IndexWatch Q3 2022: UK Visibility Winners & Losers 🇬🇧

From:

Luce Rawlings

Published: 27.10.2022

Domain Winners and Losers

Using SISTRIX’s Visibility Index, we have analysed the winning and losing domains on the UK Google Search to understand which have seen the most significant changes in visibility over the last 3 months. First, we analyse the winners…

Winner: Pokerstars rise like a phoenix from the ashes

Pokerstars.uk is an online gaming website. It allows users to take part in virtual poker tournaments using either play money or real money. Over the last quarter, the site has seen an impressive 821.4% visibility increase on Google UK.

The journey to visibility success has been a challenging one for Pokerstars. Shortly after the roll-out of the September 2019 Core Update, their visibility nosedived. Until July 2022, they have not been able to achieve anywhere near the levels of visibility they once had.

The sudden increase in organic visibility occurred on 25th July 2022. This was two days before Google announced the July Product Review Update.

On either side of the drop-off, the best-performing section of the website has been /poker/. This has always had considerably higher visibility than other directories on-site.

The initial drop-off aligned with the /poker/ directory being 301 redirected to pokerstars.eu/fi (the Finnish directory on their EU domain).

 In 2020, the redirect location was updated to the pokerstars.bet domain. The redirect provided some benefit to the pokerstars.bet domain but had little impact on the visibility of the Finnish directory on UK or Finnish Google:

In mid-2021, Pokerstars removed the redirect and reactivated the /poker/ directory. Although it contained similar content, the section was given a new and improved design.

Although it took a year for the site to reap the rewards of reinstating the /poker/ directory, Pokerstars.uk obtained a significant amount of keyword ranking positions, with the domain ranking for 16,997 new keywords, and seeing improved rankings for 397 following the three algorithm updates in August & September 2022.

Implementing 301 redirects on high-performing pages is a controversial and risky move. Whilst we may never know the rhyme or reason behind the decision, today, Pokerstars.uk is just one of several active Pokerstars domains. Whilst the company retains .bet and .eu, these currently redirect to .uk.

Winner: A second wind for Snowleader

Snowleader.co.uk is an online shop for skiing, snowboarding and outdoor equipment. In Q3, the site saw an 999% uplift in Google SERP visibility.

A part of The Reblochon Company which also manufactures cheese (can you brie-lieve it?), Snowleader has had a lot of organic success over time. However, following the May 2022 Core Update, its visibility took a tremendous tumble down from 2.01 to 0.13.

After a couple of months of poor visibility levels, the website’s luck changed. Around the time of the July Product Review Update, the domain’s visibility increased to 0.6. Up until the Core Update in mid-September, visibility continued to climb, reaching 1.57.

On 6th July 2022, it was announced that Snowleader had signed a licence deal to design, produce and distribute Eider in Europe following Eider’s acquisition by K2. Eider is a French brand which creates clothing for mountaineering and ice climbing. 

It is possible that this coverage of the acquisition has had a positive influence on Snowleader’s visibility on the UK SERPs. However, it does not explain the sudden drop-off in Google SERP visibility. 

Due to limited directory data, it is difficult to see the specific areas of the site which suffered and why. But, we can see that from 4th July to 3rd October, the site started ranking for 10,819 keywords and saw position uplifts for 6,275 queries.

Although the September Product Review Update caused a slight decrease and overall visibility is not quite as high as the levels pre-May 2022, things are still looking promising for Snowleaders as we move through October.

Winner + Loser: Go Ultra Low: And high, and low and…

Goultralow.com has seen outstanding growth in Google visibility, rising to an impressive VI of over 17, putting it in the top 500 most visible domains, alongside habitat.co.uk and flickr.com. A failed UK Government project, Go Ultra Low started to promote the use of electric vehicles in 2013.

Now, brace yourself. Whilst we worked on this IndexWatch report, something rather dramatic happened! The website mysteriously disappeared from the internet! Rather than remove the original research from the report, we’ve decided to follow the story to find out what happened.

In 2014, the Go Ultra Low campaign was started. However, the SEO story started in 2015. By July 2015, the campaign had a new Head of Marketing and the domain gained visibility. SISTRIX data for this period shows a /car-selector/ and a set of information pages along with a /blog/ directory with approximately 10 entries. The VI had a short-term peak at 0.24 on 27th July 2015.

Until 2018, there was no real growth. The /blog/ directory had changed to /news/ but otherwise, the URLs looked the same as back in 2015 and more informative content had been added. The VI peaked again at 0.22 in August 2018.

