Google Updates and SERP Changes - January 2014

[Panthro]

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System: The following message was cut out of thread at: http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4627107.htm [webmasterworld.com] by aakk9999 - 4:37 am on Jan 4, 2014 (gmt 0)

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I think we had a Penguin or some EMD update. I have an informational site that's been around for a while - 1 word EMD - and it's nowhere to be found.

[bilalyounas]

hello every one ,
i am doing seo i am not getting good result, I need a guideline for SEO off-page and onpage tools ,
in offpage i am doing , directories, Bookmarking, Blog Commenting, Article submission, Guest posting, Classified, blog posting, press releases , Social media like facebook twitter etc sharing , Forum posting .
Kindly let me know which thing i must do and which i must leave, according to Google Policies and what is the best tool for SEO now a days.
Thanks

[n00b1]

This isn't really the thread to discuss that, bilalyounas. But basically you're using techniques that Google considers spam and in violation of their Quality Guidelines. I'd suggest you do some background reading on 'Google Penguin', it would be a good start.

[Wilburforce]

I have just checked on a search term on which I have a highly relevant page, which according to WMT (and my search verifies) is on page 1 of SERPS but has 0% CTR.

A good explanation, I reckon, for the non-existent traffic is that in the results Google have replaced the clear and focused meta description with a quotation from the page contents that - in isolation from its context - says almost the opposite.

My page is well-placed in the results for the same term in all other engines, but only Google fails to use the meta description, which in this case really does skew the results when it comes to click-through (and skews all the assumptions they base on it). Has anyone else noticed anything similar?

[superclown2]

I've been seeing the yellow 'ad' boxes all day but only in Internet Explorer. They are not visible in Safari, FF or Chrome.

The font colours have changed in IE too, with the links in a blue and green that are not easy on the eyes.

I'm in the UK.

[RedBar]

I don't know about anyone else but our email enquiries for several days now have been dead, general email traffic has been extremely low across many sites. This usually happens after a messy update.

Is anyone else experiencing the same?

Insofar as the SERPs are concerned for my widgets, G's results are 90% irrelevant, they're not even a joke any more they are that bad...unless one wants various social pinning and very inaccurate directory sites.

[Awarn]

I see a lot of movement on page 2 and beyond but nothing changes on page one. Almost like they are exempt. The strange part is if I look at site signals in Moz and Majestic, links, social data, speed tests etc. about 50% should be lower. Other very odd thing is these same 410 and 404's appear. About the exact same as a year ago. It is like we are in an infinite cycle. The really aggravating issue is I never had any warnings. I feel I am close but I thought that a year ago too. Is it time to scrap it? There is just no feedback at all. I still feel like I am a test site. You know it is bad when your competitors buy off you and say thanks for bailing us out again.

[tigger]

I'm seeing movement on the first page! I've just been pushed into 2nd place for my money term ...and the first site is Youtube with a spammy 1 minute video that probably took less than that to make!

Its not effecting my traffic as the youtube video is just spam but it shows that Goog doesn't care a rats *&^ about quality and will throw its own garbage up

I do hope I'm still around when Goog fails

[Martin Ice Web]

Something changed yesterday at 5pm. Traffic from Google suddenly dried off. Good traffic comes only in a surge of about 1 Minute every hour. The bounce for the traffic that has left went from about 15% to over 95%.
Amazon has about 3 entries at the top, followed by ebay.

ecom germany

[Shai]

Anyone else seeing increase in phantom crawl errors last night/today? i.e soft 404s that are linked from pages where the links don't exist?

[Wilburforce]

Anyone else seeing increase in phantom crawl errors last night/today?

None at all here (so not even a "usual" number").

[Shepherd]

Just did a search this morning and got nothing but .edu results, some crazy bug there

"php search articles in a database"

Wonder if anyone else is seeing same?

[ohno]

/\ Yep, what a crock of #*$! Google is! Try the same search on Bing & you get results that may help you :)

[Shai]

errors all over the place on WMT. Can someone confirm? Checked 3 accounts and all saying oops.. on several section of the site.

[ohno]

No errors here apart from crawl errors in smart phone section which refuse to go away.

[tigger]

> Shepherd

how about G ranking a folder on my site! - The results are in a mess, I know its been said a thousand times but G can't be happy with this mess

Yes ...Bing is MUCH better shame its hardly used!

[Mentat]

Yuk, I've just downloaded latest links reports from Webmaster Tools and I found another 600 new Real Estate blogs (same template) that link to my site...

This is getting out of control!

Negative SEO is a good business this days...

[Shepherd]

"php search articles in a database"

This has to be some sort of a glitch, 70+ of the top 100 results are .edu, all of the top 30 results are .edu with a couple of college libraries thrown in.

[ohno]

Had to laugh though, no Amazon result, woohoo :D Ironically maybe there should be, surely there is a book on PHP?

:D

[superclown2]

I didn't believe it was possible but the SERPs I have been seeing this morning are even worse than they were previously. Relevance has gone even further out through the window.

It's as though Google is saying: OK, you searched for green square widgets. Here are the six biggest sites for widgets, period (which, by the way, share the top spots for every search term that even mentions widgets) so we're sure you'll find something there. You sure you typed in the correct search terms? We don't think you did so here are some red circular widgets, some pink oblong ones and a site that actually does sell green square widgets and it's got 100,000 backlinks even though it was only registered two days ago so it must be good. What? You want a specialist green square widget site? OK, there are probably a few on page three downwards.

