Google Updates and SERP Changes - August 2012

[Martin Ice Web]

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

Today is very low. I donīt know if its weather or vacation related? From what I see is that most product related serps will show #1-#10 price compare sites, not one informational or ecom site.

[edited by: tedster at 6:04 pm (utc) on Aug 1, 2012]

[Martin Ice Web]

@elsmarc - yes

[jinxed]

Has there been an update of some sort?

I've lost a few key positions by a few spaces. Slow day

[Martin Ice Web]

We are off 50% since thursday. It is getting worse every day.
All, realy all we are doing is just results in getting less traffic. Adding content and pictures is not a way to get out of this panda-drama.
The keywords are changing hourly. There is every our a spurt in traffic, followed by 10-20 minutes without traffic.

In regard of the discussed speed loading time, average user time on site I have a question.

I my niche is a realy bad site, but this side is alway present on every query with -keyword1 -keyword2 -lenght
Now this site needs 10 seconds to load ( time to see something, not the time till the page is fully loaded. ). If google uses users metrics like average time on page. Is google able to differ between page loading time and real time on page?

[gehrlekrona]

This is just rediculous! Something must have happened within the last few days because yesterday was the worst day in several weeks and this morning it's just non-existence. Wat is going on? Is it the Knowledge graph? Doing anything to "fix the site" is impossible since Google now is a moving target and we don't know yet where they will go, certainly not just a "search engine" anymore. Trying to be like Siri? Facebook? Seems like they can't come up with anything new themselves now, just trying to copy what others already have done. Did anybody ask for these SERP changes? I know I didn't.

[gehrlekrona]

Looking at the stats I see mostly traffic from other Google tld's. I also see that yahoo is not as good as it has been lately so they
are even with Bing so far today. Sometimes it seems like they all have Algo changes at the same time.

[backdraft7]

Something started on Friday August 3rd, showed a slight recovery over the week, now on Thursday 8/9 the rug was pulled out again. I suspect it's the knowledge graph roll out and the global databases are again out of sync. I lost a ton of long tail terms over the past 48 hours and the new results are again abysmal, right when they were starting to improve slightly. This entire Google algo mania reminds me of the Monty Python Black Knight scene...they chop off your arms & legs and you just have to keep fighting. [youtube.com...]

[gehrlekrona]

@backdraft7, I agree. I saw a change on 8/3 and then again today which is worse than ever so far. I think we can forget that Google is a search engine as we know it and they will concentrate on "information retrieval" and try will search anything you have and ten give it back to you probably more in a wiki looking style, be it your emails, documents, so they'll be more like the Tin man from Oz

[Sand]

My traffic also took a nosedive yesterday. My queries are not impacted at all by the knowledge graph, shopping, or anything else. This site has been hit my Panda though, and I wonder if there was another refresh late this week.

[backdraft7]

Whatever it is, it's giving even May Day a run for it's money for financial impact. The odd part is that ALL conversions have essentially ceased in their tracks. Not even my Adwords Ads are producing. No recent changes to my site, but now refreshing all publish dates, adding a few FB posts, a G+ post or two, blog entries and tweets to see if I can kick start this mutha back to life. If all else fails I'll need some Zombie repellent!

[thms]

Today I received a "Manual spam action revoked" message in GWT. How long does it take to see any improvement in traffic?

[wingslevel]

yes backdraft, we saw low quality referrals from google yesterday the 9th - long tails are still in a flux - yesterday's google organic referrals converted at about 70% of the normal rate

[backdraft7]

no recovery yet...usually when we get hit this bad it bounces back relatively quickly. I was tempted to call my hosting provider to be sure someone didn't kick the cable out of the back of my dedicated server.
I'm guessing the visitor numbers are on par with a normal Friday (just by looking at my MUNIN graph), (unscientific, yes, I know), but conversions are still zip. Just as well, I've been sick as a dog the past two days. Thanks for the feedback wings, at least I know I'm not they only one seeing this blip.

[Alex997]

What ARE you doing Google?! (rhetorical - don't expect a reply!)

Another huge plummet this Friday for our target 'london' keywords phrases...

***** london => #4 down to #26
***** in london => #6 down to #67
london ***** => #11 down to #30

All other phrases (including longer tail ones with london in) seem unaffected. Plus ***** on it's own is about the same.

No messages in WMT, so I can only assume that all the hundreds of backlinks containing these phrases (good mixture, not spammy) have all been devalued by Google all of a sudden - much like whatever happened on the 20th July.

ie. up until 20th Aug ranking were better and better in a nice even downwards slope (creating more and more quality backlinks). Then they dropped 60 places overnight, then a recovery slope for 2 weeks, then 1 week normal (last week), and now dropped 20 places overnight again.

Surely Google should not be using trial and error on the general public in their algorithms this much?! Don't they have private test systems to simulate this stuff - they own enough of the worlds servers!

[backdraft7]

@Alex - I'm surprised there isn't more feedback (outrage) on this one! Whatever happened starting last week has us in a keyword free fall. Ran two keyword reports yesterday and nothing but downward movement. In many cases #1 positions moved to #10 or worse over nite. Our new peak period is one or two visitors on the site at one time. So much for needing a dedicated server. I have done no big changes to the site this month, other than refresh a few pages.


