Google Updates and SERP Changes - April 2010

[wmxpert]

< continued from [webmasterworld.com...] >

We are in the same situation, since March 15, 2010 our traffic is continuously declining with the average of 6% every week. In current week it gets worst, approx. 15% decline!

Overall, 30% to 35% traffic has been reduced compare to peak week of January 2010.

"site:" is also showing huge drop in index pages, though it only provide the avg. not actual.

Don't know what's going on, Is it really the effect of Caffeine roll-out?

[edited by: tedster at 9:46 pm (utc) on Apr 1, 2010]

[Pudders]

My SERPS have bounced again today exactly as in my post above... this will be the third day of consecutive bouncing...

On checking my reults on all 100+ Datacentre IPs.. only 15 times does it show a bounce... all other entries are as normal!

[mercury77]

Hi!

I've been following this forum for a long time, and I finally have to post something. I've been watching this whole caffeine show, and now seeing some strange results on some of my keywords.

I'm running a site which is in Finnish, and finnish language has scandinavian letters like ä and ö. Our site has been on good positions on google.fi for a long time and still is, but now something strange is happening to some of our links scand letters on google.fi. We have urlencode everywhere where scands are, but now in some of links google is replacing all scands with this &%2365533; on the link to our site, the url below the description shows it normally like example %F6. And this &%2365533; is the same for all scand letters.

So anyone have a clue of is this due to caffeine or why google is messing those letters now?

And like i said it's not in all links, just in small amount.

[mikeclover]

I have noticed a change in my competitive keywords. I did however notice a jump in long tailed keywords. My competitive keyword dropped to the second page all the sudden since yesterday. The increase in longtailed keywords made up for the loss of my biggest keyword. Strange.

[internetheaven]

I've noticed changes too ...

[Rinse and repeat every 24 hours]

[Shaddows]

I've noticed changes too ...

[Rinse and repeat every 24 hours]

LMAO...

But on which theme, my referals have been all over the place this week. Normally (and even through turmoil elsewhere) they are pretty steady. Overall traffic has been a bit up and down, and convertions appear down.

None of which was anticipated from the peek-a-boo phase of this roll-out, where traffic was within projected limits (i.e unchanged, relative to expectations based on seasonality and growth).

Anyone else (particularly non-US members) seeing non-caffeine related movements this week?

[MelissaRWE]

WE have been steadily buy slowly declining in google traffic for the past 2 weeks. Yesterday we saw things go almost back to normal. Traffic was back up, conversions were back to normal. Except for the UK/Germany/Australia which are still not where they used to be. Now today, it has gone back to losing google USA traffic and low conversion.

Whatever happened yesterday I hope it comes back.

[JoeSinkwitz]

Caching appears to be massively affected in the new infrastructure.

Query:
"cache:bing.com"

Result URL:
[webcache.googleusercontent.com...]

Content displayed:
Not Found
The requested URL /search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGLL_enUS337US337&q=cache%3Awww.bing.com was not found on this server.

[SEOPTI]

There is a new feature, I call it rotating site: command. Every time you search for site: you get different results ;)

[TheMadScientist]

There is a new feature, I call it rotating site: command. Every time you search for site: you get different results ;)

I posted this in another thread a while ago, but IMO that's because they aren't showing you 'the one right answer' yet, eventually it will just say 'Yes' or 'No'...

[Pass the Dutchie]

WE have been steadily buy slowly declining in google traffic for the past 2 weeks.

Could you traffic decline in the last 2 weeks be put down to Easter holiday syndrome.

[geekie]

So I checked the UK IP and the search results address bar shows "http://www.google.com/search........"

Am I really getting the results from that datacenter?

Where and how can I know for sure that I am seeing caffeine results?

[internetheaven]

My rankings bounce up and down on Google constantly (monitoring 100+ pages for 500+ keyphrases). Even more so since the Caffeine nonsense.

Traffic has not been affected at all ... scarily similar numbers all the time, even during holidays when you'd expect a dip or a rise. I guess traffic throttling is part of Caffeine too ... shame ...

[BaseballGuy]

What is going on here?

I'm jumping around like crazy for an established keyword.

Literally, as of the time I'm posting this message. I have never jumped around this much before in such a short period of time.

[claus]

I've noticed changes too ...

[Rinse and repeat every 24 hours]

My traffic is slowly returning after an easter drop - which is business as usual, especially if weather is fine (which it was).

Nothing spectacular going on as of yet with this Caffeine stuff as related to sites I manage. No tangible changes, that is. Either it's not affecting the SERPS I operate in or it's not live yet.

[dickbaker]

I've been monitoring keywords for my site as well as sites unrelated to my niche. While there's been some minor shuffling over the last week (the #2 site goes to #4 and then back to #3), it's been pretty stable.

Today the results were really strange. Sites that have been consistently on the first page went elsewhere, and were replaced by sites that had never seen page one while I've been watching.

Some of the sites are niche-related, and some are either slightly related or not related at all. In my niche a search for "Acme widgets" brought up a site in the #5 position that has nothing to do with Acme widgets. For some reason they have a page on their site listing prices for Acme widgets, but that's it. No other information, and nothing else on the site even remotely related to widgets.

The last time I saw that site on page one for that search phrase was during an update when everyone was complaining about how bad the new results were.

I sure hope what I'm seeing isn't the final product.

[SEOPTI]

Today really something happened, long tail traffic took a dive again.

[dickbaker]

I forgot to mention one of the other sites that's in the top six results for the phrase "Acme widgets."

It's a site that uses the phrase Acme widgets in its URL. However, there's no "widget" content on the site. The site is a template for wordpress blogs. That's it. No content.

