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]

[mhansen]

Much more likely is that user intent changes for the holiday season.

We have access to several tightly focused sites, all under the umbrella of a common broader informational niche market targeting US visitors. ALL of the sites started losing Google referrals around 10-11pm eastern time on Weds before Thanksgiving. Slow to dead all day yesterday, then around 11am ET this morning (Friday morning) the Google referrals came alive again.

Traffic from Other than Google engines was slow, as we expected for the holiday, but Google traffic in particular was almost gone, much lower than other engines, which never happens. Almost like they swapped to a "transactional" set of results in the parent niche market, where all queries brought up transactional results versus informational.

[backdraft7]

The organic serps are sure to get diluted by PPC ads as Black Friday Merchants jack up their bids. It's would be fine if that was the only upset today, but the little guys in the organics are taking a beating too. Max of 5 people on the site at any one time, it's usually 20 this time of year.

[MHes]

I hope this may be of interest...........

UK based site started in 2003. Very quiet site in competitive niche until it was worked on 15 months ago. It went from 100 pages and 300 uniques per day to 1.5 million pages and 11000 uniques per day over the last year. All traffic from google organic.

Never shown any problems with any updates etc etc until friday. Now dropped 25%.

The site is very simple. Content is pulled in everyday, from 2 advertisers. These ads make up 90% of each page, but the ads also appear on many other sites. If you click an ad, they all point to one of two sites!

So the problem is that around 20 million links out point to two sites. The other major problem is content is duplicated all over the web.

And I have never been hit until now........

[viral]

@rustybrick was just saying that serpmetrics or searchmetrics (not sure which one) responded to your post ;) and yeah I know you asked the question and gave us the answer and thanks for that.

[sunnyujjawal]

What's the need of another Panda.. something is still rolling out..day by day killing traffic for my sites.

[petehall]

The results I saw on Thursday appear to have reverted back.

Panda update fail?

[gehrlekrona]

I am not sure what I am seeing but I have had an upswing starting yesterday. I thought maybe it was GOOG but it doesn't look like it. Traffic went up 75% (if I know my math!) and it seem to continue so far today (knock on wood!). I checked both Statcounter and piwik and it looks like that is just more traffic so maybe they just have caught up with the small changes I have done as they suggested in Bing Webmaster central. Who knows so I'll take what I can for as long as it lasts. No more changes in a while since if it is what I think then I made the changes several weeks ago.

[SEchecker]

@ gehrlekrona

"Traffic went up 75%"

Is the + traffic converting? How is the bounce on it?

[gehrlekrona]

@SEChecker, I don't have any "converting traffic" really. Bounce rate is lower and they seem to stay longer/view more pages. Landing pages seem more accurate so instead of showing the home page for a "green widget in city state" they actually show (?) the right page. GOOG hasn't caught up yet and I doubt they will I thought they did a little bit the other day but i don't see that now. GOOG is still just 25% of my traffic and has been for months.

[Splugged]

G traffic is down by 50% this weekend...

Really, I'm giving up. I don't know what to do.
I have tried EVERYTHING.

-Deoptimized site
-At today, no "rich keywords" backlinks
-Improved site usability
-Improved navigation
-Added new, good written articles (500-1000 words)
-Added more infos about products
-My site was reviewed by a lot of niche-related forum/anaysts. Rated A/A+
-And counting...

I give up. I don't know what G want.

But, and this is a fact, I see a lot of crap in G pages #1, #2 and #3.

No other words...

...

[Splugged]

Update: incredible... I don't want to trust my eyes.

In my niche, for the most competitive keyword (about 790k searches per month), I see only on page 1 (one) in spots #1,#2,#4,#8 and #10...

...THE SAME EXACT SITE, same logo, same text, same owner. Only domain is changing, in this manner:

#1 xxxxxxxx.co.uk
#2 xxxxxxxx4.co.uk
#4 xxxxxxxx2.co.uk
#8 xxxxxxxx5.co.uk
#10 xxxxxxxxx3.co.uk

xxxxxxxx = primary domain name.

Incredible...

[SEchecker]

@splugged

Product related Websites:

Well to me it looks and this is what all our stats showing, that you can have the INFO searcher for FREE if you want the buyers: YOU MUST PAY (Adwords, Merchant Centre so on).

In the last years G collected, analysed and categorized searchers. They know very well WHO BUYS, Intent TO BUY or just look for info.

Look for info would be G SEARCH and the other 2 goes to G SHOPPING or related services and partners!

As it looks to me, most of us survive trough converting INFO SEEKERS to buyers. But the rate is terrible!

Please some1 convince me I’m wrong and proof it plz!

[spreporter]

"1.5 million pages and 11000 uniques per day " blimey me! I got those unique per day on a 2000 pages site! wonder if I had 1,5 million pages on that site and if I wasn't such a lazy git......LOL

[petehall]

"New" results are back now (UK). Still no official word though?...

