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]

I agree with samwest, everyone should grow up and use another search engine like Bing. The funny thing about some of the complaints about G shopping is that it doesn't work anyway, it's under the same restriction that regular search results are. They haven't figured out how to separate those. One would think using G shopping that they would bring BUYERS, but in fact it doesn't bring in anything. Everything G does now is mediocre and poor. I never thought I would see this from them. Look at the range of products they have, all mediocre. Docs, Plus, Search, Youtube, Adwords, Drive...bleccch. I have switched all my stuff to Microsoft's sphere, it all runs better, better office, better search...

[netmeg]

(This is the Google Updates and SERP Changes - April 2015 post)

[Nutterum]

I know it is seasonal (I looked at the data for the last 4 years) but I still can`t shake the bad feeling I have seeing my organic traffic dropped by more than 50%. I sure hope May and June will surpass the 2013 and 2014 figures, especially with the mobile updated hitting the internet soon. We already launched the new responsive design and I have prepared the mobile remarketing and text ads in case we get a good boost in the SERPs (we should as only one other competitor site is responsive!). So how is your post Easter GA data looking?

[RedBar]

Am I the only one that seems to have been hit by Google on 1st April 2015?

[samwest]

No Rebar - You are not alone. Same thing here.

[RedBar]

Something weird is going on. I've just been checking some of my keyword phrases and the results are incredibly incorrect in that most of the results have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the search ... no wonder my traffic's disappearing.

[EditorialGuy]

So how is your post Easter GA data looking?

Off a tiny bit, but all sources are down slightly (not just Google). For our topic, that's probably the seasonal effect. Average rankings in WMT don't show any significant changes for better or worse.

On the whole, it's "same old, same old."

[olenoides]

A fair amount of flux during the past 5 days in the terms I monitor (niche ecommerce site in the US). This is after absolutely zero movement since last October. Main mover has been ebay's BHP pages which have made some sizeable gains, in some cases jumping from positions 5-10 to the 1st position. Possible the all the SEO changes ebay recently made helped them got out of some type of penalty either manual or algorithmic. Anyone else noticed ebay making big jumps?

[rish3]

Main mover has been ebay's BHP pages which have made some sizeable gains...Possible the all the SEO changes ebay recently made helped them got out of some type of penalty either manual or algorithmic

I will be curious to see if Google deems these to be "doorway pages" whenever that update is released (if it hasn't been already). They certainly fit the description to me.

[samwest]

Doesn't help when the serps have "Shop 'SEARCH TERM' on Google" on the top of the page, followed by four Youtube videos.Let's not be so obvious.
I called my hosting company to see if somebody accidentally tripped on my CAT5 connection.
Not sure why, but I hear this distant "sucking" sound.

[olenoides]

Yes, interestingly over the same time period, last five days I've seen the impressions and click through on the PLA's (product listing ads) I run basically double. So whatever updates Google made they are having the affect of funneling A LOT more traffic into Google shopping, at least for my key terms. At the same time the conversion rate on those ads dropped substantially, to the point where I stopped running them this morning.

[Mentat]

When my Tuesday traffic is less than a usual weekend, you can bet that Google made some changes.

It's like a near-death experience.

[samwest]

Looks like by the end of this week, I'm going to have to call it. It's not near death, it's death period.

[DurableFingers]

My Google results have never been more unpredictable. Google has decided to be the police of the web. Like many, we've seen slow results and lower traffic.

[Paperchaser]

Yah i got some weird thing going on as well since April 1st, keyword dancing little bit. It will fix itself soon enough though its kinda of a routine with Google lol

[Nutterum]

Thank you for mentioning on the 1st of April movement. I checked myself and while I am cemented between 4-7 spot in the SERPs, there was some whirlwind with the competition, some dropping more than 10 places since the start of the month. Will delve deeper myself and report more if I find anything.

[Wilburforce]

There has been some shuffling in my sector. Since the end of last week my UK niche sector site has been toggling between pages one and three for main key term, and is back on page 1 today.

Overall traffic has been down, but enquiries are up (and generally the worst days for calls have been the best SERPs days, although localisation factors may account for this). Today's SERPs seem to be better for my own personal searches than they have been for a while.

