Google Updates and SERP Changes - April 2015

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System: The following 4 messages were cut out of thread at: http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4739952.htm [webmasterworld.com] by aakk9999 - 2:27 pm on Apr 1, 2015 (gmt 0)

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My guess is: Google changed something when referring a visitor, not showing were they originally came from.

I saw this too. Freaked out big time when I saw the percent drop in Google referrers. I also noticed pages missing from the SERPS - but not consistently. Sometimes a particular page would be there and sometimes it wouldn't. And I don't mean just not ranking, I mean not indexed at all. Odd thing was, our traffic was up overall during this.

[Babadook]

Thank you Rish3 for expanding on what I would call bad results.

- Not relevant to the query
- Pushed down by ads, widgets, KG entries
- Spam, or otherwise artificially boosted

[rish3]

Thank you Rish3 for expanding on what I would call bad results.

- Not relevant to the query
- Pushed down by ads, widgets, KG entries
- Spam, or otherwise artificially boosted

Some are just variations on the theme, but I forgot a few:

- Low quality
- Stale/Old (i.e. good info at one time, but page is really old, and missing pertinent, recent, info)
- Good info, but clearly scraped from someone else, and the wrong page/domain is ranking for the content

[Johan007]

If we take adult material out of the equation much of Google’s success was down to the fact many techies loved it. This including ISP homepages, and techies would change the default browser from MSN to Firefox with Google. I would be much happier with Bing (OK and a bit richer). Bings results are to me more interesting.

[samwest]

Not every page can rank in the top 3, or the top 10, or even the top 100. Even if the search engines' algorithms were perfect, there would always be winners and losers.

That's not the issue, the issue is when we DID rank #1 for over a decade, then they crank the screws down, not to replace us with better or more relevant content, but rather their own interests, Youtube videos, ad network partners and now Shop on Google, which is just a bunch of affiliate links with Gorg as the beneficiary. Your market must look completely different than mine. Just wait, it's coming. They want it all.

This reminds me of a phone conversion with an Adwords rep a few months back where she was encouraging me to bid up to $5.00 a click. I guess that's pretty telling of their mission. Here I thought selling bottled water was a dumb idea. I was actually approached by some riggers on a job site in Toledo who were planning to sell bottled water and asked if I wanted in (this was back in the 1980's before it existed, boy did I miss that boat!).

[Babadook]

I had an Adwords rep call me too and because of Analytics, they knew not only my traffic but how many orders I had and the revenue. That was the day I pulled the plug on their intrusion and dumped Analytics. The rep had the temerity to talk about my numbers freely without concern about me or my privacy, he was saying you did $$$ amount last month and such and such the month before. They are not my business partner, I doubt what he did was legal. No one knows my numbers but me.

[samwest]

It's pretty clear by the lack of activity here that everyone is doing fine. Doing some research over at Bing indicates that I may be experiencing an SSL related issue. I have 301's in place for all http to https pages, yet it seem my old history of links with http not longer exists. That would pretty much explain my incredible drop in traffic. I am opening a new main topic rather than keep chasing my tail here.

[Some_Bloke]

No Sam, you're not alone. My traffic recently has been absolutely dismal. Pretty much at an all-time low.

Several times in the last couple of weeks I've clicked on my own sites just to see if they are still actually responding. I don't see any significant change in the serps, just no visitors.

Strangely, those few visitors are just about keeping things going so technically, conversion rates must be quite high. Quite worrying to observe though.

UK sites e-commerce and info.

[samwest]

I know I'm really grasping at straws with the SSL thing, but it's the only thing that makes a little bit of sense. Google is "so conscientious" about notifying people about dropped rankings and site problems, but no messages in WMT. Home page hardly gets hit. My terms and policy pages seem to be the most popular. None of my product pages seem of interest either. (ha! as I'm writing, another hit on my privacy page) Just very, VERY strange traffic patterns. The late night data set seems to produce some sales, but day time there are NO sales conversions at all. This traffic is like that of about 2002 or 2003 when I just was starting out. At least it converted back then. (as I wrap this up and went for a coffee, that same "visitor" is still hanging on my privacy page)...weird.

