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]

Oh man..... this day is the worst day in a LONG time. Google seems almost like they have taken vacation. Everything looks fine in the results but nobody clicks(?) or what is going on? Never had this minimal visitors from Google and right now they are not even half of the traffic anymore.

[backdraft7]

I have to agree - very strange. We could almost merge the Zombie traffic topic and this moth's results into one homogenous issue - Google traffic no longer converts. It's there, but it's not converting.
A move to 22% mobile traffic does not account for a complete shut down, and that's what we had today.

In September 2011, the site ranked on 12,321 key phrases, with 44k uniques for the month.
This year September ranks on 6821 phrases with around 34k uniques. That long tail was like gold!

[xcoder]

A move to 22% mobile traffic does not account for a complete shut down, and that's what we had today.

Yep... it is dead quiet alright. As if most of the world is on vacation and no one wants to buy anything online anymore (NOT!).

Was busy shutting down most of my adwords channels this morning... no cigar there either.

I have never seen it so bad...

[ohno]

Yep... it is dead quiet alright. As if most of the world is on vacation and no one wants to buy anything online anymore (NOT!).

I've been pondering this very thought for some time now. I really think it is volatile Google filtering down. Many a time we have put off a large stock order because the sales have switched off over night. How many others are in the same boat? Then think that the people buying from you have stopped buying because their sales have dried up.....

We also seem to have Gbot opening carts more frequently now (along with users from the USA, Italy & India!), twice on one site yesterday & once on another.

[Martin Ice Web]

My heavy pandalized site that never gained much traffic before the animals went crazy has now more traffic than my low pandalized site.
I see heavy domain spamming for my site ( 4 in row ). My by robots restricted PDFs are now in serps and ranking near by #10.
This must be a glitch and once again. I thought it canīt get worse but this is like they never ever had somehting to do with search.

[ohno]

Is anyone else seeing LOADS & I mean LOADS of foreign visitors? Australia & USA being most prominent (& Belgium showing up a fair few times too!).

[Wilburforce]

Is anyone else seeing LOADS & I mean LOADS of foreign visitors?

I'm still getting google.de showing up in my own cookies for no apparent reason.

Overall spread on my own (UK) site is not out of the ordinary, however.

[Jez123]

I am ohno. Well, not loads as I am not getting loads from anywhere but more than normal. .au being very prominent

[Jez123]

Well, after the excitement of something seemingly happening yesterday I am seeing no change whatsoever today in my sites SERPs. Anyone seeing improvements or drops?

[Martin Ice Web]

@Jez, yes -50%. Traffic that we gained with the latest panda is gone, gone baby, gone. Domain spamming is back again.
I see one or two of my competitors that are doing heavily linkexchange, doorways and redirects are back. Seems like black hat seo is on the move to the first search site.

[ohno]

I thought yesterday was quiet, today is DEAD.

[Martin Ice Web]

ohno, we spurts of not converting and foreign traffic then up 10 minutes dead, then very, very low traffic.

I would like to know if a not pandalized site sees this too ( unfortunately tedster did not answer to my question yesterday )

[ohno]

OT but one that may just tie into this thread, did any ecom sites that offer Google Checkout/Wallet see a flury of activity on these sales around the 13th of September?

[aster88]

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

Recovered again 2 days ago (26th Sept)...sure it won't last!

[Jez123]

Recovered from what aster88?

[SnowMan68]

100% sure something went through overnight in the US. Anyone else see drops between 3-7 in short tail rankings?

[getcooking]

Thursday started off suspiciously slow for us (US pandalized content site) but then during the day traffic increased to the degree that it ended up being our best Thursday in months.

However, when I checked keyword rankings this morning we'd lost positions on over 85% of our keywords (one, two, and three-word phrases). I haven't seen a drop this big in positions since Panda 1 on Feb 24, 2011. I'm hoping it just has to do with the rollercoaster like activity people are reporting, but my heart definitely sank when I saw the keyword losses. We've had small but steady panda recoveries starting with Panda 3.8, I'm not sure I can go back to square one.

