Google Updates and SERP Changes - July 2010

[scottsonline]

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

@john1975 the search term I posted weeks ago showed how bad Google was messed. For a year or two that search returned a real product, for a few weeks/month it return gibberish. It started to return real results a few days ago and is once again accurate or close to it. My guess is millions of other semi-long terms are now also snapping back into line.

The traffic pattern is evolving back towards normal. Google was up again yesterday but only 8% from a week ago. Bing was up 17% but Yahoo was down 35% which only confirms what the studies show - most people will go to Yahoo 2nd if Google fails. What's so clear to us is that it's that 5%-8% of total clicks that Google had filtered off that were the ones converting at probably 80%. Highly targeted searches by informed consumers that didn't need the magic intervention of Google trying to divine what it was they really wanted.

Thanks to MC and Google for slowly figuring it out. Like everyone else I was a bit harsh at times but it's tough to spend years reading the WMGL, reading everything the people from Google wrote and following it within the rules and then viola a major change happens that devastates our business and pretty much everyone else we knew in favor of spammers, scammers, mirrors, mashups etc. The filters still aren't weeding out those results and I'll say it again instead of trying to tinker with the end result why not hire/invest/spend more time looking at actual spam reports when legitimate sites report the ones running 45 sites selling the same item under different keywords which actually really DOES degrade user experience and user choice?

[edited by: tedster at 5:22 pm (utc) on Jul 1, 2010]

[nethead]

I doubt PR has anything to do with this. We have a PR5 site that has been PR5 for over 5 years and has .gov and .edu PR6 and PR7 backlinks but we lost about 90% traffic from google.

[ohno]

I don't think PR has anything to do with it either.

[edited by: ohno at 5:47 pm (utc) on Jul 1, 2010]

[tedster]

Agreed about the PR thing. I see similar hits to some PR 8 websites.

[Andylew]

@john1975 even with and without the www and multiplied by ten it still gives a number larger than the number of pages in my site!

[tedster]

I'm getting suspicious that some kind of sentiment analysis is in play. As in "if there is a detractor site, it's going to get a boost".

I've done a fair bit of reputation management in the past, but not right now. Checking out some past clients, I see their critics ranking very well almost without exception, and this is true even with no visible means of ranking support.

Alexa, Compete and Hitwise data all show drastically lower levels of traffic, backlinks are looking really weak, etc, etc. All they've got going is keyword relevance and a dash of longevity - plus a heap of yellow journalism.

But maybe I'm taking it all too personally - ROR is showing a 3-month down trend in traffic, so maybe their rankings have taken a hit.

[anand84]

Tedster,

I guess that has existed for quite sometime. I used to have a small blogspot blog a long time back where I had written one "<< >> is a rip-off" article. It continues to be on the first page till today for the brand keyword..This is even though I have hardly kept the blog active.

[Karma]

How accurate is Alexa these days? They are showing an increase in traffic for my site, yet my traffic is slowly declining?

[tedster]

Alexa gives a very general and fuzzy picture - so do the other "outside looks" that are available around the web. I use them as just one of many looks at the competition on a SERP. It would be a lot better if they would just leave their logs open ;)

In the cases I mentioned, the traffic differences are about three levels of magnitude - over 1,000 times smaller for the negative site. I think Alexa and the others are more accurate than that, so I do take it as having some value.

[Bewenched]

Today I'm seeing mostly garbage results for specific products... mostly spammy pages, doorway pages and affiliate sites.

[workingNOMAD]

I am seeing few spammy sites in my keyword areas. Looks like the serps have been really cleaned up! Thank the lord and hope it stays..

[cien]

Things are getting a tiny bit better. Earnings are up. Traffic is increasing bit by bit. I see many of the high rollers quiet today. Are you guys counting the money? :-)

[anand84]

Good to hear that..Especially Cien, since my fortune has always ridden the way it has for you ;-)

It's weekend time and so I'm finding difficult to see if my site has any improvement. Hopefully I see something good on Monday..

[walkman]

report: week to week 10% ^ today and yesterday.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

The 5-8% of filtered terms... are highly targeted searches by informed consumers that didn't need the magic intervention of Google trying to divine what it was they really wanted.

