Take a look at the SEO world’s first winners and losers of 2016, all rounded up for your viewing pleasure.

WINNERS

youtube.co.uk

Video streaming giant YouTube tops the list of visibility gained this week. It seems that the domains youtube.com and youtube.co.uk are cannibalising each other for core brand term ‘youtube’ in the UK. ‘youtube.co.uk’ is holding the number one spot this week resulting in a boost in overall visibility. As expected this only occurs in the UK, internationally ‘youtube.com’ tops the list.

theatlantic.com

Atlantic.com, an online magazine site started ranking highly for some monumental terms such as ‘google’, ‘twitter’ and ‘you tube’ last week. An article on Google from 8 years ago titled Is Google Making Us Stupid? had a brief boost in popularity and saw the site ranking 4^th on Google for the term ‘google’. The site has since dropped for this term but still holds for others, it will be interesting to see if this resurgence is just a flash in the pan or if after 8 months, theatlantic.com is making its way back to the top spots.

 

watchseries.li

watchseries is a popular free streaming website. Sites such as these are naturally volatile due to their nature and the legality issues facing the industry. Watchseries has moved domains a multitude of times in order to avoid a banning, evidence of this can be seen in the short sharp rise towards the end of the year with the site appearing to be facing removal at Christmas time. This recent boost would suggest otherwise.

 

LOSERS

newyorker.com

The Newyorker has always seen varied movement with visibility, a trait typical of a news site, in recent months however it has remained more stable. This week’s colossal drop is the result of the site losing high ranking positions for monumental keywords such as ‘amazon’ and ‘youtube’. At this early stage it’s unclear whether this is the result of newyorker.com being a late comer to the Phantom 3 party or a glitch with Google’s indexing.

 

nytimes.com

Similarly to The Newyorker, NYtimes has seen a sudden drop in visibility for some very high profile terms – ‘daily mail’, ‘youtube’, ‘amazon’ etc. This could be the early signs of a penalty but it is too early to tell currently, next week’s update will provide further insite.

 

vanityfair.com

Another news site, Vanity Fair has seen a steep drop in visibility this week. The site, similarly to nytimes.com and newyorker.com has dropped completely out of Google’s search results for highly contested terms – ‘imdb’, guardian’, ‘jennifer lawrence’. The entire top losers of the week is riddled with news and magazine sites, perhaps an indicator that Phantom 3 is still rolling out and sites are only now beginning to bear its brunt.