Google Updates and SERP Changes - September 2014

[Martin Ice Web]

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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)

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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.

[Awarn]

I don't think speed matters unless you are terrible. Start thinking out of the box. I think part of the issue is we think logically and try do thinks what we consider right. We assume Google is logical and I think this may be wrong.

[RedBar]

so where is the traffic me wonders?

This is something that has perplexed me for a while now, my gut feeling is that people are using the Net in a completely different way to before and especially so with the rise of mobile usage.

We assume Google is logical

Now that I haven't assumed for years, 05.05.05 nailed that one on the head for me:-)

[superclown2]

We assume Google is logical and I think this may be wrong.

Perhaps it's just that their logic is different from our logic.

[samwest]

I don't think speed matters unless you are terrible.

I've found that speed is crucial. The slower you are the higher your bounce rate. I do everything in my power to keep the site as fast as possible...even if that means sparing a bit of superfluous eye candy.

my gut feeling is that people are using the Net in a completely different way

Agreed. The worst thing to hit the web was mobile devices...smart phones to be exact. Is there anyone out there running an ecom site who has benefited from mobile users? They are tire kickers only and I've never converted on a mobile visitor.

[Wilburforce]

We assume Google is logical

I don't think "logical" is quite the right word here: certainly the algorithm is strictly logical. Its application may not be well-intentioned, intelligent or reasonable, but it must be logical.

One difficulty, I think, is that its complexity masks any obvious view of its operators, so that simple logical rules (IF kw density <2% AND self-posted backlinks = 0 THEN my site will not be penalised) don't get us very far. In that sense it may not appear to be logical, but its operators must be.

In the sense that strict application of Google guidelines offers no protection at all from being bounced down 150 places by the latest black-and-white animal, Google is unfair, but not illogical.

[edited by: Wilburforce at 1:13 pm (utc) on Sep 19, 2014]

[superclown2]

ecom site who has benefited from mobile users?

Yep. The way things are going they'll be the majority of my customers very soon.

[CaptainSalad2]

@samwest how does your mobile site score on Googles user experience testhere [developers.google.com...] ?

If not very well that would be the first thing I fixed. A better user experience decreases the likelihood of the visitor leaving before making a transaction!

I would also consider mobile page speed seriously NOT for ranking purposes but for an improved user experience = less likelihood of visitors clicking off.

I wonder how the LARGER iphone 6 screens will impact this stuff as it will be more user friendly for browsing purposes than the smaller screens IMO! Hopefully more mobile manufactures will offer larger screen versions in the future!

[samwest]

@Capt - I ran the test: Speed = 73/100 - User Experience = 94/100 - my site is fully responsive...except for my signup form. That's what I'll work on next. Thanks for that tip...

[CaptainSalad2]

No problem Sam, if there is anything on the test results you aren't sure how to fix or don't understand PM me and ill give you some tips on what you can do to fix the problems!

Some of the stuff took me a while to figure out but I can get 100% on everything now, that said I am a windows/ASP developer so might not have all the answers for PHP

[samwest]

thanks captn'! the forms are all fixed now. endless tweaking.

[RedBar]

They are tire kickers only and I've never converted on a mobile visitor.

I have to point out that I often sit in the pub looking at stuff on my phone however never buy on it, I always do that from my desktop, am I a normal user?

I have friends who buy all sorts of stuff on their phones however none of my family or relations do.

[Wilburforce]

I have friends who buy all sorts of stuff on their phones however none of my family or relations do.

I recently tried using my phone to buy something in a sale while on holiday, and couldn't enter details in any of the data fields on the vendor's site. My wife's phone (different OS, different browser) exhibited the same symptoms. Missed the sale, but had no problem with the site from my PC when I got home.

There are all kinds of issues with phone browsers and how they render pages and execute scripts. It used to be a challenge getting IE to render anything correctly, but phone browsers are a whole new species.

Clearly Google is taking phone compatibility seriously (see e.g. CaptainSalad2's link, above), so you ignore making your site phone compatible at your peril.

Several points I would recommend:

1. Use CSS to exclude non-essential images in phone-mode, and load smaller/lower-resolution images where you can't exclude them;

2. Use HTML 5 (or at least avoid anything in Quirks mode_;

3. Minimise scripting (and, again, use CSS to exclude non-essential scripts in phone-mode).

Tablet-sized phones blur the boundaries, but using variations of screen-size to load different CSS versions works for me.