I agree completely scottsonline, I'm seeing the same thing, the best of the best is the traffic I see missing too since my conversion rate fell by MUCH more than just that 5-8% of visitors Google finds me no longer worthy of helping. ie: a few (18% in my case) less visitors, a ton less conversions (nearly 48%).

I'd appreciate it if Google kept the BOTTOM 5-8% instead. I don't think there's anything we can "fix" as webmasters, which we've all been wasting our time trying to do since Mayday.

[backdraft7]

This whole emphasis on "brand" appears to be right out the window. Over a month after we were hit by Mayday, I am still seeing the "how to" MFA sites and sites that give away (our) content for free, loaded with adwords ads retaining top listings. Google's AI needs some big time tweaking or they need to attack the problem with human reviewers. If only they'd act on serp spam reports, it would be a start.

[scottsonline]

I think Google/MC has gotten a handle on paid ads. They have their place so long as they are from legitimate value sites and do not provide a disproportionate benefit. IMO, which is worse:

A webmaster that spends a few hundred a month advertising on targeted, relevant sites that point back to a legitimate, by the book WMGL site.

or

A company that runs 10-20 sites against the WMGL confuscating their identity at times but stuffing the serps with "custom widget a" on one site, "branded widget a" on another, "printed special widget a" on a third etc etc for 20k products just so they may rank for exact matches on one of the 20 sites. BUT they don't buy ad space.

Should they be rewarded like they were by Mayday and are STILL being rewarded now? Which one is more intellectually honest, the person buying ads when ads have driven businesses since "business" was born or the people cheating their way to the top? Think about it from a user experience. Someone that will spend hundreds advertisting is probably pointing back to a good ecommerce site. Someone that is pointing back to 20 websites is probably running 1 good site and 19 junk sites just trying to scam traffic. Which end result would be better for the SERP clicker Google? The company that cares enough to advertise or the one that is just creating cookie cutter sites to generate keyword traffic? Right now Google is favoring the latter, not the former.

If Google wants to streamline and cleanup the serps, they can blow up 25% of all ecommerce results within their index right now but ELIMINATING duplicate sites/sites from the same company under different keywords, and cleaning up Google Merchant Center/Googlebase so policies are actually followed. In our industry we are forced (we had our feeds removed) to list the bulk price. IE, 300 pieces at 1.00 we must list 300 as the price. Yet months later some really big firms still get to list the 1 dollar price? How is that a good user experience? A single human editor at Google could clean up several entire industries a day by pulling the plug on feeds until they are cleaned up. Yet the opt not to do that.

[anand84]

Has someone noticed a marginal/significant drop in IBLs reported on WMT?

[indyank]

Notice a significant drop in traffic this weekend. Weekends were usually bad for sometime now and this weekend had been the worst and the drop started on july 1. See a 6% drop in sear engine refferal traffic from july 1. I am not sure whether this is due to the drop in drop in IBLs.Is google completely ignoring IBLs?

[drall]

indybank, it is the 4th of July weekend here in the states. Every year for 10 years our search traffic drops by around 20% for the entire holiday weekend due to vacations, parties and such so if you rely upon US traffic I wouldnt put much weight behind any traffic changes this weekend.

[backdraft7]

@scotts

They have their place so long as they are from legitimate value sites and do not provide a disproportionate benefit. IMO, which is worse:

A webmaster that spends a few hundred a month advertising on targeted, relevant sites that point back to a legitimate, by the book WMGL site.

or

A company that runs 10-20 sites against the WMGL confuscating their identity at times but stuffing the serps with "custom widget a" on one site, "branded widget a" on another, "printed special widget a" on a third etc etc for 20k products just so they may rank for exact matches on one of the 20 sites. BUT they don't buy ad space.

Should they be rewarded like they were by Mayday and are STILL being rewarded now? Which one is more intellectually honest, the person buying ads when ads have driven businesses since "business" was born or the people cheating their way to the top? Think about it from a user experience. Someone that will spend hundreds advertisting is probably pointing back to a good ecommerce site. Someone that is pointing back to 20 websites is probably running 1 good site and 19 junk sites just trying to scam traffic. Which end result would be better for the SERP clicker Google? The company that cares enough to advertise or the one that is just creating cookie cutter sites to generate keyword traffic? Right now Google is favoring the latter, not the former.