[superclown2]

I'm seeing some fluctuation today in my UK niche with a few spammers (the usual suspects: new boilerplate websites with thousands of links) bubbling to the surface. Usually this signals a fairly substantial update after which the spam sites eventually fade and die but who knows.

[Shai]

Some changes here as well. Over all campaigns we have seen a 12% fluctuation in rankings for all terms of High comp and volume over 3200 searches per month (global). Baseline fluctuation is around 3 - 6%.

[Kratos]

Bizarrely the weekend has remained with higher than usual traffic and mobile traffic is converting a lot more. I have a site that monetizes traffic with the Amazon associates program and it has gone from getting 100-130 orders a day to 170-200 orders a day and the increase has come from mobile traffic as I also track outgoing clicks to Amazon among other data. Same goes for other Amazon sites (with less orders per day) and ecommerce sites.

I personally think that the mobile update is already live and has been as far back as late last year, only using some signals, while in the 21st all signals will be implemented and thus the big day. Google are masters at breaking out news when they're already silently implemented an update. It's too early to tell for us but it sure is an interesting tidbit seeing how we're days away from the 21st. I can update you guys come the 21st too to see if we have maintained the increased mobile conversions.

We're also keeping some sites non mobile friendly to test how down they go on the 21st. Just like mobile conversions and traffic have increased to our mobile friendly sites over the weekend, those sits which we have left non mobile friendly have dropped about 30% on traffic over the weekend.

Cheers

[Kelowna]

I personally think that the mobile update is already live and has been as far back as late last year, only using some signals...

I disagree. We have been changing sites over to responsive for month's at a rate of 4-5 per week. None of these have moved up or down at all other than the regular flux so if there was even a slight signal improvement for being mobile we would have seen it on some of the sites at least.

We run many categories of sites, both in the USA and Canada and see some crazy conversion swings, one day a Canadian category of site will be booming, while the USA sites in the same area go dead, the 2 days later a complete switch and the USA sites start converting. Same with same country different category, one takes off great while the other goes dead, then they switch places.

The Gorg has been doing this for a couple weeks at least so lots of testing we feel for the 21st update. All our spam sites are mobile ready and waiting so bring it on Google.

[Kratos]

@Kelowna We started changing themes to mobile friendly since November, and the mobile traffic on those sites (changed on November) has doubled ever since then. We cover a lot of sites too in a particular industry full of spammers. Most competitor sites are not mobile friendly. The fact that we have been tracking mobile traffic since November and those sites have doubled their mobile traffic while desktop traffic has been increasing slowly makes me believe that Google has already been benefiting mobile friendly sites in the SERPs (to a very minor degree to what will happen on the 21st).

Also for the last 4 to 5 weeks as per your case everyone and their dog have been rushing to change to mobile friendly, and a site with 50 pages and a decent PR will have all their pages mobile friendly (in Google eyes) in a week's time so you would hardly notice any changes as everyone is leveling up to mobile friendliness right at the same time as you are becoming mobile friendly. This is exactly what we have noticed in a couple of niches inside our industry where we started changing to mobile friendly in the last 5 to 6 weeks. Suddenly all the top 10 sites in those niches, including spammers who have yet to be filtered by any spam algorithm are mobile friendly. So there's no extra benefit to be gained by being mobile friendly. Now had you gone mobile friendly in November when page 1 results were full of non mobile friendly sites, you could have noticed a big change just as we have.

My belief is that on the 21st the mobile friendly signal will gain in importance for mobile ranking. However, it's also my belief the mobile friendly signal has had some small importance on mobile ranking for the last 6 months (if not more). Let us remember 'that one time' when Google announced Hummingbird and how it had already gone into effect 2 months before they announced it, so I expect Google to keep silent unless they will push an update that will affect a huge number of search queries and/or websites.

I actually look forward to the 21st as we're ready and have structured our website portfolio so that we have sites with different ranking backgrounds so we can fully study the mobile update from our own data.

Incidentally we too have many of our black hat sites mobile friendly (they're only test sites though). I really want to see how Google will treat a spammy site with the mobile update and where they will place it. In fact we will be sending a couple hundreds of thousands of GSA links to some of our mobile friendly test sites at some point after the first week of the mobile friendly update to see how they react. Lots of fun to be had in these coming weeks.

[kewlchat]

For everyone whos sites aren't doing well, and in fact dropping.
can you tell me if your sites page speed insights score is good?
and if your running ssl?

