Google Updates and SERP Changes - November 2012

[xcoder]

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

Today has just been a miserable day.

For us this whole week has been miserable.

Traffic numbers more or less unchanged but hardly any sales, online enquiries or phone calls...(except for loads of spam emails). The only sales we did get came from paid ads.... organic visitors all seem to be dead beats.

It is like someone or something is cheery picking all the buyers and sending our way only the crap. I wounder who it is...

Off to reducing our ad spend again... the till is simply empty!

[edited by: tedster at 4:05 pm (utc) on Nov 2, 2012]

[backdraft7]

Yesterday (Sunday) and today (Monday the 19th) have showed a reduction in traffic volume. Not sure why, but I actually contacted my dedicated hosting provider to be sure nobody tripped on my cat5 connection and accidentally unplugged my server. Of course they thought I was nuts too. LOL
Looks like it's time to kick the Zombie thread again.

[diberry]

I'm seeing big gains on one site, but it's not due to any update - it's just holiday search terms coming into play. My Penguinized site is getting a slight bump up, but it did this a week or so ago and then fell. (Still, if this was the new pattern - up and down instead of just down - it would be an overall improvement.)

[sunnyujjawal]

Too much fluctuation in rankings after every 2 -3 hours going from page 3 to 8

[chalkywhite]

IT related Niche, weekend was as normal however monday and the start to today is excellent. Was hit with panda october 13th 2011. The site has 300 pages. Normally 200 of them would get hit a day, im seeing al pages hit at the moment through ALOT more keywords.

[Martin Ice Web]

The frustating thing about the whole panda/penguin is that Cutts said they want to level the playing field but yet they created another edge of ruling sites( amazon, ebay, brands ). I thought Cutts said they want to be more open or give more hints. But that was just plain blabla, i can´t see anything beeing more open.

[SEchecker]

looking to our traffic stats and sales stats: traffic is up 30% and sales increased significantly beginning with Friday and dropped today (noticed a increase of non-converting high bounced traffic from G as well over the weekend... today at around 4pm traffic and sales dropped down, and also the non-converting did :-) I noticed a G data-center switch, tho … Over all this last days were the best in last 20 days, even not sure what to think about the increased non-converting traffic … Its like for every x% of increased high bounced non-converting traffic, “real converting” traffic is added and we get xxx % more sales...... I know that doesn’t make sense but this is how it is....

If any1 would like to join the non-converting vs. converting traffic discussion:

Join here: [webmasterworld.com...]

[Martin Ice Web]

Sechecker, where are u located?

[SEchecker]

Site in question is hosted in Germany but performs global

[Martin Ice Web]

i am in germany to and we do not have 4pm, yet. ;)

[klark0]

[searchengineland.com...]

So based on the generic answer, there was an update, but they're not saying what it was :/

I'm not complaining, since Friday I'm getting traffic from more keywords. I still would like to know why though.

[SEchecker]

@ Martin

oh well im in US time as its our main market :-)

[Shepherd]

Based on how are sites were affected it appears to have been a penguin related update. Out sites/keywords were affected in the same manner and for the same keywords that they were hit for in April.

[SnowMan68]

@ shepherd

I was thinking the same thing. One of our sites that was hit by penguin saw an increase of about 20-30% over the last couple days. Our main site which hasn't been affected by Penquin also jumped about 10% in G referrals.

It just seems odd that if it were Penguin related they would keep it under wraps? I mean they have told us about the other Penguin updates in the past.

Whatever happened it seems to be a pretty big shake up. I know that not everyone believes in the Mozcast and SerpMetrics sites, but both of them are showing some big movement. Considering the SerpMetrics looks at over 100k keywords in different verticals, that would be the best to show the bigger picture.

[Shepherd]

We didn't see any real changes in traffic, only in rankings. Some of our biggest hit keywords were starting to slowly get better rankings over the last few weeks, whatever updated knocked them back into oblivion. No changes in traffic because even though the affected keywords were improving they were not to a point where we would get any traffic from them.

[backdraft7]

@klark0 - good eye and thanks for confirming the speed bump.

