Google Updates and SERP Changes - July 2011

[Shatner]

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

Here's what I am more interested in than anything...

How are all the cosmetic changes Google is making going to affect the traffic driven from Google search?

It definitely seems like Google is de-emphasizing the straight up search aspect of itself more and more and more. They're going out of their way to direct people AWAY from search with every cosmetic change they make.

That has to be having an impact on people who get a lot of traffic from search... I don't know I don't get any search traffic anymore since Panda took it all away.

If you do still get Google search traffic, how is this impacting you?

[edited by: tedster at 3:32 am (utc) on Jul 2, 2011]

[Ummon]

Has anyone noticed a big shakeup in the serps today?

[randle]

Yesterday, and continuing today, I'm seeing a couple of different sets of results that are pretty different. Couple of deeper sites popping up into the top three as well.

[Bewenched]

Has anyone noticed a big shakeup in the serps today?

I havent seen any change in traffic.

[outland88]

In my areas over the past few days Google has really gone head over heels in ranking titles. If you take the top 100 results for many searches its blue widgets, blue widgets, blue widgets, blue widgets. One title after another is invariably the same. After that you can tell Google is obviously protecting the brands. Another thing I predicted would eventually emerge is weaker and weaker junk. Tons of 10-50 page sites with an original but poor index page and the rest being retooled pages from article sites. Bottom line once you see manipulation of the results I’m witnessing it’s almost futile to attempt to maintain rankings. The gyrations will always profit Google because of the freshness factor but hurt any web site attempting to maintain stability. The only real solution I'm seeing is link buying not content.

[maximillianos]

It is a holiday weekend here in the states. Holidays bring strange SERPS.

[MrSavage]

Not sure what the question here is. How is traffic? How about bleak and feeling bleaker with the more searches I do?

What I see? I've mentioned this to a point already. If you think about what quality content is, it's the big pro blogs and sites. If you think about what's popular, it's the big pro blogs and sites. If you think about what has deep content, it's the big pro blogs and sites.

Taking that into consideration, the topics I'm into and searching are turning up the big boys. A couple of my site are decimated. It's like a nuclear explosion went off. That's how far off the radar I am. I just say this now. If all the search results on Google want to be "spam free" with Panda, then what they are saying is, that if you aren't a "big boy" then you aren't getting a sniff on the searches that really matter. In my estimation, and I hope I'm wrong, the means of making an income in certain areas is certainly gone. I know when headlines hit, my sites are dropping off the face of the earth. Again, it's not all, but it so happens to be the site where the value might be. I can write about how to wipe my pot handles and have a site for it and show up. Right now, anything remotely monetary is taking a massive hit. I simply don't think half the people out there realize what's going on. That's my feeling. I think most people are going to have delayed wtf syndrome. If the goal is quality results Google wants, then the ONLY way to maintain that is to keep the popular sites at the top of the results. That's what I see July 2, 2011.

edit: I know emotions are not encouraged around here, but I can tell you that I'm red faced mad. A lot of frustrations for me in the past have been my own doing. Right now, this is not my doing. I'm very angry and I know for a fact I'm not alone. Sorry for having emotion, but this is huge and to ignore that is to ignore the people who visit and read these forums.

[Dragonfly080]

Has anyone noticed a big shakeup in the serps today?

Yep, a really big one. lost 50% of my daily traffic today.

[asusplay]

I lost more than 50% of my Google traffic on the 29th June...more like 70% actually and it is continuing to drop day by day and I have no idea why :(

[AlyssaS]

Just wanted to update. My site which came back on June 17th (Panda 2.2) is still doing well on Google - but has fallen back on Bing by about 12 places.

I think it's because of the tag pages I removed (I removed those tag pages that were near identical to the category pages, I left the unique tags). Panda obviously liked that, but Bing didn't!

Just goes to show what a PITA it is trying to rank for two search engines. Thank goodness all those minor search engines have no chance of taking off - can you imagine the nightmare trying to deal with multiple algos?

Not too fussed about the loss of Bing traffic (even though it converted well) as it was a fraction of the G traffic in any case. But am going to have to rack my brains on how to get ranked better on Bing without upsetting Google, just in case Bing market share increases.

P.S. It's obvious why I dropped in Bing - loss of links (internal in this case). But Google is acting like those tag pages made no difference in terms of link juice, because I'm ranking where I was. Isn't that interesting?

P.P.S. Just seen on the Bing forum that there was a Bing algo update. So adding content and deleting tags is something the new Bing algo doesn't like. Unless there is something else going on in the Bing algo. (Apologies to the mods for talking Bing on a google thread. Will stop now).

[walkman]

AlyssaS, do you target a specific word that fell 12 places?

[AlyssaS]

walkman - have checked my bing rankings for all the major keywords I used to rank for, and I've dropped across the board. 12 places doesn't sound like much but it means I'm not on page 1 on Bing. Sigh.

It's just lucky bing doesn't send a huge amount of traffic, so am not really seeing a loss of sales.

Do you know, a few months ago, I was saying that it would be nice to have Google and Bing have 50% market share each. Well I've changed my mind! It's not fun trying to figure out two different algos! It's made worse by the fact that the bing boards on here are a bit dead, and no one talks much about bing anywhere online except in the most general way.

I'm only trying to figure it out because I'm scared that in the future bing market share will increase and I don't want to sleepwalk into a situation where I've ignored a potential stream of traffic.

[walkman]

Oh 12 places is 2 pages down so I know how important that is :)

By the time Bing picks up share...and, IMO, they will since Google is making enemies /being a threat to other cos, and MSFT is opening their checkbook...new revelations will appear on how to optimize for Bing.

