Traffic Fluctuations (Panda 4.1 or something else)

[liamkk]

This question is for a long established site for Australian market. Site lost about one third of organic traffic during Panda 4 update.

Here's the turn of events in last few days.

- Moved to https in early September with no impact
- Lost Google+ page box displaying in SERPs for brand terms after moving to https
- Traffic started improving gradually after Panda 4.1 roll out and it was back to normal levels before Panda 4.0 hit by 5th October.

Earlier this week (Sun-Tues), there was a massive spike in organic traffic and rankings improved across the board.

Now rankings have returned to post panda levels since yesterday.


My questions:

1) Was the spike related to some Pengiun testing or pre-release or fine tuning of Panda 4.1? In either cases, can we expect that spike to return?

2) Does losing the Google Plus box mean anything for the site or was that just an after affect of https switch over?

Thanks for help!

Cheers

[jpalmer]

Gidday Liamkk

Welcome to WebmasterWorld.

Just logged back in after not being in the WebmasterWorld neighbourhood for a while, to check on scuttlebutt about Panda 4.1 for APAC, as the GA stats on my .au site have jumped up by 10% or so, since September 25th.

Given my site was totally pasted by Panda 1 back in 2012 (lost 20-30% of my overall traffic), and has been in recovery mode ever since (due to other action onsite, offsite and around the toobs), it's about time.

Although that said, I'll be doing more checking and wait a month or so, and get other 3rd party corroboration before declaring I'm a winner from it.

Can't directly help with your questions, as I'm not doing the https thing (yet), and have never had a G+/business box (although I've been trying to get that happening. Based on your comment, maybe I'll not give it as much energy as I was planning to).

Hope this is useful
Cheers
:-)

[GreyBeard123]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld liamkk

Was the spike related to some Pengiun testing or pre-release or fine tuning of Panda 4.1?

I personally think it was both..

[TheRedPenOfDoom]

Ensure that your switch from http to https is as per the SEO rules. An improper switch may cause more harm than benefits.

<snip>

[edited by: goodroi at 3:39 pm (utc) on Oct 9, 2014]
[edit reason] TOS [/edit]

[liamkk]

Thanks everyone for the warm welcome, hope to add value to the community.

I personally think it was both..

I don't mind if it was either but why it didn't stick beyond 2 days?

Does it also mean my rankings are going to get a boost when the new Pengiun comes into action?

[GreyBeard123]

why it didn't stick beyond 2 days?

Perhaps it happened due to their testing

[Anon]

RedPen

"Ensure that your switch from http to https is as per the SEO rules. An improper switch may cause more harm than benefits."

Is there a guide you would recommend on the best way to do this? I changed to https a few weeks ago and put the redirect directly in cpanel, so hoping that is a good way of doing it.

[kimbodude]

google looks to social media links and the content from it. The plus button i think has an impact for your ranking even though they wont admit that. The spike is most likely because of there AB testing.

[Robert Charlton]

liamkk, welcome to WebmasterWorld.

Does losing the Google Plus box mean anything for the site

Was this a Google+ box with a map and then company info below that? I'll assume it was, and I'll make a few guesses here, but they are guesses....

One initial top-of-my-head thought suggests that maybe you need to update your url somewhere in your Google+ account to https.

Also, and this is even more of a guess... back in July-August Google had a major change in its local/map rankings, unofficially called "Pigeon", which conceivably might have affected Google+ pages in the Knowledge Graph type listings. Conceivably, a url change at just the wrong time might have put a listing in a queue to be reprocessed. It's not an area I've been watching closely of late, but here are some threads that might relate...

Pigeon Update Or Rollback Happening Now?
July-Aug 2014
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4692003.htm [webmasterworld.com]

Pigeon was complex, and I posted in the above thread about why I thought results were taking a while to settle down. Whether this might have affected a Google+ listing for a site that had gone http to https is very hard to say....

I see the various factors... business type, map, named-location-in-query, IP-location, GPS-location, Google+ page, along with organic factors, all functioning like gears that need to mesh... but because of the different data sets, among other things, they're clearly not meshing yet.

Also see this thread in our Local forum...
Google "Pigeon" Updates Local Search Algorithm
July-Aug 2014
http://www.webmasterworld.com/local_search/4690773.htm [webmasterworld.com]

Was the spike related to some Pengiun testing or pre-release or fine tuning of Panda 4.1?

Regarding Panda/Penguin, I have no idea what the spike and drop might indicate. We've got a lot of Google activity going on at once, and my thought is that to some extent that might be intentional. It certainly makes it hard to pin down individual factors.

I'm guessing that the spike was monitored by Google and was likely a test. You might want to analyze what happened to the traffic that you got during the spike, to see if it provided any clues about what possibilities for improving site engagement during that brief time. What have you been doing, btw, to improve the site since Panda 4? Google has dropped hints that site improvements might speed up recovery for some sites, even prior to running the updates.

[Robert Charlton]

guide you would recommend on the best way to... switch from http to https

Anon, Google offers this support section on moving a site. It's by no means everything you need to know, like it doesn't go into individual server issues, but it should be helpful...

Move a site with URL changes
Google Support - August 6, 2014
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6033049 [support.google.com]

[iammeiamfree]

I have seen the strange spike in traffic twice in the last couple of weeks. The first time the number of page views per visitor was well below normal levels but the second time it was closer to normal. I am thinking it is a good sign in anycase. Perhaps google is considering increasing traffic to your site and testing which traffic would be suited. It could be that they are testing other sites in between these spikes and eventually will be using what they find to change the serps. If your getting the spikes it atleast could mean you are under consideration for more traffic and google wouldn't be testing if your site was out of the running. The testing I saw was only coming during the night so if it was implemented across the world all the time it would be a huge increase and really my site shoudld be getting a huge increase after the amount of work I have done and people are having to type in my domain name because google is not returning the expeced results ie. my site in top spot.

[liamkk]

Was this a Google+ box with a map and then company info below that? I'll assume it was, and I'll make a few guesses here, but they are guesses....

No it was not which makes it a bit confusing.

- All URLs have been updated and Google Rich Snippet testing shows correct association.
- This association is being picked up correctly in Gmail but not in SERPs.

My biggest concern is that we hired a Social Media person 3 months ago and while he's getting a lot of engagement on the page, he might have crossed the limit somewhere and Google now thinks that our page is not good enough?

What have you been doing, btw, to improve the site since Panda 4?

We made massive changes since Panda 4.0 including getting all the scrapers shut down, disavowing bad links (we never did any SEO but somehow our URL ended up in a list of Dofollow blogs and got copied over and over again at dodgy sites while we never allowed dofollow comments to begin with), fixing 301 issues, fixing duplicate content issues, removing tag pages from the index, improving site speed, fixing canonical and pagination issues and a lot of other small improvements.

As of today, we are seeing the traffic surge again (but not as massive as last Monday) so since Panda 4.1, we have not only recovered all of our lost traffic but there's an increment of another 30-40% from previous levels.

I think we got hit by Penguin last year as well (moderately though) and Monday/Tuesday surge correlated with some rank improvements similar to pre-penguin rankings on some high volume keywords so Monday/Tuesday last week was definitely a Penguin test and I am hoping that Pengiun release will improve our traffic further.