Google Updates and SERP Changes - Mar 2012

[Hissingsid]

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

Something very odd just happened. I searched for my top keyword term. We have been at #3 since Panda, previously #1. My listing had disappeared completely, nowhere down to page 10 (in 10s). I did the same search on a different browser with no history on it, same result. Other terms were where I expected them.

Then 2 minutes later I'm back at #3.

What's going on?

Sid (In UK)

[edited by: tedster at 3:28 am (utc) on Mar 2, 2012]

[Web_speed]

Whatever the reason, the engineers at google are seeing the same garbage that many of us are. They are aware of those huge swings in conversions and traffic quality. I think it has just spun out of control and they are just lost.

I think you are spot on!

These no longer look like "updates" or "data refreshes". They look more like a pathetic attempt at making a flawed algo stick. They are well and truly lost.

[outland88]

There are so many signals crossing each other

That is what is amazing me. Unless you're flooding them with pages business must be down to a trickle or fluctuating dramatically in many areas. But it is what I fully expected well before Panda.

[ken_b]

Whatever the reason, the engineers at google are seeing the same garbage that many of us are.

Seeing garbage and recognizing it as garbage are two different things.

[wingslevel]

But they have access to all the bounce rate and conversion rate data from GA, so I think they know it isn't working.

What amazes me is that I would never test a major code change on my live server. I have a development box for that. But these guys are shooting from the hip with big changes that affect live data. And they are serving up junk SERPS to lots of users and they know it. Why do they do that? We see these big swings. That tells us that either they are testing algo changes or they don't have the horsepower to crunch all of the changes into new indexes at once. So SERPS and user experience suffer.

[Pjman]

And they are serving up junk SERPS to lots of users and they know it. Why do they do that?

It's simple! They are using the same teaser trick that has worked for decades. We are almost all guilty of it on our sites. We give the user just enough to provide value to keep them on our site; trying to entice them to visit more pages on our site.

They are trying to increase time on page on Google Properties.

[ohno]

I think wingslevel is spot on TBH, I've felt the same for some time now.

[ohno]

I'm guessing others are doing OK as it is quiet in here today. For us I'd swear the server was unplugged! Traffic well down & conversions next to zero. Nice start to the week!

[mslina2002]

Traffic was a bit lower than expected on Fri / Sat but Sunday back to normal.

I know college students are mostly on break starting this week so maybe everyone is partying on Spring break here in the US. Lucky dogs.

[ohno]

Sadly I'm in the UK, things have picked up on one site since 1pm though.

[traffik daddy]

Something very odd just happened. I searched for my top keyword term. We have been at #3 since Panda, previously #1. My listing had disappeared completely, nowhere down to page 10 (in 10s). I did the same search on a different browser with no history on it, same result. Other terms were where I expected them.

Then 2 minutes later I'm back at #3.

What's going on?

Sid (In UK)

Hi Sid, I am in the UK and I've seen this a few times too. I run a ranking tool on a VPS (I know, against Google TOS) on a slow schedule and every now and then a keyword will completely disappear from a clients campaign, and then come back moments later, or a day later, the time varies, but they always come back.

At first I thought it was a bug in the software and it just missed the url, but further evidence after a manual check suggests that keywords do disappear from Google completely and come back again at selected time intervals, a few minutes, a few hours, and up to 24 hours. One or two (very rarely) dont come back for a while, but I assume that is down the the backlinks not being strong enough, but to see it within minutes is hard to work out why it happens.

I am having some stranger readings at the moment, see my other thread, some very strange reports that I just cannot understand the how? and why?.

[scottsonline]

For the site I manage, no paid links ever, dropped off the map for carts and conversions on 2/28. Carts down 95%.

Personal searches are returning redirects. Pages I land on and after 20 seconds forward me somewhere else including blogspot landing pages. I never remember it being this bad with google.

Is anyone else doing business right now? Is it the economy or did google just bury us?

[wingslevel]

All in all, our ecom sites are hanging in there with moderate sales. But we are still seeing big intra-day swings in the quality of google referrals.

Judging from how quiet this thread has been, I think there are probably a relatively small subset of ecom sites that are seeing this effect. Maybe we are riding the cusp of one of those 200+ signals. I am guessing the seo gang at amazon is sleeping better at night these days than most of us - their war chest of trust points seems to be carrying them through these choppy waters just fine.

[robert76]

I am not seeing the button anymore today to turn off personalized search that normally appears to the left of the gear button. Anyone else?

[amyperez]

Hello guys I need help, If someone can check my site. My rankings drop. Who can help me? Send me your contact (gmail or skype) thx

[scottsonline]

Just heard from my old coworker same at the old company. Started about five days ago. Qualified traffic gone.

We finished the day down 95% on carts.

[amyperez]

Yes same thing, what we need to do?
My rankings drop from 1. page to page 36. What I need to do?

[BillyS]

Yes same thing, what we need to do?
My rankings drop from 1. page to page 36. What I need to do?

Based on your posts, it sounds like you need to find a panic button. Fast.

[Web_speed]

Is anyone else doing business right now? Is it the economy or did Google just bury us?

Totally dead here. On all channels, personal ecom sites, a number of affiliate sites as well as third party ecom sites (like ebay and a couple more). Same old story, good to high traffic numbers but low to none sale numbers. From very bad conversions to none.

I saw a small 24 hours window with a spurt of sales over the weekend (Saturday to Sunday noon, yet again) and immediately back to total drought and quietness thereafter, the kind of "quiet" you can only hear in a grave yard.

I've said it before but i think it is well worth repeating. It looks to me like Google is dying and it is going to take allot of us in the process. They are way too far up their A*&%$ with this complete algo rewrite nonsense. It is never going to work like the good old Google. Whats worse, it is probably going to take them another two years to finally realize it...