It's weird, for the past two days my Google referrals hit better keywords. Google is now on a 1.5X Bing level or so, it's that bad, but at least the keywords were a bit better.

Then last night I got a rush of Bing referrals, now it has slowed down. Very odd. I did the same, added content and removed all the tags. Any Google reaction is checked in by Panda so I'll wait for Bing to see how it reacts.

^{I'd rather have 4 search engines with 20-25% each so no one SE loss is felt that much}

[edited by: walkman at 3:32 pm (utc) on Jul 3, 2011]

[HuskyPup]

It's not fun trying to figure out two different algos!

I assume you mean the post-Panda Google since my SEOing has always been precisely the same for the two with, pre-Panda, almost the same results.

[outland88]

Interesting one that just appeared today for me is Google has removed bottom search box. Apparently some were bypassing giving Google data and Google wanted no part of that.

[outland88]

My fault hadn't turned off data collection.

[Shatner]

>>Then last night I got a rush of Bing referrals, now it has slowed down.

Bing actually does that a lot. This is something I've seen from them for a couple of years now. One day out of the blue you'll get thousands and thousands of referrals from them based on 1 or 2 keywords, 50x your normal Bing traffic... and then it'll instantly go away.

I've never been able to figure out what that is or what it happens, but it happens to me about once every two or three months.

Anyway that's normal Bing operations.

[MrSavage]

Just doing some searches. I swear to god Google is hopefully in a state of flux. I have Google as my homepage and have so for about the past 5 years. That said, I'm finding results lacking.

I just looked for: make amazon links into nofollow

Google has complete crud, so much so I didn't click anything I saw because it wasn't relevant!

I've just added a link button for Bing, and did the same search. Bingo in the first result.

This isn't just one example. It's been the past week perhaps? Maybe I didn't realize this or I was blind for a while. I'm just asking, is Google acting extremely odd? To me it is. This is the first time in years and years when I've actually been dabbling with Bing searches just as a comparison. Very odd. Part of me is hopeful that something is in correction mode at Google so some of my sites can return. Either that or they over tweaked and the whole engine is a mess. Whatever the case, I'm rating my last search query about a 2 on a scale of 10 for satisfaction.

[falsepositive]

I "discovered" Bing a few months ago (meaning, I started using them more seriously) and have stuck with them more and more. I do a lot more SERP checks on both engines now just to find the results I need. Google has been in bad shape for some time now. I do some research and fact checking on many topics and unfortunately, I have found that results have deteriorated this year.

[peego]

RE the strange BING traffic rush coming from 1 or 2 keywords, I see that every once a while as well. It's great while it lasts, but sure boggles the mind why it does it... The same keyword(s) usually at the same rank 1 and 2, but during the Bing Rush, the several hours that it happens, I get like 5k visits. But on normal days, that keyword might bring in a few dozen a day. Scratches my own head. =)

[zeus]

I have still not seen much action in this Panda update, means that some sites gets back are they finished or are they still working on it, be cause with this Panda as it is now it has not got better when you compare with pre panda, im just talking rankings of relevant sites.

[HuskyPup]

@MrSavage - Excellent find:-)

[thedonald123]

AlyssaS,

Just wanted to update. My site which came back on June 17th (Panda 2.2) is still doing well on Google - but has fallen back on Bing by about 12 places.

I think it's because of the tag pages I removed (I removed those tag pages that were near identical to the category pages, I left the unique tags). Panda obviously liked that, but Bing didn't!

Alternatively, you could/should/still can have used robots.txt or meta robot to only block googlebot and Bing could have continued indexing your tag pages.

<meta name="googlebot" content="noindex, follow">
see here:
[webmasterworld.com...]

[AlyssaS]

^^ yeah, that's what I should have done. I just didn't think at the time - figured that getting a few external links would compensate. Who knew Bing placed such a great emphasis on tags?

[suggy]

This is the first time in years and years when I've actually been dabbling with Bing searches just as a comparison

Though I hate to rail against Google, I have to say I have resorted to trying the same search in Bing pretty frequently lately. Mainly on technical, "how to" searches, which google seems too clever by half at re-interpreting (find myself using " and +, etc also, just to tie the intepretation down).

Also, Bing's alternative to Google Earth is far superior in terms of quality and number of images.

[Shatner]

@MrSavage you said.. "I've just added a link button for Bing, and did the same search. Bingo in the first result. "

What is a "link button for Bing" ? First I've heard of this.

[Shatner]

@peego Glad someone besides me has seen this weird Bing phenomonenon and is just as baffled by it. Doesn't make any sense.

[MrSavage]

@Shatner, sorry I may have written that in a confusing way. I meant that I've made a click link in my browser so I can quickly switch between google and bing. I see I wrote that quickly without much thought originally. So yeah, I'm at a point of switching my searches between Google and Bing for the first time pretty much EVER.

[Tallon]

Bing mystery solved: After the 2nd or 3rd time this happened with a site of mine (a major rush of traffic for one particular keyword phrase), I checked msn.com and found bing search results linked to on the page somewhere. Sometimes it's a block on the page with different searches for the day, other times it may be one or two featured more prominently somewhere on the page (especially for hot seasonal queries).

A page from my site would be in the top 10 on Bing (on high visitor days). The stampede of traffic is no joke, lots of browser home pages must load msn.com. It's definitely a nice perk from Bing.

[Shatner]

@Tallon It's on msn.com? Do you mean their link to search terms? Interesting. That makes sense.