I sure hope Google is just experimenting, or they're going to have some ticked off searchers.

[drall]

We had another big drop in longtail to SEOPTI, started a couple days ago across the board drop on tens of thousands of terms.

Whats replacing us is disturbing to say the least. Utter gibberish and spam, scrapers mostly.

[Kelowna]

drop on tens of thousands of terms

yup sounds like spam for sure

[drall]

Kelowna, we are a 12 year old site with thousands of pages of unique handmade content made over hundreds of thousands of hours with oh I dont know half a million backlinks watching our rankings for longtail terms we never even tried for being replaced by scraped garbage for longtail terms.

If we sound like spam to you then I hate to see what you consider real spam.

[Tallon]

A site I monitor as a competitor doesn't normally do well in Google but something's jumped for them big time since the beginning of April and they're crawling all over the place in the serps now.

I know I can't see what's happening behind the scenes but the only difference I can put my finger on is the recent launch of a handful of niche sites (set up as blogs) that they use to heavily link back and forth (in the footer on every page listing the latest 6 or so articles for each blog, this is on all sites and cross linking within articles--it's fantastic example of a cross-link mania happening).

In the reverse: another site in my niche I watch did very well in Google for a few years as a series of networked sites that linked back and forth heavily (though not as intense as the first example). These guys pulled back last spring and combined all their sites into one new domain--and they rocked it in the serps (they pulled off the move neatly and correctly). What's happening now? Traffic started to fall February and it's a sheer free-fall since mid-March.

Cross linking networked sites back in the driver's seat or was it all along and I missed the memo? For some reason I thought only big brands could do that and witnessed a network or two plummet because of it (or that's the reason I attributed for the fall).

What I'm seeing personally: Mondays and Tuesdays this month have been roaring with traffic, drops to normal levels by Thursday, then picks up steam getting to Monday. I see a slight increase overall, which probably has more to do with seasonal trends, but not what I was hoping with caffeine since I still don't see anything ranking well that I've published since last fall (older content still holding strong).

[trakkerguy]

@Tallon - Interesting observation. I think I have noticed recent changes where collapsing of several sites (301 to 1) doesn't pay off anymore. I regularily purchase competitors, and I'm doing more cross-linking myself instead of collapsing

But I am curious why you believe you can accurately discern the total traffic of your competitors?

Traffic started to fall February and it's a sheer free-fall since mid-March.

Like many others, I have seen drops in traffic from major keywords, but they were more than made up for with long tail traffic.

Do you really know your competitors traffic, or just an estimate?

[Tallon]

Do you really know your competitors traffic, or just an estimate?

I don't want to say what competitive analysis tools I use, and I realize that most tools offer a "guesstimate", but for this site it's accurate (the exact numbers may be off but the traffic trends aren't).

I can see their traffic has halved since Mid-march, but it's a guess on my part that this is wholly related to a falling-out with Google based on their keyword rankings that I monitor--which admittedly isn't all of them.

[hni87655]

Hi!

I've been following this forum for a long time, and I finally have to post something. I've been watching this whole caffeine show, and now seeing some strange results on some of my keywords.

I'm running a site which is in Finnish, and finnish language has scandinavian letters like ä and ö. Our site has been on good positions on google.fi for a long time and still is, but now something strange is happening to some of our links scand letters on google.fi. We have urlencode everywhere where scands are, but now in some of links google is replacing all scands with this &%2365533; on the link to our site, the url below the description shows it normally like example %F6. And this &%2365533; is the same for all scand letters.

So anyone have a clue of is this due to caffeine or why google is messing those letters now?

And like i said it's not in all links, just in small amount.

We have the same problem, and we are in Finland as well. All scands are replaced with &%2365533; . This seems to happen when the Google search result is posed to the Google's url? forwarding tool. The url is already broken in Google's url? scripts address bar.

It seems Google is somehow trying to urlencode an address that has already been urlencoded and fails recognizing the charset used in the URL in the progress. Another thing: google is still able to display the cached page and in that version the address is correct (naturally, they were able to index it in first place).

The result is especially messy, because ALL scands are replaced with the same sequence &%2365533; - one cannot map the urls on the landing site.

I hope they get this fixed soon!

[hni87655]

Addition to the scands (å,ä,ö etc.) replaced with &%2365533; problem. I urldecoded &%2365533; - it becomes &#65533; - which is the Unicode Character 'REPLACEMENT CHARACTER' (U+FFFD) - see [fileformat.info...]

I think this is really a google messup. How to contact them?

[chrism]

Today really something happened, long tail traffic took a dive again.

Same here - also just seen a search result with "Results 1 - 7 of about 132,000 for ..." at the top.

Maybe the opposite of universal search? :)

[BaseballGuy]

Would anyone care to venture a guess that the recent changes over the past 24-48 hours in Google are:

1. Unintended result of a (algo?) tweek Google made
2. Intended result of an (algo?) tweek Google made

My immediate thoughts on what happened in the past 24-48 hours is that Google (either willingly or unwillingly) has tweeked some filter that deals with a PAGE that might be over optimized. ("page" not "entire site")

[BaseballGuy]

I take back what I just wrote. Looks like things are back to "normal" (for what it's worth).

I sure hope I don't come back to this thread for many years to come.

/fin

[JoeSinkwitz]

I'm seeing some 302 hijacks again, none malicious so far, just poorly setup 302s on the corporate level. (ex. 1800widgets.com 302 -> widgets.com) where 1800widgets.com is the site ranking with only a couple inbounds and widgets.com is not ranking.

I love how old problems keep coming back!

[gouri]

I am seeing Caffeine results from Internet Explorer and regular SERP from Mozilla. Anyone else seeing this?