Google Updates and SERP Changes - April 2013

[sunny_kat]

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

I am seeing a lot of ranking drop. Lot of keywords ranking between 10-50 have disappeared from Google top 100.

Is anyone else also noticing changes?

[edited by: tedster at 11:54 am (utc) on Apr 1, 2013]

[Str82u]

I was wondering if everyone was just holding their breath. Today started sluggish but looks to be normal. If the past is a guide, tomorrow being Wednesday should be like a Tuesday and away from holiday influence.

[SnowMan68]

Yesterday felt like it was Friday for us. Slowest Monday in quite some time. Like Str8u said, picked up today close to normal. Hopefully tomorrow is back to the usual mix week traffic.

[eljefe3]

I'm in a highly spammed niche and a lot of new sites just popped in. Looking at their backlinks profile, they recently bought a ton of rss feed links and they're raking in the cash.

This way is easier and more discete (no photo, real or fake) than the g+ formula above, but does cost a bit more,

[Martin Ice Web]

Is Panda now engaged with main algo? What is your opinion?
Do we see monthly updates or is it now a continuous flow of low/unrelated serch results?

[Ahsan Mushtaq]

< moved from another location >

The traffic of my website (local business directory) is decreased from 1st April and reach zero last day but all the main keywords where I get maximum traffic every month is still on their positions. I don't know what's going on?

[edited by: tedster at 11:09 am (utc) on Apr 3, 2013]

[Str82u]

@Ahsan Mushtaq - Just since April 1st? It's not time to freak out yet. Read from here [webmasterworld.com...] to the end of last month's thread about SERPs then catch up to here... That help?

Is Panda now engaged with main algo?

By now it should have been. If they did it "correctly" and had pre-tested beforehand, like I think they did back in the middle of February, no one should notice any bumps in the road, just a little confusion.

I'm hoping it will become more like the old days, make a mistake and you'll feel it within a week.

[zoltan]

I am seeing a big decrease in googlebot crawling starting from 3 April around 4-5:00 AM GMT. I see this over a network of sites not just one site. Googlebot crawling is at 10-20% of previous crawlings. Anyone else seeing something similar?

[JesterMagic]

I'm hoping it will become more like the old days, make a mistake and you'll feel it within a week.

I hope so but I have my doubts. I have a feeling Panada now slowly moves through the serps by sections updating as it goes instead of updating all at once.

[iosifg]

IS hard to be white hat regarding Google guidelines. Are a lot of niches very competitive, where all buy Links. Anyway, I hope to see interesting thinks in SERP next days.

[backdraft7]

Seeing another odd pattern of no traffic, yet huge influx of spam. Not sure why these two would be related, but I've seen his pattern repeat many times. Had a great day yesterday between 10 am and 5pm, but another total shut down after 5. Then the usual 12:28am and 12:30am sales (two minutes apart), one at 3am, one at 6am, but now that everyone in the world is awake...a big fat goose egg (11:30am CST). 1 to 4 visitors max at any one time. Could the manipulation be any more obvious?

[edited by: backdraft7 at 5:11 pm (utc) on Apr 3, 2013]

[zoltan]

< moved from another location >


I am seeing a big decrease in googlebot crawling starting from 3 April around 4-5:00 AM GMT. I see this over a network of sites not just one site. Googlebot crawling is at 10-20% of previous crawlings. I am talking about millions of pages crawled every day so far.
Anyone else seeing something similar?
.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 4:43 pm (utc) on Apr 3, 2013]

[JesterMagic]

@zoltan - Actually so am I. Yesterday was normal but today we are sitting at about 25% of what it should be.

[zoltan]

@JesterMagic, when did this start happening for you?

[JesterMagic]

Just after 7am EST this morning. I usually get hit about once a minute by a Google bot. After 7 it became once every 5-10 minutes.

Visitor traffic is not down and every now and then Google bot has a slow day so I am not to worried ... yet

[JesterMagic]

@zoltan - Let me know when google bot starts to crawl your sites normally again. I will do the same.

On a related note when I was checking what googlebot was crawling I did find an issue with my site where googlebot was crawling page numbers that did not exist for a topic. I am not sure how googlebot found these since our site would not generate them but I was able to fix it and have a 404 returned.

[zoltan]

For me, Googlebot access started to increase again, however it is still under 25-30% it was before. But a good sign is that it is increasing.

[JesterMagic]

It looks like things have started to return to normal for me as well sometime this morning.

[SnowMan68]

It looks like things have started to return to normal for me as well sometime this morning.

Traffic or googlebot indexing your site?

