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]

[gehrlekrona]

@ohno, seems like they DO have that button but then the Algiers kicks in again..... Just a proof that they manipulate anything.

[alhutch]

I am noticing that our ranking are good but our traffic is down the panda update must of affected some long tail traffic on our site. also conversions down and noticing bad traffic by email questions we get. we are ecommerce

[backdraft7]

@alhutch - what percentage of your daily organic traffic is from mobile devices? You may be surprised!

[ErnestHemingway]

I have cracked this beloved Panda/Penguin update.

Buy expired domains, turn them into topics of your choice (ones that earn good cash through adsense or leads) build some more links (buy links on networks) and within 2 weeks you rank #1.

I thought this exploit was fixed, it was a blatant spam and people were selling such domains on seo forums. Give me a break Google.

I can write a code to fix this exploit. How come billion dollar company like Google with PhD geeks can't fix this?

[rango]

What scares sh*t out of me is that it's all done while driving.

And this is why Google is working on self-driving cars. More time that people can spend on the internet clicking on ads ;)

[Splugged]

Ahahahah...

Today, huge amount of hits from G.
3 (three)...

Oh, I checked some queries about my niche from different datacenters.
Extremely high quality sites on top, of course...

<h1>"This dress is red. Enjoy".</h1>
<p> Red dress is good </p>

Meta desc: "Red dress is red"

Ahahahahah...

[Martin Ice Web]

@splugged,

yes someone at the plex must have played with the knob again. Itīs now pre bacon update serps again and domain spamming is active again.

[ohno]

OT for this thread but are any of you guys still seeing foreign traffic? This used to be a sign of an update IMO. We've seen foreign junk for weeks now, daily updating now the norm?

[Jez123]

I hardly got any UK traffic until yeseterday evening ohno. Even then I didn't get much. It's like Google is showing my site in different time zones (but not mine) irrelevant of where it's supposed to be targeted for.

[chrisv1963]

Since the last update I'm getting more non-US traffic, higher bounce rates and less income. Conclusion: Google messed things up again and is sending me the wrong visitors.

[ohno]

Yey, higher bounce rates here too. The highest I've ever seen on one site in 10 years!

[Splugged]

Mmmmmm... nice.
Messed results, no content sites, scraped/copycats sites. All on top.

Well, If I were a boss of G, I would do only one thing ... "M.C, you're FIRED!".

Obviously, G is perfect as it is.
We are wrong... poor little and insignificant webmasters.

"All is done right"... look at my finger and repeat: "All is done right"...

[themistral]

Ohno,

Since the beginning of August our long tail dropped massively - I looked into it, and the SERPS were messed up with american and australian sites (we are UK). We are in a heavily regulated (by UK law) niche, and foreign sites are of no use to UK searchers.

However, we did get a boost to our short tail at the same time. But the loss of long tail traffic has hurt us massively. Long tail is down by 75%.

We are not however seeing foreign traffic, so I would suggest you are the equivalent of the american and australian sites I am seeing - Google have screwed up on location targeting.

I sent a feedback report to them about the poor results about a week ago...nada.

How long until Google do something about this...?

[Jez123]

It just gets worse and worse. In removing so much of my link profile, de optimising my site, changing URL's and link structure to try and get out of Penguin (all to absolutely no avail) my rankings for Bing have just about totally gone now too. This is my death sentence. I am just waiting for the tax man to drop the blade on the back of my neck now.

[Jez123]

How long until Google do something about this...?

When they stop making money out of it?

[Shaddows]

Here's a thought. What if G was "training" their filters instead of assigning them a value.

Take Geo-location. Instead of using Server IP, ccTLD, potentially whois and WMT settings- what if they just let "the world" tell them which locations responded well to a site, and which ones don't.

There used to be a frequent complaint that G was Geo-targetting sites that were intended to be global. I don't hear that very often now.

This is just thinking out loud, I have no evidence and it just occured to me.

******
@ohno
FWIW, we're one of the sites who normally see untargetted traffic presaging a big algo update. However, we're seeing excellent traffic quality at the moment.

[scottsonline]

Update related to the old company/industry I was in. They took a beating on the 18th. No paid text ads ever. The companies that lept over them, when I did some research just now are all frequent text link buyers.

