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]

[ohno]

Unreal isn't it? I just don't know what is going on at Google. One day normal, the next awful. Hell we've even had a morning be great for it to disappear at lunch time! All you can do is sit it out(again!)........

[reseller]

@ohno

Have you tested your main keywords on Google India [google.co.in...] ? Maybe your site is on top of the Serps there :-)

[ohno]

But why would India always (& I do mean ALWAYS) crop up prior to the normal quality traffic disappearing?

[reseller]

@ohno

But why would India always (& I do mean ALWAYS) crop up prior to the normal quality traffic disappearing?

Maybe its part of a penalty process.

Matt Cutts has just visited Google's Hyderabad office in India. Maybe he made a deal to export organic traffic from Google India to specific sites in English speaking countries:

"Because we don't like your site, we gonna send ya irrelevant organic traffic from Google India" :-)

[Web_speed]

Sales are non existent for more then three days now, while traffic almost doubled (on a number of ecom channels). Completely dead! tons of "one hit wonders" but no cigar.

I could sware it almost feels like someone is filtering out the buyers, sending in only the window shoppers.

Our only chance of survival under such conditions is to educate everyone we know to stop using this creepy search engine. It may not happen quick enough but it will happen eventualy...

[johnhh]

Sales are non existent for more then three days now

oddly - we are the same three days exactly .. uk based - may be after school half-term and we are getting kids doing homework ?

[gadget26]

I'm also seeing increased traffic with no sales. Once every three or four days, for an hour or two, goog sends white-hot traffic that converts very well, but it's not nearly enough to make up for the DAYS of nothing but page loads.

I don't think it's the public in general, my conversions are up evenly across all other sources, never this low from goog. Heck, my Bing conversions are TRIPLE that from goog and that has never happened before.

This implies that goog knows who is more likely to buy (not surprising) but what is surprising is that they are apparently channeling these "good" leads around to various sites in clumps. For what purpose? I have a couple of theories but nothing firm.

It's also possible that some percentage of people are giving up trying to find answers from goog and are using other sources. That would explain my increase in non-goog referrals.

[Three days to the one-year pandalized mark. yay. ]

[Whitey]

There could be something in this traffic control theory. Lot's of conservations in the past have mentioned throttling, but this is a bit different.

Interesting that traffic remains steady for the last 10-14 days, but conversions are all over the place, one record day and the next a record low day. Also the pattern of peak v trough have reversed with weekdays low and weekends high - again with consistant traffic levels. It's hard to believe on a global basis that this erratic visitor behaviour would be so widespread. But i guess anything's possible.

Something may be hidden in the analytics, but i can't see it. Possibly Google is feeding crap traffic in less than obvious areas.

[Web_speed]

weekdays low and weekends high

Yep precisely what i am seeing. Low to very low weekdays and high weekends (Sundays in particular).

I also noticed this same pattern on my eBay channels (not only my ecom website channels). Dead for almost the whole week and then a good number of sales over a 24-48 hours time frame over the weekend (hardly enough to cover for the whole week though...less then half actually).

And then when it is all dead i vist WebmasterWorld to check the weather and notice "reseller" has just posted another/new major update observation.

Like clock work...it became a weekly pattern now.

This thing is killing my business (whatever is left of it anyway...)

[reseller]

Possibly Google is feeding crap traffic in less than obvious areas.

I wouldn't be surprised at all if Google is using Google Analytics as the major instrument to control quantity and quality of organic traffic which Google send to sites which have installed Google Analytics.

People may wish to consider testing quantity/quality of Google organic traffic to their site(s) WITH/WITHOUT Google Analytics installed on the said site(s). Very interesting indeed! ;-)

[wokka]

Over the past year, in my niche I've seen and can see an increased funnelling of buying traffic towards Amazon and eBay.

I've heard google are working with LARGE advertisers on a cost per sale basis, this is making it more and more difficult for small family concerns like us to compete.

To be honest google are funnelling my business into looking at selling on amazon marketplace... I need to pay the mortgage each month.

[Web_speed]

@reseller

I'm not sure about the others but in my case i don't use Google analytics on any of my ecom sites, and i don't think that ebay does either. Google has many other ways to record/log and analyze user behavior. I very much doubt analytics alone being the cause of this.

Nonetheless, I would have recommended anyone that uses analytics to remove the code though. It was a very silly idea to put it on to begin with...

[ohno]

I don't think analytics is the route cause, someone elsewhere mentioned the Google Toolbar, wonder how many browsers have that installed?! TBH I have long suspected Google is somehow tracking our sales, the amount we take each week is just too consistant! What is clever(and scary) is how they seem to be able to filter out a buyer vs a window shopper. Think I may take everythging Google off one of our sites to see what happens(+1 button & analytics)even though Matt Cutts claims this data is not used....

[reseller]

@ohno

Think I may take everythging Google off one of our sites to see what happens(+1 button & analytics)even though Matt Cutts claims this data is not used....

That would be a very interesting test ;-)

[Web_speed]

Very easy for them to profile, rank and track buying browsers.

