Google Updates and SERP Changes - May 2013

[getcooking]

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

Sunday traffic sucked, Monday was the best Monday in months, now today traffic sucks again. I'm talking a difference of 25K pageviews a day.

What I don't get is that our keyword rankings have been quite stable. How can that be? I mean, ok, so maybe every keyword that I don't track suddenly tanked... but that doesn't seem likely. Are those DDOS attacks on Wordpress sites still going on? (my site isn't Wordpress nor have I noticed any access issues but I know webhosts and ISPs were experiencing bog downs). I just can't figure these fluctuations out. I'm seeing very unstable traffic patterns lately.

[edited by: tedster at 12:41 pm (utc) on May 1, 2013]

[Martin Ice Web]

Make great pages!

As i read we have webmasters saying amazon is a great place and webmasters saying amazon is a horrible UE.
I myself donīt like amazon from a user view. I see to many things that have nothing to do with the item. Site structure is a great mess. I need about 20 seconds to find information on a amazon site.
What i am on to, is, even a realy bad site can be succesful. It seems not UE is the point to keep poeple on page but advertising, pretend to be the cheapest and a easy checkout maybe the first place to put the eyes on.

Although i think amazon is a place where to buy only one item, buying a second item is going to be very expensive because of the shipping cost that are normaly integrated in item price.

Thoughts?

[ColourOfSpring]

Make great pages!

As i read we have webmasters saying amazon is a great place and webmasters saying amazon is a horrible UE.
I myself donïŋ―t like amazon from a user view. I see to many things that have nothing to do with the item. Site structure is a great mess. I need about 20 seconds to find information on a amazon site.
What i am on to, is, even a realy bad site can be succesful. It seems not UE is the point to keep poeple on page but advertising, pretend to be the cheapest and a easy checkout maybe the first place to put the eyes on.

Although i think amazon is a place where to buy only one item, buying a second item is going to be very expensive because of the shipping cost that are normaly integrated in item price.

Thoughts?

Agree 100%. Both Amazon and eBay are the MySpace's of the e-commerce world in terms of layout and user experience (particularly eBay is a mess).

[SEchecker]

@Martin Ice Web

How are your stats looking since penguin 2.0(4) release?

Our site (IP german as yours) tanked badly and I dont see a reason why...

[Martin Ice Web]

@SEchecker, from 22. we saw better results. We have two sites both are doing better, but conversions are still way down. Whereas i donīt know if itīs because others are demoted or we have been pushed up?
I like that many MFAA ( made for amazon affiliates ) took a hard hit. Brands are up. Amazon has sufferd a little in my niche ( not for the high volume widgets but for the niche widgets ).

But keywords are rotating like a fair carousel. Also there seems to be more than one dataset?
Many of our 301s have made it with this penguin into the serps( before that, the old urls have been in index for over 2 month and have been shown in WMT as duplicate ). I think this was due to a total rebuild and computing power.

Page one from serps are 60% ok maybe clear but from 11-.... it is a great mix from messy to scrapped or unrelated pages. seems like google does not care about position 11 and greater.

Non ecom related searches have suffered again. I see forum articles from 2003 on #1 with very low content.

I canīt believe that this was only penguin, i guess that the little panda went in its shaddow.


BUT, who can u see my IP?

ecom, germany

[petehall]

I canīt believe that this was only penguin, i guess that the little panda went in its shaddow.

Couldn't agree more. Only one of the many sites I manage lost positions (sitewide) after Penguin... this had known Panda issues and I expected it to fall. They definitely threw a curve ball to confuse.

[Awarn]

I periodically see a different set of search results (only in Chrome though) and they seem much more accurate. It is strange because I see it and then after a while it goes back to the other set. I have seen this the past few days.

[Mac_Guy]

I am scratching my head here ...for over 5 to 7 weeks my visitors on my website has dropped 50% same goes for the conversion! BUT I do better on search results with key words from page 2 to page 1 but still half the visitors and half the sales that I used to get... Can anyone tell me what could be the reason for this?

