Google Updates and SERP Changes - November 2010

[indyank]

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

Here is alexa's take on the the oct 21-22 debacle..they do see a significant shift...

[blog.alexa.com...]

but wait, there seems to be one more tweak that happened this friday, oct 29. This could either be a reversal or yet another tweak...google is enjoying the tweak game and one thing for sure, they are trying to achieve something for themselves via the tweaks...

[edited by: tedster at 2:18 pm (utc) on Nov 1, 2010]

[CenSin]

Starting Sunday (11/7) traffic are higher than usual, wonder why?

[supercyberbob]

@CenSin

Probably because of the extra hour from the daylight savings time change.

[directwheels]

@supercyberbob Great point! I would have never thought of that.

[CenSin]

Probably because of the extra hour from the daylight savings time change.

But, a day is still 24 hours, isn't it? :)

Really, I've just checked today (Monday) pageviews, and they surely will close the day with higher than daily avg pageviews.

The traffics is back (at least for me.)

[backdraft7]

After a great weekend, everything seems to have shut down again. Back on the Google YOYO!

[brinked]

your search for _____ did not match any documents. Well google wont let me search for anything now. Great job G

[trey4cubs]

WOW!

so i track the clicks of roughly 1/3 of my total articles and my rolling average has been around 110 per day. Since nov. 6 i've had 18, 13, and 6 clicks per day. This is TERRIBLE for me personally, is this consistently happening to you guys?

I'm somewhat new to this (11 months) and I guess i've never experienced a downturn like this in my life, and my life (rent, utulities, bills) really feel like there hanging by a thread.....

Please, if anyone can give me some insight as to whats happening and if you think things will return to normal?

[networkliquidators]

@trey4cubs

Do you mean clicks as organic referrals from Google or visitors find your site then click on your article?

I'll assume, you are talking about Google search visitors. Your first step is to see how you rank for your top producing terms for your articles. Not knowing the number of articles you have, it could be the buzz has died down for your articles or Google updated its Algorithm in your niche causing a drop in rankings.

[trey4cubs]

Yeah its organic traffic from Google. It's spread across a lot of different niches and i've checked google rankings and they have all dropped heavily. The articles have been around for 6 months or so and it seems like it might have something to do with Google because i have articles in lots of niches and they all seem to have just dropped off Google overnight

[networkliquidators]

Next, I would check your visitor's behavior. A shift like this flags issues with quality on the site.

- Check to see how long your visitors are on site (if they are reading the content).
- Ensure you have social bookmarking tools to allow your readers to submit to sites like digg, twitter, facebook, stumbleupon, etc... Bookmark bars that stand out to the visitor is highly important.
- Check to see if your content exists on other sites (you can take about 7 words from a article and search google with "your seven words".
- Ensure you have made no changes to your sites navigation from the start of the issue
- If your content is syndicated with other sites, check to see what they are doing and you are not (if your article is ranking higher on sydicated sites and you are the original author of course).
- ensure you are not linking out to any bad neighbor hoods if you allow comments.
- If you are advertising, Google has been known to punish sites for using other advertising sources other than adwords (if linking out). Even on images use rel="nofollow" in your links for those.

I know these suggestions are broad, but do to rules of listing site specifics, I can only guess and hope something said gives insight to your issue.

[edited by: networkliquidators at 10:08 pm (utc) on Nov 8, 2010]

[Mal_Jones]

@trey4cubs Google quality score kicking in and they seem not to like your articles
.

[trey4cubs]

@networkliquidators. These are articles on article directories, so i dont think it has anything to do with the site because its spread out across hubs, ezine, goarticles

@mal_Jones Hmmm that seems plausible, i'm just surprised it happened all across the board across different sites. I'm hoping that this is something temporary with Google and their updating the algo causing a temporary google dance

[Mal_Jones]

If your articles have no link love then your quality score will be low. Google has determined your articles are of low quality and booted them

[Mal_Jones]

Is there a facility in these forums for private messaging?

[MrHard]

Getting rid of "quality sites" that employ spam article tactics.

[Mal_Jones]

Google is giving questionable websites a chance

I find that to be highly unlikely.

I agree .........google isn't interested in questionable sites and giving them a chance period.

[trey4cubs]

they do have a good number of links pointing to them. They were ranking really high just a couple days ago.

