SEO Google Pigeon Update Recovery
Well this one was a bit weird. Back at the end of July there was a few stories around about a Google update code named “Pigeon”. This is not to be confused with the old PigeonRank April Fools day prank from Google. In fact Google has said little about this update publicly. It was first reported by searchengineland.com who named it the Pigeon Update. I did not say much about it at the time as it had only been rolled out in the US and we hadn’t seen any significant changes to rankings. However a few days after the story we did see one of our clients sites drop significantly.
It’s rankings returned last week after we completed some work but the drop only corresponded with the Pigeon Update and no other external or internal changes.
Ranking Drop Analysis
The team went through our “First Aid” check list which helps isolate potential issues. Whilst things like server performance were looked at the major potential problem that was identified was that the same delivery information was on every product page. It formed a significant portion of the overall content for each product page.
SEO Solution
The SEO fix was to remove all the delivery information from the individual product pages and have a single delivery page. We then linked all the product pages to this delivery page. Voila! Ranking returns better than before.
Addendum
The changes were completed on the 25th of August, Google reindexed on the 26th and the rankings returned on the 27th. Well done o our team members, Jine, Vandi, Alex & Wing. Great work! I have a couple of theories why a “local” algorithm update affected this client but I’d love to know if you were affected by that update?
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
