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]

[garyr_h]

@Bill_H I'm non-ecomm. I'm not exactly too sure how big of a drop I had experienced over the past few weeks because of Mother's Day is usually a big traffic draw. Monday was somewhat normal, but the sudden afternoon high and drop at night happened on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday of this week. So I'm thinking something had to occur on March 15 or is in progress. I saw this same sort of traffic during the last Panda update (but of course, my traffic was up that time!).

So it makes me wonder if something big is happening or is about to occur.

What I have noticed is a huge difference in personalized search, though. It is to the point of ridiculous. They are showing results for things which I searched for a few days ago for something completely unrelated. I'm quite positive this is affecting everyone.

For example, if I search for a bug on Tuesday and a specific tree on Thursday, they'll try to list things about bugs in that tree. Or, most commonly, list something about the bug but pages which have the word "tree" somewhere on the page and most likely has nothing to do with anything.

[WolfLover]

What about this Knowledge Graph? Do you suppose this is what has messed up everyones traffic?

[backdraft7]

@snowman - I've been using AWSTATS for looking at overall key phrases. Last month had 15,000+ this month a little over 4000. That's a BIG bite! I also run (using a third party software package) daily checks on about 1000 of my top key phrases. I can watch +/- movement of each phrase. The loss of long tail explains our anemic traffic and sales.

[falsepositive]

My traffic went up the last few days but is stabilizing at levels right after the last update (or slightly higher). Not sure what happened but there seems to have been a jolt of some kind. I noticed big crawls over the last few days. I don't have an ecomm site either.

[reseller]

Very interesting article related to Google's Penguin Update on The Wall Street Journal:

As Google Tweaks Searches, Some Get Lost in the Web [online.wsj.com...]

[matrix_jan]

I see different results on 203.208.46.177. Can somebody tell me what this is? It looks like the IP is lacated in China, but the results are very different from google.co.hk and somewhat different form google.com.

[tedster]

From what I can see, that's the IP address for google.cn - licensed by Google from Beijing Guxiang information Technology

[matrix_jan]

So they haven't completely pulled out of Mainland China after all? I like the results though :-/

[crobb305]

I'm noticing some of the fake 5-star ratings disappear, at least on 5 or 6 websites I track in the top 20.

[irishsolar]

I had been noticing a constant improvement in referrals from Bing the last few weeks.

But even though my positions in the Google SERPs are improving slowly my Yahoo traffic has just taken over from Google for the first time ever.

I think this may be due to user's switching. I don't know if this is a trend overall or just in my niche (as the results are particularly bad for this).

I know that I continually switch over to Bing for my own personal searches as the Google results are just plain frustrating to me.

Anyone else seeing a shift in search engine traffic without seeing a shift in SERP position i.e. anyone seeing what might be a user migration to other search engines?

[petehall]

For me Bing and Yahoo combined are only delivering 10% of Google's traffic. The conversion rate however is double that of Google's, which may mean the search is more accurate?

Google SERPs look pretty stable, although I have seen new sites rise in the last week or so. Maybe it's not Panda time quite yet after all...

[Hissingsid]

My bounce rate on Bing is less than two thirds of that on Google organic.

[Pjman]

My bounce rate for Bing is really low compared to Google too.

I don't think it means anything because one of my top traffic pages (from Google) is a simple definition page that a lot of people use and love, but that is all they came to do. They spend 6 minutes on the page and 85% bounce.

[menntarra 34]

I want to share my experiences after this panda-penguin update.
Here's my analytics graph between tha 19th of April and 21th May:

[img826.imageshack.us...]

You can see a big drop at around 23th and 26 th of April. At that time i thought i've been hit by penguin or panda. So i started to work on all my pages and by 26th of April i changed all my titles(they were a little spammy) of all my 1million pages and a lot of other stuff. BUT then i realized that there was a server issue, and that the drop in traffic was caused by this issue...
As you can see on the 27th of April traffic went back to normal, but then slowly but surely it started to drop from day to day, and now it seems my visitor count is very low (40% loss)
What my question is:
- is it possible that the changing of my titles on all pages could have caused the drop? Or maybe it is panda? I think if it were panda then it would have happened in one day not in many days... what do you think?

[menntarra 34]

And the other question: if this traffic loss might have been caused by the changing of the titles accross my whole site, would you change it back to the original(which IMO was spammy a little) or what else would you do ?

[Pjman]

Changing titles on a great number of changes is definitely temporarily affect your rankings. I would give it a few weeks to sort it out.

[getcooking]

I've seen a huge drop in traffic in the past 24 hours. Normally by this time of day on a Saturday we've have about 75K unique visitors so far. We're sitting at 60K. I haven't had a traffic drop this large since Panda 1.0. I did make an error on the site a couple of days ago (it's since been fixed). I'm hoping that's all it is. Anyone else seeing anything drastic or is it just me?

[menntarra 34]

@Pjman
Okay, but i made those changes cause i thought i've been penalized, so what is the best solution: revert back the titles or wait?

[indyank]

For example, if I search for a bug on Tuesday and a specific tree on Thursday, they'll try to list things about bugs in that tree. Or, most commonly, list something about the bug but pages which have the word "tree" somewhere on the page and most likely has nothing to do with anything.