[Mal_Jones]

Are they quality links or are they blog roll or site wides?

[Mal_Jones]

Quality links as in organic or high PR

[trey4cubs]

Most links are high PR, and the articles had all been holding steady/moving up the serps and then in the blink of an eye, BAM! they've fallen off the map.

[Mal_Jones]

Has any of the pages you have links on been de-indexed in google? If so then there's your penalty, hence your drop in traffic.

[trey4cubs]

yes. I hope my articles can recover from this

[brinked]

I agree .........google isn't interested in questionable sites and giving them a chance period.

Mal. There are filters and trip wires everywhere. There are so many factors that can make google think a site is spam and/or does not deserve to rank high.

Lets say for example there is a website called widgetforwidget.com. Widget for widget is very close to getting a big penalty from google, automatically due to its generous use of the word "widgets" on its site and its very un natural looking backlink profile (lets say 90% sitewide links which all have the same anchor). So widgetforwidget.com is about a few sitewide backlinks away from getting penalized, so google moves it up, temporarily removing any filters already in place that may be knocking it down and wants to find out "maybe this site is of actual high quality, so lets put it to the test"

Also, not to mention Matt Cutts always talks about "questionable sources" in regards to backlinks. Google knows there are questionable sites that should not be ranking. I am glad you function in a niche where you dont see any spammy sites. Consider yourself lucky.

[scottsonline]

Lots of generalizations.

Google gives everyone a shot. If they didn't none of us would have jobs. What makes one site do better than another we will never know. If they told us exactly we would all make the same sites.

I believe the rise of spam sites is an unintended consequence of updates but that the sending of reports on those sites helps them flush out others.

Our traffic again fit the 15% lower bounce rate and increased for good measure.

The fall of article sites is part of why we can't find stuff but there is some method to the madness there always is and I'm sure it will sort out in a few days.

[trey4cubs]

@scottsonline Just to be sure, you have noticed a drop in article traffic in the last couple of days? And you do believe that the drop is some kind of google tweak?

[mrguy]

If they didn't none of us would have jobs.

Speak for yourself.

You might not, but I certainly would.

Google is not the Internet and people will need websites whether Google exists or not.

There are many other ways to drive traffic to a site other than Google.

There are actually some businesses who really don't care of they show up in Google or not.

[scottsonline]

Google is the Internet. For all that everyone wants to deny it, it is because of the great work of google and google alone that we aren't all crawling the yahoo directory looking for holiday presents.
Look at any successful ecommerce site that originated in the last five years and you have solid organic traffic to start.

Mrguy as an example what would be your example of a b2b or b2c that has hit it well without good google results?

Google was the first to bring us a lot of cool free things. They were the first to bring us useful results. We could all tweet ourselves until we are blue in the face but it won't have half the effect of good positioning in google SERPS.

To the person that asked about articles I didn't search much today but when I did I saw what I had for results days ago.

We did notice a big spike in company name searches starting 10/22. Makes me think people really did notice the fluctuations and gave up and typed the biz name. And take a look at the deeper metrics. Visitors YoY are down. Bounce rate is way down since this update rolled by almost 25% page views are up 35%, time on site has doubled and return visits are up 60%.

If this is the update all I can say is wow. They trimmed the fat padding the stats but aggravating search customers and instead refined the traffic. Less equals more. Less but more qualified visitors. We poured through the keywords and don't see much of a change but they clearly have it figured out.

New content is not ranking. New items from august that are on the sites of 1000 competitors show up on a total of two sites.

[directwheels]

If Google didn't exist, there might have been a lot more choices in terms of search engines. But then like everything else, they will consolidate through mergers/acquisitions, and you will end up with pretty much the same thing.

[nyc863]

I've been watching this topic because I also saw the traffic drop.

And I think, as of monday (today), it came back to pretty much what it was.

[danimalSK]

the problem with Google is that it is effectively a monopoly (albeit a natural one). most industries tend towards an oligopoly (not just as a result of competition law etc.); the motor industry, telecoms, aviation etc. Google has 90% market share in many European countries - if you operate in one of these countries Google IS the internet.

yes, of course you can drive traffic other than Google, but the reality is that for 95% of the population the first thing they do to find a page is search for it (including the facebook login screen...).