If Google wants to streamline and cleanup the serps, they can blow up 25% of all ecommerce results within their index right now but ELIMINATING duplicate sites/sites from the same company under different keywords, and cleaning up Google Merchant Center/Googlebase so policies are actually followed. In our industry we are forced (we had our feeds removed) to list the bulk price. IE, 300 pieces at 1.00 we must list 300 as the price. Yet months later some really big firms still get to list the 1 dollar price? How is that a good user experience? A single human editor at Google could clean up several entire industries a day by pulling the plug on feeds until they are cleaned up. Yet the opt not to do that.

I couldn't have put this better. This is exactly what I am seeing too. Today my 10 year #1 position for a particular keyword has been usurped by a MFA "widget B" site run by owner of "widget A&B" main site. Two different domains, same basic descriptions, same photos, both sites cross link, yet both are thriving. It's infuriating.

BTW - I'll take door #1.

[mromero]

It has been a rocky month for one of sites - traffic graph looks like a crazy roller coaster ride. Yesterday we put up an original post on one our blogs.

Cannot find it in regular Google Search or Google Blog Search, but today found a link in Google Blog search that took us to a scraper site with our blog post. This is weird - will have to put in a framebuster and cut off the rss to a snippet.

[indyank]

Yes, US traffic is no.1 for my site...and let me see whether it returns to normalcy in the following weeks...

[robdwoods]

if you are seeing a drop in traffic over the weekend, don't panic. It's the july 4th weekend and the first week kids are out of school. People are just away from the new for a few days. Expect it to pick back up tuesday. We've seen no drop in IBLs, in fact in WMT we have seen an increase similar to the increase seen in external backlinks with the recent WMY update. Sites that have seen a drop in IBLs may have intrenal architecture issues.

If your traffic is dropping your home page PR is going to be fairly irrelevant. It's how the link equity flows from your home page to internal pages. Most sites seeing a big drop have very few links to deep pages. From what I have seen and read Google has modified how much link equity flows internally. The more clicks a page is from a page with good internal links, the worse it's going to rank.

If you were hit by mayday your best options are going to be modifying your architecture so the pages no longer ranking are "closer" to pages with good inbound links, build inbound links to deep pages, or both. If MFA sites are outranking you on some terms it's likely that they have more inbound links close to the content that's ranking and you have more links to your home page which may be several levels higher than the content you are trying to rank for.

[AG4Life]

My non SE referrals are all way up, nearly back to levels before MayDay (so it appears some of the websites that link to us are "recovering"), but Google referrals are still down compared to pre MayDay (some sites show improvement compared to last week, some not).

I did notice a strange thing in Google Analytics, in that I'm getting referrals from "Google.com", and clicking on that shows most of the referrals are from "/". Is this from the "I'm Feeling Lucky" function, and if so, how come it's up so much compared to before (last week 1 visit, this week 77). Other Google domains are listed too (.co.uk, .ca ...). This didn't happen last week. I'm wondering if some of our "lost" Google SE referrals are being listed here instead, since these incoming visits are only showing up under the "Referring Sites" section not the "Search Engines" section.

[cien]

Rob, thanks for that. This weekend has been a disaster for me.

[pontifex]

@cien: yeah, i also see 4th of July, school holidays and the big summer holiday in Germany in my logs. But that has been the slowest time of the year for long as I do online marketing... I expect 8 slower weeks from now on...

[dvduval]

Today has been super busy for us after yesterday was dead. Seeing a boost on some long tails from work I did about 2 weeks ago. Good to know that working on content still works.

[member22]

I am a bit disappointed I really thought the PR update was for this week but so far still nothing, I guess I will have to wait another week, maybe another month... is there anyone out that has been waiting like I have ... and that has any information on what is going on and when is the update for...

[tedster]

Google doesn't give out a schedule for PR updates, and in fact Matt Cutts once posted that Google considers a PR update to be a "non-event".

The important information is that it doesn't matter for your traffic - because toolbar PR just an update to the publicly visible, reported amount. Your actual PR is updated all the time.

[edited by: tedster at 3:39 am (utc) on Jul 6, 2010]