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.

[defenseup]

I had a huge one on 6/14 something like double my highest ever at 79k or something

[JesterMagic]

@defenseup just for comparison how many pages does Google have indexed of your site?

[Mentat]

Another day, another change...
Frustrating... only going down.
This is my news/article site...

[i.imgur.com...]

[defenseup]

Jestermagic.. WMT says 296,419

[samwest]

Last Sunday the site was hit with another brick. Since then, traffic is nearly identical each day and oddly no or very few sales during the day, but just like clockwork at 11:50 +/- 5 minutes I get a sale every day, nearly same time. Totally throttled and the daily trend is down...slowly, every single day. Like we won't notice.

[Mentat]

Samwest, since Monday I have a very strange FLAT line...

[i.imgur.com...]

[Martin Ice Web]

@Mentant, ecom or info site?

[samwest]

Mentat - that is EXACTLY what I'm seeing! Flat line! Seems they are trimming the daytime traffic for themselves and their ad network pals, then "allowing" us a trickle of traffic afterwords. It just keeps getting worse and worse...and more "evil".

Here is my graph: [imgur.com ]

[indyank]

WoW, is google analytics showing the same graph to a lot of people? I am seeing a flat line too for the past week...What is happening?

[Martin Ice Web]

since friday we we lost50% of our traffic.
100% brands rule the serps, content seems not to count as most of them are off topic.


ecom, germany

[Wilburforce]

since friday we we lost50% of our traffic

MozCast shows a spike on Saturday, and it looks another update of some kind is in progress. My site has dropped marginally across a number of terms (from #3 to #4 for main key term), which probably accounts for the slight - not 50%! - drop in traffic, although UK weather over the weekend could be the deciding factor.

[Martin Ice Web]

our niche is complete brand biased. Search for apple and get a brand writing about banana.GSA are 80% on Topic.
At least this last update wiped out the complete range of Price compare engines.
While we see referal spam from russia and many new bots this is every time they change something severe and a big Change is in progress.

ecom, germany

[abhijit12a]

My ranking has been considerably improved in two - three weeks but when i checked google analytics traffic has been drop. Could not figure out why?

[Mentat]

S mall increase in my site traffic, but I had some good articles this week-end.
The Europe weather was great, finally...

[Mentat]

I feel sick and tired of this fight.

I never did spam, always tried to play by the rules. I was a "knight"...

Panda is a disaster for the usual webmaster.

Now we have to worry about unwanted links, block a lot of robot scrapers and Negative-SEO.
If we have some time left, maybe we will create great and unique content.

Top position are fixed, the rest is random per: geolocation, browser and time of day.

Also, we are blind, no info from analytics.

Each week another small tweak.

When they fix something, they break something else.

Also, for me, it's frustrating that in my niche , a top 200 Alexa sites is dominating the Serps using techniques that worked well in Caffeine update. I mean "indexed search results" page => millions of them from the same site, ranking high. This + (bad) auto translated content, so they cover a lot of local SERPS.

Penguin is one year late and the game feels like is FUBAR...

Panda seems to be really stupid in some blatant cases.
IF authority site, THEN no Panda; Panda go kill competition.

====

We are terrorist in the eye of Google, they do not negotiate with terrorists!
It's like a mind game. Google is dominated by paranoia:

- No updates confirmation
- no communications (Matt is a very clever Joker, John Mu is a hard working guy)
- if there is something to communicate, it will NOT be a clear message. The message will be very interpretable.
- big updates on non-working periods (see 1st of May or Easter)
- week-end updates
- WMT is 2-5 day behind on big updates.
- WMT keyword info seems to be fake, keyword variation is a chaos.
- Analytics is more than one day late with hourly details when there is an update.


All this to fool and blind us, to make us wonder if is a Google change or a seasonal problem.

It's impossible to contact google. All the spam reports seems to be ignored, the Webmaster Central Forum is a bad/cruel joke, populated with cruel jokers (Lysis).
From time to time, we see a response from a "Googler GOD" => front page news!

Google is working like a terrorist organisation. Each cell has access only to limited informations (need to know basis).

I see this each week, when I talk with the Adsense team.

They are clueless, more than that, they are NOT prepared and kind of unprofessional!
They lack basic webmaster training, they do not even know the adsense interface very well!
Yes, they are STUPID, I said it!

Many times I feel the urge to scream at them, that something is broker, that they are stupid or blind!
It's not possible to lose 50% of the clicks in 2 month period without any change on the site, and 10% decrease thanks to Panda...

But they are looking at stats and they are searching for clues. without results.

The truth is they do not have access to the "game masters".
They play their little role, for the monthly paycheck and that's it.

The big problem is that we have no alternative now or in the near future to Google.

Everybody is a captive Google client!

[Martin Ice Web]

They are clueless

at least they know how to fill their pocket with our work...

And yesterday at 16pm they changed again something to the worse.

[System]

If you want to discuss an April blog post which is covering something that happened in March don't post that in the JUNE UPDATE THREAD which is for discussing June updates and changes.

The following 2 messages were cut out to new thread by goodroi. New thread at: google/4682722.htm [webmasterworld.com]
8:12 am on Jun 25, 2014 (utc -5)

[edited by: goodroi at 3:53 pm (utc) on Jun 25, 2014]

[besnette]

Another big spikey day on Mozcast today - 94 degrees.

[Wilburforce]

Another big spikey day on Mozcast today

Yes. There is quite a bit of shuffling on page 1 in my sector (UK niche service), but I don't see anything really major from here. I have recovered the single place I lost last week for main key term (and one of my main competitors has dropped a couple of places, or the two sites below his have gained them, which amounts to the same thing), but all the Usual Suspects are still on the page.

