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.

[Saffron]

What confuses me is that a friend runs the same site as me, she has "free to use" articles, and never updates her site. I have added over 200 unique articles in the past year. Her site has been given a boost, mine penalised. Again, I never engage in black hat SEO, no duplicate/free article, all 100% unique. Content is NOT king, that's for sure. I have absolutely busted a gut on my site, while my competition never updates, yet she gets the boost in rankings. How the heck does that work?

[JD_Toims]

Don't like to be part of the "tinfoil hat" crowd, but you have something to offer, she doesn't -- You must pay for AdWords to be seen.

[Saffron]

Does that work with content based sites? I'm not selling anything, I just make my money with Adsense. Neither me, nor any of my competitors use Adwords. Does that work for content?

To be honest, it's made me give up. I just don't see the point in spending my days working on new content when I get penalised for it and my friend gets to enjoy a boost in traffic while she flits around on holidays. She admits herself she is "retired" and has no plans to update her site, but it's outranking mine again, despite all my hard work.

[GreyBeard123]

@ Saffron

Adwords doesn’t work for all niches; I don’t know if it will work for you, but you won’t know until you’ve tried it…
Google has a special for first time users. You pay a certain amount and then you get double that amount extra, for free…
Thus, before you give up for good, do yourself a favor and try it…

[EditorialGuy]

Does that work with content based sites? I'm not selling anything, I just make my money with Adsense. Neither me, nor any of my competitors use Adwords. Does that work for content?

Probably not, especially since AdSense came down hard on "link arbitrage" (which was the darling of the MFA crowd a few years ago).

[Rasputin]

IMO the only option is to keep at the task of creating quality content and hope it gets recognised in due course ( or give up). Google do have this as a goal, even if it is a distant goal sometimes. Generally I think sites built with free distribution articles have disappeared from the serps and it's not a good long term plan, I used to have a few but they lost all traffic and are now deleted.

Above all never try to emulate what a 'poor quality site' is doing in order to boost your own rankings i.e. do not go and add 100 free articles even if it seems to work for someone else, although you could try this on a completely separate site if you were so inclined

I don't think there are many circumstances where adwords works for an info site (typical example: adsense revenues c. 10$ per 1000, cost to get 1000 visitors through adwords $200...) although I do know one unscrupulous site that pulls it off (not mine)

[Saffron]

Oh it's not that I'd add free to use articles, I really do find them absolutely rubbish, and to my friend's credit, she doesn't have many on her site. Maybe half a dozen. It is just that I've spent the past 4 years adding new unique content, and she has very openly admitted she is retired and has no intention to add any more to her site, it just sits there, yet hers gets a nice boost and mine is penalised.

It is really hard to feel motivated when I see my traffic dropping daily. I do genuinely enjoy adding new and useful content, but when this happens (and it's the second time in two years) I lose my energy. When I feel good about the site, I feel energised enough to work, when I feel it's hopeless, I just want to give up and figure if I'm going to lose everything, I may as well be donig so walking the dog or playing tennis, not working my backside off on a site that Google keeps pushing down in favour of sites that never get updated. Maybe Google will reward me if I stop updating too.

[samwest]

@Saffron - Adwords = Zero ROI, at least in my niche.

[sandboxsam]

Just noticed a big jump in pages crawled in GWTs from an average of about 500 pages to 4100 pages on 6/9.

[EditorialGuy]

Just noticed a big jump in pages crawled in GWTs from an average of about 500 pages to 4100 pages on 6/9.

We had a monster crawl on 5/28 (twice the number of pages on our site) and a big crawl on 6/4 (about equal to the number of pages on our site). The 5/28 crawl was the biggest that I can remember since we began using Google Analytics 7-1/2 years ago.

[Atomic]

I can confirm an extra big crawl.

[defenseup]

Same here.. I had it on the 3rd and the 9th

[Mentat]

I see a big crawl on my news site (30-3-7), followed by a 30% traffic drop...
Great...

[i.imgur.com...]

[Gabriel Edward]

Some how we can say about traffic change but it was not constantly and its a part of SEO so follow the instructions.

[supercyberbob]

That's what she said.

[defenseup]

The big crawls only affected one of my sites though.. The other ones big spike was right before panda release and it was normal over the last couple weeks.

[System]

The following 15 messages were cut out to new thread by aakk9999. New thread at: google/4679408.htm [webmasterworld.com]
5:06 pm on Jun 12, 2014 (gmt 0)

[RedBar]

Whoa! What's going on?

My traffic's half of normal today, now what have they done/broken?

[kameron]

Yes, big drops for me too today.

[Wilburforce]

@RedBar, @kameron

I'm not seeing that (niche service, UK). Where are you?

[kameron]

I'm in the U.S.

[Andem]

I have to echo Redbar and kameron. Today has been a real downer for a site that has been growing week-on-week for the past 2 years. It appears that a lot of older, demoted sites had made it back to page 1 over the past 36 hours. There has been no noticeable drop in visitors from the US, but almost everywhere else.

We have visitors from 238 countries including North Korea. Strangely, we've never had more visitors from the DPRK as we did yesterday! Hah.

[JesterMagic]

I would think people watching the World Cup instead of browsing the internet would affect a few niches.

[blends]

Huge drop for me too. Super frustrating.

[cj2600]

Same here on one of my sites - about 50% drop.
On Thursday, May 15 the incoming traffic started growing. The next day it was up 100% and stayed there for exactly 4 weeks.
On Thursday, June 12 the traffic started going down and today it's down 50%, back to where it was before the jump.

I think people at Google just don't understand how serious their experiments are.

[Atomic]

I would think people watching the World Cup instead of browsing the internet would affect a few niches.

Doing wonders for my sports site!

[n00b1]

Big drop in traffic for me too. Steadily climbing these past few months and now a hiccup. I've learnt from experience such things can be temporary. I hope so this time.

[Saffron]

I'm glad to see it's not just me. My site has been tanking since Panda 4, but it's down even more today. World cup makes sense.

[RedBar]

Even worse drops today, this isn't anything to do with football, the weather, holidays, Xmas, Easter, tsunamis, vocanoes, earthquakes, full moons or whatever other excuse takes your fancy.

It's coincided directly with "Payday Loan Algorithm 3.0 Targeting Spammy Queries" ... I'm guessing that some of us have been hit by friendly fire, positive negatives, negative positives, call it whatever you like, we've been caught-up in another attempted Google crap clean-up!

[Saffron]

Yep, mine is down even further.

The harder I work, the worse I seem to be hit.