The Google PR robot says:

We make over 500 improvements to Google Search each year so we can surface high-quality information for our users.

That statement is getting old Matt, it also makes no sense whatsoever because we are not finding "high quality information" on the surface. Just thin garbage. Still having to go to Bing to find what I was looking for...that, Mr. Cutts, is not what anyone would consider a quality user experience.

[HuskyPup]

We make over 500 improvements to Google Search each year

Time to amend this to:

We make over 500 changes to Google Search each year ... Since we're all Jobsworths and want to retain our cushy lifestyles!

[klark0]

How is crawl rate/stats for you guys ? With such big flux being reported, you would expect alot of crawling before-hand if it were Panda ?

[MHes]

SnowMan68 and Shepherd

My site has never been directly effected by any Penquin updates. In fact, my main competitors seem to be generally unaffected as well, so our sector more or less stays the same (UK Jobs), week in, week out. BUT, Friday I was hit and took a 30% drop in google traffic. There does seem to be a slow recovery today, which may be my site recovering or competitors losing places they gained over the weekend. I expect I will have lost only 20% of normal traffic by the end of today.

The point is, this could be something totally new, which has never been a problem before.

[diberry]

Considering the SerpMetrics looks at over 100k keywords in different verticals, that would be the best to show the bigger picture.

You're right, I just looked at the free chart, and there's a noticeable upward tick in Google from Friday, maybe even starting on Thursday.

My Penguinized site is shifting keywords, but my traffic is within its usual amounts.

However, I just noticed something really odd: I searched one of my queries I track. I had it set to 100 results per page - the first 22 were from one brand site, and many weren't even very relevant, though many were. Then I switched back to 10 results and got the normal SERPs. Don't know what that means, if anything, but thought I'd report it.

[MHes]

diberry

When you set the serps to 100, all the pages in the top 100 from one site will be clumped together. That is normal behaviour. If you set it to 10, all the pages from one site in the top 10 will be clumped together. Nothing new there.

[menntarra 34]

Well i told you there was an update on Friday, but now it is more interesting, cause today i got back some traffic. In percent it is the following:
Down by 30% on Friday, Today i got about 10% back... This is getting to be really strange. Do note that my site is not a small site, which could have such different traffic volume in such little time... I'm talking here about 10000-s of visits.
Now i'm speechless.

[mhansen]

My Penguinized site is shifting keywords, but my traffic is within its usual amounts.

Ditto. Seeing a lot of various keywords coming into play, longtail again, but none of the primaries I lost in April.

Seeing changes in G* customer engines as well.

M

[Panthro]

Group of sites I monitor had a big weekend and about 20% bigger Monday than normal.

I'm seeing lots of domain crowding again, too.

[ckissi]

I'm seeing traffic loss in compare to monday.
At monday it was about +10%, now I'm seeing about -15% in compare to monday. Anybody ?

[taberstruths]

ckissi, same here but with a wider sweep. I think we have some major flux going on.

[Tearabite]

Also had a big hit for one site on Nov 16/17 - lost about 30% of traffic. Curious how many of you that were also hit had a large % of adverts vs content above the fold?

[canuckseo]

Also had a big hit for one site on Nov 16/17

My site had the same hit but the week before. on nov 16/17 it took a big jump up back to near where it was.

I did a test - reoptimized 1 page that took a big hit. It was ranking top 3 for months before Nov 9 for a term in the body of the text but not in the title or description. After nov 16/17 it never fully recovered - got has high as middle of page 2. I reoptimized the page on the 19th to include the missing phrase in the title and meta description and now it's back to where it was. Coincidence?

[taberstruths]

Curious how many of you that were also hit had a large % of adverts vs content above the fold?

only 1 468x60 ad in the header above the fold. Nothing else.

[peego]

just wondering, is anyone noticing some tracking discrepancies with Analytics for the past 2 hours or so?

For example, I have statcounter and analytics tracking on my site, and normally, the hourly stats are pretty close. But for the past 2 hours or so, my analytics is showing about 1/2 (or a bit less) of what my statcounter is showing... wondering if some stats are not updated/ not tracking or whatever from analytics?

[frankleeceo]

I see the same thing here.