Google Updates and SERP Changes - July 2012

[Alex997]

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

A lot of my keyword SERPs dropped a page today - totally out of the blue. They have been going up and up in SERPs steadily all this year with no panda or penguin impacts. I havent changed anything on my home page and no new spammy links, so I *guess* it's a google algorithm change?! I doubt its a penalty as the drop would have been even more severe.

Anyone else in the UK seen something similar today?

[edited by: tedster at 1:14 pm (utc) on Jul 1, 2012]

[petehall]

@Alex997 is the site only a year old?

[Alex997]

Domain going strong since 2009. Wordpress site since this March. Traffic (impressions and clicks), CTR, SERPs, pagerank, mozrank, domain authority, page authority, no. of pages (100% in google index) all up and up every month. All white hat SEO.

I predict it will go back to normal in a week or so, so not overly concerned. Just strange as have not seen such a drop in a very long time on our site.

[asusplay]

Alex997

I have seen the same. Yesterday (30th) I lost 70% traffic, most of the loss came from google UK. I have a UK site, so losing UK traffic is pretty drastic. I have no idea why, I havent made any channges of late and traffic had been stable and on the increase for a very long time. I hope it goes back to normal soon, the SERPS I'm seeing in google UK are not that great.

[themaninthejar]

UK site now dropped to lowest ever - page 37 - below some hideous dross including US and OZ sites. And this is after having all my de-optmisation work crawled and cached. Very depressing. I may pull the trigger on a reconsideration request tomorrow just to see if I have a backlink problem that they haven't told me about...

[Alex997]

Maybe its google trying out a new algo which (fingers crossed) they will roll back next week. I seen similar things in the past.

Impact seems mostly localized to my home page. Only things I could do better with my home page are that it's a little fat/slow (rich content) and the title is truncated by Google (despite being only 65 chars). They are the only things I can think of which could cause google to mark me down...

@ausplay - you don't run a WP site do you? With Yoast's SEO plugin? That recently had a big update. Perhaps something there?! ...its the only thing I have changed.

[wingslevel]

US ecom seeing changes also. Saturday between 9-11am and 4-7pm EST we saw lots of good converting google organic traffic. Rest of the day was well off a normal Saturday.

[wingslevel]

Did some segmenting in GA and calculated the conversion rate on the google organic traffic during those two time windows - came in about 15% higher than trailing 3 month average for all google organic referrals - the rest of the day was 72% lower.

[aristotle]

And this is after having all my de-optmisation work crawled and cached

Remember that your changes may not be incorporated into the rankings until the next Penquin update.

[nickreynolds]

I've seen three uk sites that have been fairly steady for a year or two disappear in the last few days

edit- they could have been pandalized (3.8).
They were all wordpress sites with shopperpress plugin

[Alex997]

Do Google updates rollout to the UK a few days after the US?

[asusplay]

@Alex977 no I dont use Wordpress or Yoast. I have a self made custom CMS, but I havent made any changes recently, just the usualy addition of news and updates.

I had heard of a Panda refresh on the 26th, but my site got its major hit on the 30th.

As far as I know in the UK it can happen one or two days later, but four days later sounds a bit much.

[mslina2002]

I am sure lots of people are taking advantage of upcoming 4th July holiday (coming Wed) and this weekend to make it an extended vacation.

My traffic has also been down since the 28th but today conversions seem to be way up.

I know Google has a habit of rolling out updates on holidays, and Penguin update is pretty much do about now.

[wingslevel]

But we can eliminate soccer tournaments, weather, holidays etc., by using analytics. If organic google referrals are normally 45% of your total traffic, but they are at 30%, likely something has happened to your rankings.

I think you also have to look carefully at the quality of the incoming google referrals - if you see goal conversion that varies significantly from historic levels, then you may be receiving lower quality traffic.

[themaninthejar]

Is there a downside/danger to submitting a reconsideration request? It just feels like going to an STD clinic when you probably don't need to...

[HuskyPup]

Nearly all my UK sites have seen a 50% reduction in traffic this weekend, none of them are Wordpress.

FWIW we had our annual blues rock weekend:

Friday: Quieter than expected
Saturday Afternoon: Only steady
Saturday Night: Heaved
Sunday Afternoon: Totally & utterly dead

In fact the entire county was dead on the Sunday according to most here in the trade.

Double-dip recession?

We never got out of the first one I'll tell you.

</slightly off-topic however very coincidental>

[petehall]

@HuskyPup we had the busiest day on Sunday since the Panda update in March. Lots of enquiries also. In fact it's been steadily picking up speed since the recent Panda update (and it is a UK website).

[HuskyPup]

@petehall

Which general sector are you in?

I'm in specialised construction products and it's been on its a$$ nearly all year in the UK, Germany was doing fine until all this Euro mularky kicked off again and the USA is doing much, much better than anticipated.

</ends brief market report!>

[Joshmc]

Don't forget that half of the East Coast has no power right now and hasn't this last weekend.

[freep.com...]

Has to be effecting lots of places online...

[federicar]

Hi
I have the same problem
I lost +90% of my traffic on the 30th. Now I am getting 8 visits per day.
Amazon affiliate, sports.
Bummer....

[SnowMan68]

@ federicar

Was this the first time you have been negatively affected by a possible update?

[federicar]

This website was pretty new, so no, up to now. It was online since April, I know this could be the google honeymoon being over. But I found it odd that it was a sharp drop so I looked for google updates on the 30th and found this post.
..we'll see what happens. Meanwhile I'll try to add more original content

[petehall]

@HuskyPup I am involved with quite a few different sectors, but this one is motor related. People are still looking at new cars at least...

[Alex997]

Maybe because quite a high % of my backlinks are from the US then the sites going down dropped my google internal pagerank?!

** Web suffers weekend of weakness **
A double whammy of disruption saw several major websites and services go offline over the weekend.
[bbc.co.uk...]

[PaulJa]

Two of my Uk sites have had traffic improvements since the weekend. One is up 40% on traffic against last week for the same days (Mon/Tue).

Can't seem to find any SERPs changes of note though.

[SnowMan68]

Our main US ecom site has seen an increase on Google referrals, well after the Panda update. I am wondering if this might have anything to do with the new Google Shopping layout in the regular Google serps. I noticed that a lot of the times I am searching it moves the Google Shopping over to the top right of the page. This is basically moving the existing serps up on the page. So if in the past you had the old Google shopping results above you, with up to 3 links there, this is now gone. I would imagine this would improve the CTR for all of the serps that were once underneath it. Thoughts?

[diberry]

I've done so much to my site recently, even changing the domain name and deleting huge chunks of my pages, that it's hard to tell whether I'm affected by algo changes or my own changes. But for the last 7 days, I've been relegated to strictly very long tail searches on my domain that got hit around the time of Penguin.

[Alex997]

....still no recovery.

The drop levelled off after last Sat though and SERPs have been steady since - albeit about 10 places lower for a lot of phrases.

My #1 local phrases have remained for the home page, just the harder to rank for phrases which have seen the drop.

[petehall]

I am seeing US results creep into SERPs... last time this happened was the day before the Panda update. Is something going down? Or just a false alarm... has our arch rival the Penguin arrived?

[Panthro]

Seeing more of the brand-heavy redundant SERPS today