Google Updates and SERP Changes - July 2014

[netmeg]

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System: The following 2 messages were cut out of thread at: http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4676767.htm [webmasterworld.com] by aakk9999 - 3:29 pm on Jul 1, 2014 (gmt 0)

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They've been tacking my site name onto my title tag for a while now - more than a year. Meh.

[Wilburforce]

Or perhaps the World Cup?

In which case the end of the World Cup would explain the "recovery".

[Martin Ice Web]

For sure this is a roll back to serps from 2 weeks ago.
All the bots/scrapers and referal spam that comes through google is back again.
What a mess. Canīt they do anything without diecing the serps upsite down? For two years now there wasnīt a 4 weeks with stable results.

edit: Our unattended and realy not good site is back and generates some income again.
I tend to believe the best thing is to have 20 sites with different layout and slight different content, one will rank.

[philgames]

IS anyone else noticing that the sites that keyword stuff niche related words everywhere rank now?

Even just looking at search results the titles of the results are so spammy looking.

They really have messed up on the authority algo, just because you can name different words in the niche doesn't mean you are an expert.

Oh well... some one should make an open source search engine (one that "SHARES" money for data and to help crawl the internet).

[EditorialGuy]

I haven't seen much in the way of ups and downs lately. Our Google referrals have been pretty steady over the last month or so: a big jump after Panda 4.0, with modest but consistent growth in June and July except for a tiny seasonal softening this week.

I find it more useful to keep an eye on search rankings in WMT, especially "average position with change." Such numbers aren't likely to be affected by the World Cup, the weather, whether people are going on vacation, etc.

[Mentat]

21 July something happened on penalised 4 of September 13 domain.

[i.imgur.com...]

[MrSavage]

Just noticed something new. Is it new? I don't recall seeing this until now.

I see an ad at the top of the SERPS. Nothing new there. However, you know the listings that are the authority site and have sub links listed also? Sorry I can't recall what those are called. So it's basically deeper links into the site. Whelp, I've seen this now on that top ad position.

This to me says, more ad, less results. I mean for those deep links to show in (below the primary ad link) the ad space, that must have removed 2 or more actual results. Page 1 for a couple sites just became page 2.

Sorry if my explanation sucked. Basically that ad at the top is taking up more real estate. I haven't seen that layout before, but perhaps others have. It's another brick in the wall to me.

[edited by: MrSavage at 7:52 pm (utc) on Jul 26, 2014]

[JD_Toims]

It's new: [webmasterworld.com...]

[Saffron]

The problem is, Google can change what they "value" in a flash. Last year it was so heavily geared towards brand sites. I'm in a niche topic, but they were giving more weight to generalised but branded sites with extremely thin content. They seem to have turned down the brand dial since then, thankfully. But what will they turn their eye on next? They do like long articles, they don't like long articles, they do like articles with lots of images, they don't like articles with lots of images. You try to do the right thing but they can be so fickle.

Just reading the fear in this forum. People are scared to link to external sites or even other content on their own site. Google has so many people running scared and contrary to what they tell us to do, people worry that even the simplest thing (such as internal linking) might result in a penalty.

[EditorialGuy]

The problem is, Google can change what they "value" in a flash. Last year it was so heavily geared towards brand sites. I'm in a niche topic, but they were giving more weight to generalised but branded sites with extremely thin content. They seem to have turned down the brand dial since then, thankfully.

Sure, Google makes changes, but at least for the SERPs that I watch, the changes seem to be more "tweak" than "flip-flop" (not counting any manual penalties that may be imposed). Granted, a rise or drop of a few places in the rankings can have a big impact on a given site's traffic, but the change may still be small in the overall scheme of things.

Just reading the fear in this forum. People are scared to link to external sites or even other content on their own site. Google has so many people running scared and contrary to what they tell us to do, people worry that even the simplest thing (such as internal linking) might result in a penalty.

Some people are gullible, and others are paranoid. That's just human nature.

[Saffron]

Some people are gullible, and others are paranoid. That's just human nature.

Possibly. Last year I removed all internal links on my site due to fear of a penalty from Google. Then a couple of months later realised I was letting fear control how I run my site. I wasn't using those links to rank well with Google, they were there for the benefit of my visitors, so I've slowly been putting them back. If I'm punished, I'm punished, but I'm not doing it to game the system, never had been.

The past year though, I've spent more time than ever trying to please Google. I never once tried to gain a benefit unethically, my focus was always on content. I hate SEO & I'm not techy, what I do is write. But they put so much fear into me and I bought into trying to do stuff to avoid their wrath such as link removal etc.

[EditorialGuy]

Remember, a lot of people are afraid of Google because they have reason to be. Maybe they've had manual penalties, or maybe they've done things they knew were shady and are waiting for the hammer to come down. They talk about their worries in public, and that makes other people worried. Pretty soon, all kinds of people are chewing their fingernails--including clean-living site owners who, in the words of JFK, have nothing to fear but fear itself.

[Lorel]

Has anyone heard about the new Pigeon Algorithm? it's supposed to have gone into effect on July 24 and affected ranking in maps and local searches.

[Clay_More]

Remember, a lot of people are afraid of Google because they have reason to be.

Frustrated with Google is probably a more accurate description rather than afraid. It's what happens when clean living site owners get hammered by Google for no apparent reason.

