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]

[peego]

ok phew... so it's not just me lol... perhaps something going on with analytics then cuz everything looks fairly normal from statcounter.

[gehrlekrona]

@peego, as much as I like Statcounter and have used it for years, it is not as useful as it used to be when GOOG and who else(?) is hiding keywords. For now I guess I am only interested in hits, no matter if they come from a search engine or not. It seems really hard to track visitors nowadays so I am not blaming Statcounter, just saying that it's hard. I also use Piwik and it doesn't have the same stats as statcounter.
For the Serps I don't know what to say that hasn't already been said. You think that you recover a little bit (like this wekend) but then today they b****slap you again for some odd reason and you can never figure it out It's like balancing act and I am just tired of it and moving away towards better odds of making some kind of money Internet business is overrrated now and who knows who does what anymore with Kill Switches and such....

[Tearabite]

I am seeing the same drop in Analytics, Adsense impressions, Kontera impressions, and in Webmater Tools for search impressions, all starting Nov 16/17 ..
..If anyone wants to borrow my wobbly stool and rope, let me know..

[peego]

Tearabite, I'm refering to just the past 2 hours or so, where I'm seeing a big drop only in analytics stats, but not in statcounter's stats. (it's 5PM here PST).

[menntarra 34]

@peego
I experienced the same, (only just in the last few hours)
analytics is showing false data, i'm monitoring the actual active visitors and it is showing 1/3 of usual visitors, however statcounter traffic is showing it as usual. I also found some google forums lately where people were complaining about this.

[viral]

I am seeing a site that has not had any traffic for at least 2 years go nuts today. More traffic then it ever has and in the job niche. I have not add content for those 2 years and I have done no link building. Anyway I am not going to get too excited mozcat saying 90 degrees I dont think I have seen it that high before.

[Martin Ice Web]

Again a big hit this night, -60% ! This is the biggest drop ever. After gaining a lot of traffic ( up to 70% of prepanda) this is now the worst traffic we have ever seen.

[raymondcc]

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

None.

I only have 2 adsense blocks in a post. One at the middle and another at the bottom, both below the fold. I don't run any other ads network other than adsense.

[makin]

Hi people,

I have some interesting data for you:

I have a network of 200 websites with enough traffic to make an study. Some of them starts dropping since friday (20-30%) and other ones starts winning traffic (20-30%).

It's funny, because some websites with same template, win positions and others down.. so, seems thats not affect SEO on page. Because two identical websites with different content, one ups and the other one drop.

I don't have duplicated content. I'm not doing black hat seo. I have never been penalized in any update.

And there is only ONE THING IN COMMON in all websites that have win and lost traffic. All websites ups or down positions in the secondary search engines. I mean, my websites are European and I lost / won traffic in America. European traffic for my websites are stable.

Sorry for my english ;)

[Martin Ice Web]

Have to revert my post, there was some blockage in server queue. We are up about 40% but lots of foreign traffic.

[SEchecker]

@ Martin

is it converting? or just + 40% junk (like by us)

[Martin Ice Web]

@Sechecker, bounce rate is very low, visiotrs are visiting more than 2-3 pages. Conversions are stable but has not gone up that 40%.
What I see is, that there seems only 2 or 3 niches on our ecom sites got pushed up.

[SEchecker]

@ Martin

we got a punch of new keywords assigned, all related all fine... still our bounce from G terrible! no other referrals have such a bad bounce rate... it looks like G took the nr. 1 spot in bouncing and is responsible for a overall bounce of 60%. Looking deeper to all other referral its about 10% bounce. duno what i should think on that... all the G visits just making the bounce worse and worse.. but we can see 50% of the search strings and all are 3 - 5 words and 100% related... why some1 would visit us and close in 1 sec? and all this from G only ... something going on :-) looking forward to get impressions on the punch of new keywords tho... overall we got a push in traffic, conversations and sale, yet it should be double compared to the unique´s we get per day from G ....

I m quite sure all this is penguin related, i see many old keywords coming back to top positions. Keywords where we was penalized (anchor based) now they recovered ..

I conclude rather the disavow tool worked and/or there was a penguin update and the big flux we all see is the flux Matt Cutts promised to going to happen few month ago...

[MHes]

Makin -

European traffic for my websites are stable.

We are only UK and now have a 25% loss of traffic compared to last week.

