Google Updates and SERP Changes - Jun 2013

[epmaniac]

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

[edited by: tedster at 3:52 am (utc) on Jun 2, 2013]

[chalkywhite]

@ serpsguy, I got smacked on the 5th to the tune of about 30% per day. Panda was my friend in earlier updates so I dont think it was that, I think it was affiliate related, I had many links on articles that where not no follow. They are now.

Additionally I had a plugin inject spammy links to all pages, this also may of been the cause. THis is now also resolved.

So im left with either the standard affiliate link issue or google update the algo to penalize spammy outgoing links. We will see.

[HuskyPup]

They should be blaming whoever signed off their business plan.

And every business plan is perfect ... yeah, right.

Show me a business that has never experienced a failure and I can guarantee you a not very adventurous business!

[drale]

An example of poor results in SERP:

- type free woodworking plans on google images. A large number of stolen images (fc2 and 3owl domains) redirect to only one website (owner is spammer).

The same situation is for a bunch of keywords:
- furniture plans
- kids toy plans
- garden furniture plans
- scroll saw patterns, and many others.

[Simsi]

And every business plan is perfect ... yeah, right.

Of course not LOL. But it will identify areas of risk and having your business depending on one source of traffic is an obvious one. If my business fails, for whatever reason, it's my fault, no-one else's.

[petehall]

@mhansen

We were effected on June 9th with roughly 40% drop in Google referrals. We have lost no rankings in our highest volume referral phrases, however the longtail and obscure phrases are simply no longer delivering traffic, as if people stopped searching for them.

Did search suggest queries change at all? This could explain a fall in traffic despite rankings being similar.

[Wilburforce]

Did search suggest queries change at all?

From where I am looking this is one area that has definitely been revamped recently. Does anyone have anything more exact on the subject? It might deserve its own thread.

[mhansen]

@petehall -

Did search suggest queries change at all? This could explain a fall in traffic despite rankings being similar.

Yes. Search suggest was one of the early things we noticed changing. In our particular market, the suggested phrases are completely shifted.

Additionally, we are seeing very thin but well-branded answers-type sites with one sentence Q&A around similar topics, in the top 5 serps.

[gadget26]

They should be blaming whoever signed off their business plan.

@Simsi: You're right. When I started my business 21 years ago, I should have foreseen that the worlds largest (by far) search engine would suddenly decide to not fairly list honest businesses and that the public wouldn't care or switch to another search engine that did. Stupid of me.

Imagine if the old Yellow Pages had decided to not give free listings to certain businesses based on some whim of their own. (If you're not old enough; all businesses were listed, you had to pay to have an ad, bold listing, larger listing, etc.)

[Jez123]

To those of you experiencing slow drops in rank recently, I can assure you they are temporary. I keep a close eye on all my competition, their backlinks, what ranks they hold daily, etc...

Because of this I noticed one of my competitors (if you can call him that after I dropped out of the results on the 5th) rebranded, new domain name and logo etc... He 301'ed his old links and site ofcourse, and it took about two days. For the last two days I see him ranking with his old domain - showing there has been a rollback to a couple weeks in the past.

I am confident about this, but would like you guys who had a traffic drop confirm- was your rank recently increased after a recent drop? If it is, and if you keep rank records, check your historical rank. My data shows the rankings are from June 10th.

Can anyone else confirm a rollback? My traffic has dropped way back. It's like no one is searching for anything, anywhere. Tuesdays are quite a busy day for me for some reason too, usually.

[garyr_h]

I can't confirm a rollback whatsoever. My traffic dropped around 50% from Google since yesterday afternoon and took another deep dip around 3 hours ago.

[gyppo]

Seeing a massive spike in Googlebot Crawls over the last 24 hours, anyone else seeing the same? Biggest spike I've seen since 20th April.

[dl.dropbox.com...]

[DigiSEO]

I initially showed massive drops in traffic this afternoon, but I now believe it is just significantly delayed reporting in Google Analytics showing for all of my sites.