Maybe they conned a lot of you into delinking your sites because that's what they could actually use as a trigger? I talked to another friend who pre-emptively removed industry site links and all it did was destroy his bing rankings while doing nothing to help or hurt google.

Within 18-24 months organic SERPS will be like the phone book - meaningless for transactional searches
. It'll all be paid placement.

The results I see are confused right now but the most prolific link buyers seem to be rocking.

[ohno]

An interesting thought shaddows but one that would mean they are "ignoring" what a webmaster tells them. eg If a .com domain that is infact a UK site is set to geo target the UK.

[chrisv1963]

How long until Google do something about this...?

Hopefully not too long. I just checked Bing. Squeeky clean results in my niche! Compared to this Google is a huge mess with scrapers, spammers, pinterest crap, ... on the first page of the serps. If Bing can keep the crap out, why can't Google do it?

The results I see are confused right now but the most prolific link buyers seem to be rocking.

I'm seeing the same thing in my niche. Link buyers are back on the first page since the last update. Some were gone for months.

[tedster]

What if G was "training" their filters instead of assigning them a value.

I've had the same suspicion for a while now. If it is true, the machine-learning does seem to be going pretty slow in the mid to long tail queries.

[bsand715]

chrisv1963 I just checked Bing and can second clean results in my niches also. The sites that are leading google serps in my niches since pen/pan started are nowhere to be found in Bing.
I use to think Bing just mirrored google but I'm changing.

[gehrlekrona]

I think Google are working with a future goal to dominate the local market and is testing different things masking it ad pan/pen updates.
With visitors using mobile devices is sometimes more than 50% then they need to try to profit from that. They have been using/is using the IP address but we all know that it doesn't really work. Now we have GPS. And they need to match up our GPS location so they can serve the right ads, not pages. Some of us don't have GPS on to save battery and that's when they send zombies....
Just a thought..:.. someone probably have more knowledge about this....

[ohno]

I'm seeing referrals from page 2, 3 & even as far back as 5 now for one domain. Annoyingly they are from users that are signed in so the search terms are blocked :(

[Jez123]

Since the beginning of August our long tail dropped massively - I looked into it, and the SERPS were messed up with american and australian sites (we are UK). We are in a heavily regulated (by UK law) niche, and foreign sites are of no use to UK searchers.

Pretty much all of my long tail searches have gone. I am wondering if it's not a Penguin trait. If just your long tails are gone perhaps you have escpaed Penguin lightly. If longtail and main SERPs are suffering, perhaps the full force of P.

I'm just wondering aloud as I see some of my competitors still showing for the long tails I used to. But also, I see loads of ebay, youtube and USA .coms in the UK results

[crobb305]

Buy expired domains, turn them into topics of your choice (ones that earn good cash through adsense or leads) build some more links (buy links on networks) and within 2 weeks you rank #1.

The number 1 site in my niche, across many, many competitive phrases, is a brand new domain registered about 2 months ago, with thousands of foreign backlinks. Until today, Google was even showing a fake 5 star review. The sad part is, there is no trust history for sites like that. Google eliminated many of the established domains. Consumer beware.

[ohno]

Google was even showing a fake 5 star review

Was that showing up in the acual SERP's next to the domain?

[crobb305]

Was that showing up in the acual SERP's next to the domain?

Yes. But as of a few hours ago, those stars are gone. Again, the domain is only about 2 months old, so I have been shocked at this result. Still ranking #1 though.

[ohno]

Those stars have been sdhifting in & out of the SERP's for our niche. Sadly G seem to ignore their own Checkout/Wallet reviews (which show as a star rating in Product Search) in favour of third party reviews.

[diberry]

The mentions of post-Penguin changes killing Bing rankings has me wondering if some of what we've been told about how to recover is FUD disinformation designed to get us to kill our sites in Bing rather than help them in Google.

[ohno]

It just gets worse and worse. In removing so much of my link profile, de optimising my site, changing URL's and link structure to try and get out of Penguin (all to absolutely no avail) my rankings for Bing have just about totally gone now too. This is my death sentence. I am just waiting for the tax man to drop the blade on the back of my neck now.

One reason I've sat tight since May Day. My site is for users not Google. Google send most of the traffic but I sure as aint playing their games in the hope things improve. Far too volatile to tell if any changes you make have any impact either positive or negative.