Straight from the “better late than never”-box: here we have the IndexWatch-numbers for June 2011.  As always, we calculated both the winners and losers based on their VisibilityIndex at the beginning and the end of the month.  We start with the winners:

Winners

#	Domain	Change
1	ohost.de	+203%
2	youtube.com	+194%
3	dpaq.de	+166%
4	netzpolitik.org	+98%
5	wie-sagt-man-noch.de	+93%
6	drwindows.de	+82%
7	duden.de	+78%
8	musik-base.de	+71%
9	felidoo.de	+67%
10	forumieren.de	+63%
11	dialo.de	+56%
12	trivago.de	+45%
13	tagesschau.de	+43%
14	yellowmap.de	+41%
15	db.de	+41%

Parasite-hosting seems to be a subject that Google cannot really put a lid on: every few month we see a mass-host skyrocket to the top with numerous, mostly adult keywords and it will take Google a few weeks to react, probably manually.  This time it’s ohost.de, while it will likely be some other host in the coming month.  A definite sign of how helpless Google is when it comes to this came a few days ago, when they banned the whole cc.co domain with all its subdomains.  Supremacy in dealing with SPAM definitely has a different look to it.

Seeing Youtube.com on the list might seem astonishing at first, so let’s take a short look at reasons for this:  back in the day the Google-SERPs were simple – there were 10 results and that was it.  When Google noticed that no one will use the picture- or video-vertical-searches by themselves, they came up with the Universal-Search idea:  any time Google deems it useful, they will show Universal-Search results in addition to the 10 regular results in the SERPs.  A few weeks ago, Google made some changes to some of the video-results:  now, they will not be shown in addition to the 10 organic results but will replace one of those 10 results from the SERPs.  Another change is that you will not be shown the familiar box with 3 or more videos anymore but only one video with screenshot.  In these cases we decided to count the results as organic – which means they now count in the VisibilityIndex calculation and therefore explains the strong increase for YouTube.

The dpaq.de is an interesting phenomenon:  the URL-shortener for the Deutsche Presse-Agentur (dpa) hides behind this domain.  They decided on offering this service themselves because they do not trust the public options.  Surprisingly, they decided on implementing the usually correct method of blocking the whole domain for searchengines with the help of the robots.txt-file.  The problem here is that Google abides to the robots.txt and does not know that all there is to this domain is redirects to the actual content.  The fact that a lot of very strong links point to the URLs is the reason why Google still ranks them – and not just anywhere, for keywords like easyjet, wettervorhersage or dönerhersteller they rank in the top-10. SEO by accident, congratulation. 

Losers

#	Domain	Change
1	urlpuls.de	-99%
2	bizzinformation.de	-97%
3	lightinthebox.com	-97%
4	lg.com	-81%
5	taz.de	-65%
6	satzeile.de	-63%
7	essen.de	-62%
8	wunderkarten.de	-60%
9	gutscheinz.com	-56%
10	webnews.de	-49%
11	popula.de	-49%
12	baulinks.de	-45%
13	linkedin.com	-44%
14	robtex.com	-44%
15	webwiki.de	-25%

Once again we see numerous aggregators, with next to no visible added value, on the losing end of the Google-index for June.  Domains like urlplus.de were some of the winners on last month’s list, it looks like Google decided that the quality of the content did not justify the number of visitors send their way and took countermeasures.  Similar reasons explain the fall of domains like bizzinformation.de or robtex.com.

I was a little surprised by the large decrease in the visibility of taz.de, even though sometimes the content would justify such a loss.  Taking a first look, I was not able to make out any SEO-reasons why they should have lost such a large chunk of their visibility. They managed to decrease their visibility from a high of more than 30 points to less than 10 points at the time of writing – external trafficmeasuring-tools like Google Trends also show a distinct decline in visitor-numbers since the start of the year.