Google Updates and SERP Changes - May 2012

[Web_speed]

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

"TRADE_PERSON Knoxfielld"

Google *insisted* on presenting me with nothing but results for:
"TRADE_PERSON KnoxVILLE" .... WTF!


I've tried the same search 12 hours later and now i do get what i was actually trying to search for, "TRADE_PERSON Knoxfielld". Obviously different servers, constant flux...

Zombie traffic anyone? ....well heres one of the main reasons. Google trying unsuccessfully to second guess its users and present them with wrong results. User ("used to" getting the best results from Google) automatically click the link but oopes...it is not what he/she was looking for. Click back.

On both occasions Adwords ads for "TRADE_PERSON Knoxfielld" was spot on. Coincidence?... ya right!...

I wish they'll get it over and done with already and move to "paid only" results. Maybe the broadening of exact match and phrase match (Adwords) are the first signs of them heading down that route...


p.s.
TRADE_PERSON = insert "doctor", "painter"...etc

[edited by: tedster at 3:43 am (utc) on May 9, 2012]

[gyppo]

Welcome themaninthejar, I'm seeing a similar pattern.

I have ~8 sites to look at data & the sites with thin content are fine:

- We have one pinterest type site which is image bookmarking related & it has doubled in traffic
- A forum with lots of diverse posts is fine.
- Loyalty site with lots of unique content, however it's all written by me (similar writing style?) has been hammered. We do have a /blog/ on this domain which could be impacting our main content - hard to tell.
- Same loyalty site however in a different country, same page format & writing style but less pages. This one has been unaffected. Similar backlink structure to the main loyalty site, just less links & less diverse sources.
- Same loyalty site format spread across subdomains (we were testing some merchants on subdomains on a different domain). Rankings are stable but traffic is down 60%, this domain has at least 1000 words per page.

I think page similarity & reuse of language could be an issue with Panda. I definitely do not suspect any of our sites are impacted by Penguin.

[scottsonline]

U.S. Ecom site way up but zombieish traffic. What I'm seeing a lot of is two keyword searches where the words one way may put you on one site flipped the other way they have a different meaning and would put you on another site...google seems a little lost. Maybe this is google suggest gone bad? Maybe but I think it's more google misunderstanding the semantic similarities of language in some cases.

Medical searches are still a mixed bag. The old business I worked for spiked after the 19th and an unrelated b2c had its busiest day today in traffic. Both report conversions were proportionately bad. Our site, record traffic but the bounce rate is up 10% grows at a consistent ratio with the increased traffic. ToS decreases.

Based on everything we all are seeing I'd say there will be more tweaks soon. As the spam got dropped a lot of shuffling took place and what we are seeing is the testing to see who belongs where.

[Hissingsid]

I think page similarity & reuse of language could be an issue with Panda. I definitely do not suspect any of our sites are impacted by Penguin.

Could it be that your language is too salesy or not salesy enough for the subject? I'm wondering if what you describe is the wrong mix of stop words. Too much or two little first person you, your. ie talking direct or not talking direct enough to the reader.

[fred9989]

Could it be that your language is too salesy or not salesy enough for the subject? I'm wondering if what you describe is the wrong mix of stop words. Too much or two little first person you, your. ie talking direct or not talking direct enough to the reader.

Crikey Sid, do you really think Google's Language capabilities are that sophisticated?

[fred9989]

What opinions do people here have on the new sparkly rankings of sites' subpages vs home pages?

I was searching for a ticket on one of the major British airlines and not a single search brought up their home page - just site subpages - and that was also true for my final search on the airline's brand name.... what can we conclude from this?

[Solar_guy]

To The man in the jar,

Very good post sir, but I didn't understand what your penalty or what message you received in your GWT account? Was it the infamous "un-natural back-linking" indictment like we received?

Thanks for the clarification,

Solar_guy

[themaninthejar]

@solar - I received no message at all. I've simply suffered a 50 place drop in my usual ranking in the serps. As such I believe my back-linking is safe and have focussed my attention towards on-page elements.