[menntarra 34]

The "weather" according to mozcast is terrible.

I lost a lot of traffic since yesterday, now i checked analytics stats, and it seems my traffic loss is from bing+yahoo, so it has nothing to do with google.

[samwest]

Bing +Yahoo accounts for a very small percentage of our traffic, but yes, I'm seeing losses there too. Maybe they are following Google's lead. I'll be interested to see if any of this relents after the 15th (1st quarter profit reports). Is this upcoming "4/21" responsive update verified as true? I see algoroo is reporting it before it's even happened.

[netmeg]

samwest - could it be an issue with your niche, and not your site?

[Mentat]

Orthodox Easter effect is kicking in, at least in Europe.
See you Tuesday...

For me, April seems to be very bad in terms of traffic and Adsense revenue.

I expect the doorway update this weekend, so good luck!

[Kratos]

@Mentat how is it that you expect the doorway update this weekend? do you have any thoughts or beliefs to support that statement or was that some form of a joke. I'm interested to know your thoughts if it's something you think could happen.

[supercyberbob]

So Panda hasn't been updated or refreshed in 6 months, and Penguin hasn't been updated or refreshed in 4 months.

[seroundtable.com...]

Should Google shut down its search engine? Only you can decide.

[samwest]

I don't know animal is in play right now, but it's definitely choking off all daytime buying. How they do it is beside the point. It's happening and it's definitely a solid pattern.
Since March 30th each and every day begins with one very early morning sales conversion. The rest of the day is a dismal trickle of zombie like traffic with zero conversions. Most of the traffic is mobile. Just because I have a mobile responsive site does not mean I want JUST mobile visitors. Desktop has always been the buying traffic. Why the sudden drop?
I'm not taking it personal, but Google is just like a kid burning ants with a magnifying glass. They just don't care what consequences their actions have. That or their system is so broken or completely out of their understanding and control. Only a small number of my pages are being visited and again, the terms and privacy pages are the top URLs. It's FM.
Guess once again I fall into the .0001% bracket. 7 pm and not one person on the site.

[MrSavage]

Not sure if this is because of quality of traffic from Google over the past while, but things on my end, in terms of actually earning money is hitting rock bottom pretty much. Zero conversions on Amazon (never have I been 9 days in without something) along with some dreadful Adsense days (moreso than usual) all equates to loss of hope. I don't know what people are searching and ending up on my sites, but whatever it is, it's like a repellent. Dead, dead, dead. Never have I seen a flat line like this. Wow.

[Mentat]

It's like all the advertisers are waiting for something to start.
Traffic is low, but not that low, but the payment is incredibly low.

BTW my town is almost ghost like (preparing for the Orthodox Easter).
A lot of people started their Easter holiday Thursday :o

@Mentat how is it that you expect the doorway update this weekend? do you have any thoughts or beliefs to support that statement or was that some form of a joke. I'm interested to know your thoughts if it's something you think could happen.

It's based on history and practicality.

1. The update is announced (unusual for the new Google).
2. On 21 of April, we have another BIG announced update (mobile).
3. They pushed some big updates with big effects on my site on Easter and Thanksgiving in the past years.
4. Pushing the update on the Catholic Easter was possible, but the possible problems could have a too big impact, a lot of US people are Catholics, so even Google Team was on holiday.
5. Pushing an update on Orthodox Easter is much more feasible.
Only half of Europe and Russia are celebrating the Orthodox easter, the Google team is also at work.

[edited by: Mentat at 8:06 am (utc) on Apr 10, 2015]

[Martin Ice Web]

Samwest, i can confirm your observation. I handle three ecoms. All the same pattern. Some sales at night. Nothing all the day. Another ecom i know has nealry no sales for 1 week now.

