Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Anybody see anything specific around which sites are seeing upswing from birthday update?  We saw a lot of rankings drop, most drastic in terms that are more loosely associated with our offerings but also seeing more sites with higher DA taking a spot or two above and some more images in top spots for ecommerce terms that you might not usually think to click images to view.  For a lot of these terms we're sure our conversion is better, and we offer to more of the search query intent, than some of the competitor sites that have taken top spots - even Amazon and staples who I'm guessing will move back down after google sees people leaving their site to find what they are looking for (hopefully).

Does anyone know what happened?? I have a great website, we ranked very highly for a slew of industry keywords, #1 in most of our top-money kws....and our keywords have been in freefall since the update. Help?!

So, I own a car shipping company called Car Shipping Carriers ( www.carshippingcarriers.com ) and I am trying to find out if I need the SSL Cert / HTTPS for the site.  I attached a picture that shows I dropped a HUGE amount of rank back in the beginning of August 2014 and that the SSL/HTTPS update happened at nearly the exact same time. I do have a quote box on my website asking for: Name, Phone, Email, Origin, Destination, Move Date, Year/Make/Model of Vehicle, and Carrier Type. I was unsure if I needed the HTTPS because I am not asking for sensitive data, but it seems that I might need to bite the bullet and update the site to HTTPS. What do you all think?  Any expert opinion and/or advice? JWV4N1o

Hey all, I do SEO. I'm currently working with another SEO firm on a project. The lady mentioned to me that Google recently updated (couple months ago) and changed their font causing them to lower the meta description to 55 characters. Is this true? I have not heard of this. Could she be confusing the meta description with the title tag? I didn't know Google could have even update the Title tag too.

Hi everyone, Does anyone know if Bing has rolled out an algorithm update recently? I have noticed a decent change in Bing/Yahoo results recently. Searching online only produces results for Google's updates. Thanks in advance for your help.

We were hit hard on both of our sites yesterday and can't afford to wait for the dust to settle, as some folks are advising. We have been attempting to work off a penalty on one of our sites by undergoing a massive (and expensive) link removal project over the last four months.  We are on our third reconsideration request and, hopefully, this last round of link removal will have done the job.  I'm hesitant to go in and "de-optmize" the site by changing title tags and changing the anchor text until the penalty is removed, but I'm not sure if that's the right plan of action.  I am, however, going to dig into the non-penalized site and change some title tags and anchor text. Any thoughts on this strategy would be greatly appreciated.

Does anyone know if there's been an algorithmic update for google.co.uk in the last couple of days? My site has dropped 15 places or more for all of it's terms and I'm trying to work out the cause!!! Thanks.

In May I announced test results for domain hyphenation but after a 3 month followup the results have changed and the hyphenated domain now wins on what seems to be the first link instance advantage. I was unable to discover any other factors which may have influenced this test but if anyone has any ideas I would like to hear about it. Here are the details of the SEO test and revealed URLs.