Google Updates and SERP Changes - April 2014

[Mentat]

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System: The following 2 messages were cut out of thread at: http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4650302.htm [webmasterworld.com] by robert_charlton - 1:45 am on Apr 1, 2014 (PST -8)

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For me, since this Saturday, google reverted the changes they did last week.
Going down, again...

[JD_Toims]

But you disallowed them in robots.txt, so Google no longer has access to see the canonical or noindex on the pages, which means the URL will likely be added to the index, because they love to index everything -- Basically, when you block a page in robots.txt you're saying, "Indexing the URL is fine, but don't check the content of the page.", so they do what you say and then try to figure out the content/topic of the URL from external sources and in some cases they're really good at it.

[Robert Charlton]

There is no reason to panic.

@Robert, I would like to add:
If there is no message from Google in WMT about a significant rising of 404s. If so, you should look for Errors.

Martin, yes, I should be very clear that I was talking about Mentat's specific case only, where he was talking about product pages that were deleted in 2010-2012, and which he was familiar with.

[brianp]

Okay, I always check in with Webmaster World when I see something "off" in our web traffic. After seeing a pretty steady decline in GA since 03/05/2014, it now appears that I've found an issue.

It would appear that Google Analytics is having some issues with tracking conversions, and the percentage it is off appears to be significant. I'm about to install Piwik to see how stats compare, but if tracking conversions is off by almost 40% I'm betting web traffic reporting is also off as well.

To anyone seeing an unexplained drop, have you looked into the accuracy of your reporting? I have never seen G.A. so far off, and we've been running it for easily 6-7 years.

[Mentat]

Ok, something is fubar.
One page from my site, deleted in Jan 2012 is ranking first for searches!

[Martin Ice Web]

Mentant, we now get crawling link errors from external sites that are offline since 5 years now!

[samwest]

went from 5000+ indexed pages, down to 144 after the 3/9 "update" what exactly does this all mean?

[Mentat]

HW problems for Google and they seems to use a 2 year old index...

[reseller]

@samwest

I think Google is using now its "Mini Data Centers" which cover only a small portion of the main index. hence you see very reduced number of indexed pages

[Mentat]

Something in wrong, wrong, wrong!

I see one of my most popular keywords -40% and I made a search...

Chrome logged in: first result on second page
Chrome incognito: first result on second page
On the first page I had domain crowding as hell, only one domain!
Safari: 4th page
Firefox: first page

No wonder that our rankings are flying all over :(

[bsand715]

Mentat - "something is fubar."

Agree
What is happening in the complex?
We do thousands of searches in our commercial business weekly. Are seeing a lot of old old pages referring to current local events as far back as 2004 ranking, one which ranks #1!
Also finding a lot of domains that are expired ranking. In a local niche, a site the owner had not maintained in over two years, let it lapse in December. It is still ranking on first page with all original content gone and replaced by ads.

Has Google broken their Search Engine?
Also finding a lot of domains that are expired ranking. In a local niche, a site the owner had not maintained in over two years, let it lapse in December. It is still ranking on first page with all original content gone and replaced by ads.

Has Google broken their Search Engine?

[turbocharged]

We do thousands of searches in our commercial business weekly. Are seeing a lot of old old pages referring to current local events as far back as 2004 ranking, one which ranks #1!

This has been the case for quite some time. I don't see any increases in the occurrences as of this morning, but it may be like a cancer spreading into other industries that I don't monitor. Google appears to be ranking whitelisted and least penalized pages well above those that are more current and relevant. Obviously old and abandoned websites are more likely to have fewer penalties because their owners have ignored the sites for a long period of time.

[System]

Mods Note

I have split last few messages from this thread into a separate thread as it discusses Google Focus and not current SERPs changes.

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The following 4 messages were cut out to new thread by aakk9999. New thread at: Has Google's main focus turned in a different direction? [webmasterworld.com]
11:02 am on Apr 7, 2014 (gmt 0)

[edited by: aakk9999 at 11:21 am (utc) on Apr 7, 2014]

[Alon]

Hello Guys,

Arguably, anyone can be attacked by spamming tactics. I have just discovered that our site is affected by penguin Algorithms for unnatural links. I have written to the webmasters to remove the links. The issues that I am having and I am sure that most of you have the same concerns.

Requesting to remove links from directories

1) contact us - page no found
2) uploaded a request to Google using the disavow toll.

How long does it take to Google to read the file and disavow links?

This is a major issue - Google should shut down sites that are spamming without the good guys spending days in trying to do the right thing.

Cheers

[Martin Ice Web]

Today we are experience very low traffic from g. All fully mismateched witch high bounce rate. We have lot of referal spam since yesterday. Clearly a sign that we are not listed for the "normal" users in the serps. So we lost 50% from traffic till 06. february. What a mess. And it smells like Panda, i see no signs of Panda beeing softened.

And Domain crowiding is back. I see 5 entries in a row for one Domain! I think they donīt have there engine under controll anymore.

[Wilburforce]

How long does it take to Google to read the file and disavow links?

