Google Updates and SERP Changes - January 2015

[RedBar]

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System: The following 2 messages were cut out of thread at: http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4719320.htm [webmasterworld.com] by robert_charlton - 1:18 am on Jan 2, 2015 (PST -8)

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I have absolutely no idea whether it's me, my sites or whatever but Google seems to be totally incapable of indexing and ranking new sites these days other than finding irrelevant garbage and ranking it well.

How have they managed to do this so well?

[aok88]

We've had the same large number of 404s ever since we re-did the whole site and let a lot 404 on purpose. This has been the case for 8+ months and our traffic went up and up while this was the case. So I don't think it is 404 causing the downward trend.

[silentneedle]

Is it me or anyone else receiving books.google.com or chinese twitter accounts (which contain the keyword) as result when there are no "quality" results available? Sometimes I wish to have a turn-off button for the panda algo when searching, it's getting worser month by month.

[Wilburforce]

404s, is it connected with rankings in any way?

It is most unlikely that 404s have any effect on ranking ("soft" 404s also probably don't, although Google doesn't like them).

It is also pretty difficult to get rid of them in WMT: I'm still getting 404s showing as "Detected" in December 2014 for pages that haven't existed for over two years, "Linked from" pages that haven't contained a link (and in quite a few cases have't existed either) for even longer.

It certainly shouldn't be on your Google list of "Things I Need to Worry About". The problem is with the linking page(s): it is more important to check your own outgoing and internal links than to lose sleep over people who don't check theirs.

@MIW - did your update contain bad internal links? I would expect Google to pay more attention to that than to the 404s themselves.

[Planet13]

has anyone else seen a sustained increase in traffic since December 25th?

My ecommerce site is up 22% in visitors since Christmas day.

Let me put this another way: The site is up 22% over the period when it SHOULD have seen a spike in traffic.

On January 3rd of this year, we had the most visitors to our site since February 22nd of 2012 - nearly 3 years ago.

I haven't really done anything to this site, so I can't figure out why the increase in visitors unless there was some sort of a significant (possibly panda related) update, since the last time we enjoyed a significant increase in visitors was when Panda 4 rolled out on May 19th, 2014.

[Martin Ice Web]

@wilbur, i was talking about internal link errors. And yes, my navigation update produced internal link failures. And IMO this is a very bad user experience if s.o. clicks on it and gets and 404 error page. Once or twice it is ok but not on high rate. Donīt u think that a healthy page with close to no errors is a sign of quality?
I agree that linked in 404s are not a big problem.

I like your "to worry baout google list"! It shows where google has put WMs. It seems that WM nowadays have to look more at how google response to a change than users do. It is a petty.
My observations in the last year is, that the big guys donīt care anymore about google. ( they get good rankings anyway ) I see heavy remarketing ( ads on partner pages reading your cookies ) and TV Spots. I think that google teached them, wow we donīt need google while getting populare through other sources , poeple just come directly to us.

[EditorialGuy]

has anyone else seen a sustained increase in traffic since December 25th?

Our visits are up about 40 percent and pageviews are up about 60 percent over a few weeks ago, but that's normal for our topic and site at this time of year.

[Planet13]

"Our visits are up about 40 percent and pageviews are up about 60 percent over a few weeks ago, but that's normal for our topic and site at this time of year."

Thanks, Editorialguy.

I guess I maybe should have specified if there were other ECOMMERCE sites that saw a significant raise in traffic over the main shopping season.

[GreenDog18]

My website has been on a crazy climb since Christmas.... Not sure why but I am enjoying it. Information site.

[Planet13]

@ GreenDog18:

Glad to hear things are going well.

Is this a seasonal thing? Do you always experience a climb after Christmas?

Also, did you make any significant changes to your site prior to Christmas?

[samwest]

For over 10 years I've seen a seasonal climb that starts Christmas day and continued until tax time. As of 2010, each year has become shorter and shorter. Last year it ran for only about 3 weeks, this year more like 3 days. Really being destroyed by useless mobile traffic and Google's apparent desire to push the site off page one entirely.

[MrSavage]

I don't often in this forum anymore, but I will in this case. Over the past while, I've noticed a lot of rubbish top results. The usefulness for finding what I need seems really bad right now. I'm not a stuck record on this subject and I know it has been beaten to death over the past year or so. I'm just saying it's becoming frustrating to me trying to use search and get quality pages with the info that I'm looking for. Perhaps it's just me seeing this.

[Jez123]

My website has been on a crazy climb since Christmas.... Not sure why but I am enjoying it. Information site.

Have you increased social signals or perhaps they have increased on their own? There must be something driving it. A new link you haven't seen yet perhaps?

[syedyasir]

I am seeing lot of websites in search results that seemed to be Hacked. For instance:

pica . gov . jm/?com_content=en-id10&itemid=9160

SERPs are currently showing lot of such sites and all of them seem to be using Wordpress and the URL has something similar to the following:

?com_content=en-id10&itemid=9160

I am also seeing lot of spammy links to my website from hacked Wordpress sites.

Anyone else is seeing this?

[RedBar]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld syedyasir

I am actually seeing sites listed where they have either gone out of business or do not exist any more.

@MrSavage

Perhaps it's just me seeing this.

Nope, my Google.co.uk widget results are absolutely diabolical with many being heavily biased towards US companies that cannot supply. It's beyond a joke now, it's been like this for several months.

[Shepherd]

WMT showing medium crawl spike on 1/9/15

[morganp2]

Ive seen a big change here in Australia.

