Google Updates and SERP Changes - September 2014

[Martin Ice Web]

---

System: The following 8 messages were cut out of thread at: http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4694139.htm [webmasterworld.com] by goodroi - 3:07 pm on Sep 2, 2014 (utc -5)

---

Hopefully Google is getting this thing tweaked.

as i see today, they didnīt get it right. Very low and nonconverting traffic.
+ domaincrowding
+ not compelling sites are on page #1
+ Content is NOT king
+ search for bananas and get apples


On saturday a friend asked me to look into his niche and all the ranking sites are like
- keyword town
up to page two
I thought this would be considered as spam? There was not one local Business, there was not one realy -> compelling <- site.

[aristotle]

My two main sites have both seen a total traffic boost of about 20% during the past week or so, gaining a little more each day. I thought it was due to college students returning to school, since that's where a lot of my traffic comes from. But when I compared it to last year, the gain then was only about 10-15% over the same time frame. So I'll just watch to see if there's some underlying permanent improvement as well.

[rish3]

I have something of an accidental testbed. I have two US based b2b ecommerce websites, that are somewhat related. Something like "steel widgets" and "plastic widgets", very similar, but different buyers, etc. They happen to run on different hosting companies, in different locations, with different technical platforms.

Both experienced the "zombie syndrome" during, and after, whatever changes Google was making in the second week of August. Traffic levels were roughly the same, the split between PPC and organic was the same, etc. But...I saw, for the first time, what many of you have complained about for a while. Big jump in bounce rates, big dive in conversions, only my "loss leader / cheap" products selling.

It all came back yesterday and today, with today coming in slightly better in conversion rates, average sales price, and lower bounce rate than before the downturn started.

The strangest thing to me is that the downtick, and the uptick, were almost identical for both sites, even though they share almost nothing in common. Also, the downtick and uptick were not minor...we're talking about huge changes...like bounce rate jumping from 30% to 60% for an extended time, then coming back. Similar for conversions, average sale price, etc.

I also didn't see anything about SERP positions that would account for it. (using proxies, clearing cache, changing location, etc).

I know this sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it's as if Google is learning how to detect a buyer with imminent purchase intent, and funneling them away somewhere.

Usually, I would blame a change like this on myself...some misconfiguration, network issues, etc. The fact that it happened on two sites that share very little in common, at the same time, though...makes that unlikely.

[Jez123]

I know this sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it's as if Google is learning how to detect a buyer with imminent purchase intent, and funneling them away somewhere.

But where? Are buyers that easy to manipulate? If it were the case, wouldn't we all see an uptick in PPC sales? I know I don't - my PPC is appalling and I only keep it going as a lost leader.

[Wilburforce]

Are buyers that easy to manipulate?

At least two mechanisms are within Google's control:

1. The SERPs themselves (likelihood of selecting P1 results);
2. Displayed Description.

Both have been the subject of changes that could be interpreted as manipulative.
Certainly (discussed previously in this and other threads) "throttling" provides some evidence that SERPs are sometimes manipulated on short (daily? hourly?) timescales.

The two pages of my site currently showing for main key term dropped another whole page yesterday, and there was a sharp drop in overall traffic accompanied - paradoxically - by better-than-usual conversion. Perhaps this is down to the fact that my own Descriptions are being used again.

[Martin Ice Web]

But where? Are buyers that easy to manipulate?

Yes, and the users donīt know it in the Moment. Remember 90% of users out there donīt know anything about Google Panda, penguin and the Google is tracking all their activities.

-it begins with giving the user a search suggestion on their old search Habits <- this is my number one
-cut out all the real good niche sites that sell the item
-show only known brands <- this is my second one
-show multiply entries from one domain
-push down organics down the fold
-make ads look like you wish to click them ( yellow sign )
-make a big selection choice only on ads
-rewrite titles as if the site is not relvant
-show only similar pages in organics
-laser sharp GSA
-donīt search for exact match only on ads
-make a suggest did you look for ....

I have a big pool of old search data. And when i search this phrases right now, 90% are occupied by Amazon, one or two big brands and then rubbish.
19 out of 20 ads are laser sharp on the search Phrase.

It is so easy to manipulate poeple. And donīt Forget 40% of all users with buying Intention donīt go to Google anymore. The go directly to Amazon and this Count will grown in the next years. Google is on a loosers road, wait until Amazon replaces the google ads on their pages with their own ads. This will cut out even more buyers from google.

Ask youself some questions:
-why are search Count is steady growing up on Google since Panda and penguin?
-why are there more ads than organics
-why is Google scraping Content for thier KB
-why are short periods ( 10 minutes ) when it seems Panda/penguin is switched off and visitos and sales suddenly come in like creasy
-why are other SE (bing, yahoo, DuckDuckGo) have so much more choice and even lists the Panda/penguin punished sites on page one ( certainly not because this sites are so bad )

Oh Boy Google does not collecting personal data because it is funnny, no it is to manipulate poeple.

But you can strike back!

MAKE GOOD AND COMPELLING SITE, SO THAT USERS WILL LINK TO YOU!