That's very much a "piece of string" question, but from my own main disavowal I would say at least a couple of months: I removed some links at the same time as the disavowal, and these were still showing in WMT nearly three months later.

There is also the question - see earlier posts on "ghost" 404s in WMT - of whether historic data may affect your SERPS position for years rather than weeks or months.

My site - for years dominant in my sector for hundreds of terms, and still well-placed in all other engines - has only recovered about 20% of the loss inflicted by Penguin 1.

[Wilburforce]

@Martin Ice Web

I'm seeing a loss of traffic here. It could be UK factors (weather, school holidays...).

I'm not seeing anything particularly unusual in the SERPs, although Google's interpretation of long phrases seems to have reverted (since a week or so ago) to throwing up everything containing the individual terms.

[Martin Ice Web]

@Wilbur, so i am not sure but i loaded up a false sitemap. This ended up in g found many 404s.
Ist now 4 weeks till i fixed it. I hope it was this fault and not an generall algo Change.

Besides this i it Looks like panda. I think Panda is not all about link/refetence queries but about 404s, Picture path Errors a.s.o. So it is not content related but user experience in regard of having a functional site.

But Domain crowing in my niche is present like i have not seen it in the last 2 years.

ecom, Germany

[Alon]

does anyone suggest to ask google not ti crawl 404 pages using webmasters tool

[aakk9999]

does anyone suggest to ask google not ti crawl 404 pages using webmasters tool

Why would you want to do this? It is good that Google crawls 404 pages to see that they are gone. If you block it from crawling, it would not know the page is gone as it could not check the response.

[seodayal]

Hi All! Any one noticed that, google serps shows "use google.com" and also local searches.

[theskunk]

Same loss of traffic here on UK Ecom 16 year old site. Things stablelised over last 4 months after the ups and downs of the last years. But in the last 5 days (or so) I see a marked downturn.

[RedBar]

I don't know what G has done however my SERPs, both search and image, are absolutely diabolical, this seems to have started Thursday, Friday was awful and today is heading for even worse.

I just did a three keyword search on Google.co.uk and only one UK site was returned in the top ten and another two in the top twenty the remainder were:

USA 12 sites
China 5 sites

Ridiculous, start staring bonkers, crazy, madness, WTF is Google doing?

[samwest]

Google crawls 404 pages to see that they are gone

Yeah, but they KEEP crawling those same pages for years. I have pages that I retired in 2011, and three years later, Google bot is still looking for them.

[Mentat]

Use 410 for those pages of Google URL removal, if it's possible.

[JD_Toims]

Yeah, but they KEEP crawling those same pages for years. I have pages that I retired in 2011, and three years later, Google bot is still looking for them.

That's because "Not Found" [404] means it's not there right now, and even "Gone" [410], much like "Permanent Redirects" [301], change enough for them to rerequest the URL to find the current status -- They'll likely keep requesting all URLs they know about [and some they don't] as long as they're a search engine, so the best course of action [imo] is to simply don't worry about it.

[superclown2]

I don't know what G has done however my SERPs, both search and image, are absolutely diabolical, this seems to have started Thursday, Friday was awful and today is heading for even worse.

I just did a three keyword search on Google.co.uk and only one UK site was returned in the top ten and another two in the top twenty the remainder were:

USA 12 sites
China 5 sites

I'm surprised there weren't some Russian ones too, they own a lot of the UK as well as the USA and China.

Seriously though, what IP address was you searching from?

[Martin Ice Web]

JD_Toims, it off topic but u mean we should never take off a 301? So i use it to reorganize my site. Jet all the 301 make the site slow down. Even if its at .htaccess.
I wanted to wait 1 year and then i thought i should be ok if the old one then shows 410 and only the new one is online?

[RedBar]

Seriously though, what IP address was you searching from?

My regular UK address.

To be fair all the results were reasonably valid for the product if I were in the USA however I have never seen a SERPs result like this whereby nearly all the UK sites for it were gone, disappeared, nowhere to be found. I've just searched down to 50 and there were only another 5 UK sites, so out of 50 results 8 were from the UK, unbelievable.

I just tried the same search by region and it got even worse and was totally irrelevant...what have they done wiped out the UK SERPs?

This also applies to quite a few of my other widget searches in the UK, it's not just me, it seems to be almost every UK widget company has been removed/demoted, useless SERPs, utterly useless and, of course, my traffic is almost non-existent today...something happened Thursday 10th April and it has been catastrophic so far.

[RedBar]

I'm walking away from websites until Google gets its head out of where the sun doesn't shine, for my widget sector their SERPs are completely irrelevant, totally and utterly fubard beyond belief.

I'm almost speeechless!

[RedBar]

I've had several people around the UK try this and they've all ended up with the same results as mine, the only way I can get UK sites to appear is to enter keyword1 keyword2 keyword3 UK

That's crazy, who searches the UK SERPs and appends UK to the query?

[edited by: aakk9999 at 3:45 pm (utc) on Apr 13, 2014]