April has gone by and here are the current IndexWatch-numbers for last month. As always, these numbers are calculated based on the SISTRIX VisibilityIndex and are used to show the largest winners and losers in the Google-index. We once again start of with the winners for last month:

Winners

#	Domain	Change
1	buchbinder.de	+8.910%
2	hamburg-frage.de	+3.824%
3	rankarea.com	+2.284%
4	autos-gebrauchtwagen.com	+1.430%
5	suchnase.de	+970%
6	ebay-kleinanzeigen.de	+940%
7	twenga.de	+517%
8	wunschauto24.com	+491%
9	barmer-gek.de	+466%
10	semager.de	+444%
11	amaredo.com	+295%
12	semags.de	+284%
13	pdfqueen.com	+247%
14	medizinfo.de	+236%
15	onlinestreet.de	+235%

We can roughly split last months winners into two categories: on the one hand, we have those domains that rid themselves of a Google-Penalty and are ranking once again. We can take twenga.de as an example here. For three weeks it was nearly impossible to find them, but for the last two weeks they are back in the game and are ranking better than before the penalty. As far as Buchbinder.de is concerned, Google was not quite able to decide on whether they like this domain or if they would rather have buchbinder-rent-a-car.de show up. Now it seems that the algorithm changed its mind once again and buchbinder.de's visibility goes through the roof. Lets see how long that will last.

The second category is populated by made-for-adsense-sites, a problem which I though Google had a grip on for years now: those sites contain scraped content which is generously bordered by advertisements and then shoved into the index. This worked rather well in 2006 but after that we did not hear from it anymore. This makes it all the more astounding that this method seems to work once again now, for a few weeks already. On the losing side we have some surprises this month:

Losers

#	Domain	Change
1	goyax.de	-100%
2	heisetreff.de	-100%
3	medizinfo.com	-99%
4	shops-muenchen.de	-97%
5	kijiji.de	-97%
6	deutschebahn.de	-97%
7	edelight.de	-96%
8	plazoo.com	-93%
9	expedia.at	-91%
10	euroexchange.de	-91%
11	bpb.de	-75%
12	preisvergleich.de	-72%
13	elternimnetz.de	-71%
14	bol.de	-68%
15	aol.de	-64%

Besides a few domain-moves (kijiji.de can now be found at ebay-kleinanzeigen.de, deutschebahn.de and .com cannot decide which one to use and both medizinfo.com and medizinfo.de seem to be doing something important) we have a number of well known and quite large domains on this list. Goyax, a stock-exchange portal first started to convulse and then broke down completely. While diagnosing a website from afar is always an inexact science, it seems that the large amount of foreign content in the /nachricht/ subdomain did not fare especially well for the domain.

When it comes to the bpb.de, the Federal Agency for Civic Education, I am quite stumped. Thanks to features like the Vote-O-Mat, the domain has backlinks that above any reproach and the visibility still manages to go on a free-fall in the past few weeks. If I am not misinterpreting this cached version, then a relaunch could be the culprit here – which would also fit the continued decrease in visibility.