[Wilburforce]

MAKE GOOD AND COMPELLING SITE, SO THAT USERS WILL LINK TO YOU!

Or so that spammers will scrape your content and bury you in bad links, at least in my case.

[GreyBeard123]

But you can strike back!

MAKE GOOD AND COMPELLING SITE, SO THAT USERS WILL LINK TO YOU!

Thanks Martin, you made my day :) :)

[Martin Ice Web]

GreyBeard,

you are welcome. I though, while MC is on his 10 year vacation someone has to refresh webmasters mind related to Googles guidelines.

For all others who have allready good and compelling sites but still suffering:

THERE IS NO NEGATIVE SEO!

[Awarn]

I too see the on and off periods but I do not think the traffic is going to Adwords users. Adwords sucks right now. I also see site NOT using Adwords listed higher than those that use Adwords. I would bet that Google is price shopping and sending people to the cheapest sites. Cheapest usually is Ebay and Amazon. Quality may be garbage but it is cheap.

[GreyBeard123]

I do not think the traffic is going to Adwords users

I do not see it either

I would bet that Google is price shopping and sending people to the cheapest sites. Cheapest usually is Ebay and Amazon. Quality may be garbage but it is cheap.

Not in my niche

[CaptainSalad2]

>>MAKE GOOD AND COMPELLING SITE, SO THAT USERS WILL LINK TO YOU!<<

Better make sure you make it "extra good" Mart because everyone adds nofollow as standard now anyway, unless they are

1) Paying the site owner for a dofollow link
2) Known to the site owner (friends)
3) Have an arrangement with the site owner (business networking, sexual favours)

As with most things in life to get ahead its not what you know but who you know, for everything else there is "nofollow" :)

[Martin Ice Web]

Google is price shopping and sending people to the cheapest sites

better to say to the well known sites. A freind just told me that ebay sellers suffer too. So I bet on Amazon as i know that two of my manufacturers told me that they sell more to Amazon then to other resellers right now. Remember Amazon did make 20% more sales ( not earnings, earnings are down and honestly a minus ). But this 20% must come from somewhere as poeple donīt buy more only because it is Amazon.
Once again i say in one or two years Google will not be the place to visit for buying items! This not only is because Amazon is (not my opinion ) better but the choices for poeple will get smaller on Google as they Progress top hurt smaller ecoms. This is not a delusion but this copys the todays high street. What we see right now is milking the cows as Long as they are not captured by Amazon. And Google knows this day will come.

Better make sure you make it "extra good" Mart

+1, the only way to survive is make it so good that poeple come back and have realy niche items.
Once you are a brand in your niche u can do everything u want.

[EditorialGuy]

Better make sure you make it "extra good" Mart because everyone adds nofollow as standard now anyway, unless...

That simply isn't true, although it's closer to being true for e-commerce sites (as it probably has been all along).

[RedBar]

Something appears to be afoot, my widget sector results are a complete mess.

That's a pity since they had been looking reasonably good for a while with mostly relevant results, now it's a jumbled mess of mostly garbage with the occasional decent result randomly inserted!

Pinterest, houzz and several different forum boards seem to be the flavour of the day.

[Martin Ice Web]

Redbar, my niche full of sites that uses the same CSV file from the manufacturer. Same title, same description, same Pictures even the Navigation is the same. Out of 20 results 18 are the same only different Domains. What a mess.

[samwest]

Pretty sad when my Houzz page is outranking my site page. I fully agree with the "flavor of the day" redbar...it seems G does this quite regularly then drops them. Remember the ebay crowding, the youtube video crowding, facebook post crowding?

Listen Google, if I want images, I'll click the "images" tab". I don't need good results in the main page usurped by a well funded or well followed photo spam site. The user experience suffers when good results are displaced by multiple listings of thinly related photo sites.

I'd say these are to WORST SERP's I've seen, ever!

[Saffron]

Yep agree, they're pretty poor.

I really wish they'd get rid of the 'home remedies for every search term used' and one site listed four times on page 1.

[samwest]

@ rish - your observations fit the profile to a T.

Yup Jez, buyers are easy to manipulate (as MIW described in detailed) by their past behavior and every day G has more data to steer "objects" more precisely towards their funnel. There's no magic, but at what point does their aggressiveness destroy the free internet market? That's another discussion.

I've noticed a considerable loss of PR5 referrals from places like *.about.com
My take on backlinks is that they are dead (unless as defined by Capt'salad above). Affiliate programs are dead too...for quite some time in my vertical. Too many Linkjuicelossaphobiacs out there...thanks in part to our pals in MV.

[samwest]

Wow, this topic has died...apparently things are just great out there in the Google SERP world...that, or everyone just gave up.

[RedBar]

or everyone just gave up.

I know I have, it's pointless doing anything now if one is trying to use the web, one can have the most informative and highest quality site going and Google does not give a flying fig, all it does is serve up its self-serving financial buddies and garbage.

