Google Updates and SERP Changes - November 2012

Shepherd, we see the same. Got a big hit -30% since Sunday.
But the german serps are "waste of time" to search something.

This is happening for us just this morning here in the U.S., Big movements for us but it must just be us or we would be hearing more reports.

search holding pretty steady for me. Down 14% yesterday but that can be attributed to the news cycle running out for an article, down 6% today which is pretty typical of a Friday. Total traffic up today 15% due to an article that has little search value but great niche appeal and being shared on social networks.

My week has also been down fairly significantly as compared to the week before. This is likely my doing, as I changed 75% of all the title tags on the site last Friday. Yeah, it was a drastic move, but it needed to be done to reflect new content sections added to the pages. Yesterday was down ~35% week over week. There could also be some seasonality at play, as interest shifts towards shopping and away from the information I'm providing.

I hope that's the cause anyway, and not some stealth Panda refresh or something of the like. From my box, I don't see any significant ranking fluctuations, but who knows how closely what I see resembles what anyone else sees.

From Nov 12th and continuing today ..i have 28-33% bump in search traffic. The site was hit by both panda/penguin.

Just checked my rankings again today. Still down from last week but long traffic to my site is up.

In checking rankings today I have seen a lot of movement and some searches even gone missing from the results. It looks to me like a penguin update occurred. I blog about this as it happens on my site <snip> the most recent post is from today and not so great because i am still in a dissarray as to what happened. Until there is a confirmation of sorts i will not be able to update this. The older posts are in full though from all all months prior to november.

November has been a slow but tricky month with random updates occurring and i am suprised to see not much chatter about todays occurrences

[edited by: incrediBILL at 6:28 am (utc) on Nov 17, 2012]
[edit reason] No links to personal sites please [/edit]

klark0, does your traffic convert, are the users going through your site or do they bounce back immediately?

Bounce rate is steady at 50%, traffic converts fine. Never was a believer of the whole 'google can control what kind of traffic it sends' thing.

traffic converts fine.

What is your web site about? what do you sell?

What is your web site about? what do you sell?

I have 5 websites; 2 very large content sites that do adsense & cpm; 2 are amazon affiliates, 1 sells its own products in addition to having a large library of content that brings alot of traffic (or used to). It was the one hit by Penguin in May and by Panda recently. I think I have both issues sorted, I'm just waiting for refreshes to roll by so I can see recovery. (hopefully).

My stat counter program has a thing they call "Search Engine Wars". For the last month or more Google has lost that war with a big margin. I'd never thought I'd see both Yahoo and Bing win that war.
My site seems to go between page one and page 99 (-950 or whatever the penalty is).
I THINK my problem is that I have had the site "forever" and there has been changes over the years with removing old pages. Google seems to still use these pages because they keep popping up in the "error report" in WMT. I don't know which is the best tactic. Should I just delete the old pages? If I do that, will Google punish me for breaking som links?
I have said many time that you get served a certain amount of pages a day and it seems like I have settled around 500 a day (which used to be 5,000!) a day. Funny how "glad" you can get when it goes over 500.... :( Very seldom do I get any hits to my inner pages from Google even though they might be a better fit for the queries AND I don't have any of the keywords on the main page.... Weird...

Finished the day with search down 16% but traffic up 38% due to the earlier mentioned article that had niche appeal. For the first time, Facebook traffic exceeded Google traffic. 454 uniques from FB, 303 from Google. Will end up with 1600-1700 uniques for the day.

My traffic up by 70%, bounce rate got better after changing the site structure. Time on site also got increased.. happy novermber!

Anyone else seeing some big movements within the last 6 hours?

I jumped a page up but it reverts back sometimes. It started happening yesterday afternoon. I assumed it was just me.

I see this jumping too. For like a few hours page 1 then reverts to page 3 and may be there for days. It is like there are multiple sets of results. That might be the reason say they think there is a switch they turn on and off. Just depends on what set of search results they are serving up.

Personally I am getting frustrated at how slow Google is updating information. If they are going to ding us on backlinks, lack of nofollows, and all the stuff in WMT like short titles and robot.txt then they need to be indexing faster or not count it. Google today is surviving on their history (what they provide in the past) and not their current results. They don't seem to get that their little tweaks are killing traffic for many good companies and for the end user. If I were Bing I would spend millions on an ad blitz here in the next few weeks. That could cripple Google because right now Google is not providing quality results.

I don't know what's going on, but since around 6 or 7pm yesterday (fri) we took another 25-30% nosedive... maybe I should just stop trying to make the site better. =/

@peego, I totally agree. Trying to make the site better just makes it worse. At least that is my experience. It might make it better in the long run for BOTH GOOG and visitors but it takes forever for GOOG to "redefine" your site now. If you, like me, look in WMT and try to fix the GOOG errors in there, then you are screwed because you don't know which way to go. "If I fix this this way, GOOG might not like it. It's better for the user but who knows"
Personally I think GOOG has lost it. Rumors (maybe that is anther new thread, or maybe even an old one?) has it that they are involved with NSA so who knows what is going on. Maybe they own the "Kill Switch"? Sure as H*** looks like it.

Peego, we witnessed the same thing and the same exact time... Probably a penguin update. Would have thought more people would have said something if it was tho.

not sure what it is, when I look in analytics, comparing to same time last week, it's showing goog/bing/yahoo all down by roughly the same amount (20-30%). So I don't know what to make of it... thanksgiving isn't until next weekend, so... I don't know what's going on.

google traffic is at it's usual rate for Saturday but NO conversions from google. Adwords is converting, but organic has brought us nothing very odd for us. based on the last few days of sales i would have expected at least 6 or more conversions by now, but nothing. very odd behavior for us.

Traffic is down by 25-30% i don't know what is this, but it looks terrible for us...

Also my website was picked up by this odd website. Basically is has a list of 6 keywords, when you click on one it takes you to google search but only shows 4 listings and some Adwords. The 4 listings it shows arnt even the first 4 listings normally.

Anyways this website isn't even indexed or anything. It would be awesome if someone could take a look at thing and tell me how they are referring over 200 visitors a day to my website.

google traffic is at it's usual rate for Saturday but NO conversions from google. Adwords is converting, but organic has brought us nothing very odd for us.google traffic is at it's usual rate for Saturday but NO conversions from google. Adwords is converting, but organic has brought us nothing very odd for us.

Yep, same thing here, the only sales we get now are from paid ads.

Organic = worthless junk

Yes, I am not seeing a huge drop in traffic, but conversions have almost disappeared over the last week or so.

I have been holding on, lost 80%+ of a good income in the last few months and things just keep slipping from bad to worse. I am actually having to contemplate another line of work for the first time in a long time... Depressing to say the least.

I had an uptick in traffic in September and have been holding steady since. But there have been no conversions from unique visitors. Conversions are only from our returning visitors. It's really odd.

We are an ecommerce site targeting North America.

Conversions are only from our returning visitors.

Maybe the result of personalized search results now predominating?

@robert76 that is a really good point actually!

Maybe the result of personalized search results now predominating?

Returning customers comes directly to our site, not through a google search though.