Heres how they probably do it:
1) Look at user search history... look for the words "buy", "purchase" or "order" (or similar terms) in the search string
2) Look closely at the websites this user visited prior. Shopping sites may suggest a hot lead, a potential "shopper" looking for something.
3) Check for any price comparison activity for this user on price comparison sites, Google product included.
4) Look at previous purchasing activity/history for this user
5) Check this user ISP and Geo location.... Yes they do keep a *success* rate geo profile. Probably down to suburb level (for probably most of the GOOD countries).
6) Check for Adwords click activity for this user. This again suggest a hot lead.

They are probably using a rank system and up the score while algorithmically looking at the above activity as it unfolds. They can then channel this traffic according to their needs.

How can they gather all this big brother information ? ....very easy really. Via Chrome or/and the Spybar or/and Analytics or/and Adsense ads or/and Plus buttons or/and the SERPs ....

Not to mention their millions and one other beacons not listed here.

Just my two cents...

P.S.
This may also explain the major change they are making now to their privacy policy (with regrades to crossing info across all services), this may also explain the reason they hide now search string info from webmasters.

[Martin Ice Web]

I too see all yout observations. But what has it to do with panda? Google claims panda is targeting linking farms, scrappers....

Maybe panda is targeting ecom sites after all, to push big advertisers like amazon, ebay....

[Martin Ice Web]

I too see all yout observations. But what has it to do with panda? Google claims panda is targeting linking farms, scrappers....

Maybe panda is targeting ecom sites after all, to push big advertisers like amazon, ebay....

[ohno]

Could be, Amazon & eBay are all over the SERP's to my eyes! Still dead today, no surprise there.

[wokka]

I'm wondering if they've applied a panda filter to my ecommerce site.

But, don't understand why they want to promote amazon and ebay so strongly...

[ohno]

I've just searched for "google chat back broken" as the chat back badges on our site give a server 500 error. The top result is the OLD Google forum with posts from 2008! They now have a new forum which doesn't show up yet there are posts in there from people with the same issue. If Google can't even have their own fresh content in the SERP's then what hope have we got?! Oh, & the fault started Friday, another broken Google product.

[ohno]

/\ Both show up in Adwords a LOT, it's all about $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

[helenp]

Dont know, I have analytics since may, and I wasn´t affected until 3 March, however is still on first page, only dropped on the page.
What chocks me Is that I have 455 pages in my sitempap, normally I only see about 200-250 indexed, but today I can see I have 447 indexed....thats nearly all my pages. I ever seen that.

Added: I changed host and DNS on the 31 january as host blocked ips in spamhaus for accessing server, so on the 1st and second of march I had a slightly increase of visitors, but on the 3rd I dropped position and amount of visitors. Dont think could be due of changing host...

[Martin Ice Web]

zombie traffic is coming up again, seems there is another update coming?

[ohno]

I guess so, conversions & traffic have all but gone again.Smart!

[reseller]

@ohno

Could be, Amazon & eBay are all over the SERP's to my eyes!

@wokka

Over the past year, in my niche I've seen and can see an increased funnelling of buying traffic towards Amazon and eBay.

Allow me to recall an interesting related article from December 2011 :

Google could threaten Amazon and eBay with a new shipping service, an analyst says
[internetretailer.com...]

[trinorthlighting]

Amazon ranks top ten in a lot of keywords. Reminds me of the wikipedia days when they ranked for almost every keyword. Google needs to dial down amazon.

Think about it, if a searcher wants to buy something from amazon they are not going to go to google first and search for an amazon item. They would go to amazon and search there.

[reseller]

@trinorthlighting

According to the report I mentioned in my previous post; Google wants to make its online shopping experience easier. Google would direct online shoppers to e-commerce operators that offer quick shipments of products for a low fee.

Accordingly Google would redirect traffic to Amazon and eBay if it considers such action to make Google's online shopping experience easier!

[ohno]

We do next day delivery, 100% of our orders ship same day. The eBay & Amazon domination of the SERP's is pushing the smaller retailers to start selling on their sites (with the fees that eat margins even more!) rather than sell direct via their own site. Google constantly harp on about making online shopping easier(Google Checkout?) yet they do not enforce the rules for Google Product Search!

[wokka]

Yes, my experiences with Amazon have provided fast delivery, but with eBay your usually relying on someone fitting in the chance of getting to the post office during a busy day at work.

Ebay deliveries in my experience have been sketchy to say the least and I have even had refunds when they either haven't been able to shoplift/find the product or not been bothered to send it.

No - The reason they're all over google adwords is the fact that they need to keep growing revenues and they've setup nice %age on sales type adverts... they're probably the biggest affiliates for ebay and amazon in the world at this point.

Us little people aren't reliable or stable enough to set these types of affiliate campaigns up with google as we're not massive plc type companies.

These sorts of affiliate deals are going to drive small adword customers away, or out of business. How can they compete with amazon's prices/service and have to pay triple or more the price to advertise on a pay per click basis?

[reseller]

@ohno

Talking about Google directing traffic to Amazon, I wish to mention what Matt Cutts wrote once:

Amazon, I love ya. Amazon Prime is a fantastic program. Once you’ve paid your Amazon Prime fee, two-day shipping is free for a year. Not having to worry about shipping fees means that I buy a ton more stuff.

[mattcutts.com...]

That might explains why Google is directing traffic to Amazon, as Google considers such action to make Google's online shopping experience easier!