[themaninthejar]

I accept there are other things going on in the index. For instance at the weekend my UK site was out-ranked on Google UK by a site based in Guatemala serving Guatemala City. Today I see a popular two-word keyphrase (not one I compete for) returning 488,000,000 results. Whatever it is, it is not over. But I don't believe there's anything wrong with starting to bail your boat before the full extent of the storm is apparent.

[SnowMan68]

Whatever it is, it is not over. But I don't believe there's anything wrong with starting to bail your boat before the full extent of the storm is apparent.

Could be a bit counter productive. Unless you are 100 percent sure where the boat is leaking and how to fix the leak. You would hate to create more holes and sink the boat at a faster rate.

[themaninthejar]

@snowman - There is indeed an element of risk. But as long as what I'm doing is moving me towards tighter compliance with the guidelines I feel less concerned about unpleasant surprises.

I just had reason to search <Companies House> which has to be the most uncompetitive keyphrase ever (it is the authority for filing accounts and company documents in the UK)and Google UK showed 1,000,000,000 results. It seems that everything that was ever published that is remotely connected to the phrase is now part of the index. The next step for Google has to be to rationalise, re-rank and finally prune back to the live wood. Given the effort already put in and the disruption already caused, I doubt it will simply go back to what it used to be. This I see as a good reason to get on with considered edits so when Google gets around to looking at me again I have a shiny clean face to show them.

[SnowMan68]

@snowman - There is indeed an element of risk. But as long as what I'm doing is moving me towards tighter compliance with the guidelines I feel less concerned about unpleasant surprises.

As long as you're comfortable and feel like you're making the right moves it's all good :)

[backdraft7]

Bouncing Back A Bit:
As April closed out, I am seeing a slight improvement in stability but our site still bears the scars of the Penguin. Solid, highly relevant, plural two word terms have remained unaffected, but strangely we lost many of the exact same terms in their singular versions on which we used to rank equally well. Anyone else observe this? Long tail is still hurting too.

Traffic volume (using AWSTATS) overall looked largely unaffected, but the ratios of "total visits" to "pages" and "hits" was very erratic day to day, all month (suggesting the churn). The biggest difference was that while April had the lowest Number of total visits for the moth (this year so far), the number of pages accessed beat our best month (January ) by a WIDE margin. That would indicate a lot of bot action. The month also saw the worst April sales in seven years.

Not to state the obvious, but the Google system remains in a state of chaos for many areas. We all expect miracles and instant results, but once you understand the way they build their database networks, these upsets and variances in search results between all observers makes more sense. See: [news.cnet.com...]

Once all the 'shipping containers' settle out and begin having similar versions of data, the results will hopefully improve. I see several more tweaks they'll need to work on (the plural issue) to make results better, so hold on too your hats. It ain't over yet!

[themaninthejar]

Re: Plurals - for one of my two word key phrases I am currently at no.4 on page one for the plural and way back on page 11 for the singular. Bonkers.

[AndyA]

Checked a few key phrases and have found the same as others. Low quality sites ranking high in the SERPs. These sites are generally updated rarely, and offer little in the way of content.

For one phrase, I found a competing site listed on page one, while mine is on page five. I have hundreds of pages of original content, and provide details the other site has never provided. It's been online since about 1902 (it's an old site!) and has a lot of long-established links pointing to it, but offers little to users other than a few dated images and a Yahoo Groups mailing list for people to join. The list is great, but private, so I'm not sure how much weight that carries in indexing.

Going to take a hard look at my site and see if I can improve things. I've never purchased any links, and only exchanged a very few links on a links page with other quality, on topic sites about ten years ago. I rarely add new links to that page, but I do check periodically to make sure the links are still good and the sites haven't changed for the worse. I haven't had any messages in GWT, so not sure what's holding my site back at this point.

[HuskyPup]

Is Google actually updating new pages?

I launched about 80 new and exclusive pages a couple of weeks ago, Bing already has them all indexed at #1 yet Google doesn't even recognise the urls.

Can't the penguin digest new info?

[bsand715]

Can't the penguin digest new info?

Penquin is full from eating good content sites.

[HuskyPup]

Penquin is full from eating good content sites.

