Movie Sites Ranking Better In Google, Now That “Transient Issue” Fixed

A couple days ago, we reported that Google was investigating an issue where several movie blogs lost their rankings in Google. The head of search spam Matt Cutts himself said, “I hope to dig into this soon.” Well, he did and he restored the rankings for those movie blogs calling the ranking problem a “transient issue.”

Matt Cutts of Google told us:

This was a transient issue that affected a small number of sites, and the issue is now fixed.

It is indeed fixed. When I asked the owner of /Film, Peter Sciretta, if his traffic is back, he told me “yes, most of it but not all.” Google told Peter that this was an “error on Google’s side,” but didn’t give him any more details.

SEM Rush confirms with their charts that their traffic is just about back to normal Google referral levels:

Other movie blogs seem to have a similar pattern of traffic, although they have not confirmed with me if their traffic declined and recovered. Here is a chart from SEM Rush for ScreenRant.com:

Of course, I bet you are wondering, what does Google mean by a “transient issue” and did this impact more than just “several” sites in the movie blog space? Was there a bug in one of their algorithms? Was it an indexing issue? Was it some weird adult filter issue? We have no idea. Google’s Matt Cutts would only tell us it was a “transient issue” and that “issue is now fixed.”