Unconfirmed Google Update August 8th 2014
It’s seems that Google updated one of it’s many Algorithms over the weekend starting on Friday August 8th, which sent the SEO community in mass discussion “Panda or Penguin”. If I had to choose between those two, I would go mini Panda, but personally I think it was a mini multi pack update. These happen from time to time where Google collect a few different things and update them all at once. We started to see weird HTTPS error logs appearing which in turn led me to this issue :
The Urls are actually from another site hosted on a shared server with www.beckynaylor.co.uk if you check out the cache in Google : http://bro.gs/laww you can clearly see British Butler Institute is now merged into Becky’s site ( cheers Google ), but it got worse for others. A few people asked me for help regarding Akamai and SSL and again they didn’t have a certificate and were seeing pages merging into their site ( could that be causing dupe content ? ) but in the worst case I have seen was when you did a brand search and clicked on the results you got this screen. Google had swapped out the HTTP for HTTPS in the serps even though the site didn’t have HTTPS and no LINKS pointing to HTTPS :
Again nothing had changed on their website and I know that Akamai have had this issue for years which makes me feel that this is open to abuse from the NEG Seo guys
We also started to see “Get Updates About” when you were signed into your Google account
But it didn’t stop there, MOZ saw the first signs of Paid Local results ( at least know why Google Removed the free listings 😉 )
I also collected my new Volkswagen, but I’m ruling that out of the equation at the moment 😉
6 Comments
Joost de Valk - https://yoast.com
Yeah seeing the https thing to for a few clients. Very annoying behavior…
Dan Sharp - http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk
Seeing the https URLs for a different site issue from July looking at our data (possibly further back, need to do some digging). Looks like the same URLs across most/all other sites on the same server.
Barry Brown - http://www.visigraph.com/
I did read something about an update in Search Engine Land website online. They talked about a sudden spike in traffic on the 8th. With our site, we didn’t experience any spike so far or otherwise. I’m quite surprised with this news. I’d be thankful if it’s a panda update. I did notice that paid local results lately.
Colin Stead - http://www.clickonyou.co.uk
Paid local results? Haven’t seen them yet. Nice VW – you should look for a number plate like DN63 SEO
David Naylor
@colin it’s getting D1 SEO slapping on it soon 😉
Chris O'Connor - http://www.wpforall.net
Isn’t this just mis-configured servers, rather than Google screwing up? I’m using two different hosts and each time I stick https: in front of any of my domains (I don’t have an SSL certificate) I get another guys website appear under my domain name. He has an SSL cert and I’ve been told that Apache defaults to the first site that has an SSL on the server when a site without one is requested with https.
I thought SNI was meant to get around this, but both web hosts seem to be scratching their heads. I think we can expect to see a lot of ‘wrong’ search results popping up.