[tedster]

Mac_Guy, are you doing better on the same keywords, but still getting lower traffic and conversions? I ask because traffic from different keywords can have wildly different conversion rates.

You may also get some insights from WMT if you drill down into the CTR for each keyword and then check the report on how MANY different ranking positions your keyword gets returned for, often from page 1 to page 3.

----------

Here's a request from your moderator squad. Please let's hold a bit stronger to the topic of the thread, the Updates. Some of the discussion here (yes, I've been involved, too) goes way off into various directions. That makes the thread a lot less useful going forward.

[Martin Ice Web]

Mac_Guy,

i see the same - beginning at 10.april. It slowly moved up. But I think itīs missleade traffic as the bounce for this keys are way up. Some keys are related, i can see users fetch 5-6 pages in a row and finally buying.
I push this behavior to a reorganization of a part of my site. I think it will googlebot to take time to get the right intention of the new pages, even their are 301īs by the old once.

Has anyone of an ecom site ever considered that google uses data from google shopping? I mean we deliver data for free to connect this with our widget pages.
E.g.
-widget not in stock
-IBAN Number ( so google knows about the widget and can compare many sites with this widget )
-Manufacture

[Jez123]

My traffic seems to be a bit up on last week after P 2.0 hit. It was down over the weekend but probably due to it being a holiday weekend but yesterday was higher than it's been for a while. Is anyone else seeing any improvements to Penguin sites after last week or am I deluding myself?

[rossell123]

My traffic had been down massively a week prior to Pengiun 2.0 but has increased back to its usual level. The strange thing is the majority of the traffic is coming through on completely different and random keywords and my ranking are still off the pace where they dropped to when Penguin 2.0 hit.

[thms]

@Jez123

I'm seeing some movement today, about 15% higher than usual but it's still morning here

[Ahsan Mushtaq]

After hitting penguin update my website’s keywords dropped from the first page to 2 and after 2 days it was back but today my site is disappeared on my main keywords, I have checked my site index but only site disappeared against keywords, ..… Anyone here know what’s going on and how much time takes two things on normal position ?

[SerpsGuy]

I saw one of my keywords drop off from page 1 num 2 all the way to page 4 number 5. Just one keyword though, and its moving between page 3 and 4 now. I was also attacked with negative seo by a competitor so that could have played a role. Ill post back with an update tonight.

[diberry]

Is anyone else seeing any improvements to Penguin sites after last week or am I deluding myself?

I'm seeing a definite small improvement, probably in the 10-15% range.

[Jez123]

I'm seeing a bit more than that. Glad to hear it for you diberry (and for me of course). But why?

[Rasputin]

Seeing a small improvement here as well (down 15-20% instead of 25-30%) but harder than usual to follow stats when uk and us both had public holidays this weekend.
Also seems unlikely they would have run an update straight after a public holiday.

[diberry]

I'm seeing a bit more than that. Glad to hear it for you diberry (and for me of course). But why?

Either we did something right, or our competitors screwed up worse, I guess, LOL. Or Google tweaked the Penguin parameters for round 2, and we benefited from that.

All I did was improve my content and work on boosting social media, which really responded to the improved content and brought me some new backlinks.

[HuskyPup]

Is anyone else seeing any improvements to Penguin sites after last week or am I deluding myself?

I'm seeing it on one specific specialist .co.uk I have, more than 50% up in the last couple of days, must check the UK SERPs.

[Jez123]

All I did was improve my content and work on boosting social media, which really responded to the improved content and brought me some new backlinks.

Same here. What SM did you concentrate on diberry?

I'm seeing it on one specific specialist .co.uk I have, more than 50% up in the last couple of days, must check the UK SERPs.

Mine is up around that sort of area too. I can't see any drastic SERP improvements so I am at a loss to explain why.

It's worth noting that revenue has not increased as of yet however!

[gouri]

Have you guys seen the following in the SERP?