Fortunately I have a real world business which doesn't rely on the daily whims of juvenile brown-nosers plus, very interestingly, my entire global industry also tends to agree with. After 2008 it became noticeable that volume trade purchasers' attitudes started to change, this has continued to the extent that we're now back to mostly doing trade pre-web days style.

Sure the sites are still used by architects and specifiers for technical information and the ease with which we can introduce new product lines but 90+% of actual NEW financial trade is face-to-face either at exhibitions or our factories, the balance is good old-fashioned customer site visits.

[samwest]

It really is a sad state of affairs. The web was once for the people, not it's for the biggest untouchable monopoly ever. You're absolutely right, the only way to survive now its to revert to our pre-web business practices and cut the whole search and PPC approach out entirely. Nothing seems to work right...WMT data is a week behind, AW is non converting and they've got us buying "thin air". It's time to stop. I may even go back to magazine and newspaper advertising. The web has become worthless for this cat.

[EditorialGuy]

Wow, this topic has died...apparently things are just great out there in the Google SERP world...that, or everyone just gave up.

The monthly update topic made a lot more sense (and drew a lot more participants) when Google had a regular monthly "dance" and Google Search rankings were less affected by personalization, geotargeting, and other factors than they are today.

In the absence of useful or actionable information, it stands to reason that the topic of "Google Updates and SERP Changes [Insert month]" inspires less interest than it did a few years go.

[xelaetaks]

The search reults have turned into a joke, for my niche 3 Amazon links come up on oage one! That over websites that actually updates regularly and provides useful content about the niche and industry.

[JesterMagic]

In the past 3 days I have noticed sites in my niche being pushed down a bit by the large "we cover it all but not indepth" sites.

A large online pc magazine also has gotten into reviewing non pc related websites now. With their ranking clout and not because of the content they have been appearing in my niche in the top 5.

[matt621]

I have been online since 1995 and earning a living online since 2002. I posted back in 2006 what google was doing but my threads were just ignored/abandoned/attacked. (here and elsewhere.)

I only point this out to hopefully convince a few of you that I know of what I speak. There is a way for us small businesses to survive and that is expose google for what they are: A business, an advertising business. I give google total credit, they sneaked in right under everyone's nose. That nice empty page with nothing but a search box... It was simply beautiful.

Google got to be google because they did what no one was doing: focusing on the user of the net. They were looking for something (maybe information, maybe a product) but they were in no mood for a salespitch to interfere with their search.

But now look at google. They have very slyly slipped in ads that look like... content. Just like a wolf in sheeps clothing.

Did you know Yahoo is experimenting with the original google approach? [search.yahoo.com...] They are seeing if the can bring in those who have awoken and realized that Google has become an internet version of the home shopping channel. You know where people watch commercials for hours for products they don't need?

The way to "beat" google is to expose them. Inform others, "You know 90% of what you are looking at on Google are advertisments, right?" Back in the day when you presented an "ad" as "content" in print media you had to have a small disclaimer at the top and bottom. Google USED to do that with the blue then kinda brownish and now gone bar. All those pictures you see are also ads. Does anyone know if there was a law that required that or was it just professionalism on the part of print media? Seems likeit would be a worthwhile discussion on this one topic alone. Could google be legally required to indicate ads from serp?

I agree there are many ways to gain customers for small businesses and we usually innovate about 3 times faster than the big boys. But it's hard work innovating and after many years it can seem daunting. However we must do both: inform and innovate. Inform others that google is an advertising company (not a search engine) and that we have to find ways to create the new "next big thing" on the net.

[bannha]

My google site was fine then. sad too

[samwest]

My US targeted site is getting no US traffic. It's getting plenty of traffic from Australia, Norway, the UK, South Africa and Japan. In fact, most sales now are in the very early morning hours and are all from far away places. Google must be reserving all US traffic for itself and it's ad network buddies. BTW - good home shopping channel analogy Matt612.

[xelaetaks]

It's crazy. I even heard an seo that called out Matt Cutts on all this and his response was something to the extent that he doesn't care because all these sites hit by Penguin used what he called webspam.

It's messed up though, i think back around 07-08 Google used to be at these public seo conventions and helping out small businesses now it seems they have made a sharp 180.

[seoskunk]

And yet despite all this the money keeps rolling in at Google. As a cash making entity Google excels at this so I see no change coming soon.

Back to update, took a site that was not doing so well, I have recoded to html5 and redone semantics of the site and slightly improved the look and feel of site. All code was cross browser checked and valid W3c coding.

The result in the serps was dramatic, Its gone from main keyword completely. I haven't a clue if this is because of a penguin penalty already there or because of the update this month, but feel pretty sad about it.

[Wilburforce]

@seoskunk

I think the recoding and loss of position are probably unrelated, but I also updated my site to HTML-5 a couple of weeks ago, and dropped about 10 places for main key term with whatever happened around 6 September.

I'll be adding some more sites to my disavowed list in the next couple of days, as the biggest recent change to my site is a couple of hundred new spammy links. That, too, makes me feel like it was some kind of mini-penguin.

Perhaps we should call it Eudyptula minor?