Ah, I forgot, it likes spam:-)

[mhansen]

Is Google actually updating new pages?

Not sure about updating existing page that were published in the last 30 days, but as far as digesting NEW content (using pubsubhubhub, xml sitemap, rpc pings, etc) it's nearly instant for us.

Even on a site being pressured from Penguin, the new content is indexed and ranking as expected, almost immediately.

MH

[edited by: mhansen at 3:32 pm (utc) on May 1, 2012]

[n00b1]

It's been online since about 1902

It predates the internet. Impressive! I am guessing that was 1992 :).

[HuskyPup]

the new content is indexed and ranking as expected, almost immediately.

That's good to know and why I feel this update hasn't finished yet. I've never experienced Google this slow with any pages or site re-directs etc. I wonder why?

[AndyA]

n00b1 wrote:
It predates the internet. Impressive! I am guessing that was 1992 :).

LOL! I intentionally typed 1902 because the site is very old. (Trying to maintain some sense of humor!) It probably does date back to at least the mid-nineties. And the best thing is it still looks pretty much the same as it did when it first went online.

[BillyS]

Anyone else seeing a lot of Google testing today?

It's almost like Google is testing a new index and the difference between the old and new is quite significant.

I see subtle differences all the time. I'm talking about a big change. I saw this in Analytics. It wasn't isolated to one term, suddenly we were getting a lot of referrals on very different terms. (One's we used to rank well on before Panda.)

[Pjman]

@BillyS

I have been noticing pre-Panda terms jumping in and out since late Thursday. I thought that I was just the winner of the Penguin lotto.

But today I have notice the terms are constantly changing.

[fred9989]

Anyone else seeing a lot of Google testing today?

It's almost like Google is testing a new index and the difference between the old and new is quite significant.

I see subtle differences all the time. I'm talking about a big change. I saw this in Analytics. It wasn't isolated to one term, suddenly we were getting a lot of referrals on very different terms. (One's we used to rank well on before Panda.)

Yes, very significant changes - my sites are back. LOL.

[netmeg]

FWIW a new site I launched on Friday was almost completely indexed by Sunday (couple hundred pages). The only thing I can think of is the Google+ page (which has NO people in its circles, btw) since there's no links to it all, not even from my own sites.

So even if you'll never use it, try making a Google+ page and linking up the author/publisher stuff. All it will cost you is a bit of time.

[scottsonline]

Tremendous changes today. SERPS are in flux. On my employers site the traffic is still high but it's all wrong. Everyone we talk to in unrelated businesses reports high traffic terrible quality.

Two word keywords are driving a ton of traffic. Long tail is not. I cannot tell if it's related to google suggest or the change. Bounce rate is up 15% over April when orders are converting. A b2c site jumped from 32% to 60% on Sunday and it's stayed 50-60% for the last 36 hours.

I agree with those that say don't change anything. The hit some of you took may have just been the prelude and the real spam hit is occurring now.

[petehall]

@scottsonline are you in the UK?

[scottsonline]

Pete no this is US based. All of the sites I refer to are US based ecom. 2 are b2b and 1 b2c. They vary in ages from 14 to 2 years old. Varying link profiles but no link networks, spam etc.

All three have seen a radical increase in google referrals but with an associated steep drop in ToS and pages viewed and an increase in the bounce rate. Carts and coversions are way off.

For those on the deficit side of this change what you can take from this is being dramatically on the positive side has not helped the three of us. It also supports the theory that the SERPS are serving the wrong results.

Sites have no connection at all. Two are ancient brick and mortars now online. Unrelated industries, owners, hosts and registrars

[serpsup]

@scottsonline - I am seeing the exact same thing.

I was hit with Panda 1.0, ecommerce affiliate site. Since April 26th, I have seen traffic gains north of 40-50% - a large chunk of that is image traffic which historically has a higher bounce / lower conversion. However, the increase in organic search has not resulted in a corresponding increase in conversions. Seems like a lot of non-targetted keywords that are either unrelated or loosely related to my site.

Since this change started on the 26th I suspect Penguin, not Panda - but who knows?