If Google had real competition they would cease to exist with 'search results' like this but this isn't going to happen quickly so what do we do to get round this? Sorry but the only method I can think of, apart from buying a 'brand' and writing thousands of spammy pages covering every possible search term, is to go black hat. Produce quality, unique content? Sorry, no. With a logical search engine which was trying to find the best answer to a visitor's needs then that would work, but not with the current Google incarnation.

[ohno]

What do we do? IMO, act like Google doesn't exist. People have got sucked into their smoke & mirrors bull#*$!. We follow what they say yet they still rank garbage sites on page 1. It's clear we should be ignoring anything they say & get back to acting like we all did prior to Google.

[tigger]

Did you hear the radio yesterday where the MD from First Choice was discussing cheap holidays for this year - it was a dropped comment but the DJ was asking about trends and what people were buying and the MD made reference to increased advertising on SM and TV as Google was a waste of time now!

[ohno]

That doesn't surprise me, clicks go up in cost, all it does is line Googles pockets. When Google Shopping went paid I tried it, it was a complete waste of money. Clicks that didn't convert. No difference between weeks with paid ads Vs those without. Obviously all sectors are different but I won't be paying Google another penny.

Back to the SERP's I'm seeing the big ad block & shopping at the top pushing organic below the fold again.

[Martin Ice Web]

superclown2, what about Google Shopping. Is it worse too?
In last time i see that organics is a mess but g-shop is on the point.

ecom, germany

[superclown2]

Did you hear the radio yesterday where the MD from First Choice was discussing cheap holidays for this year - it was a dropped comment but the DJ was asking about trends and what people were buying and the MD made reference to increased advertising on SM and TV as Google was a waste of time now! ]

This echoes just about every conversation I've had with business people recently. OK I've only talked to several dozen but not a single one has had any praise for Google and, more significantly, none of them featured them in their long term plans. Generally the SERPs were dismissed as biased or irrelevant so they weren't using G for searching either (but neither were they using Bing - a lot of them didn't even know that B existed).

@Martin Ice Web; sorry but Google Shopping doesn't feature in the vertical I'm interested in here in the UK so I can't comment on it.

[CaptainSalad2]

superclown2 I hear this from many of my clients, G is good for informational searches but the local traders I deal with are priced out of addwords now by the middle men companies that SELL the PPC leads onto the local traders who they priced out of ppc. Ironic isn't it?!

The organics are also dominated by the same lead sellers as they have huge brand sites with a page for every services and every town/city. A small 5-10 page local company cant beat the brands with local landing pages. BING/YAHOO is still okay, the playing field seems more level and they are picking up more traffic and using BING adds which they aren't priced out of....

G for traders has become a "lead sellers" paradise because of the brand bias pushing bizz owners off the organic and PPC map. Google local CTR is terrible in my experience so that doesn't help either.

Rewind to a few years back and the local traders were at good organic positions on G so had a little extra cash gained from the organics to pump into an additional add words campaign, they just don’t have the money anymore and many have reverted to traditional advertising like leaflets drops and BING for cheaper adds.

Just my observations and feedback I receive from clients over the past 3-4 years.

[ohno]

Rewind to a few years back and the local traders were at good organic positions on G so had a little extra cash gained from the organics to pump into an additional add words campaign, they just don’t have the money anymore and many have reverted to traditional advertising like leaflets drops and BING for cheaper adds.

Echos what I've been saying for a while. I don't think G's model is a long term plan. If they carry on they will have all of their eggs in the big players baskets, nothing stopping them taking G out of the equation. The public may have a bigger say than we can imgagine too, G's results are terrible right now, the next generation of Internet users may be more switched on...

[Liane]

LOL … I just got an email from my uncle who is 79 years old. He is a pretty savvy kind of guy and still very active.

He asked how things were going in a previous message and I had written him back saying that my Google rankings had been hit badly and I was having trouble staying afloat. He clearly didn't understand what I was saying so he told me the following:

"The trick with using Google is that if you want to find the good stuff, you do your search and then immediately go to page 2 or 3. Never mind page 1, it's full of stuff nobody is interested in. It's all Wikipedia this and Amazon that!"

He added a long explanation about why he was doing it. But basically he said he has told all his friends to do that and they think he is brilliant because they can now find the stuff they are after.

I couldn't believe it! I guess he thought I was having trouble finding things on Google.

Anyway, I told him he might not have to do that if he used Bing. He had no idea what I was talking about. Sigh. :(

[edited by: Liane at 12:39 pm (utc) on Jan 24, 2014]

[ohno]

Send him a link to Bing! Reading that has made my day in a way (not about your woes but most on here are in that boat, me included). It's not just the people who do this day in day out seeing the mess. Listen up Google!

[Liane]

Yeah, I just answered him and sent him the link to Bing. I told him it's another search engine like Google but that he may not find the same problem of the "Wikipedia this and Amazon that" all over page one of the results.

It'll be interesting to see if he tries it out or sticks with Google. He will let me know if he likes it. If he doesn't, I won't hear a word from him. Older people get set in their ways ... it's hard to teach an old dog new tricks! :)

But I just thought his "helpful tip" was precious. I love that guy! :)

[ohno]

Please keep us updated. I'd love to know his thoughts :) Thanks

[edited by: aakk9999 at 12:48 pm (utc) on Jan 24, 2014]