Google Updates and SERP Changes - Nov 2011

[canuckseo]

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

October 30/31 something happened - traffic to my canadian sites is down 15-20%. Traffic to US sites is only down slightly. In some cases traffic to some of my US sites was actually up yesterday - first time in months.

Not sure what happened. Still looking into it.

[edited by: tedster at 1:43 am (utc) on Nov 2, 2011]

[Martin Ice Web]

was it another panda update? Changes on 19th?

[neildt]

Martin, I believe yes there has been a Panda update. [twitter.com...]

[onebuyone]

Minimal increase if anything, if it was another Panda iteration I would rather expect 40-60% decrease.

[neildt]

onebuyone we've experienced a 40-60% decrease on our product/profile pages. Other pages on the site are unaffected

[ohno]

Google UK has a link to their new Andriod phone, that should tell you where their priorities are! Oh, and Royal Mail's website is down today (again) so that won't be helping matters if you are online based......

[flanok]

I am seeing nothing in the UK.

Is this the manual push button update?
Or are they just stating that they have made a small change to Panda prior to the almost monthly manual update?

[nt10000]

Was visited by Google about 100 times yesterday from various geographical locations - presumably it was googlebot. This morning I woke up to see I'd lost my rankings for most of my keywords. Having recovered about 50% from the same thing back in July I am lost for what to do next.

My site is full of well written 100% unique content. The sites which now come up for my search terms are unadulterated crap. Badly written (and badly spun) content on non-relevant site topics.

What the hell is happening? Google is just killing me and no matter what I do it's always two steps forward three steps back.

[ohno]

Being visted by Gbot seems to de the sign of impending death for some reason. Stick a reconsideration request in if I were you. If you check your logs do you see any visits from Google that seem to be human? Gbot comes up as linux in our logs but I see a few page fews from Windows XP & Andriod!

[nt10000]

Thanks ohno. I just scoured my statcounter stats and in all cases it was an unknown browser with no referring link and no identified landing page. The visitor was 'Google' and they were from:

Brussels,Belgium
The Dalles, Oregon
Groningen, Netherlands
Council Bluffs, Iowa
Morganton, North Carolina
Charleston, South Carolina
Bellevue, Washington
Hoofdstedelijk Gewest, Belgium
Atlanta, Georgia
Mountain View, California

It doesn't seem like I've been de-indexed for any pages, just slipped off the search into oblivion. I don't know if it's permanent or just short term. Only time will tell I guess. The only thing I do know for sure is that emailing Google for anything (including reconsideration) will be a waste of time, bandwidth and electricity. I'd have more chance of getting a reply from my dead grandmother.

Like the last few months (since I got hammered in July) all I can do is keep adding new fresh content and hope. I'm afraid to even work on getting backlinks in case I get further penalized for it. Ugh what a mess.

[ohno]

The last time I did a reconsideration I got the auto reply yet later that day the site came back to normal. Coincidence? Only time will tell as I've just stuck another one in as we can't go on like this!

[nt10000]

I'd say definitely a coincidence. Fingers crossed for us all. Today I've lost about 50% of my real traffic, which is now down about 90% of the real traffic I was getting pre-July. Also a lot of the traffic I've had in the last few weeks has been junk foreign traffic - mainly India. Looks like the kids will be getting a cheap Christmas present this year unless things change quickly.

BTW, the website which now occupies the top position for one of my keywords (a well known stock trading product) is a Singapore hotel site. If that's not Google serving poor quality search results then I don't know what is.

[ohno]

Terrible for us today too, infact this week has been the worst in ages(on the back of an excellent week last week(apart from Friday)-go figure!). The SERP's always look good for us so it comes down to what Google is sending us. Our one site has had the SAME number of visitors every day this week! Traffic throttling problem?

[nt10000]

Yes I've seen traffic throttling on some of my sites too. A new day starts and I get great traffic for several hours then it stops suddenly until the next days starts, then the same all over again. The traffic numbers are very close each day before they get switched off. I've seen this happening on and off for years so it's obviously another mystery in the Google algorithm, nothing to do with Panda.

[ohno]

Here is one such visit :-

HostName : tul01m01-in-f81.1e100.net


IP : 74.125.72.81


Last Visit : New


ISP: GOOGLE INC


Country: UNITED STATES


Region/State: CALIFORNIA


City: MOUNTAIN VIEW


Type/OS: Personal computer - Win XP


Domain: US Network


Language: English US


Browser: MSIE 7 [Win XP]


Screen Res: 1024x768 16 Millions colors (24 bit)


Javascript: Enabled

[nt10000]

That certainly looks like a human operator. I understand Google do do human reviews on some sites - presumably sites occupying top positions for high competition keywords. I have had some as well in the past.

[ohno]

This is what worries me & comes back to the fact that we seem to rank too well for Googles liking? They can certainly switch us on & off like a switch.

[nt10000]

Yeah, if you see a human visitor from Google you'd better hope your site is squeeky clean. One excuse could be all they need to drop you down a page or two, which let's face it as as good as de-indexing you.

[canuckseo]

Regarding that IP I don't think it's a human - we had one in that range get caught in our spider trap in the past few days. There's no way a human is getting to where it got too. It was using apple webkit - so i'm thinking a mobile bot that doesn't follow robots.txt?

But that being said - it is interesting to see google traffic coming from a new IP range.

[nt10000]

Here are the IP addresses Google used on my site in the last few days (if it helps anyone):

66.102.12.86
209.85.226.88
209.85.228.87
74.125.52.80
209.85.226.80
209.85.226.82
209.85.226.83
209.85.228.91
66.102.12.91
209.85.224.81
209.85.224.88
74.125.92.84
74.125.114.91
209.85.224.86
74.125.126.92
74.125.78.82
209.85.226.88
74.125.126.80
74.125.92.85
209.85.228.85
74.125.126.83
74.125.52.82
74.125.52.89
209.85.228.81
209.85.226.89
209.85.226.81
209.85.228.89
209.85.224.91

Still no improvement in my SERPs results today.

[camynix]

I have experienced crazy rankings since 31st October. On 4th November we upgraded back end, site was down for approx 1 hour. google de-indexed our site, our rankings keeping popping up and dissapearing, still not sure what is the problem....

[golfdaze]

We noticed a ranking change around the end of October as well, dropped 1-2 positions. What was odd though was that through the 14 of November our sales were running 50% above last year m to m despite losing the 1-2 positions. On the 14th the good times ended and sales are running 50% less than the same period last year. Abandoned carts are way up, 40% as compared to our normal 10-15%, and foreign traffic is up but US traffic is down as much as the foreign is up. Alas woe is me this Christmas season.

< continued here: [webmasterworld.com...] >

[edited by: tedster at 5:48 pm (utc) on Dec 1, 2011]