A classic example of trying to show their over smartness, something their PHDs were working on for a long time now and their spokespersons were taking pride of - "they know what you want better than you as a searcher do".

I am seeing this craziness too.

[Bill_H]

getcooking:
We are seeing a huge drop today as well. Our traffic has dropped 60% in the last week. We have changed nothing, can't figure it out. Was not affected by Panda, it helped us. Beats me.

Best,
Bill

[petehall]

Something is going down that I can't see. Our traffic is up and referrals are coming from positions I just can't see. I'm quite excited as have been working very hard on the site the last couple of months...

[Hissingsid]

So i started to work on all my pages and by 26th of April i changed all my titles(they were a little spammy) of all my 1million pages

How many did you get to before you realised you were wasting your time ;)

[themaninthejar]

@menntarra - I think any action that takes you closer to G's guidelines is a positive move. Maybe the time is here for us all to be brutally honest with ourselves and conduct a sweep of our metas and content, anchor text and headings.

But I would confine your activity to on-site adjustments until the dust has settled. I have recently received a request from a webmaster to remove a link I had to his site, a perfectly legitimate organic link. It turns out that his site had dropped from the serps and he'd put in a reconsideration request. Google had then sent him an email stating that he was still in violation and suggesting: "Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank."

The email went on to point out: "...here are examples of pages that contain inorganic links to your site..."

This was sufficient to panic him into requesting removal of all links, in his words: "...we need to get as many links as possible removed, even if it means we lose some good ones or ones we are not sure about..."

This prompted me to download WMT's Links to Your Site to a spreadsheet and visit the top 125 linking domains. I evaluated each and made notes on the spreadsheet. One fifth of those domains (26) earned the label "suspect". These included scraped content from my site that had been spun, directories using my entry over many subdomains and bloggers that used a high density of contextual linking.

I put this list together in order to still the flapping wings of paranoia. I now have an action plan should I receive a WMT message about backlinks. Until then I'll sit and wait until there's more evidence on backlink penalties.

Another exercise I'm conducting is the "balancing" of keywords usage (as described in a previous post). WMT's Content Keywords is invaluable in assessing whether your onsite keyword usage is top-heavy. I particularly suspect keyword usage in anchor text is a temptingly easy "crime" to commit.

Assuming you have a content-rich site I believe you can regain top-rankings on Google, especially if Bing still loves you. The over-optimisation penalty is harsh, like punishing the whole class when the culprit won't own up, but by honest revision of previously "acceptable" SEO tricks there will be a way back...

[Pjman]

@menntarra34

I would concur with themaninthejar. I would stick with titles that I feel are best use for the user and comply with Google's guidelines.

[backdraft7]

I think any action that takes you closer to G's guidelines is a positive move. Maybe the time is here for us all to be brutally honest with ourselves and conduct a sweep of our metas and content, anchor text and headings.

True enough, but let's use caution and not get caught up in "overSEO penalty paranoia" and start reversing what is still works and what is normal to Bing, Yahoo and the rest. Some have suggested deleting your meta keyword tag altogether. I won't do that. What I WILL do is use common sense to tweak it to not be spammy or irrelevant (something we have been doing since being clobbered by the MayDay 2010 update).

As many of us have painfully learned already, if you trust what Google says today, you're just setting yourself up to be burned tomorrow. Beware!

Happily, in the past week, I'm seeing many more relevant referrals coming from Bing!
When you compare results for the term, Google's results are beyond laughable.
Google should be truly embarrassed by the poor quality of their current results.

What they need now is an Orca update to eat that stupid Penguin.

<. .> figures that was coming...

[edited by: backdraft7 at 2:41 pm (utc) on May 20, 2012]

[tedster]

if you trust what Google says today, you're just setting yourself up to be burned in the future. Beware!

Also, if you trust what other webmasters and bloggers THINK Google is saying today, you may also be setting yourself up to be burned.

[backdraft7]

@tedster - Did not someone recently suggest that the keyword tag is "dead,dead,dead". While that may be true for Google, it is not for Bing or Yahoo. I for one now prefer to stay away from putting all my eggs in the Google basket.

[menntarra 34]

@Pjman & @themaninthejar
Thanks for the suggestions...

I'd like to add that 50% of my traffic are driven by let's say 50 important keywords, and it's variations. And i lost all SERPs for these words... However other words i'm still ranking same. OF course these words suit my site the best, they are the most relevant to my site. It seems that my "penalization" is just about these words... In WMT all these main keywords are like minus 50-100%
And like i said all other variations for example:

I lost ranking for "car" and i also lost all ranking for 2-3 word searches which contains "car" ("nice car", "honda car", "cheap car" etc.).

[backdraft7]

@menntarra - I am seeing the exact issue you describe. a few of the staple key phrases remain, but most variations are gone. Pre-Penguin, (and 10 years prior) this was working great. Now it's out the window.
I can rank on "blue widgets", but "widgets blue" or "blue widget" are gone. If you check your phrase on Bing, I think you'll see how it's supposed to work...of course that is IMHO only. God forbid my comment gets take out of context and I get flamed again.

[menntarra 34]

Yeah, Bing is fine, actually i gained a lot of rank positions during this googlerankloose period...

I have an affiliate AD on my site and what is interesting is that my sales statistic is very good these days(this last month). Actually it is the best this year so far.