Google Updates and SERP Changes - June 2014

[linkbuildr]

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System: The following 4 messages were cut out of thread at: http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4667620.htm [webmasterworld.com] by robert_charlton - 1:49 am on Jun 2, 2014 (PST -8)

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Had a few days of double the traffic and great user interaction and on the 1st, albeit a Sunday, I have more than half less the traffic and a on site of of less then 20 seconds. Strange day for me in B2B.

[spreporter]

@superclown "the big brands with their single page boilerplate junk returning back to the top for the major search terms" Maybe it is junk for you but Google knows better what is junk and what is best for its users........

[Martin Ice Web]

Does anybody experience a throtteling issue?
We have good converting traffic till 9am ( with traffic volumn from prepanda 4.0 12am) and then traffic drops to 10-15% till 13am.
The rest of the day is devided in traffic surges and drops with changing keywords every 1 hour.


ecom, germany

[Robert Charlton]

Martin, are you seeing your rankings change as well, or is it just traffic that's changing?

What's happening with conversion rates when you see these changes?

[Martin Ice Web]

Robert, rankings seem uneffected only traffic changes. Conversions are going down in this time. Bounce is nearly 100%. Users fetch only one page and go back. AND in this time we see robots come and scrap our site.
With google traffic coming back suddenly robots are away, bounce is 60%, conversions are back.

Guess: Second datacenter? Changes in google suggest/autocomplete in this time?

The traffic from google shopping ads is disappearing in this time too. It looks like we are there but invisible for the users.
I tried the search from different IPs, with different computers/ smart phones, tablets a.s.o. Rankings for our main keywords don´t move.
In this low traffic time we seem not to get a single hit from certain ISPs ( like german telekom or vodafone ).

I see this phenomen since 2-3 weeks. With panda 4.0 we gained about 25% more traffic ( about 50% more visible keywords) with throtteling hat this higher traffic rate.

ecom, germany

[superclown2]

Maybe it is junk for you but Google knows better what is junk and what is best for its users........

ROFL. Google knows what's best for Google.

Just checking the SERPs today for various niches I'm interested in here in the UK and if anything the big brand "best for users" sites have risen back up and are crowding out the quality sites even more than they were before the last update.

Meanwhile, interestingly, I'm getting more and more business from Bing from tightly specialised sites I put up and pretty well forgot about because G ignored them. The conversion rate is quite spectacular compared to G's too.

[Anon]

2 years ago we were 1st on google Australia for our primary keyword/s and then we suddenly dropped over the following year to 10th causing us a 50% decline in sales which has stayed the same for the last 12 months. Last week I thought all our hard work and tens thousands spent in investing into SEO finally paid off, and after the Google changes we moved into 1st again! Now sadly we have dropped into 10th-12th for our keywords. The companies above us are all the generic ones - ebay, wiki, directory sites etc. And then above below them but above us are small local sites which have 10-15 pages max on them and what looks like no SEO and no linking. I don't understand. Why would we have suddenly gone to 1st again for exactly 1 week and then dropped lower than we have ever been?

[not2easy]

Hi Anon, welcome to the Forums. Sometimes your position has little to do with anything except the up or down movement of the sites that were in those positions before. With the recent Panda shakeups, a lot of ranking changes going on in a vertical can alter your position without your site having had the newest changes applied to it. It can take a while for changes to apply to all sites that are returned for a given search.

[samwest]

I've been watching this "throttling" issue since it started and I've noticed some very odd patterns that accompany hot and cold traffic periods. Strangely, when it's cold, my level of background email spam is very low (1 or 2 spam emails per hour). When I hit a hot period of good converting traffic, it seems to always coincide with high levels of email spam to my server (1 or 2 spam emails every few minutes). So, this points to an overall global network issue, not Google.

My rankings don't change and traffic always follows a sinusoidal daily/weekly pattern, but hot and cold periods are much more noticeable now than in the past. Maybe it's something other than Google?

I do notice one other thing with major updates: we always lose out initially while bounce jumps up and conversions drop, but after 3 or 4 days, we recover to a more natural pattern...until the next big update. The pattern is always the same.

I notice sites that typically don't do well initially jump UP after an major update, getting a surge of traffic, but when it settles out, they go back to obscurity.

