Google Updates and SERP Changes - April 2015

[getcooking]

---

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)

---

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.

[Atomic]

WMT just updated crawl stats and I see deep crawls 4-14 through 4-16 and an extremely deep crawl on 4-17.

[heisje]

Minus 70% here, FYI - e-commerce.

.

[toidi]

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

maybe the goog turned off the regular algo in preperation for the ec anti-trust case?

[Martin Ice Web]

@toidi, Antitrust is because Google prefers Google Shopping ads, its own flight and booking sites ... Scraping Content from sites to fill their own services. . I canīt see that beeing turned off.
And as u can read on different sites, Google faces antitrust investigations in 5 other countries ( eg. india, australia .... ).

[Eksto]

I have a couple of questions about mobile traffic serp changes:

1)Right now the google mobile test page says that my website is NOT mobile friendly. How much will it drop in ranking for mobile searches?

2) Am working hard on making it mobile friendly. Once I'm done, how long will it take google to realize my website is mobile friendly and get ranking back up?

[Itanium]

1) Only Google knows ...
2) In my experience it's fast and on a page by page basis. When I switched to responsive design, the most popular pages were indexed fast with the "mobile"-mark.

[RedBar]

The US centric SERPs are still dominating my widget sector. I spent Saturday checking a couple hundred keyword phrases on Google.co.uk only and the results were interesting to say the very least.

They were either pretty good with a good spread of the companes I would expect to see there with many of my pages at #1-5 HOWEVER when the mix was not like this it was totally dominated by US results from Houzz, Pinterest, Gardenweb, Alibaba, 2/3 main US wholesalers with absolutely zero UK, European, Chinese or Indian links which I woukd normally expect to see since they are the most dominant suppliers.

As a note when the UK results were ok Pinterest.com was not there but uk.pinterest was occasionally!

Will someone give the wheel an almighty thwack with a sledgehammer, get the hamsters out of retirement and get this damned thing running properly again?

[Kelowna]

@ Eksto

1)Right now the google mobile test page says that my website is NOT mobile friendly. How much will it drop in ranking for mobile searches?

I have a feeling it will not show up at all. I "think" they will be using a separate set of results for mobile just like they do for countries. I would be surprized to see any non-mobile friendly sites mixed in, but who know with google.

2) Am working hard on making it mobile friendly. Once I'm done, how long will it take google to realize my website is mobile friendly and get ranking back up?

That all depends on how important your site is and how often it gets crawled. Once crawled it should show in a few days just like any other changes to pages. But google could be real busy fixing their mess once they launch this, just like all their other updates. Sometimes it takes weeks for the results to settle and things to get back to normal (normal for google that is).

[EditorialGuy]

Re "mobile-friendly":

Google determines mobile-friendliness at the page level, not the site level. If some of your pages are mobile-friendly and some aren't, the ones that are will do better in mobile search than the ones that aren't.

Also:

I have a feeling it[a mobile-unfriendly page] will not show up at all.

According to Google, whether a page is mobile-friendly will be "a ranking signal." (Note the term "ranking signal," not "filter.")

[Wilburforce]

Note the term "ranking signal," not "filter."

Noted, but a lot will depend on the strength of the signal compared with others, and with the number of mobile-friendly sites/pages in a given sector.

I expect it to be a strong signal (i.e. one with a highly visible effect), and if there are fifty mobile-friendly sites/pages that are reasonably relevant for a particular search-term, then I think it will look exactly like a filter to a mobile-unfriendly site/page with high relevance.

The question of site vs page probably won't be completely clear-cut either: many sites (including mine) have many pages that are broadly relevant for an industry-specific search-term, so there will probably be some partly-converted sites for which a less-relevant converted page will overtake a more relevant but not yet converted one.

Although my site was mobile-responsive before Google started adding mobile features in WMT, I'm not sure what difference this will make to my business (I don't run a Pizza takeaway in a town full of Pizza takeaways, for which I would expect a more significant effect), but it will certainly be interesting.

[kewlchat]

Still waiting I saw a little drop in traffic today actually but im as mobile friendly 'responsive' as I can get I guess, todays drop was the biggest drop sense april 1st when it started the upward swing, that's on my best site, so it kinda worries me but might be normal, all my other sites I checked seem to be holding steady a couple have been climbing the last few days but most are normal, best ones been droping the last few days and today really sucks lol

21 is almost here lets see what it brings.. *fingers crossed*

[Kelowna]

Pacific Time west coast morning of the 21st and no changes for Canada or USA searches... anyone wakeup to anything new?