That or their system is so broken or completely out of their understanding and control

I guess that the opposite is the thruth. They know everything about the users, so it is easy for them to give them a complete different set of results as you will see them. Unfortunatelly poeple don´t care if they beeing spyed by Google.
And serps have been reduced to such a small number of brands that i doubt poeple don´t search deeper while going to sites they know allready.

Zero conversions on Amazon (never have I been 9 days in without something)

U are kidding?

[Martin Ice Web]

@ samwest, are u able to see the IP from the user hitting the privacy page? Is it allways the same IP?

[petehall]

Has anyone noticed pages missing on some long tail searches?

The pages I'm looking at are listed in Google for some long tail variations, then on others the site still ranks but with a less relevant page and obviously a slightly lower ranking as a result. It's like they have been 'lost' or excluded from one search but not from other related searches (as Panda does with thin/duplicate content).

Perhaps a sign of something brewing...

[samwest]

I really fear for the 21st. As proven by data, since Mayday 2010 there has not been one Google update that has produced positive results. Just the slow slide towards site extinction. People have loved our site. No complaints from buyers, never a dispute. Probably the same with your sites. Guess it's just not the quality user experience Google pushes us for. From all indications in the current serps, that has to include over half a dozen ads, videos that start automatically and ad scripts that crash the browser.

A quick check on search queries in WMT actually shows HIGHER levels than usual. That's sure not resulting in more traffic or buyers. Doesn't explain how the site sits at zero for 30 min stretches during the day. I did notice that in Wordfence, Googlebot is appearing as a "human" visit. I toss all fake goggle bots.

By all appearances, they've filtered out all the buyers and are sending them elsewhere. Hope they turn dial it down after the Q1 report, but you know how that goes, why turn it down when it feels so good when the cash is rollin' in.

[edited by: samwest at 11:16 am (utc) on Apr 10, 2015]

[Itanium]

Had a HUGE crawling spike from 6th to 8th of April.

I noindexed over 4.000 mostly user generated thin pages, added lots of content and changed pagination settings to get more words on a page (I know it's not the only Panda-factor, but text length is certainly one of them) on February 24th. This resulted in around 6.000 removed pages. Exaclty one month after that, the Google Index (checked with site:domain.com) sometimes (!) showed those 6.000 pages dropped from the index. Yesterday was the first day that number (nearly) stuck. Google dropped 4.000+ pages from the index and seems to continue to remove the rest to slowly.

Lets hope Panda is finally on its way.

[samwest]

Good luck. When I see a Google update coming, I just yell "INCOMING"!

[mrengine]

I have not seen any good traffic from Google in the last few days. Conversions are non-existent despite the number of visitors remaining stable.

USA - Ecommerce - Full HTTPS - Mobile Friendly

[Johan007]

Panda is supposed to be monthly and done without official announcement according to experts such as Glenn Gabe. I will be following this thread in anticipation too but with the mobile update on the 21 of this month I get the feeling there will be no Panda in April.

Currently I am fixing broken links, broken video embeds, getting EU legal requirements in, optimizing an already good mobile setup and even filed a removal email to a couple of dictionaries that stole a sentences from my site. I am scraping the barrel and I am slowly running out of “stuff” to do since...

80% drop from panda’s since 2011
0% Penguin drops
40% geo drop though this happened around the same time as a Panda.

Lets hope next update will see us back, but keep searching for stuff to do. Most notably duplicate content.

[samwest]

I've been working on improvements using several references you can find by searching for "why google hates your ecom site". Admittedly my upgrade to CMS last August did not pull in all the finer tweaks. That is an ongoing process. My biggest flaws are possible dupe or missing H1's. Also beefing up product descriptions to 400 words (from 300) and making sure every image has proper alts. This may amount to just more tail chasing.
The real paradox is how listings and search queries can remain mostly static yet traffic and sales vaporize. G needs to understand that we need to make some income too. The trickle down effect is that many other online and offline businesses will suffer as they shut down the Mom & Pop shops. Always reminds me of Zorg from the movie The Fifth Element as he casually orders "Fire One Million".

