Comments on: What’s Causing Google To Shuffle?

By: Chris

Chris — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 14:43:25 +0000

Yes, this is indeed very interesting. I think that Bing is making a big impact on what Google are doing at the moment. One thing I am trying to get my head around is that my site has quality links to it and when i check it I find that Google cannot find one link? However, the other engines are. Movement is up and down for a lot of SERPS and this must be causing a lot of SEO consultants a lot of concern. Also, why do we need instants and how do you know what settings to have on Google settings (moderate,safe etc.) because you get diferring results when you change your parameters. Great post.

By: Gareth

Gareth — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 10:49:00 +0000

I’ve seen massive drops and position changes over the last few weeks. With no real consistency between the sites being moved around other than them being new sites. I guess they are shuffling things around to see where they are best suited in the rankings

By: Peter Young

Peter Young — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 10:34:55 +0000

Interesting insights from Phil and Lloyd.

With regards to the points about CTR, I remember Google saying they used the search behaviour data for ranking Youtube videos during one of the sessions down in London about a year back.

Continuing that line of thought I would suggest the likelihood of similar technologies porting between Google products is highly likely, and usage in the mainstream serps would only make sense based on the behaviour outlined above (and from an IR perspective), and the fact Google already include personalised data within serps + filtration if there is any merit to Malcolm Coles post this morning.

By: Admin

Admin — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 09:15:06 +0000

Thanks for the comment Phil – I completely agree, “car insurance” on it’s own has always been quite an unusual SERP compared to others. I’m currently running ranking reports for a number of different search terms, of varying levels of competitiveness, so in a few weeks I should hopefully have something a bit more concrete to share, although I think some of the more likely theories (click-through rates, satisfaction rates) can only be theorised about rather than explicitly proved.

By: Phil MacKechnie

Phil MacKechnie — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 07:41:10 +0000

We studied this with some considerable data from car insurance SERPS 6-12 months ago for all of the top 50 results. The data indicated clear ranking bands for top generic terms which were either very stable or susceptable to great flux.
Positions #1-3 – solid rankings, very rarely altered for months at a time
Positions #4-6 – rankings altered only occasionally, from time to time replaced by pos# 8-10 for days at a time which suggested testing of the factors discussed by @lloydcooke
Positions #7-10 – these rankings altered the most, both up the page and off the page to pos #11, #12.

The data was pretty conclusive at the time and really helped set clients expectations with DATA, removing opinion and theories from discussions. Its probably time to run the same tests again across this SERPs to see how it looks again. Wouldbe wise to pick another couple of examples. ‘car insurance’ as many people know is a particularly special SERP in the UK which gets a lot of attention by SEOs and Google engineers alone. Testing on regular SERPs often doesn’t pick up some of the latest algorithm tests.

By: Admin

Admin — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 20:00:46 +0000

Thanks for the comment Lloyd – I completely agree with the click-through rate idea, although it’s not really possible to prove it, it does make the most sense. It depends on how you mean bounce rate though – I assume you mean people bouncing back to the search result (which would suggest that the site didn’t answer their question), which I also totally agree with – although again, can’t really prove. This post from Blogstorm shows a Google engineer talking about it and suggesting that that’s the main change they made with Vince.

Not to be confused with just any bounce rate though (like if they immediately went off to Facebook or anywhere other than straight back to Google) – which Google wouldn’t be able to see without looking at Google Analytics data, and I’m almost certain they wouldn’t do that.

By: Lloyd Cooke

Lloyd Cooke — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 18:07:57 +0000

Interesting point about the data centres.

I remember in the insurance vertical about 12 months ago there was a very similar test and looked to be CTR led as Google was trialling different types of companies in the #5 position for home insurance and car insurance.

For home insurance the following types of brand/company offering home insurance was ranking at #5:
- Over 50s insurance company
- Supermarket brand offering insurance
- aggregator (large brand)
- aggregator (small brand)
- standard well known brand insurer

For motor insurance the following types of brand/company offering home insurance was ranking at #5:
- breakdown cover brand offering insurance
- over 50s insurance company
- supermarket brand offering insurance
- standard well known brand insurer

Would be interesting if they also took the bounce rate data into consideration on this to0?

By: Admin

Admin — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 09:00:10 +0000

Bowdeni – that’s a really interesting point, I’m starting to track some SERP changes so I’ll look into that more.

Brad & Sam – Really good spots, the cookie idea makes a lot of sense.