14 year old site, USA, ecom.

[Mentat]

It's strange... I believe that was the only weekend without Google updates for me.
It's quiet, too quiet.
I'm getting crazy!?

[EditorialGuy]

We continued to see gains in Google "organic traffic" for about a week after the Panda 4.0 update (up another 10 percent or so), but the numbers have mostly settled in at the new level since then.

We did have a record Googlebot crawl on May 29, though--a monster one-day spike. I'm not sure what (if anything) to make of that.

[Shepherd]

we saw a medium crawl spike on may 29

[SnowMan68]

We continued to see gains in Google "organic traffic" for about a week after the Panda 4.0 update (up another 10 percent or so), but the numbers have mostly settled in at the new level since then.

Same here...ended at about 10% gains last week from the previous weeks HUGE gains. Now it's settled in.

[Martin Ice Web]

Samwest, i don't think it is a global Network issue. because when a Traffic/daytime treshold is reached, Traffic Shuttle off, and when the next treshold is reached Traffic switches on. It is a 4 Hour Pattern.

[Martin Ice Web]

Showmaster, informationslos or ecom. Does the Traffic convert? What about bounce rate?

[defenseup]

I see a spike on May 25 (Huge) and then a mini spike on May 30 (mini)

[Itanium]

The traffic of my full time website is pretty low, but that might be the usual seasonal fluctuation (tech related site, usually lower traffic during the spring and early summer months). When Panda 4.0 was announced, my rankings did rise, a few days later they reverted back to where they were before. 3 or 4 days ago everything started to shift again and my rankings rose again. Let's hope it sticks this time....

Still, I have to wonder, because one of my competitors has really crappy content on some of his pages and is allowing indexing of all his tag pages (wordpress). His site is 10 years old, has many backlinks (quite a few with exact match keywords via guest posting) and is an authority in this niche. Seems to me, that those things are still more important than good, well researched content.

[Itanium]

Btw, same here: My ranking changes correlate with WMT crawling stats. HUGE spike on 22nd, small spike on 29th (May).

[aok88]

I see this phenomen since 2-3 weeks. With panda 4.0 we gained about 25% more traffic ( about 50% more visible keywords) with throtteling hat this higher traffic rate.

I have seen some of this too, with yesterday and today being the worst for us. Traffic is up and rankings are holding in their better positions since Panda4, yet less sales than I would expect (just bad conversion rate, bounce rate is decent though). It's like the people who are visiting via Google don't want to buy.

I wonder what is going on?

[ColourOfSpring]

because when a Traffic/daytime treshold is reached, Traffic Shuttle off, and when the next treshold is reached Traffic switches on. It is a 4 Hour Pattern.

I have a site that attains 80 to 100 visitors a day. What's special about this site is that if I switch on Google Shopping and Adwords for this site....it still gets 80 to 100 visitors per day. When I look in my Adwords account, the Shopping campaign tends to get 25-30 clicks per day, Adwords about 10-12 clicks per day (before each daily budget is spent). Let's say an extra 35 clicks (25 + 10) paid per day. So, when I switch OFF Adwords and Shopping, I get 80 to 100 visitors per day. When I switch ON Adwords and Shopping, I get 80 to 100 visitors per day. I've been testing this out for a week now, and I can't make the site get more than 100 visitors per day - even when I buy 35 extra clicks! I'd say that the purchase days ARE higher, but not in a measure I'd expect them to be - it's like I get the extra 35, but I lose 15-20 elsewhere!

[Shepherd]

ColourOfSpring, from the outside looking in I would say that your market consists of about 80 to 100 people a day, all your doing is changing how they find your site (organic, adwords, shopping).

[EditorialGuy]

Traffic is up and rankings are holding in their better positions since Panda4, yet less sales than I would expect (just bad conversion rate, bounce rate is decent though). It's like the people who are visiting via Google don't want to buy.

Maybe you're getting more traffic from casual visitors than you had before? If, say, your widgets page ranks no. 1 for "widgets" now, maybe you're getting more fly-by visitors than you got when your widgets page ranked no. 5 or no. 10 and only motivated searchers found their way to your site.

