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]

[cangoou]

Switch back to dataset no2 (Caffeine?) in Germany.

[nethead]

I heard someone here say that caffeine is 80% rolled out - whatever it is, I hate it.

[edited by: tedster at 11:34 am (utc) on Apr 29, 2010]
[edit reason] moved from another location [/edit]

[pdivi]

I'm seeing wildly differently results on google.com (searching from US) as of yesterday. I took a beating on most of my terms. Seems like the ones that had been climbing the fastest recently fell the furthest back. Are these caffeine results or a rollback to an old data set?

[caribguy]

Google is really good now in detecting such networks

They're all in the same WMT and Analytics accounts (all four) and 2 out of three have Adsense... I would expect them to know :)

[indias next no1]

I lost nearly 30 - 50 % traffic from yesterday

[chms]

Mee too

[gouri]

I noticed a decrease in traffic yesterday also.

I noticed that the regular SERP dataset was on Google.com more yesterday (and less of the Caffeine dataset) than the previous few days.

Did anyone else notice this?

[roadkillu]

yes

[SEOPTI]

Yes, huge decrease since yesterday.

[Simsi]

I'm seeing some good competitive term longtail increases today on the smaller sites I have that don't rely on inbound links (Google.com from the UK). The one or two sites I have where IBL's factor in significantly are relatively static. If that helps.

[drall]

Decrease in traffic noticed here to since yesterday for our big longtail heavy sites.

[ckissi]

Same here, we lost 11.000 visitors from yesterday, worldwide...

[gford]

Has anyone noticed on their lost traffic was it for pages that received internal link juice versus links from off-site?

I am not 100% certain on this but my analysis is showing that to be the case. Pages that have less links that DID rank well because of the power of the site are losing rankings the worst.

Not 100% sure this is it, but is the best logical guess I have on this severe site-wide drop.

[SEOPTI]

Long tail traffic in most cases relies on internal link juice, this is how it works.

[chrism]

Has anyone noticed on their lost traffic was it for pages that received internal link juice versus links from off-site?

That's an interesting idea and fits with our long tail traffic loss. Could this be a side effect of the deep crawl return to our site? Perhaps the data needs to be crunched again to calculate the PR flow through the site?

[chrism]

I think we were simul-posting SEOPTI!

[ckissi]

I don't think it's the case cause I see lot of sites from our niche with keyword stuffing and incredible internal link juice (looks really spammy) and their traffic is increasing starting from last november without any significant drop noticed.

[bwnbwn]

Google was crawling our sites so hard today it was almost crashing our servers. Our IT department came very close to kicking Google out this morning. This is not usual and wonder why Google would all of a sudden use up our servers operating ability.

[gford]

it may not be reduction in internal link juice, it's just a sneaking suspicion of mine.

The counter argument for me is the # of searches I do for and not for my sites that include squidoo,hubpages,associatedcontent,ezine

Sometimes I see all 4 of them top 10 and laugh..

[ckissi]

These tests and google itself is ruining businesses. Yes, somebody can tell that why you just don't create loyal user base ? But for some niches its simply impossible. There are many situations when user just search for some quick help or file and is not interested to come back anymore.

[1script]

@drall:

Traffic decrease today: are you talking about the same site you've started the March update thread with ? [webmasterworld.com...]

I also have sites whacked in March, wonder if the long tail slide down will keep going.

[drall]

1script, yes same set of sites. Its not just us, our comp is all falling as well. Seeing some really crazy results right now.

Few days ago gbot came in from mia since jan 12th and put almost 1 million hits on the server in 48hrs. Longtail is getting fried while we have started ranking for some serious single terms we never tried for.

I think im seeing what others are seeing, internal pr seems to be disappearing and content that is in very close proximity to ibl's is shooting through the roof.

Most of our sites are doing fine pr5 and below, its just the pr 7 sites that are seeing longtail changes in our case.

[walkman]

Decrease of traffic. Still not caffeine in the 5 DCs I checked via proxy.

[gouri]

I am seeing that Autosuggest is off for Google again.

They might be testing something.

[SEOPTI]

I hope tomorrow will not be the third day in a row with long tail traffic drops, this caffeine stuff is a never ending nightmare.

[internetheaven]

I lost nearly 30 - 50 % traffic from yesterday

So? Unless you're going to tell us something about your site -- the sort of traffic figures you're on about, how long you've been indexed, is the lost traffic top keyphrases or longtails ... you know ... something ... anything!

I noticed that the regular SERP dataset was on Google.com more yesterday

Probably a few people did. Probably a lot didn't. If you read this thread, most people are being served different results at different times.

Mee too

yes

Come on! Seriously? That's your contribution to the thread about trying to identify the changes?

This thread is about 16 pages long now ... heaven help any poor sod that actually comes in looking for answers and wastes their time reading the whole thing.

Right now we know nothing and can identify nothing. You don't know if what you are seeing is Caffeine and even if you do think you know, do you really believe that what you are seeing is the finished product? It's a roll out. For all those of you saying traffic is down there are an equal amount of people excited about their traffic increase ... me for one!

[internetheaven]

I hope tomorrow will not be the third day in a row with long tail traffic drops

I think the loss of long tail is more to do with Google's incredible improvements in Adwords relevance matching. They seem to have spent 10,000% more effort on improving Adwords relevance than organic.

That might be what Caffeine is all about ... ;) Matt Cutts is the organic spokeman isn't he? And while this Caffeine update is going on he's away on holiday.

[aristotle]

After all the false alarms on this thread about Caffeine rolling out, I take eveything with a grain of salt. During all of this period since January, despite all the talk, my sites have either had steady Google traffic or a slight uptrend, although today there appears to be small upward jumps. But I'm just going to wait for an announcement from Google and see what the results are then.

[steveb]

Big changes, back to the flawed dataset that was improved a bit by the last three small updates. Suddenly some of the tiny few 301s that Google had updated over the past ten or so days have reappeared, so it would be logical that this data won't be around for long -- but sadly Google is never logical.

However in this case, there is no reason to un-redirect things it knows should be redirected, so this update in the past 24 hours is certainly an intentional thing they think is a "good idea". Maybe most likely it means that yet another thing they tried to do failed.

[Clough72]

My site's traffic still fine as most of it comes to internal pages, news articles etc but I have noticed in the last few hours that a few of the keywords that my homepage was ranking for (not too high traffic generators) have slipped a page or gone completely, is this the hallmark signs of the updates that are ongoing?

All internal pages etc are unaffected...