Google Updates and SERP Changes - September 2010

[mfishy]

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

For the last 10 days or so I am not seeing any "fresh bump". It's almost like the days of old where sites just stick in their current positions. This is radically different from what I have been seeing for 2 years and across many sites.

[edited by: tedster at 3:26 pm (utc) on Sep 1, 2010]

[Jez123]

On the other hand, places like facebook and leading portals are grabbing up some of the search traffic. People are basically performing other activities besides search.

I am a customer of yours a few times :-)

I agree that Facebook etc is probably a bit of a thorn in google's side but this is no slow decline. Someone switched the lights off I think!

The question is, how can traffic be regained? I had 1 enquiry over the whole weekend and that is about equal to the first week of launching my site in about 2002 when I knew nothing of search engines and was receiving paid traffic from alltheweb!

If my SERPs are still there and ranking as well as they ever were which they seem to be (better in some instances) and I am not getting the traffic I need, or the quality of the traffic that I need I don't see how something like an adwords campaign will help. Adwords was always my fallback plan if organic SERPs failed me. But if I am #2 for my main SERP and getting no business how will it help to spend, spend, spend on adwords?

Who is getting the traffic? I'd like to know.

I really am at a loss.

[tristanperry]

I'm seeing junky traffic as well. I have a new site (Google's only known about it for 3 weeks), although it's got good content and at first Google was sending good quality visitors to it.

But now I'm seeing a fair amount of traffic from: Sweden, Romania, Spain, Russia, South Korea, China, India, Czech Republic, Philippines, Brazil, Ukraine (List taken from AwStats)

It's all very odd. I guess I'll just carry on with adding new content and getting backlinks where possible and hope it'll sort itself out.

[backdraft7]

In the end these drastic upsets in traffic can't work out well for Google. I for one am again considering shutting down my Adwords listings, since even they don't seem to be producing results. We did recover from the Mayday serps changes, but the past two weeks are really a double whammy for us. I can't get a bank loan to pay for unreliable Adwords ads in an attempt to recover from the serp and or system upset.
Bottom line is that this seems more like a Google system problem than actual serp related problems.

[ohno]

Junky traffic here too, our product feed also failed on Sunday night so no doubt they dropped out of search until later today. Still can't pin it on SERP's though!

[walrus]

Who is getting the traffic? I'd like to know.

There have been quite a few posts now stating the same thing, positions pretty well the same but traffic vanished. In all the years i've read WebmasterWorld I don't recall a symptom like this. Its as if millions of users just vanished, and even though Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Youtube, etc, are gaining search traffic, it seems disproportionate.
<wild conspiracy theory>
Has there been an army of robots searchers the last ten years ? Now truned off ?</theory>
The BM local sites have been remarkably stable through all Googles wackiness in 2010, BUT the non BM sites especially entertainment,have been a rollercoaster and see the same symptom, thousands of users gone, though rankings remain.
I suspect the sites that have the same rankings but missing traffic are
similar in theme, entertainment of some kind, games or blogs where people used to go but now commune with their facebook buddies. If it was only entertainment, music, movies, tv, games, it would make sense, facebook, youtube etc have been taking it.
If other sites like specialized airplane parts, are seing this than consider my wild theory.

seems more like a Google system problem than actual serp related problems

Sure hope so, at least then theres hope of some return to normality.
Seems it all started after the attempt to open in China, some serious attacks were reported, who knows what damage they might have done, G would never admit that publicly. I like the other theory also, where the devs have to look busy, so they are constantly tweaking and fidgeting with the algo. Waht if we did this ?.....tika tika tik...wwhiiiiir....phhhttt.....beep !
Oh ! thats no good, wikipedias number 4, lets try this....tika tika tik....whirrrr spin...phhhttt

[edited by: walrus at 3:33 pm (utc) on Sep 20, 2010]

[Globetrotter]

I’m also noticing Google is slow at indexing new articles. A couple of weeks ago it took only minutes before Google would find and rank any posting we’ve made. Now it takes hours and it doesn’t indexes the source, but the snippets from authority sites (this is stated before in other topics as mashup sites).