[Sophronisba]

I certainly hope it's delayed reporting, because our traffic has been down dramatically since about 1:00 this afternoon.

[MikeHalo]

Not sure if it's delayed reporting or what... But no gains here. I've made some content changes but I am not really hopeful.

I also changed up the parameter settings in WMT and loosened my robots.txt -- Not changes I am expecting to help, but I guess you never know...

Not sure if the analytic's thing is delayed reporting or another drop. If it's a drop, it happened about 6 hours prior to this post.

[Sophronisba]

I feel like it must be lag because our real-time stats are doing quite well. It's the total reported traffic that looks extremely low.

[scottsonline]

@simsi you act as though the days of cold calling on the telephone, knocking on doors and attending meet and greets are the way the world operates now.

It doesn't. The Internet and google have changed that forever. There is a responsibility there to prevent the equivalent of the yellow pages missing half the pages or Ma Bell having the phones not work for a few days every time they installed a new switching station.

I realize googles job is tough but they make money at a terrifying rate. These 2 or 4 day bumps are increasing and weaken a lot of good businesses that did nothing wrong. If the phone company didn't work for a few days or cable tv and electricity went out at the rate of these google glitches people would be furious.

Google does a remarkable job. It is just frustrating to see the war on spam being won by the biggest spammers while so many people just running legitimate businesses get buried. The only ones I see winning lately are the most abusive spammers.

Equating the expectation of reasonable stability in google with a defective business plan would be like blaming Sam Walton for failing if when his first store opened the town closed all the roads leading to it for a year for "upgrades." Better yet if the post office stopped delivering mail randomly in the old days or the phone company misrouted phone calls for a few days a month.

These dances really hurt a lot of businesses and they occur so often now the pain is increasing.

[HuskyPup]

@simsi you act as though the days of cold calling on the telephone, knocking on doors and attending meet and greets are the way the world operates now.

It doesn't.

@scottsonline

I have some news for you, the business world IS going back to this and I have just experienced it in Germany at a huge widget trade fair, it surprised me big time.

Real-world companies buying real-world products have lost faith, literally do not believe, the results they are being given. They are crap, period.

In the 90s I was advocating the imminent "new" world order of information, since the intorduction of the P'animals nothing could be further from the truth.

The majority of businesses in the world, mostly SMEs, WANT to know who they're dealing with, BS websites do not cut it, period. I now have new customers who had seen our sites for YEARS but never, for whatever reason, requested prices, four days in Germany and I've taken multi-million Dollars worths of confirmed orders ...

Believe all the button pushers you want to, people want to see the whites of ones eyes:-)

[scottsonline]

@husky online sales are booming. There is no putting that genie back in the bottle.

Google wins in all cases. Good results put everyone else out of business. Now they can sit back and push all of their properties. Results get worse businesses spend more on ads.

If I were google I'd churn new sites to the top consistently. Give them a taste and then hook them with CPC as you turn down the organic knob.

If you have 100, 500m businesses in a niche and 99.9% have under 100 domains pointing in but 1 or 2 have 10k I don't need to be a mathematician to realize that's suspect. But in our niche those two dominate.

Someone on another thread said post in forums, build g+, aren't those considered black hat now? I thought the only good link was a no follow from a reputable source with no back links to it when it's clean marked as an advertorial only, doesn't use any type of link text aside of "website" that the person on the other end disavows.

You can be penalized for brand building. One must not speak of brand building, one must not speak of building authority. These are the rules of the google fight club where the only good link is an Adwords link!

Google is winning. They aren't losing significant share and are monetizing every channel. People aren't going back to buying offline.

[rango]

Looking at a 50% traffic drop in total traffic, since ~7PM GMT.

The percentages for traffic sources are unchanged. Direct, referrals, search all have drops. And real time stats look pretty normal. So it must be delayed reporting.

[taberstruths]

I am seeing a traffic drop as well since 4pm ET and 1pm PT. Not sure what it is or if it is permanent. I have seen this before at the begin of a new update only to recover shortly.

