Google Updates and SERP Changes - Jun 2013

[epmaniac]

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

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

[JesterMagic]

@SerpsGuy

100 uniques a day? Try 6,500 uniques a day and a 400k alexa. All traffic gone

Slightly off topic but you had 400k ranking on Alexa with that traffic? A year ago (before penguin and when I had that much traffic) I was at around 80k alexa ranking. (Not that Alexa ranking is an exact science or anything)

[Awarn]

Martin come on that is the easy part. Put in Ireland and use the Irish double dutch. Company is based in US, profits earned in Ireland. No taxes paid and you just stash the cash away.

[Savanadry]

I too am seeing more hits from Bing than google on a UK focused site. This presents me with a huge dilemma. The site still does v well on bing / yahoo but has been 'penguined' by google.

I was going to launch on a new domain but now Bing seems to be gaining traction and their referrals convert so much better (45% better conversion from bing / yahoo referrals) so I really don't want to lose that valuable traffic trying to get back into g's goodbooks (with no guarantee of success and none of the stability that Bing provides and my business needs).

I'm thinking about blocking Google from the original site and blocking Bing / Yahoo from the new site, a site for each SE, how tedious. Anyone tried this with success?

[tigger]

your really getting so much traffic from bing its worth that effort! - All my traffic is UK targeted and just about every main keyword term is ranking well on Bing and was before on G - until this week...

But I still only get 14% of my traffic from Bing, the rest G - whilst as webmasters we will see massive amounts of spam & poor results on G the lemmings still keep heading towards G

[Savanadry]

Yes I am, have you looked at your bing referrals lately? They are growing week by week for me for terms that I've held for years.

Google for me has tanked, and although I know most here won't believe me I haven't indulged in any shady practices so I'm not entirely sure how I can recover or improve, my only option is to start again for google. If I was hit by panda I would know what to do, but penguin, with this site, just leaves me scratching my head. So that is why the Bing traffic has become v valuable to us, we don't want to lose it.

[Mac_Guy]

@Savanadry: I understand your website is in the U.K?
Are surfers in the U.K. prefers Bing to G.? If you get more referrals
from Bing could people have switched to Bing internet search from Google?

Maybe average people starts to realize that their search with G don't returned
what they where looking for .. I hope that trend will cross the pound !

[tigger]

Yes I am, have you looked at your bing referrals lately? They are growing week by week for me for terms that I've held for years.

yes, the referrals are very good, but thats because I'm in the top 3 for most of my terms, problem is I'm just not getting enough of them to pay the bills so I have to jump when Cutts shouts and NO it doesn't please me..

Are surfers in the U.K. prefers Bing to G.? If you get more referrals
from Bing could people have switched to Bing internet search from Google?

Mac_Guy ...last time I looked G was used between 85-95% of all UK searches

[Savanadry]

Yes google far outweighs Bing in the UK at the moment, although that seems to be shifting partly down to the massive negative press google is getting in the UK, and partly down to the actual results being better on bing.

The dilemma I have is do I forget my bing traffic trying to chase google traffic with little chance of success? I know new sites do well in google recently, I have one myself with no SEO done at all, launched late last year which is already top 10 for some meaty competitive terms with absolutely no seo or promotional work done. It doesn't even have facebook or twitter accounts.

But cracking Bing is much harder, they prefer long established sites with a history and their SERP's are relatively stable - if they were moving towards a 50/50 position with google in the UK then I would have to go with Bing.

[edited by: Savanadry at 1:57 pm (utc) on Jun 7, 2013]

[tigger]

no dilemma really is it - you put a new site up and hope to see Bings usage increase, thats what I started doing 2 days ago, but I'm not holding my breath on Bing turning things around when the media constantly refer people to Googleit - Bing (sadly) doesn't stand a chance

[rj87uk]

I used to get almost 90%+ traffic from Google UK but since these updates I don't rank as well and the traffic is now split 60% Google, 30% Bing, 10% Yahoo!.

I have many websites in the long tail, local search market and I have found that Google is pushing their Google local / places results as the top 10 results with only around 4 organic results under that. So I have been pushed to page two for a lot of terms and the bigger brand websites occupy the only 3/4 page one organic results slots available.

[jimmy519]

I definitely took a big hit. Currently my site an alexa 312,000 but in US 63K. Was getting about 2k google hits a day and in total about 3500. Now I am getting 200 google hits and not ranking for any of the high keywords I was before. Went from Page, 1, 2, 3 to page 23.

This is terrible.

[SnowMan68]

@ jimmy519

Have you been affected by an other big updates (panda or penguin?)

[jimmy519]

@SnowMan, Yes on the 23rd I saw a change in specific keywords and took a small drop in traffic, maybe 200 google hits a day or less. But this one was big.

[SnowMan68]

Late on the 22nd they rolled out the Penguin update. I wonder if that's what affected you the first time. It looks like the sites who took further drops (this week) in my niche were originally hit by Penguin 2.0, but not as hard as I expected them to be. This recent rollout makes me wonder if they tweaked the Penguin and reran it. The sites I followed that avoid complete disaster last round got hit much harder this week.

[reseller]

I guess it is evident by now that the changes which took place on 5th June 2013 could be part of the new generation of Penguin update(s). Personally I think it was a modified Penguin 2.0 B (referring to Matt Cutts mentioned on his blog - my msg:4581694 on this thread). IMO, we shouldn't be surprised if Matt Cutts & Co. would proceed with further modified Penguin 2.0 C, Penguin 2.0 D etc..