From what ive seen myself I did go mobile back in November and went SSL too
Also worked on getting my page speed insignts scores from high 80.s so low 90s across my whole network, and around about april 1st I saw my traffic double over a 3 or 4 day period, the same time a lot of you guys are saying yours droped..

I think page speed is just as important as mobile and I think SSL has become a little more important as well.

Also I should note I had 1 site that got busted for thin aff content in 1st week of april, and enom confiscated one of my domains lol..

But the rest are holding steady and im working now on more quality and making the traffic convert, my traffic now is about 45% mobile and doesn't convert well. So im tweaking things out and waiting till the 21st to launch a new network.

[Nutterum]

@kewlchat - you do realize that depending on your niche, mobile can be a thing for your business, hence when you redesigned your website with responsive layout you saw the results. In my niche for example mobile is about 15% of the total organic traffic and even after SSL and responsive design were implemented, the traffic stayed the same nor there was any notable difference in the mobile SERP positions of the keywords I monitor.

[Kratos]

@Kewlchat I do not think that page speed for mobile traffic is important at the moment. Google will develop the mobile form of it's current algorithms so that they can apply them specifically to mobile traffic. It will be then that page speed will matter, how much? I think it will be not very important.

Page speed is a minor ranking factor. If your site is taking 6 seconds to load, then you're in trouble, and even then you will still rank. However if you're site is taking less than 3 seconds or even 4 seconds, you're fine. Unfortunately I cannot reference this theory because I heard this from Matt Cutts in one of his videos (webmaster vids). He said that page speed will only matter if you're site is really slow (over 4 seconds). That doesn't mean that you should have your site loading in 3 seconds for visitors to your site want it to load yesterday. Put an effort to increase page speed for your users and forget about how Google factors in page speed.

We have a lot of sites and I can confirm traffic increased a lot in some on the 1st April as it happened to you too. However we have a few big sites which are the ones i'm reporting here when something happens.

Cheers guys let's kick it on the 21st!

[superclown2]

However if you're site is taking less than 3 seconds or even 4 seconds, you're fine

If it takes 3 or 4 seconds to load on a desktop it may never load on a mobile or over a slow wifi connection.

[EditorialGuy]

Google are masters at breaking out news when they're already silently implemented an update.

A couple of us have mentioned seeing a spike in mobile traffic several weeks ago, when Google may have been testing the mobile upgrade.

If Google has "already silently implemented an update," this forum and the SEO news sites have been remarkably silent about the effects. :-)

[kewlchat]

@Nutterum Ok I went mobile and ssl in Nov. had the traffic increase in april, also I didn't see an increase in just mobile I already had a high percentage of both and it increased about the same for both..

Also it was round about march when I got my page speed down to under .70

@Kratos I respectfully disagree having a page speed of 3 or 4 seconds will not make you just fine, imho its terrible, google has made a lot of statements about how page speed does matter and a lot more now with the influx of the mobile surge. But hey if your making money with a 3 second page load, great I don't know everything I just have opinions.

Also I must say a lot of people think that little things, like page speed, SSL, being mobile, having everything compressed and clean code ect.. Are all minor factors in rankings/traffic But it can some times be the combination of fixing all little things that push you above the competition..

Im glad to make discussions with you guys, thanks, Ive been a member here sense 2008 and only posted one time until the other day, because I saw some users having problems and i'm pretty sure the april update was a lot about mobile/SSL/speed*/ and a little bit on cutting thin content sites on certain niches.

Im no expert but I have been making good bank the last 10+ years in the most comp niches with my crazy theories :)

[RedBar]

this forum and the SEO news sites have been remarkably silent about the effects.

I have written in several messages that something happened on 1st April, a couple of others have seen similar, I have absolutely no doubt about this since my traffic across all European countries has been down 50%.

FWIW I was checking Google.no/fr/be for keyword phrases and their SERPs for my widgets were as bad as in the UK...they are totally and utterly dominated by US sites none of which can supply...unless one wants to look at youtube x2/3, houzz x2/3, forum boards, alibaba x2/3 and other associated crap!

My current European widget SERPs are without doubt the worst-ever I have seen and I know from within my industry many concur.

[Mentat]

Since ~ a month, all the local SERPS looks like this:

1-2-3 positions with local results (ofter lousy content), after that, comes English.