Google Updates and SERP Changes - April 2015

[getcooking]

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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.

[gregorym]

@Nutterum: yes unfortunately I know too well that when Google hits you, the road to recovery is long and painful.
Actually I've never seen a site fully recovering, whatever is done. Doesn't seem fair in this case. If you become mobile friendly you should recover very quickly if the update is about that.
But I feel that many will suffer, maybe forever, including me.

I bet that once again those famous big sites that will become mobile friendly will gain their rankings back within days while smaller sites will eventually never recover. It's sad, but I've always seen Google do that. Same when they manually penalize a site, famous brands come back sometimes in 1 day while businesses with less PR power get lost for months, years or forever.

[System]

The following 3 messages were cut out to new thread by aakk9999. New thread at: google/4744522.htm [webmasterworld.com]
4:35 pm on May 1, 2015 (gmt 0)