[jimmy519]

Almost makes me just want to give up. My site actually just started making money with the targeted traffic and now back to square one.

[netmeg]

How long did it take you to build that traffic?

[jimmy519]

6 months or so of blogs posts, Link building, etc. Just when things were finally good, time to start all over again.

[netmeg]

Yep, that's how it seems to work.

[ubound]

I was hit last time by Phantom update on May 9, lost about 50 percent of traffic. Today I seem to recover though. The traffic is higher than May's average despite it's Friday and despite I had issues with my server and site was offline for at least 30 minutes, perhaps more.

[diberry]

although I know most here won't believe me I haven't indulged in any shady practices so I'm not entirely sure how I can recover or improve

You're not alone. It sounds to me like it's a waste of your time to keep trying to please Google when you can't know what they want, and Bing is doing better for you anyway.

I was hit last time by Phantom update on May 9

Phantom update? Do you know anything about this one? (I gained traffic from it, significantly, on a Penguinized/Pandalyzed site.)

[ubound]

Phantom update? Do you know anything about this one? (I gained traffic from it, significantly, on a Penguinized/Pandalyzed site.)

No nothing special. When this was happening Google said: nothing to announce now. But there was obviously something happening. Webmasters called it Phantom update. You can look up in Moz Google algorithm change calendar for more info about it.

[Martin Ice Web]

Does someone noticed that domain spamming is back?
Most results from #1-#3 are from the same domain.
I see competitors come onto page #1 with new ecom shops. Seems like ecom shops will have a short living and its time to open a new one with every update, while the old one gets hit by penguin.

[jimmy519]

After a hit like this does the traffic come back? Or do I have to start from scratch, all new posts trying to target those same keywords?

[chalkywhite]

Jimmy, yes it does but be patient. I lost 40% to Panda, it took about 15 months it came back massivly though. Like you I started to make money enough to have a fairly decent bit of pcoket money.

Like you ive been hit on may 8th and looks like yesterday. Who knows why! Keep fighting! Google now make zero from me. Adsense has gone from the site. I sell direct.

Most likely why they hate me ;)

[epmaniac]

my site also doesnt have adsense, still got hit

[turbocharged]

Does someone noticed that domain spamming is back?
Most results from #1-#3 are from the same domain.

It never really left in the industries I follow. However, I thought Google was going to limit seeing the same domains on future pages deeper within the SERPS. Funny that a cluster of the .com version of Amazon listings is followed by a cluster of UK Amazon listings on page 2 in one product I monitor. I guess multinationals get a free pass yet again.

[mike2010]

they need to stop f'n around.

yesterday and today has been horrendous.

legit rss / blog sites that update daily = completely wiped out.

[MikeHalo]

Thought I would sign up to post here.

This recent update has hit my website with a cut of over 100,000 unique visitors a day. It literally took a hit of 75-80% or so of Google traffic. All of the popular pages/keywords that ranked, are now the last result for many of those searches (As in last page, last result). I was watching Google Real Time Analytics as the "penalty" or "algorithm" shift took hold. I initially thought it was a server issue. My online visitors dropped from around 800 to 200.

I would say that this is not Penguin. I have done no link building at all. In fact, the website has less than 20-30 or so back links and they are all organic.

Some things to note:
* HTML is valid HTML5.
* Page load times are < 150ms according to WMT.
* Site has a speed ranking of 95. All things done properly, sprites, etc.
* Google crawled (and still crawls) 2-5 pages/second.
* There are no ads/links for cash/etc. (It is a 'passion' project).
* Site is a custom coded application. 15,000 lines... No WordPress blog or similar. Has frequent development.
* Has a bounce rate below 25%.
* Canonical URLs are always used if duplication is possible.
* Widespread use of nofollow/noindex on pages considered not worthy.
* Widespread use of robots.txt
* No real user generated content (where it is, it is blocked from indexing).
* 99% of pages are not even SEO URLs, they use regular extensions.
* Has an average pages per viewer above 10.
* Has two dedicated servers.
* Few thousand registered users.

So, it's probably not Penguin, but is it Panda? Panda was deemed to hit low quality websites. Now I know that it would be easy to jump to the conclusion that anyone who has been hit would consider their website "high quality" and while my site may not be perfect, I at least thought my stats reflected the time I dedicated to this ad-free for fun project. It's a highly functional website.

Still trying to work out where I have gone wrong... It is interesting to note that many of my return visitors were still doing so via Google. This is something that is disappointing with the recent update. It is possible that many of my visitors are not tech-savy, and as such, their reliance on finding my site is via Google rather than directly. This is around 5-8,000 people per day.

I won't sit here and whine that Google has ruined my income, as like I said the project is one for fun and had no ads... But it is still disheartening. The site was approaching 30 page requests a second. I guess one positive is that it will be easier to deploy development updates and maybe even scale back to a single server. Two was a little overkill anyway :)

[edited by: MikeHalo at 12:48 am (utc) on Jun 8, 2013]

[mike2010]

Mike, hopefully it's just a temporary fluctuation for both of us. I've seen this with other sites, only to soon return back to normal several days later. (keeping my fingers crossed that this is the issue...to prevent myself from goin nuts)

I've also got a ton of 'nofollow' tags on, but see no reason why that solely would be the issue.

Welcome to the crib.

btw, watcha think so far about Halo Destiny ?