This week we see a pattern of steep gains and violent dropouts in the addmustard battleground…

Winners:

channel5.com

One of Britain’s biggest TV channels takes its place this week for greatest visibility gained. The station has recently picked up new contracts for top American TV shows such as ‘The X Files’, ‘Once Upon A Time’ and ‘First Great Western’ for which it has seen an increase in visibility. The current season of Celebrity Big Brother is also on their cards, and the site has this week seen an increase in dominance over Google’s search results for the term ‘big brother’, with parts of the site taking the number one and two slots. The sharp drop and immediate rise are likely due to this other area of the site jostling with other key contenders for that term.

barclays.co.uk

Barclays appears to have to have suffered a technical malfunction sometime last week, possibly due to Google’s crawlers being unable to access the site. As a result, overall visibility for the site sees a sharp drop and immediate rise the following week. This could, of course, be the first sign of a penalty. Next week’s positioning will provide more insight.

santander.co.uk

The well-known bank shoots up in visibility this week. The site sees huge growth for broad term ‘credit card’, with its targeted page now ranking 3^rd on Google. This page isn’t new and The Wayback Machine shows that it has not seen fresh content for at least a year. Other gains seem to be around further expansion of its dominance of brand-based terms. One example being that the site is holding every spot on the first page of Google for term ‘santander online banking login’.

Losers:

Gizmodo.com

The design and technology blog suffers a loss of visibility this week. Keeping in line with the trends of Google’s most recent update, the site has dropped out for big brand names such as ‘nike’, ‘the star’ and ‘pirate bay’. The Pirate Bay article that has seen a loss refers to the recent news that the Torrenting service now allows browser-based streaming, similar to the likes of Popcorn Time. Perhaps this drop is a result of legality issues.

Geek.com

Similarly to Gizmodo, the site sees a steep drop after a rise in visibility. The reason behind this also seems to be the same as Gizmodo’s. Geek.com lost rankings for terms surrounding ‘pirate bay’ with the same news story facing the drop.

Product-reviews.net

The product reviewing site hosts features on different technology and people’s opinions on them. The site has followed the same visibility trend as the others in this week’s battleground, whereby visibility has seen a sudden rise followed by a steep drop. This week, they have seen drops in visibility for terms surrounding AOL (‘aol mail’ ‘aolmail’ ‘aol news’ etc). This follows Product Reviews posting an article regarding AOL’s brief loss of service. As the article expired, so did the site’s rankings.