Google Quality Update: What’s Affected and How to Fix

If you noticed a slump in traffic beginning at the end of April, it’s not your imagination.
It’s another Google gimmick. It’s the Google Quality Update aka kick in the butt. At least it’s not an animal name this time!

Before we dive into what I discovered about this update, let me vent a little. In case you wonder what bizarre kind of people work at Google, coming up with this dumb stuff, look at Woman Sentenced to Six Years in Heroin Death of Google Exec; that should explain it all…perhaps only a heavy drug user and the like is capable of coming up with Google innovations like the ones we have seen in recent years. (^_^) Yes indeed, the childish looking Google logo is hiding quite a bit of dirt, isn’t it?

 

Ahhhh, thanks for letting me get that out of my system. Now let’s get to the data:

In the new Webmaster Tool screen you need to use the compare option and compare the date ranges: 4/29 to 5/19 and 4/8 to 4/28.

After doing that, select clicks, CTR, impressions, and position.

Download the CSV and head off to Excel. Add the columns “impressions lost, compute percentage, clicks lost, again percentage”.

And look at the obvious losers and winners among your pages:

 

So upon further investigation I noticed the pages that lost traffic had one thing in common, all other known differences such as links are negligible:

* keyword density was above 3% on longer articles

* bold text was used to highlight phrases

 

The winner pages had low keyword density, below 2%. Also, the length of the article made no difference; however, the KW density limit may be higher for shorter articles.

By the way, a great tool to check KW density is: http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword-density/

 

Things to remember:

* Google does not treat each website the same. If CNN uses a high keyword density it’s going to be ok. You are likely not CNN if you are reading this 😉

* The number of authority links going to a page appears to affect/increase the density limit Google will tolerate

* The next update is around the corner. Nothing lasts forever. Ranking is a temporarily phenomenon

* Each user receives a slightly different ranking result when searching for the same keywords, depending on many factors

 

Conclusion

From what I have seen so far this Google Quality Update appears to be an idiotic “over-optimization” penalty. Pages that were doing fine for many years now get penalized, despite lots of good natural links from forums, social, etc.

Thanks again to Google, trying to screw the small business community with their hypocritical B.S. they want to “improve quality”, save the oceans, build self-driving cars, oh yes and let’s not forget Google Glasses, the result of a true Google romance 😉 Yes Google wants to do it all, except provide us with a fair market place.

OK, so basically refrain from repeating yourself unnecessarily, unlike what I did up here. Google sucks, Google stinks, Google hijacked all internet traffic, yeap and they are after your Momma, too 😉

For the IT People Amongst You

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