I don't follow Google's FUD other than things that make sense. Sometimes that puts me outside their guidelines, but they are guidelines, not commandments from above.

[Robert Charlton]

Regarding "Pigeon", I've posted a thread in our Local Forum...

Google "Pigeon" Updates Local Search Algorithm
http://www.webmasterworld.com/local_search/4690773.htm [webmasterworld.com]

[Martin Ice Web]

Was there some update last week? We got hit very bad after beeing on a good way to recover from panda. Now we are back to -60-70 loss of traffic and no sales. We have foreign traffic, bounce is about >90%. Googls shopping ads are a joke ( spend money yes, but donīt get any real customers ). We are outranked by silly garbage brands sites that have nothing to do with the query. Amazon ranks #1 to #3.

ecom germany

[iammeiamfree]

There was an update. On Friday I saw a page jump from position 12 to 2 but they had previously been moving down.

[shipissinking]

Big G has really been toying with our site now. Last month, we have been hit very badly with no messages on GWT.

So I revived my Adwords account to create Text ads to some of the product pages that I have been ranking for previously.

Last week, the organic rankings on some of my products went back to the top (I realized this on the Adwords preview tool). I turned the ads for those products off. Can you guess what happened next? Yep, the very next day my products disappeared from the organic results. What in the #*$! hell? I have no words....

ecom AU

[philgames]

@shipissinkingIm getting same thing.. well I dont use adwords but seeing that my main keywords have gone are your results being vomited like mine? If all of this is linked to boosting sites with adwords then that is illegal.

[Lorel]

Why would Google boosting sites with AdWords and pushing down generic listings be illegal? Google search is a free service and they can terrorize generic listings all they want.

[philgames]

Of course its illegal because it is anti competitive and misleading searchers.

[EditorialGuy]

If all of this is linked to boosting sites with adwords then that is illegal.

There are plenty of SERPs that don't even have AdWords.

Still, if you're into conspiracy theories, don't forget the argument that says Google pushes sites that buy AdWords down in the organic results so they'll have to keep buying AdWords.

The Conspiracy Theories Shop offers an argument for every taste.

[JD_Toims]

Yeah, we all know Google's totally ethical about everything, so quashing any speculation about motives other than how pure they must be should be strongly encouraged.

Or maybe not everyone who thinks they might not quite be ethical at times is as silly as some seem to think -- In one recent case 64,000 of the conspiracy theorists happened to get a fairly large win for some reason: [nbcnews.com...]

It seems blindly gobbling up everything they say and do as "pure and ethical" in at least one case would have led to people getting completely hosed by the anti-trust/anti-competitive practices employed by Google.

[shipissinking]

Im getting same thing.. well I dont use adwords but seeing that my main keywords have gone are your results being vomited like mine? If all of this is linked to boosting sites with adwords then that is illegal.

I am not sure what you mean by being vomited but I can go as far as saying that they are taking a huge dump on us. I'm not trying to create a conspiracy here, I'm just sharing what I am seeing and experiencing.

I am still at a never ending guessing game here because there aren't any messages in GWT and I have not made any major change in the site prior to the big drop. It wasn't a gradual drop either. If you are not Amazon, walmart or target, or any bigshot store, you can't expect much from Google. Blimey

I'm doing pretty good on Bing and other search engines though. I don't know, but G has probably decided to try and be clever and drop the site for something that nobody but themselves can see. If this is an algorithmic drop, which it probably is, then it is just a poor one. Pushing me to Adwords, yeah I guess..

[RedBar]

What's happened?

My traffic has been decimated today across all sites, checking logs something happened last evening UK time.

Anyone else?

[johnhh]

@Redbar we have seen decreased traffic starting Mon 28th, yesterday was pretty grim, today not much better so far. Could be Commonwealth Games, sunny weather, school holidays or other social factors.

Or some sort of update, although I don't see any major SERP changes ( not that I check that many ).

UK site

[Martin Ice Web]

@redbar, -40% since yesterday. Bounce is near 100%.

[Mentat]

Since monday some of my domains have no increase vs Weekend, so another Google Update...

I'm so tired of this...

[Martin Ice Web]

Mentant, while your are tired, google CEOs laugh and think: Oh what fools still believe we are serving best results over ads.
While seeing the bankaccount growing faster than the mountain of debt of greece.

[EditorialGuy]

No change here in Google organic traffic. Up a little some days, down a bit on others, but unchanged overall for a while now. No big crawls, either. Even Googlebot appears to be on summer vacation.

[webcentric]

My traffic has been decimated today across all sites, checking logs something happened last evening UK time.

My guess is that something is rolling incrementally through Google and whatever happened last evening to some, already happened to others on other dates. The following thread is focused on the 17th/18th of June and there have been other mysterious, drops reported since then.

[webmasterworld.com ]

One thing I noticed recently is that Google changed a huge volume of my title tags (essentially appending " - My Site Home" to almost all my category pages) e.g. Category Name - My Site Home. Can't imaging this is helping a bit on top of the obvious drop in rankings across many pages.

Added: I just remembered that page titles is where this thread started this month. Oh well.

For i = 0 to infinity - 1

Loop

[edited by: webcentric at 2:34 pm (utc) on Jul 30, 2014]