Had the usual morning sale...now I'll watch the rest of the day be redirected, but hope not.

[petehall]

Panda is supposed to be monthly and done without official announcement according to experts such as Glenn Gabe.

Glenn recently wrote an article about the absence of Panda since last year?

[Babadook]

@samwest - I don't think that those on-page factors matter as much as they used to. I see sites that don't do anything right but get good rankings (as to whether that converts, that's another story), so there is more. It's obviously something that no one sees or G cares about. Have you ever met a sports fan that always bets on the team everyone thinks should win? They're kind of pathetic, you can see they just want to promote and be a winner too, the bandwagon effect. It's a base human emotion, to be associated with winners. That's what G does, always picks the expected, which are big entities on the web, that's where the money is (ads), less working in getting it too. This is cultural, and those engineers at G are affected this way too. For all the brains they have, they are kind of dumb. That's why we're seeing the weight of results going towards big monolithic stuff.

[samwest]

Getting a lot of these showing up as "Human" visits.

United States Mountain View, United States visited https:::://www.mydomain.com/yadaydayada/
2 hours 30 mins ago IP: 66.249.69.119 [block] Hostname: crawl-66-249-69-119.googlebot.com
Browser: Google Bot version 2.1
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

False positive?

[rish3]

@samwest: Some things I've done that I feel have resulted in a little more love from the Gorg.

Eliminated any "tabbed" info, and made the product page a long page that you have to scroll down on. For example, if you have sections like "Description", "Specs", "Questions", "Shipping Info", stacking them to make a longer page, versus grouping them into a tabbed view. I've noticed this is how most of the bigger ecom sites are set up, including Amazon. I suspect it has some indirect effect that google likes (higher dwell time, perhaps?)

Modified any product pictures that weren't unique to me, like manufacturer photos. You can, for example, use software to rotate the image a little (perspective distortion), or pick an interesting part of the photo to create a little "zoomed detail" section and overlay that on the photo.

Make use of a Q&A section. I think this is one reason Amazon listings do well. Also, so that you aren't left waiting for customers to ask questions, find any questions you've been asked via email and retroactively create entries for them. This, of course, adds more unique content with a natural sort of "LSI" flavor.

Add any functionality that a big site would have. Like, for example:

• Shipping time calculators on the product page
  
• Reviews (and finding ways to incent customers to write them)
  
• Related products (or "people who bought X also...")
  
• Links to support documentation, articles, etc, related to the product

Structured data markup ("rich snippets") on both product and category pages

Function rich sorting/filters on category pages, versus just simple "by price", "by name". Being aware, of course, if they introduce new url parameters that you avoid creating dup content.

More content on category pages, especially where you can bring in language that pulls in related keywords or brands.

Customize site-wide "boilerplate" where it brings value to the end user. I would avoid this if it's purely for seo purposes, but sometimes, the site-wide boilerplate text about things like refunds, or shipping should be a little different for specific products, or categories of products.

Make sure you have pages for coupons, promo codes, etc. If you get any branded searches at all, chances are "brand product coupon" or "brand promo code" are being searched for. If you don't have these pages, they may end up on somebody else's site.

If you're using a site theme that others may be using, make enough changes that yours is unique.**

• favicon and apple touch images that are unique
  
• as unique of an html and css structure (class names, etc) as you can.
  
• unique css background images

** I think many may not agree with me here, but I saw something with Panda that I can't prove, but I believe to be true. Panda seems to associate things like a specific sequence of html, or css class names with "good" and "bad" sites. To the degree that a "good site" can get slapped solely because it's using a theme that is popular with a large number of "bad", or "spammy" sites. I believe this to be a sort of side effect of the way machine learning works. Similar to false positives from a Bayesian spam filter.

[edited by: rish3 at 3:21 pm (utc) on Apr 10, 2015]