his Week in the Local SEO Community…T

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SEO Mad Scientist 🧪🥼🔬

Hey there SEO scientists,

Due to the recent local SEO update, we’ve had an exciting week so far in the SEO communities with tons of updates and fluctuations in search. During these times of extreme flux we always go back and review some of our older test sites and see how older experiments may have been impacted to get a better idea of what may have changed in the upcoming algorithm.

Usually we find these things and there is some correlation so we then turn around and test the theory of what we believe had changed. This week when reviewing some of our old Mass page websites, we noticed some weird organic fluctuations over the past month, specifically on our Mass page sites that utilize subdomains.

We haven’t been able to draw any solid conclusions yet but we are looking to some new sub domain tests in the future. For example, do subdomains impact the ranking potential?

If you aren’t familiar with mass page websites it’s essentially where your generating a ton of pages for different services and different service areas. Often this is all done on one root domain where all the pages are generated as subdirectories. In the case of some of our Mass page sites we decided to set them up as subdomains for each Target location so every subdomain was essentially its own individual lead gen site for the Target area.

A couple years ago we had found that hyper targeted sites would perform better when linked to a local GMB campaign which is what initially led to the shift in Mass page site design. Crawl rates and indexation seem to be much better as well.

Over the past month however there seems to have been some massive updates as we know that local has had a lot of movement as well as the product review update that’s still rolling out now.

As of November 22nd however, there appeared to be some type of rolling update in organic that caused some massive shifts in our sites rankings.

You can see that on November 22nd there was a massive increase in impressions which then continued every 5 days, 4 times…

When we started looking into where the shift and impressions came from it was very clear that almost all the subdomains had lost rankings and impressions while the root domain skyrocketed on these days.

The main site and all the subdomains are 100% duplicate content aside from the name address and phone number being swapped out.

When reviewing the canonicals they all pointed to the corresponding pages as well in Google had not declared any canonicals themselves which we thought may have been the case. (And possibly could have since we didn’t check on these days)

This is why we are looking to do more testing with not only subdomains and mass page sites but also with canonical SEO.

Our past canonical tests have shown that there’s definitely an impact on what Google shows in the rankings based on other canonicals they find on the internet.

This may attribute to where the original content is but could also just define where Google feels the most authoritative or relevant content originated from as it pertains to that page.

Google even states that they consider the canonical the most authoritative content and not necessarily the original content.

So let us know what you’ve seen in the search over the past month and if you’ve seen any rolling fluctuations like we have.

Let us know in the Facebook group if you have any theories as to what may have happened during these Mass fluctuations.

Hope the update is treating everyone well, as always, until next week,

Happy Testing,
Mike and the Web 2.0 Testing Team

If you’re interested in past SEO testing, you can catch up on all our tests online.

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