Google Updates and SERP Changes - March 2014

[Wilburforce]

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System: The following 2 messages were cut out of thread at: http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4642316.htm [webmasterworld.com] by robert_charlton - 3:04 am on Mar 1, 2014 (PST -8)

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@advaith

Embedded video was discussed a couple of pages ago in this thread [webmasterworld.com...] (pages 5 & 6), and focus on news has also come and gone in the SERPs - and in discussions in earlier threads - a couple of times.

My guess is they are still testing these in the results, probably with a view to rolling them out at some point.
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[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 6:12 am (utc) on Mar 3, 2014]
[edit reason] added link [/edit]

[Ekon]

All,

Here's what happened

Google crawled extra pages of websites from last week.

Google favoured big brands , they are all ranking on position 1 - 5 for single term keywords mainly in UK , dont know any other country.

One last thing websites who sells or promote other brands products on their website (affiliate or ecommerce sites) started ranking better for those brand keywords. Sudden jumps from 10th page to first page.

[Martin Ice Web]

Massive Domain crowding is back again. 5-6 entries on the first page for one domain. Amazon & ebay now have all! 1 & 2 spots.

ecom, germany

[CaptainSalad2]

I wasn't going to post for a while but just wanted to say I have seen huge changes this week across almost all LOCAL clients, all getting better results! So thank you for that google, now don't touch NOTHING ;)

I don't know why but im hoping its to do with how anal I am regarding standards and onsite quality signals for my clients! Brands still above sure but a lot of the crappy slow bulky websites now ranking below my sites. Maybe the MOBILE update? who knows? Domain crowding is back for national searches on my personal hobby site, only gripe for this update! This was a big one IMO! Have a good weekend people!

[reseller]

Amazon & ebay now have all! 1 & 2 spots.

May be Google to acquire Amazon or eBay or both. Who knows :-)

[rowtc2]

I have one site with an increase from 250 to 500 visits per day since Monday, not much but i begin to be a little more optimistic.

Also, the site appears now on first position when i search by SiteName.

[Dymero]

We had a big boost yesterday. Most visits since earlier this month. However, this may be due to industry reasons rather than Google reasons.

[BillyS]

Seems like an update, we've increased 25% week over week. My guess, a Panda refresh... It may be related to smaller sites, but I don't think it's all in yet.

I do think Matt Cutts will announce that particular update, but I think he'll wait at least a week before saying anything.

[EditorialGuy]

It may be related to smaller sites, but I don't think it's all in yet.

In his May 13 Search Engine Land article about a "softer and gentler" update that would help small Web sites and small businesses, Barry Schwartz wrote:

"Matt Cutts didn’t mention when the new update is coming out but rather they are currently working on this update. My feeling is that it is far off from being launched, like maybe in two to three months at best..."

[searchengineland.com...]

It's always possible that Barry was being too pessimistic, but the small amount of noise here and elsewhere would suggest that any update going on now is just a data refresh.

[kma9090]

After months being penalized I thought things were improving. Whilst one of my sites continues to gain the other saw a 75% increase over the last week however dropped back 75% just as quickly. I am now back to where I was a few months ago.

[Andem]

I reported a small drop a few pages back, but numbers returned to slightly about normal on Monday. The slight improvement we saw in bounce rate from Google SERPs, despite a small traffic drop, has returned to normal.

I should note that traffic has been increasing for 19 consecutive months, though after ever supposed update, a small drop lasting a couple of weeks is followed by a bump up above previous averages.

[edited by: Andem at 12:19 am (utc) on Mar 29, 2014]

[new_shoes]

There's a lot of fluctuation going on for me (high traffic education site, English language) - first my traffic went up 40%, now it's going back down to where it was.

The interesting this I'm noticing is that incoming United Kingdom traffic is what went up the most - US traffic improved, but not hardly as much.

Anybody else notice this?

[gachet1]

Hi,

24.3.2014 was one of the badest day in my life. Since one of my big forums was hit by the top heavy algo on 7.2.2014 I thought ok, lets reduce the ads and invest more time in my other sites. I thought, its not so bad, I have one forum more and this forum is doing really good.

Its a huge forum with "only" great links from newspapers, universities etc. I am pretty sure, that the links are not the problem. It must be a onpage thing.

On 23.3.2014 I saw in wmt a huge increase in crawl frequency. Very high. You too?

On 24.3.2014 came the big hit with -50.

I have NO idea whats going on here and I have not Idea how to fix. The forum is perfect optimized. Is very fast. Dedicated Server. I have adsense on the site but only 1 block above the fold. I thought really this site is safe from any coming updates, because the links are just too good. I invest 10 years work in this project...

I have at the moment NO mobile page for the forum. Maybe thats the reason? For example:

When a site has more then X% from mobile search and the user experience is bad, the site gets a drop?

Give me please a telefonnumber to ask a google guy whats happend. I promise I will fix it during 1 day when I have a clue whats going on...

[gachet1]

btw: Also on 24.3.2014 I lost the rich snippets (stars) for some articles on the site.

Maybe a trust problem?

[gachet1]

What I noticed also is, that bigger brands rank better. Maybe our sites are not hit by an update. The reason could be, that brands moved up on my positions. I have no lost in top keywords, only in long tail but when you have 50 top keywords and 4000 long tails in the top 10 and all of the sudden the long tail top 10 results reduced to 2000 its a hit of -50%...

[dethfire]

Today is a very slow day. I hope it's not a sign.

[thms]

one of my sites lost 90% of its traffic on march 10th then on march 28th it recovered and is getting 300% more visitors comparing to pre-drop

[superclown2]

Here in the UK I'm seeing even more brand dominance and even more scarcely relevant results. I reckon they are moving further away from finding what the visitors are looking for and more towards what they think they should be looking for. A search for red oval widgets brings up the biggest sites for widgets period, whether they are pink, green, square or star shaped, on the assumption that there must be some red oval ones in there somewhere. Also I'm seeing far fewer meta description tags which I've always found much more useful than snippets in working out what pages are all about.

This is an Alice in Wonderland algo - as a search engine it's becoming useless.

[edited by: superclown2 at 6:52 am (utc) on Mar 31, 2014]

[Martin Ice Web]

After adding +stock and Price for the top three brand results they now have widget pictures added to. What is significant, is that it is only for one brand ( and this is the biggest adwords / Google Shopping adds subscriber in our niche ).
Clealy a sign that Google prefers adwords/shopping subscribers in organics and thats the next move to kill smaller ecoms.
I have no doubt that the soft Panda is just a joke. Meanwhile our main site has got is worst week since Panda was introduced.

ecom, germany

[Wilburforce]

A search for red oval widgets brings up the biggest sites for widgets period, whether they are pink, green, square or star shaped, on the assumption that there must be some red oval ones in there somewhere.

I don't know what Google's underlying intention is, but yesterday I was looking for configuration information specific to a couple of IT widgets, and qualifiers of any kind scarcely featured in the results. I got widgets, period.

To be fair to Google, my default search engine is Bing, and I only went to Google because Bing's results didn't deliver the information I was looking for.

The main contrast between them was that Google's P1 results were dominated by Amazon & eBay, so whatever the intention, and whatever my query, it looked like Google was assuming I wanted to buy one.

[System]

The following 2 messages were cut out to new thread by robert_charlton. New thread at: google/4659095.htm [webmasterworld.com]
1:45 am on Apr 1, 2014 (PST -8)