[TypicalSurfer]

In the last years G collected, analysed and categorized searchers. They know very well WHO BUYS, Intent TO BUY or just look for info.

Look for info would be G SEARCH and the other 2 goes to G SHOPPING or related services and partners!

As it looks to me, most of us survive trough converting INFO SEEKERS to buyers. But the rate is terrible!

Please some1 convince me I’m wrong and proof it plz!

They are doing just that SEchecker. You aren't going crazy.

This from their earnings conference call, the speaker describes exactly what you are observing.

And we believe being able to do product listing ads gets us closer to intent because if somebody types a Nikon D800 then we know they are looking to buy or looking to get more information about a specific product and the fact that we can show them reviews pictures and pricing information gets us closer to action. And we believe in the medium term that’s going to create more monetization and a better monetization for us as opposed to having just 10 blue links of ads we’d send them to other websites.

[seekingalpha.com...]

[Tearabite]

My traffic has creeped back up to "normal" after the Nov 17 cliff, but not at the near record high it was at for the last month or so prior to that.

I have been operating on the 'above the fold penalty' theory and made changes to put more content and less ads above the fold.. of course CTR and overall earnings are down, but traffic is back so I'm happy.. i s'pose..

[zeus]

has this domain stuffing got worse or did they just say they have adjusted it back, but did not. It really gets on my nerves and I can not see the benefit in the serps.

[xcoder]

of course CTR and overall earnings are down, but traffic is back

That's because it is mostly bogus (probably prefetch) traffic that Google would like you to believe is real.... welcome to the growing club.

Your "real" traffic is shopping/interacting elsewhere on Googl's partner sites.

[Bewenched]

< moved from another location >

Google has been crawling our site like CRAZY the last couple of days... at a rate of double what it has been in the last year.

Anyone else seeing this... should we be bracing for a new update?
.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 7:21 am (utc) on Nov 26, 2012]

[Jez123]

My UK targeted site is once gain getting more .com and .au referrals than .co.uk Does it mean anything that my rankings are usually better in those regions than my UK SERPs? My site is affected by Penguin.

[makin]

I lost 20% of my traffic since 17th and haven't come back yet. That's all.

[MHes]

spreporter - 3 short pages of code = 1.5 million pages generated. If I hadn't been lazy and done 2000 pages of code..... ;)

An observation may be that out of the 1.5 million pages, only about 1000 get 50% of the traffic and the rest get visited perhaps once every couple of months, if at all. This has not appeared to have been a problem for Google BUT around now and at Christmas my sector goes quiet, meaning that there is less content from advertisers and by default more repetition throughout the site. This could be a problem which has arisen recently, causing the drop in traffic/rankings.

I'm also interested in the mobile phone side of things. My site is not very mobile friendly and yet 19% of visitors are on smartphones. They manage to use the site ok but it isn't very user friendly. If Google spots a site which is not mobile friendly, then I understand that searches done on a mobile won't rank the site very high.... is this true? I can see no evidence but I think it is a logical theory.

[MHes]

Jez123 - Is your site a .co.uk? If not, is it hosted in the UK (actual location of server)?

[Jez123]

@ MHes it's a .net but hosted in UK and WMT targeted to UK.

[Jez123]

Now I have a search in my stats, Large Blue Widgets that is top 10 on .com and not anywhere that I can find on co.uk. Though on checking other phrases that I used to rank for on .com I am not there. So just certain phrases pop up in com that are nowhere near on .co.uk. Anyone else seeing anything like this?

[menntarra 34]

Today, i sense another big hit... traffic is just way low :(

[SEchecker]

@menntarra

Today is Cyber Monday, why you think you should get traffic to YOUR Website?

Traffic is reserved to other G properties (Not Knowledge Search)! :-)

[menntarra 34]

My site is NOT a shopping site, this website is "informational", so i assume i should not be affected. By the way yesterday was quite good, today is just horrible.

[SEchecker]

@menntarra 34

same here, traffic down 50% by INFO sites compared to yesterday ....

Whats your target location?

Still, today is cyber monday and I see steady traffic on product websites and down traffic on info websites...

now you conclude or believe its accidental, or something other going on :-)

Who knows what’s going on anyway...me not any more:-)

[menntarra 34]

Oh yeah, maybe you're right, they might have the shopping sites ahead of info sites for this day, that might be a reason...
My main traffic location is USA(30%),UK(10%),Germany(10%), but mainly english speaking countries.

My 17th traffic hit:
[i.imgur.com...]
As you can see i was hit hard on the 17th , and slowly i climbed back a little, now it is even worse today(obviously it can't be seen on the graph yet)...
I really don't understand why they keep that BIG update a secret...