Google Updates and SERP Changes - March 2015

[Itanium]

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System: The following message was cut out of thread at: http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4733881.htm [webmasterworld.com] by aakk9999 - 12:23 pm on Mar 1, 2015 (gmt 0)

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@samwest
10 years of data are worthless, if Google constantly changes the rules. It may as well be, that there was a stable conversion rate before Panda, because your rankings were stable throughout the whole keyword range you're targeting. That might have change with Post-Panda with a strengthened focus on authority and big brands.

How do you thing is Google managing to manipulate your conversion rate? The only way I could think of is via ranking changes and those have to be pretty obvious too. I haven't seen anything like that and can't find any correlation between conversion and my rankings (checked via Sistrix, Semrush and Searchmetrics) or general ranking changs (checked via Mozcast and Algoroo).

I just thing that the user behavior has changed and that Googles algorithm changes reflect that and lead to highly unreliable conversion rates for smaller sites (besides Amazon, Ebay & Co.).

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Mods Note: When sharing observations about Google changes try to provide some general details to help us better understand your observation. What details should you try to include?
Which country did you find this?
What type of site? (B2C, B2B, e-commerce, content only, old, new, less than <100 urls, >10,000 urls, wordpress, etc.)
What type of serp was impacted? (desktop, mobile, tablet, local, etc.)
When did you notice this? (weekday, weekend, morning, business hours, late night)

For example it is not very helpful to say "My site went up" but it can be very helpful to say "My e-commerce site with less than 100 urls increased its Germany rankings on the weekend for mobile devices."

[edited by: goodroi at 4:06 pm (utc) on Mar 2, 2015]
[edit reason] Added Mods Note [/edit]

[EditorialGuy]

Our Google organic traffic has been up slightly each day over the last week (compared to the same days in the previous week), but without any obvious dips or spikes--just modest increases of about 5% to 8% on any given day, or about the same as we've been getting from Yahoo and Bing.

This is the time of year when we normally see a slow but steady increase, so if there's an update going on, it's being masked by seasonal factors.

[RedBar]

UK & Global - Overall the past couple of days I have been 20% down on my daily average however some sites have faired much worse than others especially .co.uk sites several of which are down 50% (halved) and a .eu down 33%

A .com trade directory site is down 20% but most other .coms seem to be running as normal.

These are all normally consistent traffic sites however, insofar as the UK is concerned, I have been seeing absolutely diabolical results for the past two days, it's not competitors, it's a lot of garbage. Is G experimenting with the UK and trying to get this rubbish to the top and then try to skim it off?

And another thing, email traffic has also been noticeably down across all sites!

[Mentat]

In the past years Google used a lot of holidays to mask updates. Easter is huge and it's near.
This year Easter is in the same day on Catholic and Orthodox churches.

Nice weather outside does not help traffic :(

[eeek]

Has Googlebot slowed

Yes, it had very much slowed.

[Mentat]

Pages crawled per day very slow in the last 2 weeks!

It's Gbot finally dying ?

[EditorialGuy]

Has Googlebot slowed

No slowing here. No speeding up, either. We get a massive spike in crawling every few months, but other than that, it's mostly a predictable up-and-down pattern that averages out to roughly a third of our pages on a typical day.

[Nutterum]

Googlebot slowed on my end for the past 5-6 days. On Sunday it was the lowest crawl since June 2014. I smell an update abrewing... In addition the SERP leader lost some ground compared to the rest of the authority websites. I am sitting on below the fold first page (6-10) and am not affected, but I see the movements at the surface.

The only thing I can tell you is - brace yourselves.

[EditorialGuy]

Googlebot slowed on my end for the past 5-6 days. On Sunday it was the lowest crawl since June 2014. I smell an update abrewing...

It used to be that, when we had a massive crawl, an update happened about five days later. We still get the occasional massive crawl, but it isn't necessarily a precursor to an update.

For our site, at least, crawls and updates aren't necessarily related anymore (at least, not in an obvious way).

[Nutterum]

@EditorialGuy - I guess I forgot to mention my earlier post where I got more than 80% of my website re-crawled 10 days ago. At first I thought it was due to the new mobile responsive CSS we implemented but then I noticed a secondary recrawl and then the bot fell like a rock. That combined with the strangely volatile weather over Mozcast and other services and some shake-ups in my otherwise quiet corner of the internet, smells like trouble.