[samwest]

I'd rather look at the phone book or catalog in full size rather than trying to read it through a straw. Always feel I'm missing the big picture on the phone. The problem is, in this economy, for a growing majority it's a phone or PC, not both.

[toidi]

My site has recovered the page it dropped on 6 September for main key term, and has also reverted to mysite.com.

For quite a long time it had been returning mysite.com/key-term.html, until - at the point when domain crowding entered the discussions again - it returned both.

As it is now back to a single entry, I assume whatever Google were looking at that resulted in widespread multiple entries has now been resolved.

Similar thing with my site around the same time. All of the sub-directory pages mysite.com/geolocation/ disappeared from the serps and were replaced by mysite.com, which doesn't have the power of the sub-directory pages. This has moved me from page 1 to pages 2-5 for those key terms.

Mysite.com is still on page 1 for its key term(s) but down 2 spaces to #5.

The pages in the sub-directories mysite.com/geolocation/pages.asp are all doing as good or better than ever. Couple thousand of these.

The same thing happened to my site back when the disavow tool started to become popular and I suspected the loss in ranking might be a trap so I did absolutely nothing. Everything went back to normal or better in less than a month.

I am starting to see one of my sub-directory pages moving back into play, but it is hard to sit back and watch.

At the same time, I have a dozen small thin geo-sites sites with little or no content and they have all moved up to fill the void. These sites individually target the same geo-locations as the sub-directories of the big site except there is a site for each location. So my thin geo-location sites are beating out my content rich big site.


local service business online since 1995

[netmeg]

The mobile thing kind of depends on your demographic. Most of my clients are B2B, and they get a ton more sales from tablets than they do from phones - I suspect that typically it's someone walking around a warehouse with a tablet in hand checking inventory and ordering to cover stock shortages. Those people don't buy on phones so much.

I've bought stuff via my phone, but usually through an app, like Amazon's.

[RedBar]

for a growing majority it's a phone or PC, not both.

One of my company sites is an example.in, 50% of its visitors are from India and, coincidentally, 50% of its visitors use mobile phones, fortunately it's only a brochure site therefore sales processing is not needed.

[Wilburforce]

@toidi

Welcome to the forum!

I suspected the loss in ranking might be a trap

What do you mean by "a trap"? Did you think that using the disavow tool had made/would make a difference?

[samwest]

No changes on site, but traffic one day can sure look completely different than another. One day decent customer interaction, then the next day, nothing but one shot visits...mostly from Google. Completely un-natural patterns. Big surprise?
Bounce rate up, order form appears to be made of Teflon. Zombie traffic is back for me.

In the last two days, the order form periodically becomes like Kryptonite to visits...only for specific time frames. Nothing is changing on my end. They must be throwing around a lot of garbage test traffic.

[edited by: samwest at 2:01 pm (utc) on Sep 20, 2014]

[JesterMagic]

50% of the users in our niche is from mobile now days when it was less than 10% 3 years ago. Mobile also accounts for about the same in purchases. In our niche a lot of services have website landing pages that point to their app on Google Play or iTunes. They don't even offer the service through a website anymore. They rely on marketing through Facebook and Twitter (plus any newspaper interviews they can get which boosts their online presence).

There has always been a high failure rate in our industry but with mobile and the marketing just through social media the failure rate is even higher still.

I am surprised I haven't heard many questions about ranking apps in Google Play or iTunes (not necessarily in this forum).

[toidi]

What do you mean by "a trap"?

A favorite law enforcement technigue is to tell a suspect they have enough evidence to convict but if you give a detailed confession they will go easy on you. It works for law enforcement and when the disavow tool was given to us suspects, i could not help but see the similarities. From what i see on this forum i might be half way right in my assumption.

I do not know if i had a penalty as i had stopped using wmt and most oyher g products a long time ago.



Us service business adverising on the web since 1995

[EditorialGuy]

A favorite law enforcement technigue is to tell a suspect they have enough evidence to convict but if you give a detailed confession they will go easy on you. It works for law enforcement and when the disavow tool was given to us suspects, i could not help but see the similarities.