[JesterMagic]

Googlebot indexing the site is back to normal. Traffic hasn't really changed in the last few days.

[backdraft7]

Anyone who says the keywords meta tag is dead is flat wrong. As I was doing some key phrase checks today, I see my favorite-photo-spam-site-to-hate is audaciously using keyword to great success. The term I searched for produced their site as the #1 result, but the resulting page contained ZERO occurrences of ANY content for that term. However, the term is the first entry in their meta keywords tag (15 keywords total).
Another #1 result on Google that is a clean miss. No improvements on my position, traffic or conversions. Not even PPC is producing traffic.

[tedster]

Wow - it looks like the keyword tag is back in serious play? Now that is something and it's worth a closer look by lots of webmasters.

@backdraft, was the specific keyword relatively uncommon?

[taberstruths]

A quick dumb question but one I have always wondered about. I have always assumed that the proper way to enter keywords into the tag is "blue widgets" "specifications about blue widgets" "operating blue widgets" ect. Is this correct or should it be "blue" "widgets" "specifications" "operating"?

[gouri]

The term I searched for produced their site as the #1 result, but the resulting page contained ZERO occurrences of ANY content for that term.

I read what you wrote about ZERO occurrences of any content for that term, but I just wanted to ask, do they use related terms in the content?

[Str82u]

@backdraft - Look at the page you saw and see if that phrase can be put together from words that are <4-5 words apart. I've been itching to tell people that for 2 years but it falls in the bigfoot category. Specifying keywords that were not on page worked if relevant but seemed to decrease the non-specified KW traffic signifigantly.

@tedster - the keywords I'd tested were common to the niche

@taberstruths - I've always used phrases, not words, unless the page was specifially about "blue" and nothing else.

EDIT: more quick research - A few states have a lot of public schools on spring break until the 5th of April so next week should show normal "potential" levels back out on the internet.

EDIT !: @backdraft - when you say zero "0", do you mean they use meta-keyword "round red widget" but the words "round" "red" and "widget" do not occur on the page at all seperately? That would negate my previous mention, the terms I tested did have teh words on page, just not together.

[backdraft7]

@ tedster - yes it was relatively uncommon as a whole, but as str82u says, common to the niche. The key phrase is covered in considerable depth on my site, which of course ranked well below.

Str82u - when I searched for this phrase (four individual words), and I'm being pretty specific in my search, their page did not contain a single mention of the phrase or anything remotely related, except for photos and even the photos did not contain any representation of the term. What I did find is their monkey generated user comments...all one or two words, and those were somewhat related. Either way, I found nothing useful, but that's par for the course. I'm going to go ahead and add keywords back to my pages, so if G decides to ignore them today, but use them tomorrow, I'm all set. The speed of my site's decline increased dramatically when I removed most of my keywords. One of my competitors never touched his keywords...used the same one on every page and outranks me with very thin pages, presumably because of his keywords. Look at Wordpress and the available SEO plugins, they all implement the meta keywords tag and they all seem to rank well.

[Str82u]

OH MY, you mean you weren't using keywords at all? Yikes, I don't care what google says, they'd have to dump our sites in the toilet to prove keywords have no value. That's aside from the fact that other search engines can send healthy traffic too and ARE manipulated by or need the keyword suggestions.

The rule I've followed was G's guideline I think, "if the phrase doesn't occur on page, adding it in the meta-keywords is spammy" ~paraphrased

On the other hand.... you said 15?

[JesterMagic]

I never removed my keywords since you never know if Google would change there mind again about them affecting rank. I also tend to use phrases for keywords instead of breaking up the phrase into multiple keywords.

I have seen related terms popup before like "best" can be interchanged with "popular". This should be interesting to see what others find.

[petehall]

Wow - it looks like the keyword tag is back in serious play? Now that is something and it's worth a closer look by lots of webmasters.

@backdraft, was the specific keyword relatively uncommon?

Are you sure it's the keywords tag and not anchor text?

I see a site with no meta tags, a 3 word title tag, no content, no pages, and very few links at the top of page 2 for a highly competitive term.

The words aren't on the page or anywhere in the code, but the backlink anchor text appears to be over 50% of the small volume of links they do have.

There's no content at all and I do mean no content... been there a while now!

[diberry]

Just a thought: also check the file names of any photos on the pages. Since Google recommends that they be named descriptively, like "green-poodle-with-fluffy-tail.jpg", there's always a chance the algo is picking up on image names to determine keyphrases.

[flatfile]

Gotta agree with petehall. A page on a former site of mine once ranked high for an irrelevant phrase, I later found a backlink with the same anchor text as the ranking phrase.