By 2019, the site ranked in the top 10 for electric vehicles, electric cars and related terms:

The project was cancelled on 4th February 2021. At this time, only 23 URLs were ranking and therefore, there was no significant visibility. There were, however, significant incoming links from Wikipedia, UK Gov, BBC, Good Housekeeping & The AA, and an estimated 1,700.

So what happened next? This is where it gets REALLY interesting.

On 21st August 2022 – over a year after the project was closed – a URL for the keyword “roof cargo bag” appeared at Position 21. By the time we had crawled the extended database at the end of the week, we had recorded hundreds of new ranking URLs. With a little research we can also see that the domain was bought via sedo.com for $2,950 on 3rd June 2022. This confirms that it was not hacked or hijacked.

The incoming links gave us a huge clue that they may be responsible for bootstrapping the new content. 753 links were detected from the (now empty) subscription-crates.com, all with suspiciously targeted anchor text:

There are thousands more examples of these types of links from dead, hacked and fake sites. You’d think that if we can work this out in just 30 minutes of research, Google can do it in milliseconds. But surprisingly, it didn’t!

The site grew over the following 3 months to a VI of 17.1! Fart Fart sounds, anybody?

On 17th October, a few days before the October 2022 Google Spam Update was announced, the site lost all visibility, indicating that a Google manual penalty had been applied. Today, the domain doesn’t even have a nameserver entry which means the domain has been removed from the nameservers. Technically, the domain could come back into service but if there’s a manual penalty, it’s unlikely to ever come back into Google search. Keep your eyes open for an attempt to sell the domain!

Update, 24 hours after writing the above: The domain is now active again with the same content. If rankings don’t return it will confirm that a manual penalty was applied.

Update: 7th Nov 2022. The website is offline but the DNS is now hosted at Namecheap.

Q3 2022 winners tables

Below are the top 250 winners by absolute change:

And this table shows winners by percent change:

Where there are winners, there are always losers, so now it’s time to analyse some significant movers. The tables can be found later in this article.

Loser: Business moves for MiniClip

MiniClip (miniclip.com) is an app and browser-based gaming business. Since their launch in 2001, they have developed and published over 1,000 games across a variety of genres.

When many think of MiniClip, they think of a library of super addictive mini-games. But, in March this year, the MiniClip team made a huge announcement about their direction. After 21 years and in alignment with industry movement, all games would be mobile only.

Consequently, over time, miniclip.com has transformed from a browser-based game library to a typical company site. The only games that are still playable on their website are the popular 8 Pool Ball and Agar.io.

The changes we’ve seen in the Visibility Index are reminiscent of this new approach. The /games/ directory experienced a sharp visibility decline around 18th July.

Between the 4th & 18th July, the directory saw ranking decreases across 2,528 keywords. The section also lost rankings altogether for 2,167 terms, including “Bubble Trouble”, “Electro Air Hockey” and “Snowball Warfare”.  This is due to many of the  /games/ pages no longer existing on the website (for example, Bowling King Quickfire).

Some /games/ pages do exist for MiniClip’s flagship games, including Mini Football. On these pages, users can read about the games, preview content and download them. Yet, MiniClip does seem to be missing an SEO trick.

These remaining game pages are brand-new URLs. This means that they have no historic authority even though the games they are promoting do. To boost performance, they could implement 301 redirects from the legacy URLs (the same URL but appended with “/en/”). As the website only serves content in English, historic Hreflang would not be an issue.

Loser: A 180 degree turn for 365 Games

365 Games (365games.co.uk) is an Ecommerce website where users can buy video games for PC, Mac and all the popular consoles. It also sells board games, card games and even trading cards (including Pokemon & Yu-Gi-Oh! cards).

Since the beginning of July, the website’s Google visibility has decreased by 80%. During the quarter, there were notable decreases in the performance of product category pages, including “/pc-games/” (-94.5%) and “/ps3-games/” (-96.4%).

Researching 365 Games business activities reveals that the site recently changed ownership and a platform migration commenced in late September.

Comparing the website pre and post-migration, we can see that the header has been refreshed, including the internal search and mega menu items:

Further exploration into the website data also confirms that AMP (Accelerated Mobile Page) equivalents of product category pages have been created and are gradually seizing rankings from the non-AMP versions.