I think there is still movement in the serps, today may be important for us.

It has been a few years since I have really studied SEO and Google. I can remember that there was always a lot of confusion because some sectors or countries got hit at different times by changes Google made. It seems to me, that unless the sector and country is the same or very similar, observations can be misleading, untill the dust has completely settled and the update is uniform.

[jaysh4922]

Let me start this by saying that you should NEVER pay money for links, especially do-follow links; Google can spot those pretty quickly these days, and you'll do yourself far more harm than good.

[Jez123]

I'm not seeing any changes. Still badly penguin affected. Someone mentioned about the possibilities of penalising for false facebook likes. Any thoughts on that?

[Martin Ice Web]

Sechecker, 12.30pm, that was it?! Something changed again the nice traffic stream suddenly stopped. Do u see the same?

[SEchecker]

yes... all droped

another ON periode was in the night (CET) (few hours) and from morning CET till now ... OFF

talking here form the "extra" traffic tho ...

[ethought]

I am seeing a site that has not had any traffic for at least 2 years go nuts today. More traffic then it ever has and in the job niche. I have not add content for those 2 years and I have done no link building. Anyway I am not going to get too excited mozcat saying 90 degrees I dont think I have seen it that high before.

I have been noticing this as well, but for a month or so not just today. Some of my old affiliate sites are suddenly getting traffic and sales after laying dormant for a year or two. No updates, no new links, just bang - new traffic and sales. In fact I pointed it out to my partner just the other day, that we are noticeably all of a sudden getting sales on sites that have not had a sale in years.

Also, I have seen quite a few other sites revert / come alive to levels of traffic that they had in about January / February of this year. Almost like Googles index went back to its state 11 or so months ago.

[SEchecker]

@ethought
maybe they realized penguin produced more damage than it helped:-) so lets load the back-up and hide in dark... finaly rofl

[klark0]

I'm thinking Google has rolled back something. That's probably why they're tight lipped with Barry. They don't want us to know that they undid one of their previous updates ?

[SEchecker]

as far I can see, some of the keywords what did came back are more than 6 month old ... maybe they just adjusted or rolled back (parts) of the penguin algo?

I personally think they did nuke a lot of spammers down, but guys from 100.000 Webmasters what need to make a living out of their work, 90% did participate in SEO (there was just no other way to rank, you needed to compete with the spammers)... on the other hand even brands needed it. It was just called different (we got nuked cuz we did hire so called online marketers for products (what did we know in that time?) now the mess is that all the content G relies on, to have the searchers and advertisers happy (long term), is nowhere...

We do advertise, and stopped with most of ads as it just became too expensive and the click quality of lower budget keywords is jut insane, it seems all Asia has financial crises and using bots or other tricky scripts so on...

G shows crap results on related search terms and every1 clicks the ad what is showing up... but how many of the clickers are buyers?

The adwords pocket is empty G, rather pay for printed magazines where I know some1 really reads it cuz he is interested in!

[SnowMan68]

I dont think they have rolled anything back. I think they continue to push out more updates. Check out serpmetrics, the flux has spiked to the highest point it's been in months.

[Martin Ice Web]

@klar0 and ethought, where are u located?

[ethought]

@Martin Ice Web

Australia

[Jez123]

I am seeing nothing whatsoever in UK. Anyone else in UK that is seeing anything?

[Martin Ice Web]

ethough, i try to figure out a scheme with the ups and downs.
So did you notice a sudden decrease of traffic 3 hours ago? Or did u see a sudden decrease anyway?

MIW+: I see converions on a almost dead website, too. Its an affiliate with descriptions from manufacturer. The sudden drop 3 hours ago did only affected my real content site, the affiliate feels happy about google arganic traffic. This is very annoying.

[IanTurner]

I saw big change over the weekend here in the UK, traffic remained strong both Monday and Yesterday.

[ethought]

@Martin Ice Web

I was reporting on general traffic over the last couple of weeks over a lot of affiliate sites. I never look at stats by the hour, recently traffic on my sites is often very erratic from one day to the next let alone by the hour. Also we use awstats and a custom system - no analytics etc. So not sure if there has been a drop in traffic 3 hours ago, sorry.

[Splugged]

I'm noticing a "return" for some pre-penguin keywords but traffic is always low and non-converting.