It's pretty clear - Google wants us out. No messages in WMT whatsoever. I guess this time they mean business and I'll be soon joining the ranks of the unemployed. Guess this one should be called "Pink Slip".

[gehrlekrona]

@backdraft7, @Alex. I agree with both of you. There seems to have been some changes to the localization and I don't think they got it right, or they did get it right to flush out some more garbage (hopefully not me!) from the SERPS because what I saw yesterday was a lot of spammy sites with what it seemed, autogenerated content. They had a mish-mash of keywords in both title and description (or whatever Google gets their info from now!).
I am also surprised that there are not more people posting abiout it so maybe it's just left, the other ones have recovered since it seems like when you have a better period you don't tend to post anything.
I have posted before about it and to me it seems like Google tries to classify where your site(s) belong to, in what cluster of results it should be. My site have changed a lot lately and is now showing up among eBayclassifies and sites like that. Not sure if it's right or not but if I am above these sites, I'll take it.

[reseller]

Maybe... on Monday @Google would tweet: Minor weather report. There has been a Penguin data refresh during the weekend :-)

[SnowMan68]

We saw an increase of about 10-15% this week from last week. Mostly in the tail. Our previously rewritten titles (by google) have reverted back to the ones we have written. Not sure if that had anything to do with the increase in traffic though.

[backdraft7]

pretty sad when on a typically busy Saturday, my only visitor for the past 10 minutes has been someone in Kenya.

[ascensions]

There's internet in Kenya?

[backdraft7]

Yeah, that's what I was thinking...apparently there's more action there than the entire USA.

[gehrlekrona]

They do have Internet in kenya but it was probably a scammer that was visting... We have a lot of them, niot so much from kenya but from, of course, Nigeria and Lagos.
Anywa, I used to have a page full of different search query hits before that was within a minute, now I only have a pge with different search queries an hour. That's how bad it has become. There is a balance between keeping it or close the sites/hosting all together and it is pretty damn close that the hosting can't be paid with what I make. I am not blaming anybody really but I am not sure what to do anymore since I have followed every rule there is and then some lately but like a lot of people here say, "It doesn't really matter what you do, nothing changes the outcome".
A really good thing though today is that it's raining outside, which is hasn't done since back in April I think (Sorry for the OT)

[backdraft7]

@gehrlekrona - I hear ya! Between about 2000 and 2010 we made gradual improvements every year, then at May Day we started slipping backwards... and this year, the site has fallen back to 2005 levels. I guess the good old "wild west" days of the internet are pretty much over. It seems for every forward step we now take, Google walks us back two. happy rain!

[SnowMan68]

@backdraft7

Are you a content based site or ecomm?

[klark0]

Seeing one guy report today he lost 20+ sites which were initially hit by Penguin but then insta-recovered after doing 301's to new domains.

Sounds like a Penguin refresh is blowing through. As reseller mentioned above, they'll probably tweet about it after the fact on Monday.

[Elsmarc]

Any idea if the new domains were on the same server & IP? I've been thinking about that possibility but domain on the site of mine that was blasted is an old one and well known. I would hate to abandon it.

[gehrlekrona]

I read somewhere in a SEO blog that Google penalties can go away if get a new domain since they stay with you forever. However they weren't sure that chaging to a new domain would stick since it was the domain + content that gave you a penalty in the first place :(
If it sticks, then more power to him!
I am pretty sure there has been some kind of animalistic update or we are just screwed without any apparent reason. It looks to me that it has to do with long tail searches because for the moment that is all I get, not the 3-4 keyword phrase I usually get hits from. It they could at least mix it a little bit, then it wouldn't be too bad (well... everything is relative!) but for the moment it is either or. They still haven't figured out the localization. It seems that with these long tail searches Google either did show the right page or the user didn't like the page since my impressions is low.
When will we hear from Google?

[gehrlekrona]

Yep, turned out to be a REALLY sh***y day :(

[jinxed]

Some of my lost positions are slowly creeping up again. Traffic is increasing today. Hopefully this trend continues.

[gehrlekrona]

@jinxed, with a username like that I wouldn't want to make a statement like that :)
Anyway, I don't see any improvements at all. Looking at my stats I am so happy that there is a little bit of competition with SE's like Bing and Yahoo becausew if there wasn't, I wouldn't have any traffic at all. Maybe it is time to SEOwith Bing and Yahoo in mind now and forget Google since they don't send traffic anyway? Google is less thean 50% of my traffic now. Get a lot from Mobile apps now and other SE's I have never heard of. Google today? Worse than ever for now.

[whyohwhy]

This is a repeat of what happened to my site at the start of May. Suddenly over night I lost 70% off my traffic which was all Google traffic. At first I thought it was a Penguin attack but then after some investigating I put it down to server issues as for the previous 3 weeks I had problems with down time causing my average page load in webmaster tools to sky rocket. Slowly things crept up and two weeks ago all of sudden things were back to norm, or at least back to how they were around March time and that coincided with the spikes which caused my average page load to increase to finally disappear. Then for no apparent reason on the 9th August all the Google traffic disappeared again, or to be more exact pretty much all of the Google traffic from America vanished with dribs and drabs coming in from other countries.