[garyr_h]

It was an Analytics issue. However, there was still a change that happened Monday afternoon which I am still seeing. Fairly major and involved many long-tail keywords.

[Martin Ice Web]

Another 50% drop from what has left till yesterday. That is now 25% left from pre-panda/penguin.
Serps itself look quiet spammy like normal.

[MikeHalo]

Seeing 10-15% drop here. Pretty much all of our Google traffic is gone. Direct only now.

[Jez123]

Seeing some really crap traffic today. All foreign.

[martaay]

can report a significant traffic drop from 11am till 3pm yesterday (against previous weeks Tuesday traffic) followed by gain of up to 30% per hour from 3pm yest until 8am this morning, strangest thing I've seen in a while

[HuskyPup]

@husky online sales are booming. There is no putting that genie back in the bottle.

I did not say online sales were not booming, I'll rephrase it ... Many, both small and large B2B companies, no longer trust the results they see therefore are returning to the tried and trusted methods of face-to-face exhibitions, visiting potential suppliers or factories.

Our factory in southern India has had more new customer visitors so far in 2013 than in the whole of 2011 and 2012 combined. Undoubtedly, in part, this has to be an increase in business confidence and new projects in many economies, however it is notable that visitors are inspecting many more factories than they used to do.

Online sales for relatively lightweight, postable, couriered, branded products, even own brands, are doing well and if one is in the unfortunate position of competing against many other drop-shippers, good luck, however the real meaty, weighty side of factory production, for many, online sales simply do not exist, sales information and specifications, of course, but the actual sales of multi million Dollar machinery without inspection and extended discussions, well, in my industry that certainly does not happen.

I mention this because so many here are focussed on B2C and they forget that B2B is where the future of all new products is. Of course the problem for many is that they cannot "do" B2B since they have no in-depth knowledge/training/apprenticeship of any chosen subject so end up competing head-to-head with many other B2C sites and then try to gain advantages over their competitors by whatever means possible ... spam, hacking, whatever crap.

This entire B2B area is one that Google clearly does not understand nor comprehend, sure they can put Chinese directory sites at #1 to #10 in the SERPs, however for many businesses in many niche areas this is totally and utterly a waste of time and the reason why I am seeing a definite increase in trade fairs and visitors to them.

[ColourOfSpring]

GREAT post HuskyPup. B2B is about building great relationships, because often B2B is about offering continual services / products, not one-off sales. B2C is usually a lot more mechanical and impersonal - it's search + buy, end of story (by and large). A business looking for another business (B2B) will often seek word of mouth recommendation because that means so much more than a high ranking position in Google. If there are businesses who still don't realise that now, they will do later. Why? Because it's all about trust, as in - REAL TRUST, not "trust signals a website gives". A website is just a brochure at the end of the day - it can talk a fine talk, but most businesses want to know how well your business WALKS. Google are obsessed about the talk (content, content, content), Google's SEARCHERS (Google's CUSTOMERS) care about the WALK. Sorry to put it in such simple terms, but that's how it is for B2B. Can you deliver? A great word of mouth recommendation shows you can. A face-to-face demo with a potential client shows you can. Also, face-to-face networking at conferences and exhibitions means a lot more than a high ranking position in Google. Sure, a high ranking site can introduce you to new business, but in B2B, there are many ways to find new business.

[robster124]

Seeing some shifting on some UK serps I watch. These serps have been fairly static recently - seems something going on at the very least.

[rj87uk]

As Mr Cutts has said they will be rolling the updates out over the full month so we should expect movement every two weeks I would guess. I've definitely seen movement yesterday/today (UK) doesn't look too bad but they still have a lot of their own local places which push the real organic results below the fold.

What everyone should do is nothing, just work on your own website and forget about the results for a month or two as your websites will more than likely be up and down like a Yo-Yo until they stabilise the results.

[rlopes]

When should the results be somewhat stable again?