[RedBar]

Much lower than normal traffic across all sites for me today including all my mobile-friendly ones.

[kewlchat]

kinda normal here yesterday was a bit slow but not un usual
haven't looked around on other sites for any news, I came here 1st..

don't know whats going on.. its quiet too quiet.. :P

[samwest]

Enjoying the sled ride to the worst month ever. While search queries try to increase and traffic appears almost at normal levels, conversions are completely non existent. I think I could be giving away gold bars but none of this zombie traffic would take the offer. It's not just mobile, it non interactive desktop. They arrive on the site, sit on the same page for 5 mins, then drop off. I can understand mobile doing that, but it's desktop too. At this point, the gaming is so incredibly obvious and it's time the US joins the EU and rest of the world on fighting this menace.

Total search query terms for the month 659 - in 2011 that number was over 13,000.

[Martin Ice Web]

Biggest drop ( -40%) today. But sales and inquiries are up.
Surges of traffic are followed by Long periods of non traffic from g. We have a lot of foreign traffic again.

Seaching with Google is annoying. g completly disregards search keywords and gives complete unrelated serps.

[Martin Ice Web]

I have to adjust my drop is now at -60%.
Something is going through. I think they started a Panda update too.

[silentneedle]

Looks like german pandas are on crack today.

[RedBar]

Very low traffic across all sites again today, this is more like low summer traffic to me rather than Spring DIY fanaticism.

[Mentat]

So, as I presumed, "doorway update" was applied sometimes between 6-12 of April (two Easters).

[seroundtable.com...]

My figures never recovered after Easter.

[RedBar]

I believe that has rolled out

He doesn't know?

Just what position does this guy hold, prime puppet, they may as well give him Miss Piggy's voice to go with it if he is unable to give a definitive answer...oh, I forgot, this is Google we're talking about!

[dethfire]

Saturday's are usually my worst day, but this is low even for a Saturday

[netmeg]

Pretty big jump in all my mobile event sites this week (compared to same time last year) ranging from 12% to 65% more organic traffic. Hard to think that's just the mobile update; pretty much everyone in events is mobile now.

[samwest]

Any jumps in traffic are accompanied a total drop in e-com conversions (not sure about MFA conversions). Google must have added a new trick to their repertoire. My signup form that worked 80% of the time (when hit) is now down to 5% conversion on all platforms, desktop, tablet and mobile.

[EditorialGuy]

No changes here--just the normal upward creep at this time of year, which should reverse itself in the fall.

We haven't seen any dramatic changes in Google organic traffic since May, 2014.

[Eksto]

so is the mobile friendly SERP change in effect yet?

[frankleeceo]

It's in effect. But its effect has alot to do against your competitors and existing SERP. If all the players on your keywords have all gone mobile, you will basically tell no difference. In some cases you can actually lose out traffic since people below you could have overtaken you.

But if you were on the tail of the competitor on second spots and the first spot competitor has not gone mobile, you will have overtaken him and achieve that extra ~15% additional mobile traffic.

The effect appears to be huge if you are competing in a vertical where very little competitors have gone mobile. Shuffling appears to be the greatest. I am working on a project currently with a few competitors that have not switched to mobile, my mobile growth is much higher than that of the desktop in the past couple of days. Although it still pretty early to tell if its a continuing pattern for my own project.

But if anything, finding competing niches in the mobile space where people have not caught on can be some relative quick ways to win more traffic. That's my conclusion.

[Nutterum]

Am I the only one seeing increase in impression count for mobile on WMT but heavy decrease in clicks on GA? My mobile traffic dropped like a brick, while at the same time my impression count and SERP positions saw a healthy increase in the green (around 2.0 SERP positions for 30% of my keywords which is awesome). The discrepancy is very very disheartening and worrisome. Your thoughts?

[Martin Ice Web]

Something very big went through german serps starting last friday and it is def. not the mobile algo. It seems more like a very strong Panda update to the german index.

[Itanium]

Yes, something happend with Google.de, but I'm not convinced it was Panda. While there was some significant movement on saturday, the changes seemed to have rolled back at this point, so there is very little change for the SERPs I monitor.