Google Updates and SERP Changes - August 2012

I don't know that it will help in this, but something significant happened on one of my main sites (one which I *rarely* make any changes to related to SEO and which has been online over 10 years) on 28-29 July 2012. Search queries dropped close to 70%. I have never personally seen such a significant, almost instant drop happen before on any of my sites (yes, I have read about it happening to others). Nothing in WMT to indicate anything is wrong. I've never used link farms or done link exchanges so everything is organic.

@Tedster - I somewhat agree, but what about scenarios where you just can't really identify what you're "doing wrong" and/or "what you can do"? My personal direction is to wait and watch for at least a month. The last thing I want to to do is to start making changes without knowing what and why.

Elsmarc, there was a Panda refresh on July 25th......if your rankings have been demoted for many sections of your site to varying degrees of severity it's possible this is the explanation.

The typical symptoms are ranking demotions to reduce your traffic, as opposed to complete removal of traffic by removal from the SERPS (which would indicate something else possibly). Panda doesn't tend to stop your traffic completely, just removes it from the problem areas of your site and, to a lesser extent, any areas close to the problem areas.

Elsmarc, I think your advice to Tedster is a reasonable, but I think it might take even longer. I once discovered in retrospect dramatic changes in specific traffic for precisely 3 months without anything being changed about the website.

Bing! 11 a Clock, again all reverted back all to before friday.
Our Keys flipping like penguins on Crack.

The algorithm just starts to reward any website as it grows in "brandedness".

This is exactly what I mean by a built-in bias for "brands". It helps profits because that is, like you said, what the users seem to prefer. In my opinion, though, it's a win-win for Google. Bigger, more successful companies tend to have more money to spend on advertising. As the branding bias continues, those competing for the top spots will be the ones with the bigger pockets and will have to open those pockets to compete with each other.

I'm not complaining, and I'm not even one of those seeing my sites wiped out or losing traffic from the changes, just sharing my thoughts.

...In fact, it doesn't give us anything actionable as a conclusion and that's what real analysis should result in: an action plan.

I know there's a lot of emotion in the posts around here, and I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with that, but I agree with you about an action plan. Understanding that there is a built-in bias for brands, though, is necessary to developing and implementing that plan.

I just believe the new way forward is pretty clear and a lot of people used to marketing online in the past few years are finding it to be confusingly difficult to deal with. Essentially, it says to be successful, you must be successful.

Seems like a crappy day today. Mostly image searches and longtail searches. Been like this for a couple of days now. Just when you think its getting better its getting worse.

Elsmarc, part of my site also dropped on that date. I think some Panda filters for duplicate content might have been tightened.

I think some Panda filters for duplicate content might have been tightened.

@topstar,

If possible, can you tell me what would be considered duplicate content: (1) The same content appearing on multiple URLs on a website (the website that created the content), (2) content from one website appearing on another one, or (3) both?

Regarding No. 2, if the content of a website is appearing on another website but there is a link back to the page where it is from, can that still be considered duplicate content?

If that is not considered duplicate content, would the content of a webpage appearing on several pages of another website (with link backs) instead of only one be considered duplicate content?

Knowing the answers to these questions would really help me to determine if duplicate content is something that could be affecting me.

Thanks.

Looking at the first week of August... G traffic is up 30% for me, after a month of decline. We seem to have shot up on a lot of long tail searches. Holding a lot of #2 and #3 positions on queries I used to be on the second page for.

Google must've recalculated the backlinks for our site or something because I'm seeing a huge boost across the board.

topstar - I can tell you one thing I am looking at. In WMT I see duplicate titles - A lot of them - in the vBulletin 3.8.7 forum on this site (where most of the "action" is). I decided to edit a lot of crawl-url-parameters in WMT which I can see is causing a lot of duplicate title pages. I don't know that this is a (the) cause, but it can't hurt.

I used to track things I did but since I stopped making any "significant" changes some years ago I have started a new spreadsheet itemizing every individual change I am making and the date.

@ setzer

We are seeing the same thing. An increase in our long tail referrals starting today 8/7.

We also saw an increase in our overall traffic from Google since Friday. Some sort of an update rolled through.

@tedster

I agree with you that the big brand bias is algorithmic and not something deliberate - however I do think that it is a matter that should be of concern. If you consider the logical conclusion of this we will see an internet where there may be half a dozen Amazon like entities which sell everything and dominate the SERPs for pretty much any product that is produced on a large scale.

This I do not think is a good thing from a moral perspective as it will create a barrier to entry into commercial ecommerce and will create a potential cartel that can price fix - not good for consumers or small businesses.

Independent webmasters should be using Google to visit these big brand sites and then immediately bounce back (and use your friends and relatives PCs to do the same) - if enough people start doing this then there will be a small increase in the bounce rate for these organsations which will weaken their positions in the SERPs.

It is 11am ( germany ) and Bing! Immediatly traffic stopps.
I can figure out why it is 11am.


@IanTurner - I donīt think that you will ever could change their bounce rate, not to mention that goomazon ist not treated the same way others are. I think this will adjust on its own, because no business can do this compete in the long run because the spread is very, very low.

