Google Updates and SERP Changes - September 2012

[backdraft7]

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

Historically we never saw drastic drops due to holidays...except this year, when the now daily everflux drops just happen to coincide with a holiday.

[edited by: tedster at 5:33 am (utc) on Sep 1, 2012]

[chalkywhite]

I noticed 9am this morning. Checked for site outage overnight, nope. The cuddly one AGAIN, seems we gone back to the update before last stats wise . Makes no sense, ive double paged views over last 4 months, panda doesnt care.

[SnowMan68]

Why does it link to a blog post in 2011?!

Because that is explaining what the Panda Update is.

[ohno]

"Andrew Whyman ţ@andrewwhyman
@google 0.7%? I think you put the decimal in the wrong place. Again."

Nail & head. Google are just taking the piss these days.

[Sand]

I would love to know what they mean by 'noticeably affected.' The number of 'affected' SERPs must be much higher. But nobody notices?

If a tree falls in the forest...

[Hollywood]

Jezz Agree!

"I don't think I have ever seen so much negative feeling for google as I see on forums nowadays. I think they have well and truly lost the respect and trust of a considerable amount of webmasters."

[gehrlekrona]

I was searching for "widget city state" and all I got was lawyers and chiropracters....

[edited by: gehrlekrona at 2:58 pm (utc) on Sep 18, 2012]

[Kenneth2]

If the change occurs mainly on the top 1-5 pages, then 0.7% out of million of indexed results/pages seems believable at least to me.

[blackpixel]

Google just announced about Panda Refresh on twitter

"Panda refresh is rolling out—expect some flux over the next few days. Fewer than 0.7% of queries noticeably affected"

edit: upps, i see its already posted.

[edited by: blackpixel at 3:00 pm (utc) on Sep 18, 2012]

[blackpixel]

Panda again, can't wait to see Penguin refresh.
However, I don't see any changes in a few niches I monitor.

[edited by: blackpixel at 3:03 pm (utc) on Sep 18, 2012]

[backdraft7]

This just in...Panda refresh has started...but don't worry, only 0.7% of queries affected. (followed by maniacal laughter)
[twitter.com...]

[edited by: tedster at 8:12 pm (utc) on Sep 18, 2012]
[edit reason] make link clickable [/edit]

[ohno]

Why don't they roll this crap out over a weekend? That would minimise the financial loss surely. Well & truly killed it again for us. 4 hours of nothingness so far. Well done again Google. FFS. Very annoying as a site that was dead had come back to life late last week.

[SevenCubed]

Why don't they roll this crap out over a weekend? That would minimise the financial loss surely.

That's a very good point. Or even on a Friday morning because by Friday most people are present at work in body but not intention so that would allow 3 days for a webmaster to consider how the change has affected them.

[SnowMan68]

that would allow 3 days for a webmaster to consider how the change has affected them.

They don't give a rip about us. We are all spammers!

[netmeg]

Because nobody ever rolls out anything new on a Friday, in case nobody is around to fix it when it breaks (when it breaks from their standpoint, that is)

[gehrlekrona]

I used to think Pandas were cute. Now I want them extinct! What is even worse is that neither yahoo nor bing is sending traffic.....
I don't know how many members WebmasterWorld has but only a few posts about loosing traffic. Are all other not affected?

[SevenCubed]

Because nobody ever rolls out anything new on a Friday, in case nobody is around to fix it when it breaks

Employees that hold critical positions that manage important areas within a company such as network access control or their commerce doorway via the internet are always around 24/7/365 and ready to react to something adverse. I am referring to the people who tend to interact with those websites.

[Panthro]

We had a big traffic day again yesterday on one of our sites (this always happens on a Panda run). Most of the traffic came later in the day, but that's the recent trend for a lot of our sites.

We'll see how it goes today.

[netmeg]

Right, but Google hasn't had that history.

It did sound like there would be fluctuations over some number of days. So it may not have hit everywhere it's meant to yet.

