2: Google MAYDAY Update - SERP Changes May 2010

[cangoou]

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

Puh, this is really strange: I still see 2 resultsets - and after 7 days I can say that SERPs #1 are shown from right at 0am to about 5am local time and SERPs #2 the rest of the day. I thought this was some kind of dancing around again but it seems to be quite stable now for 1 week.

Funny thing is: SERPs #1 are better then before, SERPs #2 are worse (in rankings of main keywords).

Google is no longer following my robots.txt file. It has indexed hundreds of pages that I have disallowed.

Same here, got a complete set of new pages with robots=noindex in the index.

Generally it's best to make any changes when SERPs are stable, never within an update due to panic!

In general I would agree, but I haven't seen something like "stable SERPs" since January... This makes it quite hard not to panic ;-)

[edited by: tedster at 7:43 pm (utc) on May 13, 2010]

[ohno]

I hope you are right Andy, i really do.............

[arizonadude]

Considering there was a huge article in Business week about the two guys who designed the new layout and also about how they vetted it with peer groups and eyeball screen testing, it is exactly what they want and they love it so if you think it's going to change or get better, then just keep right on waiting.

In the mean time, those that have come to grips with the new reality are moving on and learning how to work with it.

[ohno]

This has nthing to do with layout changes-the results speak for themselves.

[Andylew]

Another example, sorry im still on socks...

search google for 'buy brown socks' 1.1mil results and i only got one adwords. Organic results are awful, amazon is top then urban dictionary(adult) then the rest are unrelated or bad quality - clearly broken

search yahoo for 'buy brown socks' 18.3mil results and a page of adverts relating directly to the purchse of brown socks and organics directly linked to the purchase of brown socks, exactly as required.

Ok, so you could argue the point over the organics but where are all the adwords adverts?

Re the new design - I really like it. This isnt being called into question. It is the results that somehow have gone back to the 90s.

[ohno]

Do you need socks Andy?! Wish i sold them.......

Seriously the layout change was implemented a while back, IIRC some people saw it & others didn't. We were fine then, then in the last 7 days/2 weeks(really noticed it this week?) traffic started tailing off & the sales obviously followed. If this was layout related i would have expected us to see the impact as soon as the new layout went live. The new layout also doesn't explain the silly results lots of people are seeing. The more shopping sites tab is a joke right now.

[pontifex]

@Andy: I obviously do not see the same results like you do! My result set is not brilliant, but OK (like B to C)... It varies for the colors so... "red" socks is throwing tickets for the Boston Red Sox at me!

[ohno]

Is there a way to find out which data centre you are hitting?

[edited by: tedster at 4:40 pm (utc) on May 14, 2010]

[tedster]

You can find which IP address you are hitting (ShowIP extension for Firefox is one way). But that's not the same as finding which data center. Google's load-balancing can send you results from any data center on any IP address,

[freejung]

I'm also seeing two distinct sets at different times, and to me one seems to be more up-to-date than the other (it's farther along in implementing the predictable results of recent changes). However, it seems to me that's pretty common during major updates, usually it settles down on the more up-to-date set in a few days.

[aparraga]

My other 2 cents:

This wednesday (in google.es) the search for gmail returned an spammy page as the first result and Gmail in the second position. I saw it with my own eyes... unbelievable.
Seems like the author of the spammy page had not intention of getting this traffic (according to him), however, could you imagine how many people was clicking by mistake on this page?
Gmail was in the second position...

Source: [google.com...] (in spanish, sorry guys)

[curioustoddler]

Whenever a site loses ranking and traffic, there are some other sites who gain that traffic. Here so many webmasters are reporting loss in traffic but noboday has reported any gain. So where has that traffic gone which all these people are losing. OR only those people want to share who have lost traffic?

[skuba]

< moved from another location >

Did Google update the algorithm? I checked the ranks today for several keywords we track and across the board we dropped big time.

Anybody else seeing something similar?
Thanks

[edited by: tedster at 6:34 pm (utc) on May 14, 2010]

[gford]

Skuba - wasn't just today, welcome to the club.

[skuba]

Yep, sorry guys, I have not been following the SEO news recently. That sucks. We had accomplished so much with SEO and gained great positions. It's all gone now.

[Andylew]

Sorry cant post screen shots.

However to make it even funnier I have come back to this after my dinner and still get no relevant results for buying myself some brown socks but the first positon is now taken up by this thread with all the other junk shuffled down!

This is on google.co.uk - I get auto redirected to this, is it the same on .com?

[ohno]

curioustoddler-something i have been wondering, i guess those sites just get a massive bonus & are busy processing orders! Scuba-this started for us this week-how about you? Don't think your work has all been wasted just yet-i find it hard to believe Google would dump so many good sites.