I did a search for big widgets and looked at a few pages in the SERP? I then went back and saw sites in the SERP that I did not see when I was going forward.

You might be thinking that this is because of different data centers, but I have seen this on different days, so I am wondering if this means something? It may not be about different data centers.

Is this supposed to mean something about the sites that you see when you go back?

[frankleeceo]

I see this quite often. Search for a term, visit a couple sites to see if they offer what I am looking for, then did the search maybe 30 minutes later with completely new SERP. Maybe 5 out of 10 results are sites that I did not see before.

The worst one time is that I searched for a way to code something, saw a decent tutorial with a sample code. But since I didn't bookmark it and cleared my history. I simply cannot find it again on Google after wanting to look for it again a couple days later.

I even went out to like top 50 results.

I begin to believe that my own "actions" on those sites that I go, can affect my subsequent search SERP later.

[diberry]

What SM did you concentrate on diberry?

For this site, Pinterest is gold. Tons of repins, plus various new inbounds from sites that obviously look on Pinterest for pages to link out to. (I also think Google may actually measure the Pinterest inbounds, so when Pinterest works for your site, it has additional benefits beyond its own traffic.)

[rossell123]

A lot of the websites that are on page one for highly competitive terms like "nike trainers" or "Sunglasses" are fake,replica or 301s websites. A lot of people are going to be trusting Google to provide them with high quality genuine websites, especially on the first few pages. This has remained the same since the update.

I tried posting this on Matt Cutt's blog but surprisingly he didn't respond and the message was never approved. I am talking in reference to Google UK

[steve40]

@Rossell I do not think just in UK my wife was looking for a specific pair of Boots to buy herself ( US ) and in 3rd result of Google was a store selling them for about 35% discount luckily just before she completed her purchase she told me she was going to purchase.

Being me if something seems to good to be true it normally is not true so I did some checking

I looked and did some research because they only took Paypal lo and behold the site was first registered 11 days earlier, and it appears they create a new site every month , from a little more digging they not only sell boots but many other stores using same template selling all kinds of stuff from Boots to Jewelry

It is fine G asking Webmasters to report this stuff but the reality is by the time IF they get round to doing anything hundreds of poor suckers will have been shafted

[getcooking]

Anyone else seeing a huge dip in traffic today? I was actually rather optimistic about our traffic this week - until I started watching our stats today. We're down about 15% as of right now. Ugh. What's crazy is one of our big traffic keywords is ranking the highest it's been since Panda. We dropped to page 2 for another big (bigger) keyword but that shouldn't yield this low traffic (we occasionally bounce between pages 1 and 2 for that keyword but I don't see this kind of dip).

I'm really hoping it's just a lag in our stats being reported and not another Google "tweak".

[Sophronisba]

Our traffic was up on Tuesday, flat on Wednesday, down just a bit yesterday and down horribly today. However, our numbers didn't go up at all for a good forty-five minutes or so, so I have some hope that there's lag.

[Jez123]

Our traffic was up on Tuesday, flat on Wednesday, down just a bit yesterday and down horribly today. However, our numbers didn't go up at all for a good forty-five minutes or so, so I have some hope that there's lag.

Mine was up Tues, up more Weds down Thurs and horrible today. My traffic is always flatter as the week goes on so I don't know. I have a feeling that that was it. 2 days of better traffic and that was it

[niwtsol]

I am seeing a massive downtick across my sites today. At 4am PST it tanked almost 50% across a variety of sites. Can anyone confirm the time of drop they see?

I also can confirm we had some big big keywords that are pretty much gone from page 1-3. We have been down pretty heavy for the last two weeks and then MTW we were up Th we were flat (w/w) but today it dropped off the cliff.

I am looking at below video from Cutts as a possible explanation, we used to have multiple results for some keywords and now all of those results have been pushed way back on pages. Thoughts?

[youtube.com...]

[SnowMan68]

It looks like our G Analaytics are lagging today. We have a chat program that tracks real time unique numbers and GA is usually +/- 10 uniques and right now it's behind about 1 hour or so.