Traffic to the site so far today isn't dismal, but it's not looking like a great day either.

One interesting observation that seems to correlate - I'm seeing about 6800 additional backlinks to our site being reported in the past 24 hours. We don't get jumps like that unless there is some major shakeup going on.

[SnowMan68]

However, when I checked keyword rankings this morning we'd lost positions on over 85% of our keywords (one, two, and three-word phrases)

Were they big drops, or somewhat small (still big impact) around 1-7 spots?

[smithaa02]

Something going on? One of our penalized sites jumped up 17 pages this morning. Some of our neighbors (who we also used to see in the basement) jumped up too.

[SnowMan68]

@smithaa02

Penalized for what?
What page did 17 pages bring you up to?

[getcooking]

Were they big drops, or somewhat small (still big impact) around 1-7 spots?

Both actually. Some kw only lost 1 position while others completely fell off the map (and others were everywhere in between). A couple of our most stable, highest ranking kw fell between 3-5 positions and they haven't moved in years. Glad they didn't fall off the map but when they move I get really worried.

[backdraft7]

On the bright side, I just had on conversion this morning. However, the last conversion was 20 hours ago and this one was from the Netherlands. So, am I to really believe that the entire US of A is shut down? NOBODY is buying anymore, just like that? Is the economy over here so incredibly bad?
That doesn't explain the sudden "ON" periods where sales flow naturally again. Those "ON" periods are becoming more and more rare these days.

The manipulation is glaringly obvious. The serps are now so dynamic and ever changing that it's pointless to try to analyze the problem. It's that way by design.

In the mean time, Google's stock continues to skyrocket, so we know somebody is making a boat load of advertising dollars. No dividends though...go figure.

[smithaa02]

Snowman...we don't know what we were penalized for LOL... We got a major hit on 'penguin day' but also got hit on the last recent Panda update. So I think we're penalized for link building and for onsight factors...we removed a bunch of ads from our home page last week (which was the only money page affected) so maybe that helped? We also cleaned up a lot of artificial backlinks in July/August...

At any rate, we went from 25 to 8 today. But we keep track of this all the time and google is predictability unpredictable, so who knows. This is however (and we chart this) the most significant jump we've seen in a while.

Just wonder if it is an algo tweak, or our page just go specifically reevaluated.

[tigger]

Just wonder if it is an algo tweak, or our page just go specifically reevaluated.

no its just one of the many roll ups / downs that G likes to throw at us...I'm seeing sites ranking that are so spammy its a joke and I can't see G leaving this current mess in place ...although saying that its still making money from ads so why should it care

Monday we'll probably see another roll back or up

[Jez123]

Is anyone seeing any movement in the UK? I am not

[tigger]

Is anyone seeing any movement in the UK? I am not

yep seen some big changes around the terms I watch - one term the top 20 is taken by 3 sites...funny didn't Cutts say that was going to stop LOL...like we believe a thing that guy comes out with

[ohno]

The only thing I'm seeing is a big mess and a complete lack of traffic. Another joke of a day to finish the week off.

[backdraft7]

Just closing the books on the month. Lowest sales in over 5 years. For whatever reason , 2012 has not been kind. It looks like we might survive one more month and that's about it. Usually this (September) is the "upswing" for our business, but right when it looked like it might start back up, Google's poor converting traffic cycles killed it off. Definitely worse than MayDay ever was, and very persistent.
Serps are again full of junk and domain crowding from the same old sites.

The key it seems is thin content on finely tuned wordpress sites, chocked full of optimization plugins.
Ridiculous!

[ohno]

The only thing I'm seeing is a big mess and a complete lack of traffic. Another joke of a day to finish the week off.

[Sand]

I'm really not seeing many changes in my niches the last couple days. Sometimes, I really wish we could share specifics here, because I wish I could see what you guys are seeing for the sake of personal curiosity.