Or maybe Google is like the VD investigator from the Department of Public Health who wants a list of an infected person's contacts. The "disavow" list makes it easier to see who's been transmitting the clap.

[Wilburforce]

The "disavow" list makes it easier to see who's been transmitting the clap.

Yes, I think that is a more likely model.

On the "trap" model, there's also the small point that by the time you start disavowing links you're probably already in the slammer.

How and when disavowing sites makes any difference to your site's perfrmance in Google SERPs is impossible to establish, but Google may well take notice if a particular site is disavowed by lots of other site owners.

On the other hand, you would have thought they could figure out that some Chinese DMOZ scraper should be disregarded without needing anyone else to tell them.

[xelaetaks]

A favorite law enforcement technigue is to tell a suspect they have enough evidence to convict but if you give a detailed confession they will go easy on you. It works for law enforcement and when the disavow tool was given to us suspects, i could not help but see the similarities. From what i see on this forum i might be half way right in my assumption.

I do not know if i had a penalty as i had stopped using wmt and most oyher g products a long time ago.

I wish they would stop this Penguin business or at least update it regurlarly.

My site actually did have a ranking change when they were rubbing what seemed like Penguin test a few weeks ago - a keyword went from page 9 to around page 5, then it seemed to revert back - so I think there could be an effect from disavowing links for some but takes a Pengui refresh I guess.

What effect it could have on different sites in different areas of the web who knows but it did seem to have a noticable effect when they were doing some tests a couple weeks back.

[Wilburforce]

Today in my sector (UK, niche service) it looks like whatever happened on 18 September has been retracted. The results look exactly as they did on 17 September, and my two-page return for main key term is back, with mysite.com/key-term.html once again outranking mysite.com.

[Saffron]

It works for law enforcement and when the disavow tool was given to us suspects, i could not help but see the similarities. From what i see on this forum i might be half way right in my assumption.

This is what terrifies me. I used the disavow tool last week. I have never, in the 12 years I've owned my site, tried to build links. Not once. But I disavowed probably 200+ links. I feel like it was an admission of guilt, when there truly isn't one.

Do Google really think I'd be hanging out on 'adult' sites asking them to link to my G rated site? Seriously?

[EditorialGuy]

I used the disavow tool last week. I have never, in the 12 years I've owned my site, tried to build links. Not once. But I disavowed probably 200+ links.

Yes, and in doing so, you identified 200 links that you thought looked shady. If enough other people disavow the same links, that will create a pattern, and the pattern will be useful to Google's spam-fighting efforts.

In other words, it probably isn't about your guilt or innocence, it's about the links that you've chosen to disavow.

[Wilburforce]

I feel like it was an admission of guilt

I don't see why anyone should construe disavowing links as an admission of guilt: you can remove links that are under your control (disavowing them would serve no purpose), so disavowing links is an assertion that they are not under your control.

[Saffron]

I'm terrified of everything to do with Google. One slip up and we lose our house.

It is possibly my own paranoia, but the way they have been since the whole Panda and Penguin thing started, I am very, very afraid of everything. Do I link to other articles on my site, don't I. If I do, what do I use as anchor text? Can I link to other sites I find useful, or will that get me in trouble. Should I disavow or just leave those iffy links to my site there? Should I add an image to an article, or will that slow down my pages enough to earn me a downgrade (after all, my main competition has zero images and they rank no. 1 for almost everything). I'm not even trying to game the system, I'm just scared of a penalty for something I did unintentionally.

[samwest]

@saffron...sadly, we share the same feeling. I could rant, but it does no good.

I sitting here, on the busiest day of the week, busiest time frame in fact , Sunday night and GA is reporting 30 minutes of absolutely ZERO traffic on my site. My serps look fine, but still no visitors. Verifies on multiple analytics.

What button out of ten thousand did I accidentally toggle the wrong way for Google's approval? and like you said, lost the farm over it?

Seems if one little thing is amiss, you can be taken out of the game lock, stock and barrel.

[Awarn]

I am wondering if maybe it isn't our sites but more the way Google is indexing the sites. I find it very odd that some products show up as being listed with structured data yet another product with the same type page does not show. I know there is no difference. This tells me Google is not fully indexing sites. It seems like I have to drive traffic to a specific page to get it truly indexed.