February is done for and the SEO-Conference-Marathon is just arround the corner: last Friday already saw the SEMSEO and PubCon in Hannover (SEO.at has in-depth coverage of this event) and this month we have both the Campixx in Berlin and the SMX in Munich. So to make sure that there is enough to talk about, here the current IndexWatch-numbers from February 2010. Traditionally, we start out with last months winners in the Google-index:

Winners

#	Domain	Change
1	flix.de	+4.839%
2	yigg.de	+1.643%
3	e-hoi.de	+1.427%
4	stestuj.de	+578%
5	supernature-forum.de	+534%
6	unterkunft.de	+478%
7	camp-firefox.de	+253%
8	semags.de	+192%
9	ran.de	+185%
10	vimeo.com	+164%
11	kreditinform.de	+142%
12	wallpaper-area.to	+139%
13	gesundheitsfrage.net	+134%
14	maedchen.de	+131%
15	cosmopolitan.de	+126%

Even though it looks like Yigg.de managed to get out of the penalty-box, they are still ranking noticeably worse than at the start of the year. Interesting to see if the domain can manage to return to their old (traffic)-numbers, even though I don't quite believe they can. In the same period, a number of other domains got released from their penalties. The one on e-hoi.de managed to last from mid-2009 until now – quite a substantial period, although they returned to where they were before rankingwise. It would be exciting to manage to find a connection between this and the rather large TV-Ad-campaign that they recently launched.

It seems that ran.de has discovered the SEO-basics in the last few weeks to month, seeing how they are using the strong domain to rank well for many competitive and trafficstrong keywords: the site managed to get into the top-10 for such keywords as sport, bundesliga or soccer, for example. Kreditinform.de, which had a rather inconspicuously constant ranking, has started to charge ahead and managed to more than double their Google-SERP visibility in the last few weeks. It will be interesting to see how this will play out – they are not treading on a field thats light on competition and new backlinks can sometimes prove to have a boomerang effect. Maedchen.de seems to have broadened their range of topics: this can work, but does not have to.

Losers

#	Domain	Change
1	go-windows.de	-99%
2	b2b-trade.de	-98%
3	dashandyforum.de	-92%
4	aol.co.uk	-91%
5	joinr.de	-91%
6	spreadshirt.net	-90%
7	traveljungle.de	-89%
8	appsundco.de	-89%
9	coupons4u.de	-85%
10	bundesaerztekammer.de	-85%
11	airhour.de	-80%
12	1asport.de	-79%
13	heine.de	-77%
14	thomascook-reisen.de	-76%
15	multimania.de	-73%

Seeing how Google is not increasing the amount of organic results on the first page, when some go up, others have to go down: which brings us to the losers. I am not sure what exactly go-windows.de did, but it lead to an exemplary penalty.

Spreadshirt tried their hand at a domain-change from spreadshirt.net to spreadshirt.de and are demonstrating what can go wrong. Since they did not copy the whole domain 1:1 to its new location and redirect it with 301 redirects, they still have a large part of their linkjuice still lingering on their old domain. If we look at the visibility-curves for both domains, it becomes apparent that 1 plus 1 is, in this case, not 2 but more something like 1,1.

Thomascook-reisen.de is a prime example that, even though Google has, on more than one occasion, reassured users that duplicate content does not pose a problem, it can still manage to become one. Besides the correct “www.” hostname, they also have the “www5” to “www8” hostnames show up in the SERPs – all of them with identical content, which led to none of them ranking decently anymore. It begs the question whether they should have done a clean on-page-optimization before they started to get backlinks.