I might be wrong about this (and I hope I am cause I am doing OK), but somehow I know I am not.

[EditorialGuy]

I might be wrong about this (and I hope I am cause I am doing OK), but somehow I know I am not.

Well, I hope you're right. These "monthly update" threads have been pretty boring lately. :-)

[Kratos]

Are any of you continuing to get the "temporarily unreachable" message for certain HTML elements when Fetching as Googlebot?

Anytime I use the Fetch as Googlebot tool, it will come up with some element that is temporarily unreachable. I then go and check the element and it's live and fine.

Could this be a bug in the Fetch as Googlebot tool since so many people must be using it currently?

[rish3]

Are any of you continuing to get the "temporarily unreachable" message for certain HTML elements when Fetching as Googlebot?

I get the green colored "Partial" note, and the "temporarily unreachable" message for the images on pages where I load the images with a javascript lazy loader.

However, that seems like it should be what happens...I wouldn't expect their rendering engine to wait some undetermined amount of time for javascript events that might happen after the page load.

Are you getting that error for elements that aren't loaded via javascript?

[Kratos]

I'm getting them randomly for .png images that are part of the website structure. However, when I run Fetch as Googlebot again, the error will not appear again and the render status would be Complete instead of Partial.

A couple of days ago I was having this issue with all fetches that I did. It drove me mad as I had no clue what was wrong. The next day, I fetched the same pages and the render results were complete and it didn't come up with any of the temporarily unreachable issues from the day before. I also checked my server and any WMT server reach issues and it was all fine.

For the last 2 days, I get the temporarily unreachable issue once out of 3 fetches, and when I run the same fetch, the problem doesn't come up.

I have a feeling this is a bug with Google's own WMT, and it sorta gives me a bad feeling of how reliable the determining of a site's mobile friendliness will be come the 21st April. The pages I'm getting these random temporarily unreachable errors are also very basic pages, nothing crazy or complex. Just a pretty much Wordpress vanilla interface. I get the same issues with other sites using different CMSs using reliable mobile responsive themes.

It does however seem like this issue occurs more with dynamic serving of a page (same URL, different layout) instead of a responsive design.

EDITED TO SAY that I'm talking of this issue happening for the Fetch as Googlebot and Render for Smartphone option. Not for the desktop option.

[edited by: Kratos at 8:16 pm (utc) on Mar 23, 2015]

[EditorialGuy]

I'm not getting any error messages from WMT's smartphone "Fetch as Googlebot" on static mobile pages, unless the pages have embedded Google maps (in which case I get a message saying: "Googlebot couldn't get all resources for this page. Here's a list").

If I use "Fetch and render" for such pages, the Googlebot version of the page shows a blank spot where the map was, while "what the user will see" shows the map just fine.

I suspect this is a bug in the smartphone version of "Fetch as Googlebot." I'm not going to lose sleep over it, since most of my pages don't have embedded Google maps.

[Sand]

Anyone seeing a traffic change today? Starting at 10:00 AM EST, my organic traffic has been up ~25% compared to last Monday. I haven't had a chance to dig in yet and see if it's a ranking change or seasonality.

For what it's worth at this point, this domain has a Panda history.

[Biggy]

Traffic is increasing but conversions are taking a nose dive with each update to almost being non existent. What's up! Anyone?

[Martin Ice Web]

@kratos, we have the img loading problem with fetch and render too. I don't care anymore.
But what you said about googles ability to see if a site is mobile friendly is something i realy doubt.
wMT says we have about 150 pages not mobile friendly. I took a look at them and found them as desktop pages. The redirect works correct. Fetching it with google insight site speed shows them correct as mobile site only WMT shows this errors. Way to go google.

[guggi2000]

@kratos @MartinIceWeb

The Page Speed Insight tool is not rendering the CSS correctly at the moment:

[developers.google.com...]

Anyone else seeing the issue or is it regional?

[Martin Ice Web]

@guggi, where do you find this information about insight tool does not render correctly?

[Martin Ice Web]

Traffic is increasing but conversions are taking a nose dive with each update to almost being non existent.