[Lorel]

max - no, it's not personalized results, I have that turned off and I am signed out of my Google WM account.

I make sure I'm signed out of all google accounts, have gone through web history, signed out of personalized results, cleared my caches, tried another browser I never use, and still I'm ranking #7 for a term that I don't even try to aim at due to competition and it's peppered with other local results. Either the web designers in my city are all fantastic at SEO or you can't sign our of personal results.

[Lorel]

The question is, how can traffic be regained?

Set up a face book page, a blog, twitter account, etc and whenever you post a new page on your website or a new product, post messages on the other sites linking to that page. Most of the above are nofollowed but once you get enough ranking (friends, followers, etc) to those sites it may increase your traffic.

[backdraft7]

All the human traffic got sucked into the Facebook / Zynga games black hole of un-productivity. What a shame.

[tedster]

Either the web designers in my city are all fantastic at SEO or you can't sign our of personal results.

There are two different phenomena:

1. Personalized results based on your search history. Happens when logged in and Search History is active.

2. Customized results based on your IP address and cookies. Happens even when you are logged out.

[backdraft7]

Ok, so the only way to really determine what results people are seeing around the world is to get someone to cooperate in another locale. I took a small vacation last week about 300 miles to northern Wisconsin and the results were exactly the same as at home, using a brand new laptop on a hotel wifi network.
OHNO and myself have also been exchanging results and what he sees in the UK is that same as what I see in the US.

[scottsonline]

Traffic was throttled again today. For the first few hours of the day about 30% of our traffic is Google, it then jumps to 60% during the peak periods before settling back in the evening. We always seem to have about 10% of the visitors from overseas as well.

[petehall]

There are two different phenomena:

1. Personalized results based on your search history. Happens when logged in and Search History is active.

2. Customized results based on your IP address and cookies. Happens even when you are logged out.

The search history results are in effect whether you are logged in or not. You can turn it off in either case. :-)

[Lovejoy]

Well my site as of about September 21st has gone from #1- 6 for all of it's major keywords to no record of it at all in the first 100 searches for any of the keywords. The site has been online since 1997 and on the first few pages of Google on and off since Google first fired up. This has happened before, but the site has alway magically re-appeared within two weeks. It's still list on Bing and Yahoo however.

[Lovejoy]

Well, my site is back at #1 again for all its main keywords, and I did nothing to change anything....... Strange stuff.

[indyank]

This has been my experience in the new google.

#2- 5 is a bunch of pages that can interchange positions except for #1, which is usually not touched.

#6- 10 is the next bunch of pages and you can find yourselves moving from anywhere between #6 and #10 at anytime of the day or week or month.

then it is the second page of results and so on...

So, if you see yourselves moving from the range of #1- 5, to #6 -10, then there is something wrong.either your competitors have worked on something to push you down or you have made something wrong...

and in the new google, a page is not at the same ranking position in all regions...Your page's ranking varies from one region to another...

[Lovejoy]

My site has been pretty consistent across the different datacenters, any time it's been hit and dumped from the first page to the nether regions it has not been a result of the top ten sites making any changes I can see,( I do check their code and links on a regular basis). One that routinely ranks on the first page is a static site, basically an image map with about eight links that has not changed anything since 2002.....

[Spencer]

I'm seeing only 10 results and no additional pages numbers in my search results.

[indyank]

My site has been pretty consistent across the different datacenters, any time it's been hit and dumped from the first page to the nether regions it has not been a result of the top ten sites making any changes I can see,( I do check their code and links on a regular basis).

You are right on that count.sometimes it may not be result of your competitiors but it may even be due to google's algorithmic change. For example, google may tweak the weightage that it assigns to the various factors.This tweaking is sometimes seasonal, and sometimes it may be difficult to ascertain the real reason behind the tweak.

[tedster]

I'm seeing only 10 results and no additional pages numbers in my search results.

And you've got company. Let's take that topic into the dedicated thread: [webmasterworld.com...]

The SERP Changes and Updates discussion continues here: [webmasterworld.com...]