An interesting take on Winners vs Losers this week, as all websites involved were at the subject of visibility loss and gain caused by Google Phantom and Core updates. It will be interesting to see the shift in website visibility next week as sites accustom themselves to the new updates.
A few weeks back, we reported news sites taking a massive hit and seeing massive drops with their visibility, suspectedly caused by the Google Phantom 3 Update launch in late November. This week has seen these sites climb their way back to the top with the weekend Google Core Update.
Winners
The Sun originally saw a huge loss in visibility late November and this week saw a massive gain. It seems there was a dispute between the two Google Updates, with Phantom 3 affecting the sites visibility and the Core Update working to its benefit. Taking a deeper look, the Core Update may have a correlation with brand names, as The Suns top performing Keywords and URLS are all celebrity names or TV series. It is also important to note in early December The Sun saw a peak in visibility before its drop, this was due to the site taking down their pay wall therefore customers are allowed to use and read all facilities of the site for free.
Boots has previously seen a decline in visibility, which is indicated towards the Google Phantom 3 update and has since seen gain. The site also had an issue with its international domain www.international.boots.com, where the sites were cannibalising each other for the core brand term boots. Again, just like The Sun, the Core Update has helped with Boots gain and its top performing keywords were brand names such as ‘babyliss’ and ‘molton brown’.
Following the theme of news sites making their way back to the top, ibitimes.co.uk saw an increase after a previous drop. Again, Google’s Core Update this weekend is most likely the reason for the gain. The site saw brand names ‘Thorpe park’ and ‘natwest’ in their top performing keywords.
Losers
Downdetector has been featured twice already on our Battleground. The site took a hit after this weekend’s Core Google Update and following the theme, these drops were for branded terms such as ‘ebay uk’.
Worldlingo has had a hostile few months. This week losing visibility for important keywords such as ‘translator’ and ‘translate’. This will affect the site massively as it’s out on core traffic driving terms that the site specialises in.
The popular internet meme database site has lost visibility this week again which appears to be due to the Google Core update. It also seems that popular and important keywords for the site have dropped in ranking for them. ‘yolo’ and ‘doge meme’ have both seen a drop for the site.