Basically in my niche results are terrible. Most articles that are ranking are 2-3 years old and a lot of the time they aren't remotely close to the actual topic.

This seemed to happen late last week. Not sure if anyone else has seen this in other countries or not. And im not sure if this was a planned update.

[edited by: morganp2 at 7:42 am (utc) on Jan 13, 2015]

[Mentat]

-20% US traffic Monday...
They are messing something!

[samwest]

@mentat - traffic volume is down a little, but the quality of all remaining traffic also dropped like a rock in the past 48 hours. All non converting....again.

[aristotle]

I have the impression that there's been quite a bit slow movement and gradually reshuffling taking place in Google's organic results over the past month or so. It might have been harder to notice because of the effects of the holidays on U.S. traffic. But although the movements have been gradual, they appear to have added up to a fairly big overall change. The Google traffic to two of my sites has gradually climbed to record levels during this period.

[aok88]

but the quality of all remaining traffic also dropped like a rock in the past 48 hours. All non converting....again.

Same here. Amazing because things really improved after Panda 4 back in May, and kept going up till a few weeks ago. This last week we're seeing less traffic, higher bounce rate, and the 'tire-kickers' exclusively. It is so obvious it's a different set of searchers.

Since the time it went up in May till now, we did not do anything drastic to change things, except for changing a lot of it to html 5 and responsive mobile design

We did enough of the site that it is significant. Has anyone else seen an improvement or decline after implementing responsive design? That's the only thing I can think of.

Or the site's on the fence with the algo and a little Google tweak tipped it back over. It is so frustrating.

[morganp2]

No idea what has happened but here in Aus it has only been the last week. Before that traffic had been on small incline for awhile. The thing is now, the results in google are terrible so traffic is down and the quality of traffic is also down as the traffic we are getting is unrelated to the articles people are clicking on whilst our related articles won't show for these searches.

It seems old pages are now in favour of new content which is crazy when you run a site in a niche which is time specific (sports) as our articles for match etc are showing in the results from 2012 but our articles for the upcoming match are no where to be seen.

If left you feel Google is own a downwards spiral here, no wonder their market share has dropped.

[Itanium]

I'm still waiting for Google to fix their last Penguin roll out. Before that, everything was fine, but when it rolled out, it looked like Panda was dialed back a lot, pushing big brand sites to the top although the content is of lower quality. Quite annoying.

I hope they are working on that, since there has been virtually no changes for the last 5 weeks: [algoroo.com...]

[samwest]

Since the time it went up in May till now, we did not do anything drastic to change things, except for changing a lot of it to html 5 and responsive mobile design

Last August, as part of the CMS upgrade, I also changed to a responsive design. Unfortunately mobile buying is still seems to be in it's infancy for most users...unless it's between an iPhone and the Apple Store. I'm at 52.5% desktop, 27.65% mobile and 20.10% tablet, so almost 50% mobile (mobile & tablets combined). My only buyers are desktop. The rest are tire kickers.

I still can't wrap my head around anyone seriously browsing the web with a cell phone (my office has 8 32" monitors to aid my aging eyesight). In my informal survey, I find most switched to cell phone only out of financial necessity. Apparently few can afford both a home ISP account and a data plan for their phone...so they switch to the trendy smart phone option that all their friends use. I'll be happy when a "Google Glass-like" product become available.

IMHO: From a UI stance, smart phones moved us back 20 years.

[RedBar]

The rest are tire kickers.

I don't feel you can assume they're worthless tyre kickers, I do a lot of research on my tablets and smartphones however only buy from my PC. How representative that is I have no idea however I like to keep ALL my order buying confirmations etc precisely where I know they should be for accounting purposes and not spread around on several devices.

Apparently few can afford both a home ISP account and a data plan for their phone

I have no idea how much you guys are paying but a competitive UK Smartphone SIM card with unlimited texts, 2,000 mins and unlimited 3G Internet is USD 27.00 month or with 1,000 mins and 5GB of 4G for the same price.

FWIW I pay USD 15.00 per month and have never, ever used up my unlimited texts, 500 mins and 3GB data.

[Jez123]

I don't feel you can assume they're worthless tyre kickers, I do a lot of research on my tablets and smartphones however only buy from my PC.

Same.

[samwest]

I never said "worthless"...I just said tire kickers. Now maybe if you're an MFA site then smart phone users work for you, but many phones block ads making them "worthless" visitors...worth wise. RB confirms the desktop buyer theory.

In The state of Wisconsin, the price of simple high speed internet in about $50/month. Two smartphones with a 4Gb shared data plan are $120 / mo.

Low power users opt for the smart phone option...which IMHO is the dumb option...unless you put a lot of value into walking around like a zombie with your face in your cell phone...reading content through a straw.

[RedBar]

Hehe, I associate tyre kickers with worthless however one never knows! In 1987 I had a tyre kicking architect come on an exhibition stand in Italy asking for free samples, in 2004 he came back to me asking for prices for a project he was doing...and yes, I got the order.

Remind me not to move to Wisconsin, that's horrendous however is there any competition I wonder?

[rustybrick]

So the rankings have been pretty stable guys over the past 30 days, right?

[elAndrew]

That's right, pretty stable and slight gradual ranking improvements, in several sites

[edited by: elAndrew at 1:39 pm (utc) on Jan 16, 2015]

[IamnotMattCutts]

Have been stable, however yesterday and today seeing big shifts in rank across a group of websites (UK), also less organic traffic coming through, which seems to be the pattern when something is happening.It's also showing on Serpmetrics (UK Flux)