Although few ranking URL changes were notable during the period initially analysed (4th July to 3rd October). As October has progressed, we can see that many of the product category pages (non-AMP) have lost visibility to the AMP product category pages:

A closer inspection of a sample of AMP URLs also confirms a mixture of ranking losses and wins due to AMP transition, with some product category pages now resolving in 404 errors. Only time will tell how much of their former visibility 365games.co.uk can reclaim through the platform migration and AMP changeover but at the moment, the growth of AMP pages is not compensating for overall losses:

Loser: LinkedIn companies loss

Professional social network, Linkedin.com, has seen a performance decline over the quarter. Between 4th July and 3rd October 2022, LinkedIn’s visibility dropped by 96.2 VI points.

Until recently, Linkedin.com’s Google visibility has gone from strength to strength. But, in late August, visibility started sloping; reaching levels comparable to late 2020.

Throughout the algorithm updates in August & September, this downward trend has continued.

A closer analysis of Linkedin.com’s directories has revealed that the “/company/” section has suffered the most. This is where all company profile pages are housed.

At the beginning of Q3, the visibility of /company/ on the www subdomain was rising. The directory reached a peak of over 230 VI points before dropping from 25th July onwards. If we look analyse the lost rankings we can find 720 page 1 keyword rankings that were lost completely from the SERP. Some of the keywords are very significant.

Given the dates and the Core Update and Product Update that occured during the period, it appears that LinkedIn’s company pages are not what searchers really want to see. What would you expect to see when you type “Haribo”?

Negative impact on News sites

In Q3, there were several Media industry SERP visibility casualties. Four of the most notable losers in this category were:

• Metro.co.uk – 63.9%
• Mirror.co.uk – 44.2%
• Dailymail.co.uk – 40.2%
• Independent.co.uk – 29%

SERP visibility for news sites has tumbled over time. With most sites analysed seeing ongoing decreases since the September 2019 Core Update.

Aside from the Daily Mail, July’s Product Review Update had very little impact on the sites. This was very much the case with the September Product Review Update too.

However, following the Helpful Content & September 2022 Core Updates, Metro suffered the most notable drop in visibility.

Category movements for Metro

Metro.co.uk is the popular Metro newspaper’s online version, targeted at young metropolitans. In Q3, Metro’s Google visibility decreased by 63.9%. The decrease followed the September Product Review Update, although it must be noted that the September Core Update was also rolling out at the same time and could have played a part in the loss.

The directories which saw the biggest decreases were “/2022/” and “/tag/”. 

“/2022/” contains all news articles published during the year. As a WordPress website, metro.co.uk chose this default URL structure from the presets, with a new directory auto-generated annually. 

In contrast, the “/tag/” directory contains defined categories for news topics and locations (e.g. “london” and “love-island”). 

One notable observation from exploring the directories further is the site’s structure. Housing so much content, it is possible that these directories have introduced thin article categories. Also, the vast amount of content in each directory may also have made Metro’s information architecture (IA) flat. 

In the case of Metro, the date-based directories – such as “/2022/” and “/2021/” – are likely to be the biggest contributors to hierarchy issues. A flat website hierarchy can make it more difficult for Google to understand which web pages are more important. It can also affect organic rankings.

Content structure, quality and relevance are key ranking factors for all sites. Over recent years, these have become more important to appease Google’s algorithms. Additionally, the subjective nature of news reporting makes establishing source trustworthiness more complex. Based on the domain’s overall SEO profile, has Google deemed metro.co.uk as less reliable? Perhaps backlink and citation issues have come into play here too?

Q3 2022 losers tables

Below are the biggest 250 losers by absolute change:

And this table shows losers by percent change:

Conclusion

Following this quarterly analysis, we have concluded that:

• 301 redirects should be implemented with caution. Before implementing 301 redirects on high-performing pages, weigh up the importance and relevance. In the case of Pokerstars.uk, this caused long-term organic search woes.

• The power of link building and citations should not be underestimated. Although content is king, strong SEO performance requires a holistic approach. Press coverage from relevant, authoritative and trusted online sources has the potential to have a substantial impact on a website’s organic search visibility.

• When restructuring a website’s URL structure, it is important to put the right redirects in place to pass historical link equity to new pages. This can be particularly beneficial for boosting the performance of new URLs which have been created to replace older ones.

• A migration of any kind is risky. Whether a site redesign, platform move or partial restructure, it is essential that all content and technical implementations are transferred to avoid major visibility drop-offs.

• Content freshness matters, particularly where competitive keywords are concerned. If page content is outdated, it is likely to be devalued when compared to newer and more useful sources of information.

• The importance of E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness & Trustworthiness) has grown, particularly over the last couple of years where Google has really emphasised the importance of serving the highest quality and relevant results for user search queries.

• Google is by no means perfect. Go Ultra Low shows that bad websites can benefit from algorithm updates and their deceptive tactics can go undetected for some time.