For what it's worth, most of our editorial pages have affiliate links, and our affiliate revenue shot up with Panda 4.0--though not quite as dramatically as our Google referrals did (maybe for the reason I just described).

[Martin Ice Web]

CoS,i can confirm this Pattern. And i did a Second Test. I Visited My Site with different Computers (ip different ) a Day. Hence You would Say My extra Visites would Direct be visible in more visitors a day. But it wasn't. The visitors from google this Day was decimated by My Visites.

It is like MC Said with Release of Panda 1 : Don't expect any free Traffic from google anymore.

[Awarn]

So let me guess CoS you are making just about the amount of profit to cover the Adwords campaign? Realize they keep saying Adwords and organic are two separate entities and not related. I saw a boost with Adwords but it wasn't enough to justify the cost. What I see is a lock on the page one players. A lot of movement on page 2 and beyond. I am thinking it is more when a person searches for a term they are more likely not bouncing when hitting a page 1 site. So as a person goes through page one to page two they are a person that is searching but not really sure what they want so the bounces. So in effect page 1 results will always stay at page 1 because the buyers are weeded out by the time they hit you at page 2 or beyond.

[Martin Ice Web]

There is an article in Bild.de today about google. It seems that the publishers in Germany get aware of the threath that is coming from google. So they Beginn to Ask where google Wants to go and If it is Getting to Big.

Was wird also aus Google?

Wer Google nicht so genau kennt, kann bei der schieren Vielfalt an Projekten leicht den Eindruck gewinnen, dass hier einfach ins Blaue geforscht wird und dass die Firma „coole“ Projekte fördert und zukauft. Doch das wäre wohl falsch. Alle oben genannten Projekte verfolgen zwei Ziele: Mehr Menschen ins Web zu bringen und dafür zu sorgen, dass dieses Web von Google beherrscht wird. Es geht unterm Strich immer darum, die 13 Milliarden US-Dollar, die Google 2013 als Gewinn erwirtschaftet hat, zu verteidigen und vermehren.

Last 2 centence : bring more People online .... that this Internet is Controlled by google. the bottom line is, to defend or Increase the Revenue of 13 Billion they made in 2013.

[bild.de ]

[Itanium]

The german publishers fear Google for 2 reasons:
1. Google is generating revenue through ads, whithout own content. The publishers ad revenue is declining while everything shifts to the web. AND
2. They are heavily dependend on Google. They tried to get Google to pay for the News snippets, and even get a law passed, which legally allows them to make the claim. However, Google does no pay (nor will it pay), because it asked those same publishers to sign an agreement, that they won't charge for the snippets, or otherwise they will get de-indexed (at least from Google News - maybe from regular search too).

And Bild.de is part of Axel-Spriner-Verlag which is on the front of the fight vs. Google. So it's not surprising that Bild.de is posting such an article. Don't read too much into it. Axel-Springer-Verlag wants to build their own ad-network. It's all about the money.

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I noticed the traffic cap too. I said it in another post already. It seems Google is asigning some kind of value for a domain, which determines how much traffic a site gets. I don't know how they calculate that value, but I guess many different factors play a role (links, on page seo, bounce rate, brand, etc). So when 1 keyword goes up, another one goes down. Overall traffic doesn't change. My main website is in some highly dynamic tech niche. Keywords are shifting all the time and I really can see that traffic cap in action every single day.

[EditorialGuy]

Bild is Germany's version of The Sun or the New York Post. If I were forced to choose, I'd rather have the Internet controlled by Google than by the editors of Bild. :-)

[ColourOfSpring]

ColourOfSpring, from the outside looking in I would say that your market consists of about 80 to 100 people a day, all your doing is changing how they find your site (organic, adwords, shopping).

Shepherd, the thing is - my products pop up (via Google Shopping) on keywords I don't rank for at all, as do the Adwords ads (they appear on keywords I don't rank for at all). I should be gaining 35+ extra visitors a day, surely. These are visitors I wouldn't have gained without advertising. Something just doesn't add up.

[Martin Ice Web]

Traffic today is 100% unrelated, google shopping ROI 0% !

I guess they installed a quality update this night again. ( a sale more ads quality update )

ecom germany

[spreporter]

Mein Gott Martin liest du das Bild?!
EditorialGuy is right