The next month is gone and along with nice weather, we have the current IndexWatch numbers for May of 2010. As usual, we calculate the winners and losers in the Googleindex based on the SISTRIX Visibilityindex. Again as usual, we start out on the winning side:

Winners

#	Domain	Change
1	sport.de	+100.000%
2	edelight.de	+1.186%
3	flyamo.de	+1.148%
4	gegen-hartz.de	+790%
5	pdfgeni.com	+286%
6	branchenbuchdeutschland.de	+277%
7	bpb.de	+263%
8	elternimnetz.de	+259%
9	heine.de	+248%
10	iphone-ticker.de	+144%
11	barmer-gek.de	+141%
12	cluburlaub.de	+121%
13	billiger.de	+115%
14	paperball.de	+102%
15	indymedia.org	+97%

This months winners can be mostly put into two categories: existing sites moving to a new domain or being released from various penalties. sport.de and barmer-gak.de belong to the first category, for example. At sport.de, they transferred all the content from sport.rtl.de to the new domains and it seems the rankings are following suit, the content (and rankings) of barmer-gak.de could be found at barmer.de. Both moves seem to have worked out nicely, which puts the old domains on the list of losers.

As far as the penalties are concerned, we have a number of different reasons: self-inflicted penalties like with bpb.de (which was probably due to an “accidental” upload of an incorrect robots.txt) and elternimnetz.de, as well as (temporarily) dropped ranking-penalties from Google as with edelight.de and heine.de. It is interesting to look at flyamo.de's strong growth on this list – they seem to have found the Philosopher's Stone Link, which gives them a notable upwards push. Let's see for how long.

Losers

#	Domain	Change
1	hotmail.com	-100%
2	travel3.de	-99%
3	hamburg-frage.de	-98%
4	finanzinform.de	-97%
5	barmer.de	-97%
6	frauenzimmer.de	-96%
7	celeb.ag	-94%
8	adpedia.de	-93%
9	jobcenter.info	-93%
10	seneque.com	-92%
11	pdfqueen.com	-91%
12	semager.de	-89%
13	lastminutestern.de	-83%
14	softliste.de	-79%
15	rezepterang.de	-79%

The causes here are not much different from the first list – just inversed: Hotmail.com is, by now, completely integrated into Live, which means the domain is mostly absent from the index. I already talked about Barmer.de on the winners list.

I would consider misguided linkbuilding the cause for some of the losers on this list. When I take a look at the linktexts that are used most often for the domains, it is easy to notice that they do not have much in common with a natural distribution of links. Google is quite reliable at noticing such deviations from the norm – and if there is no good explanation for this, they will move the site to the back of the SERPs.