Google Updates and SERP Changes - Feb 2012

[robdob]

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

Any help would be greatly appreciated, is it possible that this lastest update woull dump the SEO of my sites because I had link to them within the footer of one of my other sites? Also Google shown within its webmaster tools that there were some 2,000,000 + pages linked from the footer to my site.. is this a reason for google to penalize me? Any input wouldbe greatly appreciates..

I own all the sites involved...

Thanks

[edited by: tedster at 5:41 pm (utc) on Feb 1, 2012]

[backdraft7]

The last time I saw sales conversions this bad was "May Day".

[Donna]

Yep around the 6th my traffic got killed after 4 months of recovery. No sales just increased bounce rate by 15% and a lot of kws dropped under the 50-150

[ohno]

@ backdraft, I wa shere yesterday trying to recall when it wa slast this bad & came to the same conclusion! We has sales last night (FRiday UK) for the fisrt time all week. This morning sees loads of traffic from our friends in India though! Who knows what the weekend will bring, I still see many forums appearing in any searches I do. So much so that a search for a product we sell has our forum support page rank higher than the actual product page-never seen that before.

[wingslevel]

Seems like mostly ecom folks complaining here. Maybe an algo change on the 6th?

[marycontrary]

Also older sites.

[wingslevel]

I am thinking it is trust related. Because of the long tail effect. Maybe discounting older links?

Strange that g has decided to fill in the void with zombie traffic. They can certainly see it - in our case we have GA, WMT and conversion tracking. They have the data. They must be seeing the low conversion rates - dissatisfied visitors - too.

[backdraft7]

@Ohno - I had more sales overnight Friday than I did all day Thursday. If you see a recovery, please let me know because historically, the recovery hits you first in the UK and makes it way to the States shortly thereafter.
I see the recurring patterns with these algo changes, it's always an upset in traffic quality, a juggling of the serps, then slowly back to "normal". The problem is, as soon as it returns to "normal" - they do it again! Since the MayDay update, the roller coaster upsets have cost us about 25% loss in sales.
We no longer show an increase over the previous year. For some strange reason, I think that's what "they" want.

@wings - I wish we could put our finger on the cause, but trying to analyze each algo update is about as useful as a dog chasing it's tail. I still believe most of these changes are to deter black hat, which is fine, but sometimes their method is like trying to kill a mosquito with a shotgun. The ecom sites always seem to take the worst of the blast.

[gyppo]

Seeing a big shift in terms today, stuff that dropped off earlier in the month has come back.

[Whitey]

@gyppo - was that site the one you reported that revived on 19th Jan / Panda or a different one ?

[Mike_Brent]

In the last 2 days our bounce rate dropped from 65% (which was constant, 65% for 3 years) to 53%... conversion also seems to have went up. Anybody see any changes in the last 48 hours?

[vampke]

@kellyman

We've detected that some of your site's pages may be using techniques that are outside google's Webmaster Guidelines.
Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links ...

Why did you receive this email?
Google is not the internet police that is sending our warning messages to every webmaster out there. I don't understand why you got this message?

[wingslevel]

Mike, we are seeing improvement too. The periods of low conversion traffic are getting shorter. If there was an algo tweak. On the 6th or 7th, the longtail may be finally refreshing into the index. We saw that same pattern on the January algo changes.

[netmeg]

Something got shifted awright. I wrote a ranty blog post back in October about a certain cell provider when I was trying to upgrade to an iPhone, and in the past week suddenly I'm getting all kinds of weird long tail traffic on that outdated post (and a couple others too). Presumably something else somewhere got knocked out.

[Lenny2]

any predictions on the next Panda update?

[Whitey]

It's hard to know. The frequency of updates is slowing down , the last major one being Oct 14.

Maybe the focus should be on reports involving data refreshes and interim "Panda related" movements which appear to be integrated into the main algorithmn - although we've heard nothing from Google on this.

But that said, possibly we'll see something next week or in the range of 19 Feb to 4 Mar which will be 4 - 6 weeks from the previous data refresh shift.

[zerillos]

From where i'm standing, there have been 3 updates in the last few days. One on friday, one on sunday, and a big one yesterday

[TheJimmySmith]

I'm also seeing a drop in my visits over the last week or so despite the majority of my keywords maintaining their previous ranking.

[Web_speed]

@zerillos

Thats what i'm seeing too.

[SnowMan68]

@zerillos

We saw a 10-15% drop in Google referrals to our US based ecom site yesterday. We had been on a steady increase for the past few months and had gained on every panda update. Not sure what's going on...

[achean]

@zerillos

We got taken to the woodshed to the tune of -50% as of last Wed, 2/8. We've been in the process of noindexing a bunch of pages (among other things), but clearly that was not enough to save us.

[ohno]

Have been all over the place since the end of Jan. No sign of any stability since although this week is half term in the UK which is always quieter for us(yes that is a straw you see me clutching!).

[Whitey]

Google had indicated that it would turn the dial up on the quality score for Panda mid last year. I wonder if this is it.

If so it makes some recoveries vulnerable, and unaffected sites the same.

It also seems that these reports of Panda like shuffles are going over extended periods, again morphed into the main algorithmn. Still no confirmed clue until Google reveals what's going on.

[syed]

Fairly positive that this is an algorithm update that targets long tail traffic. Seeing a 15% decline while major ranks are holding up. Long tail is going down. My guess is other ecom sites will be effected too

[cr1t1calh1t]

I don't know what it is, but I'm seeing similar effects. My higher traffic cornerstone keywords are holding strong, but long tail is off bringing my overall traffic down 15-20% vs. last week (which was down 10-20% from the previous week as well).

cr1t1cal

[gyppo]

Seeing exactly the same thing. Hard to tell if it's Valentine's Day related or not.

[SnowMan68]

Our drop was long tail as well on the US based ecom site.

[epmaniac]

i am also seeing a drop 40%

[epmaniac]

i am also seeing a drop 40%

[epmaniac]

is the drop due to valentine?

[MelissaLB]

Wow, we saw a drop off in traffic during valentines as well. About 15% of our Google traffic disappeared to our e commerce site. Doesn't look like it's any different today. As well, all our strong 2 word keywords remained steady, haven't had a chance to check the long tail but it seems obvious that's where the loss is coming from.

Sincerely hope this is a mistake.