[tedster]

Not for me in the US - but it is pretty common to be researching a topic here and then see the very thread you're researching come up at #1

[mrez74]

Well for the last 12 hours I'm seeing only one set of dataset on google.com. This is just about the same as the Caffeine SERPs. It is showing me the same results on my desktop,laptop and iPhone (Wifi and Edge).

However, today I haven't seen any sort of increase in traffic at all compared to earlier in the week where the SERPs were switching between the two sets. Even though the current SERPs is showing my keywords in better positions the traffic is not there as expected.

I hope this is a sign of things beginning to stabilize a bit. Anyone else notice the SERPs not moving around too much today?

[mercedesP]

In case it helps anyone to extract any conclusions (from a micro point of view).

I have a single site that could fit the "mom's&pup's" definition (e-commerce and about 40 pages).
New domain (no previous history) and went online in March-09. I've done no advertising. I've submited it to about 40 free directories and it has about 10 natural IBL's. (completely white hat)
As I have no resourses for ads, I've gone for giving substantial information about the products, not just technical specs (the only mention of "buy" is on the alt buttons). Its architecture is basically in just 2 levels.

It ranks on first page for many 2-keywords, but since about Nov. more long tails have been appearing on my stats.

In previous months, when others where reporting loss of trafic or drops in ranks, my site was gaining some more traffic and gaining some positions in the ranks, although the increased trafic seems to follow a steady line of about 10º/15º (no big jumps).
I also had a big crawl in April, but saw no drops after (nor ranks or traffic), but more longtail kws like "How to..." or "What is best..." have been bringing trafic (nothing huge).

If this is happening for many micro sites, could this justify the loss of traffic for macro sites?

[ohno]

Some more info that may or may not mean anything. I've done some searching for our products and we are back on page 1. However, if i click cached page for what i call normal results the page is fine, if i click the more shopping sites tab THEN pick a cached page the page loads very slowly with lots of images and add to cart tabs missing. It may be my imagination but the sites that i saw way above us seem to be filtering back down. Oh, & we sold something-woohoo :)

[freejung]

mrez74 - yeah, I'm seeing the same results all day too. Odd, it seems like the less updated results are the ones showing now.

I don't think it's done.

[ohno]

Well if proof was needed, i've just checked out our products in shopping results, our customer feedback rating was 75, it's now 150! However, if you click on the reviews it says based on 75 reviews!

[shomethemoney]

Nearly all of our traffic is from Google longtail keyword searches. Our situation is that Google traffic dropped nearly 30% overnight, but has at least stabilized and is now slightly improving over the same period last week. On the point of keywords, overall the number of keywords used to find our content dropped 24%. However, we also use a blog to drive traffic and for the blog not only did the number of keywords used to find blog content go up 10% in the first 2 weeks of May, but there were blog posts suddenly showing up at the top of our traffic logs that hadn't gotten many hits in months.

[seolearner]

However, today I haven't seen any sort of increase in traffic at all compared to earlier in the week where the SERPs were switching between the two sets. Even though the current SERPs is showing my keywords in better positions the traffic is not there as expected.

I also have the same situation, mrez74.

Whenever I check my ranking, I am better positioned but I am not getting the traffic I supposed to get from new ranking.

[anand84]

Google has been rolling out a few updates to their site lately. First it was the site design. And now, encrypted search [news.cnet.com] is coming next week. I guess Google is just holding back on turning the trust filter on until these roll-outs are made.

I really don't know if these factors have a correlation, but just looking at the pace of updates from G, I just hope it is so.

[tedster]

Whenever I check my ranking, I am better positioned but I am not getting the traffic

This sounds like you might be getting personalized search results - are you logged into a Google account when you do that search?

[mrez74]

Tedster...for me I'm not logged in and have cleared my cache. So far since last night I am only seeing the same SERPs with one dataset. But like I mentioned earlier my positions have really improved for the last 24 hours, but still no traffic increase like I would expect. This is the case for several of my niches.

So I can only guess that the SERPs I am seeing is not the same across all datacenters as of right now and could possibly change over the next few days as things stabilize like it has for me the last 24 hours.

[ohno]

"But like I mentioned earlier my positions have really improved for the last 24 hours, but still no traffic increase like I would expect. This is the case for several of my niches."

Exactly what i am seeing, ranking top on page 1 but no traffic. Infact traffic was a flat line Monday-Thursday but went DOWN of Friday when i started seeing more stabalised SERP's!

[Tamer]

google have indexed may pages I disallowed in robot.txt!

I have no problem in "crawling" them... but indexing is a different story!

[mrez74]

ohno...what do you think is the issue here? I haven't seen the SERPs so stable in the last day or so since like 3-4 months ago. I can't understand with such great positions on the SERPs, but the lack of traffic.