[Sand]

Does Google usually wait until after the rollout has completed before they make their announcements?

I'm curious, because my traffic up until 9:00 this morning sucked. They made the announcement at 9:00. Since then, it's been pretty good.

Watching real time analytics, my day today can be summed up as a series of:

Yay!

Crap.

Yay!

Crap.

[crobb305]

6 or 7 sites that I monitor will gradually float from around page 15 up to page 4 or 5, then drop again. This happens over the period of several days or perhaps a week. Yesterday, one of those sites had made it to page 3; now today it's gone, but I know it will be back based on observing this pattern for 2 or 3 weeks now. I think this may help to explain the rolling pattern some of us see in the stats. I just don't understand why it's happening, unless pages 4+ are a testbed or if we are seeing an iterative process leading up to some update.

[netmeg]

Does Google usually wait until after the rollout has completed before they make their announcements?

Sure seems like it, but they never say that. There was a lot of flux over the end of last week into the weekend. Then it calmed down. Then they announced.

[claaarky]

UK Panda hit site - sales from Google stopped DEAD at 5pm on Monday (up to that point Google traffic was our top converter), but traffic remained about the same for a Monday. Today (now 5:30pm in the UK) we've had a normal level of traffic from Google again but no sales from that traffic at all today (including Adwords). That's 24 hours without a sale from Google - I've NEVER seen that before, not even during a Panda refresh period.

Ironically we've had some ranking improvements in the short tail. Hopefully that will turn into long tail improvements over the coming days, but I'm not holding my breath. Just be glad when the Google traffic starts converting again.....everything else is normal.

[aster88]

UK site recovered last week for first time in 11 months, then today dropped down again today! Aaagh

[ohno]

UK site recovered last week for first time in 11 months, then today dropped down again today! Aaagh

It's almost like when an update is processing we get the good old Google back for a few hours/days. Then once the update is complete (?) it's "normal" service.

[klark0]

Panda seems early this month. Making room for a big Penguin landing next week?

[zeus]

A question does any of your Panda sites also have there frontpage blasted to the end, so around page 80 for a main keyword.

[backdraft7]

@claaarky - Myself and others are seeing that exact phenomenon. Traffic stays pretty much the same level, but quality turns on and off like a switch. We've determined it's probably not related to your Adwords Ad finding it's way to a highly relevant & popular site...since some experiencing this do not use Adwords.

It's something cyclic and as far as we can tell, random.
Yesterday I had four distinct ON traffic periods, with multiple sales within under 15 minutes of each other, followed by many hours of zip. Never used to run that way, it was always a nice "natural" pattern.

Today my "lucky" number has yet to come up. It always did until about the 5th of this month.
Now "zero" sales days are becoming more frequent.

Besides serving up more drivel than gold, the algo seems to have become very restrictive to the natural flow of traffic.

[edited by: backdraft7 at 7:25 pm (utc) on Sep 18, 2012]

[wingslevel]

i think a lot of the swings that we see on these refreshes are due to mechanics. they must have to segment the data before they can process it, so the new stuff comes in layers. i figure the big time keywords come first until finally those obscure longtails get hashed through.

who knows what kind of stuff gets served up in the interim, but, whatever it is, my google referrals don't like it - todays traffic is converting at less than half of benchmark rate.

notwithstanding whether or not we agree google is taking us and their users down a good path right now, you would at least figure, with their tremendous resources, that they ought to be able to implement a refresh by now without having to serve up so much crud.

[claaarky]

@backdraft7, yeh I've seen on/off periods for years and watched the discussions here about that but never experienced such a long off period before.

Interestingly, shortly after posting, the google sales (organic and paid) started rolling in which makes this a 24 hour OFF phase. Hope I don't see too many more of those!

[wingslevel]

@claaarky - yep, us to - 20 minutes ago started a high converting wave of google traffic

cheers...