In the mean time spend more time on polishing your resumes boys and girls. The future looks very grim...

Sorry for the pessimistic outlook. But it looks like things are only going from bad to worse and I wish i was wrong...

[fred9989]

Sid:
Something very odd just happened. I searched for my top keyword term. We have been at #3 since Panda, previously #1. My listing had disappeared completely, nowhere down to page 10 (in 10s). I did the same search on a different browser with no history on it, same result. Other terms were where I expected them.

Then 2 minutes later I'm back at #3.

What's going on?

Here's another interesting thing to try: if you have your results set to 10 per page, change the settings to 100 per page, then run the search again. In my case, the site that had "disappeared" from the results when showing 10 per page reappears in the same place it originally was, and remains there when I switch the results back to 10 per page. (Even when I am signed out of G with history turned offand cookies cleared...but using same ISP though.)
If anyone can explain that, I'd be grateful. It has been happening over several days now.

[anteck]

They HAVE to know it's not working. Long tail results are absolutely rubbish and i've spent literally hours trying to find certain answers to PHP coding questions and other phrase specific information.

Some results are literally garbage. I type in a grammatically correct query and i get code in results where the best google can find is to pull out CSS code and show that.

Un F**king believable.

[gadget26]

On my Feb 2011 pandalized US ecom site I'm seeing 95% zombie traffic from google organic. Even google products mostly sends non-converting traffic. But every once in a while, for a few hours at a time, mostly (but not always) on Saturday or Sunday, I see spurts of very good traffic. Others have reported the same. I've been seeing this for some time now, long enough to believe that this is the new normal.

Are only pandalized sites seeing this kind of wide variation, or is mostly everyone?

With that in mind, we need to start thinking about this new "oscillating fan" version of google. When and why does it point to one of us and say "your turn." What can we do to, literally, get the attention turned on us longer and more often? Who, if anyone, gets the attention when it's not on us? Is google testing us or is this the result of a test/algorithm decision, or both?

Sorry to ramble, but I feel that this new behavior is key, at least to us that are suffering from it.

[Web_speed]

I've been seeing this for some time now, long enough to believe that this is the new normal.

Yes I agree, I've been seeing this Fenomenen for a few months now. Definitely (and sadly) the new norm.

[scottsonline]

Gadget same pattern on a non pandalized site. Traffic stays the same but the quality of traffic is all over the place.

It's one of two things:

1. Google is being fair in sending all of us spurts of traffic
2. Google is broken and the code is inadvertently cycling users to the wrong sites.

I think it's an attempt at 1 but in reality 2. They are trying to be equitable which in itself would reduce the driving forces to be #1 in the serps as it wouldn't matter. But the formula isnt right yet so we get bursts of buyers and then junk. If your normal busy day is wednesday but your site is set to get a burst on Saturday you're in trouble. Sometimes like an eclipse it all lines up and you get tons of buyers. Most of the time you're on the dark side of the moon wondering why a 10% increase in google traffic resulted in an 80% drop in sales.

The economy is tailing with petrol prices rising too.

[Web_speed]

1. Google is being fair in sending all of us spurts of traffic
2. Google is broken and the code is inadvertently cycling users to the wrong sites.

But heres the killer. I check my keywords and my pages are featured high, normally on pages 1-2. Yet, junk/zombie traffic galore...wtf

Economy must be at play here, big time.

[ohno]

I think it is to do with traffic throttling & that part of the algo is just not working. I can't accept it is the economy, if it were we wouldn't get zero sales for 6 hours then 5 in 5 mins for example. I see ads in Google Shopping results now, have they always been there? Or maybe that is a sign that my sector is having a bad time & have resorted to ads (which would be playing into Google's hands IMO!). Google just seems a mess these days to me, it took them months to sort a product feed issue out for us (which they admitted was a coding issue with our account!). Now Google Chat Back is broken & has been for two weeks, great when you spent time pasting code to your pages! As above, They've lost touch me thinks, you only have to check out the support groups to realise that.

[Noximus]

Hello Guys,
what do you see , have the serp-s stopped dancing?...

It seems more stable today...

[Web_speed]

@ohno

My spurt of sales seem to come on weekends (for a few months now). It seams to be quite dead most of the week and if i do get sales during the week they seem to be late at night. Another theory i am now investigating is that maybe the exponential increase in mobile device usage has something to do with with this dead beat zombie traffic.

Mobile devices convert badly, it is a known fact. Maybe the reason i am seeing more sales over the weekend and late at night is because more people have the time to seat in front of their good old pcs at home on weekends?... will definitely look into this further in upcoming weeks.

[Hissingsid]

Our conversion rate (to sale) is about half of what it was pre Panda, pre Instants. Traffic is down a bit but the quality of what we get is way down. Previously Google (including Adwords) gave us hot leads now it seems to be giving us a mix of hot leads and people who are in the right broad target market but not in buying mode. The balance is skewed way over to the aimless wanderers.

Last week I really drilled down in Adwords and switched of broad match and phrase match on all of my campaigns. So far the number of conversions has remained about the same but the conversion rate has shot up. I can't believe that I let Google sell me crap for so long.

The same is happening with Organic search. If you look at your Analytics data you will see that you have hundreds perhaps thousands of terms in your long tail that are 100% bounce rate and that spend less than 10 seconds on the page, many less than a second. As a result my bounce rate has gone up from less than 25% overall to over 40%. I don't want crap traffic and carp traffic doesn't want me.

Sid

[ohno]

/\ Yep, bounce rates on our sites is at an all time HIGH while traffic is at an all time LOW! You'd think this smart algo could work out that maybe, just maybe, it is sending the wrong queries to sites!

[Hissingsid]

I think SMART is an acronym:

Simple Minded Answers to Redirect Tangentially