Just as I mentioned in the previous IndexWatch-Posting: I want to try and shine some light onto the reason for the major break in Google visibility for Qype.com. On the one hand, because my thoughts on this issue would go far beyond the scope of the IndexWatch-commentary and on the other hand, because I believe that other sites can learn a lot from this example. So what is all this about? Qype.com, a site that hosts user-ratings of restaurants and other shops has lost an exceptional amount of rankings in the Google-SERPs in the past few weeks. You can get a good idea of this when you look at the SISTRIX VisibilityIndex for the whole domain:


This shows that Qype managed to end up at a level that is below that from the beginning of 2008. Though this is not the only indicator which shows this trend: in February, Qype only managed to get 5,6 million IVW-Visits, while in January, they still had 7,6 million visits. Once the current numbers are released, we can expect the site to lose visitors once again.

What happened?
First, it is important to figure out what exactly happened. The strong break in the VisibilityIndex is a good start but from there on, we have to look at the details. As a first step, I take a look at the itemized value for each of the different subdomains, which can be seen in the diagram to the right. Here we can see that while there are different hostnames, the part that is relevant for searchengines happens exclusively on www.qype.com, which is also where we register the losses.

The next step for me is to look at the VisibilityIndex of the strongest directories on the main-hostname – this includes the current weekly values in comparison to the numbers from the beginning of January, when everything was still fine in Qype's SEO-world:


It seems that we found the reason for the decrease in the VisibilityIndex: while the www.qype.com/place/-directory had more than 100 points in January – making it stronger than many well known, complete domains – you are hard pressed to find it now. We can also see this when we take a look at the progression of this value since the beginning of January:


The left axis shows the SISTRIX VisibilityIndex progression with the major decrease a few weeks ago, while the right axis, with the red line, shows the amount of keywords that are found for this directory. I do not want this posting to become too long and since I would also like to spend some time outside in this nice weather, tomorrow I will go on and look at possible reasons for this crash.

There is something rotten in the state of Qype
There is something rotten in the state of Qype - part II
There is something rotten in the state of Qype - part III
There is something rotten in the state of Qype - part IV