I imagine things might look a bit more turbulent in other sectors.

[petehall]

Another big spikey day on Mozcast today - 94 degrees.

@besnette I am seeing dramatic changes as of this morning.

Also, this is definitely a more relaxed Panda - websites I have not seen rank for years are climbing to the top 30 quickly.

[besnette]

websites I have not seen rank for years are climbing to the top 30 quickly.

@petehall - exactly. This should be very encouraging to a lot of folks out there who have worked hard to earn it - so that's very cool.

One thing that leaves me with a slightly 'furrowed brow' is that I have heard, since this update, on several occasions site owners say almost verbatim "Wow, my site is ranking now, I haven't touched it in over a year."

I see a few sites, at least in my area, that are doing great again, sites that I know have just been sitting there for a while -

so I wonder how much 'freshness" and new, unique content plays into everything now.

[supercyberbob]

I haven't seen this posted anywhere else on this forum. I guess it fits in this thread.

Google Drops Profile Photos, Google+ Circle Count From Authorship In Search Results

[searchengineland.com...]

Seems like McGrooble is backtracking on a lot of things these days, softer Panda, etc.

What's next, backtracking on Penguin?

How bout just backtrack out of the search engine industry altogether. That'll work for me.

[Robert Charlton]

supercyberbob - I was in the process of posting when you posted the above. Our discussion here....

Google dropping profile images from Authorship Results
[webmasterworld.com...]

[Saffron]

One thing that leaves me with a slightly 'furrowed brow' is that I have heard, since this update, on several occasions site owners say almost verbatim "Wow, my site is ranking now, I haven't touched it in over a year."

Yep, happened to my friend. Her site (which is in direct competition to mine) has had a bit jump in the rankings, and she has admitted herself she rarely works on it. She considers herself retired. Meanwhile I add a tonne of new content (all original, I work hard to make it good), and my site gets over taken by hers.

Slightly off track. I was just looking up some information (related to salami of all things, personal research, nothing to do with my site), and came across one well known site, and I don't know if it's new or not, but to get the answer to your question you have to click to see a new "image" every sentence. It is incredibly frustrating, I clicked twice, still hadn't got the answer...just filler words, and I clicked back. I hate sites that make you click multiple times, how is that a good user experience? It wasn't going to be a long answer, they didn't need to break it up. Really poor form.

[Andem]

I think I'm seeing a small dance, but I can't be sure because of the change in authorship display.

Also, some pages not displaying rich snippets are now showing up in site: searches.

Seeing changes in different GEOs when viewing specific country TLD with corresponding VPN.

[iammeiamfree]

Yep, happened to my friend. Her site (which is in direct competition to mine) has had a bit jump in the rankings, and she has admitted herself she rarely works on it. She considers herself retired. Meanwhile I add a tonne of new content (all original, I work hard to make it good), and my site gets over taken by hers.

It is quite amazing. I have some pages from an initial test version of my site from 5 years ago that got left out of the newer vesions (abandoned pages lost in the directories). These pages are similar to my new pages in terms of topic but they are extremely basic. Like I say 5 years worth of development less and yet they appear to rank as well or better than the new pages. It really used to be quite good but nowdays I am even beginning to use other engines to search. Recently it is getting to the stage where I make a search and I'm getting a bunch of results for other words that I would have put in the search box if they were what I was looking for. In my niche google has lumped me in with another niche so I am now competing with sites that are gigantic and not at all specialising in my niche. I am seeing number 1 positions going to sites from the other niche for pages that don't even cover the search term at all because yes there is a relationship to that word but the searcher isn't looking for that info. The only ranking factor in my niche seems to be number of pages so I am going to publish 500 million or a billion to see if I can make enough to buy the groceries.

[Steven Davis]

Yes, all this talk about the SEO side of Panda 4.0 nobody else seems to be discussing how generally bad Google search results have been since the update. Specific search queries are netting the most generalized search results and old content (specifically from 2009 and 2011) seems to be cluttering the front page. Since 2000 on I have exclusively used Google, but for the first time since this update I find myself using Bing. At least there if I make a specific query about a video game I'll get results tailored to that query and not some generalized page from IGN that may be vaguely related to the topic.

[supercyberbob]

Yup, glad it's not just me noticing that a lot of Google search results are junk.

Steven has it right with SPECIFIC search queries not returning specific results.

Even when I specify a 2 word term in quotes within a long tail query, it doesn't help.

Super. Broken. McGrooble.

[Wilburforce]

old content (specifically from 2009 and 2011) seems to be cluttering the front page

Cluttering up my Crawl Errors log in WMT as well.

This question should probably go somewhere else, but has anyone else had site verification issues (in WMT/Analytics) in the last couple of weeks?

[webcentric]

Yup, glad it's not just me noticing that a lot of Google search results are junk.

Did a search for a local business directory this AM...lets see...

1. A local jurisdictional Home Page
2. Public Records Search ()
3. Wikipedia (local page)
4. Lawyer listings from a nationally scoped legal site
5. Contact Page for local Government entity
6. Hmmm. Something relevant - the local Chamber of Commerce - which claims this is one of the fastest growing areas in the state
7. Census Quick Facts page for local area
8. Another site listing attorneys
9. Well known Genealogy website
10. Staff directory for the local extension office (whatever that is)

Not one major directory is in that list which is curious in itself. The results themselves are purely incomprehensible. Artificial Intelligence indeed!

Added: On the other hand, Bing's results for the same query are incredibly relevant. I'm about to put a list of recommended search engines on the front page of my website and G will not make the list. Hmmm. My own little search engine that ranks search engines. What a concept.