they only averaged 14,000.
Negative impacts from Google’s bugs ended early August and have been cleared from Google’s system. Any lasting negative impacts throughout the month of August indicate a greater SEO issue that requires fixing.