Did we ever figure out what happened on the 27th July. I saw some significant changes in the SERPs with new big brand sites jumping in on Page 1 when they have never ranked there before (Google UK)

I'm certain something happened on 27th July.

Just wondering if this change / update has taken some time to roll out across the different Google engines or taken time to show in the SERPs.

Anyone seen anything about the 27th Update?

@IanTurner

If big brand bias is algorithmic THEN it is deliberate.
I'm very concerned by this - for my money keywords - big brands take up the first 2 pages of the SERPs.

Also Strange - in Searches related to [keyword] sometimes all 8 are brands.

Well something seem to have happened on Friday. After a week of a little bit of upswing it's back to being bad if not worse than it was before. Long tail and images search is dominant now and Yahoo is 30%, Bing is 21% and Google is "only" 47%... Go figure!

Anyone seen anything about the 27th Update?

@edwatki
I did noted some movement as well in the July thread on the 28th and looking at the algorithm weather report it shows quite a bit of activity on July 27. However, no official report.

Since my main site (a technical discussions forum) was hit hard, and for several years I haven't really been paying much attention, I've been digging in. I thought my hit started on 28-29 July 2012. In looking closer at search queries in Google's WMT there was a slight spike on 24 July. On 25 July it was a "normal" day. On 26 July a small drop. Each successive day through the weekend there was a small drop, but the following week (this week) traffic appears to have stabilized at about a 70% drop in search referrals. It has stayed stable so far this week at that "level".

I'm getting ready to look at my "new visitors" numbers which tend to correlate with search queries to some degree. I do get a lot of direct traffic - It's a very old site and is relatively known in its niche, so I have to try to take that into account.

So far it looks like what @muzza64 said in post 4482487 on page 5 in this thread is what I'm seeing. But as always, just guessing.

I just read an post from Dan Russell a scientist from google who researches how poeple using google.

A question was:
How does google know what poeple mean when they search?

Answer: We donīt know what the poeple mean when the search. But we know on which search result they click and how long they stay. Does he turn back immediatly and clicks on another result, we know something is wrong. We are measuring the excellence of the result with many of those indicators. Sometimes we can figure out what is wrong sometimes not....
... google is reflection the society. It like paths in he park. Some are not constructed but made from humans to have a shorter way. Google does not say which way is the best to go. But google analyses how the park(pathes) is used.

(translated from german )

I made some on page changes to a webpage and see it in the cache version, but I don't see it in the SERP preview.

Do I need to see the changes in the SERP preview to see the effects of them?

Independent webmasters should be using Google to visit these big brand sites and then immediately bounce back (and use your friends and relatives PCs to do the same) - if enough people start doing this then there will be a small increase in the bounce rate for these organsations which will weaken their positions in the SERPs.

Kind of surprised to see this from a moderator, but at any rate, I don't think it would make any difference (I don't think it *should* make any difference) and doesn't seem like a very productive use of time. But go for it.

Anyone noticing an increase in G referrals today? We are up about 25% today. Seeing a big increase in the tail, yet again.

@SnowMan68, I am noticing it but I am down by 20-25%. I changed few things on the site to improve the page load time by paging the comments, i thought that caused this mess but it seems like something else. I am afraid to make any changes because my steps are doing the -ve work.

I've been monitoring Google Analytics "Real Time". Slow. This has been like a down hill sled ride. Hopefully I'm at or near the bottom. Today is looking a lot like yesterday which is typical for me. My normal "drop off" (being a business related site) is Friday to early Monday morning. My fingers are crossed for some stability ("bottom").

Since you mention Real Time, one thing that has bothered me about it for some time is that in USA I don't see what I would expect as a normal visitor cross-section.

You can't possibly tell me that at certain times only people in Southeast USA or Northeast USA or Southern half of the US are the ones visiting. It's too far off mark from what I believe (but can't prove) actually happens. I often wonder how this relates to the traffic shaping discussions.

The pattern I see right now real time is if you were to draw a horizontal line equidistant from top and bottom of US, ALL of our visitors are in bottom half.

Anyone else in USA, or your respective country, noticing this?

robert76, I see the same thing, we are getting more visitors from the south, but then again our company and website are located in the south even though we do business all over the US and the world.

@bewenched, do you have addresse(s) on your web site so that Google would know where you are at? It seems to me that they try to "localize" sites now and if you are from the South then Google think they need to show local sites in your area.

We do, however they are done as a graphic. To combat the location issue we have a section on our website of related events all over the country... there's not addresses per se but we have cities and states of events that are related to our business. It's worked in the past.... maybe not anymore.

Tuesday and Wendsday very cery good, climbing traffic, good conversions. And like every week, thursday, bam! 50% off for our main site, with self written descriptions, lots of pictures and a site made for users. But our affiliate site, that has no additinal value fot he user, just selling, all widget descriptions are from manufacturer ( like 1000 other shops ) is up again.

And whatīs just amazing, is that if i search for a (big ) search engine the serps for this one are different from day to day. They show me most english result but i am located in germany. There are only 4 direct results for the competitor. Then there are coming fb-sites and other semi-related sites.

fb-sites = Face Book links? Excuse me for asking - I'm a novice.