Google is working hard to route all users with buying intentions to through their ad system.
I can tell you that we have two sites. One is daily updated with inforamtion, we have done all to satisfy users. HTML valide code, insight Speed gives a Rating > 90 for all pages.
We have added search functions, we did nofollow on shallow sites ..... all that Google says we should make to have a compelling site. Nevertheless with every update it got hit, conversions are as low as they could be.,
The other site is unattended. We donīt care about this site much. It has no extra Information, only two sentence of product description, only a small search function. In short: it has nothing to do with a compelling site. No PLA for this site. Jet Google likes this site. It is ranking in top10 for very competitive phrases and yes it converts pretty good.
I allways wondered if this shallow sites in Google serps - added to brand sites serps layout - would have any conversions. I doubt they did. But now i know, they have much conversions. It is all price based, but i donīt care, this site cost about 5 EUR a month.
It was never easier for churn and burn sites to make money as goog compelling sites suffer in favour a Google making money with ads.

[Spiekerooger]

I'm having those temporarily fetch problems with all kinds of files like png,jpg,css,js at googles mobily-friendly test (the open one, have not tested the mobile renderer at wmt).

SO I'm asking myself: is google too busy or do they restrict the loading times to better simulate a mobile use case surrounding?

It's for sure sth. to keep you uncomfortable even with everything else being ok for mobile serving.

[Wilburforce]

Anyone seeing a traffic change today?

My UK niche service traffic was up by about 25% yesterday (and, according to WMT, marginally higher on Sunday).

Today my site has dropped 10 places (#16 to #26) for main key-term, so there might be Something Afoot. Incidentally, it gained 10 places (from #16 to #6) for a couple of hours last Friday, which might have been something under test.

Another sign which often emerges temporarily when algorithm changes occur is double listings, and I notice that one of my competitors - whose site disappeared completely while mine was at #6 - today has pages at #11 and #15 for the same term.

The current posistion may revert in a couple of hours, but the top 20 SERPs for that term have been the same for months.

[Jez123]

Traffic is increasing but conversions are taking a nose dive with each update to almost being non existent. What's up! Anyone?

It's the same here. It can be a bit like this at this time of year for me - people gearing up before the Easter rush. Strange that it's the same for you though. I am hoping it's just that anyway as it's very odd to get traffic in these amounts with so few conversions.

[Jez123]

I can't see any SERP changes so no idea where the extra traffic is coming from - unless purely seasonal?

[guggi2000]

@Martin They fixed it after a few hours

[Wilburforce]

The current posistion may revert in a couple of hours

My site is back at #16 again, but there has been some other shuffling. Any other UK sectors doing this?

[Kratos]

I'm guessing the Google servers handling the fetching are being overloaded as people prepare fr the 21st. Drama to come.

Big shuffling over here. Automobiles/UK/Europe/USA Other sectors involved with lots of spamming are shuffling. Expert spammers are at the top. I'm seeing the amateurs go down, but it's so early to tell. Relatively white hat sites are shuffling, but then who is really white hat in sectors where money is involved?

People, brace yourselves.

[samwest]

Just checking serps this morning and what I'm finding is the same horrific garbage that Goofle CLAIMS to be fighting...without ANY success.

The images bar has two photos ripped off from my site that lead to a bogus download site that will infect your PC with malware or a virus. Way to go dipsticks. Totally clueless. Imagine the effect on traffic. Goofle is still misrepresenting our sites and damaging our businesses. They'll never get it right.

[Martin Ice Web]

They'll never get it right.

No, they donīt want it getting right. As Long as PLAs and Ads are not effect by spammers the current serps should be doing what they supposed to do. Beeing as bad as it can.

[Sand]

We have added search functions, we did nofollow on shallow sites ..... all that Google says we should make to have a compelling site. Nevertheless with every update it got hit, conversions are as low as they could be.

You have to understand, just following guidelines isn't going to give you success. They are a bare minimum starting point -- basically, guidelines for not getting penalized or caught in a filter. Following them doesn't mean your site will be seen as good or relevant.

I'm not aiming this specifically at you, but more at everyone who says "I followed all the guidelines, why aren't my rankings improving?" So what? Almost every legitimate (not built for SEO) site follows the guidelines. They can't put everyone who does on page one.

I wouldn't focus so much on the anomalies -- meaning, the crappy sites who appear in the search results. In my niche (edu / employment), I see them come and go all the time. Complete rubbish ranks for awhile, and then disappears into the void. If I started chasing what they were doing, I'd start coming and going too. I'd rather focus on what the people absolutely dominating the niche are doing, and then try to be more like them. From a marketing, usability, and business perspective.