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]

[Martin Ice Web]

I'd rather focus on what the people absolutely dominating the niche are doing, and then try to be more like them

i canīt try to be a multimillion Dollar business. My niche is fully ad driven. Spend much and get the traffic.

You have to understand, just following guidelines isn't going to give you success.

and i didnīt say that we deserve to beeing listed at the top only because of following Guidelines. If you would have read the post, then i said it is not worth to put much effort into programming new functions when there is much more money to make with less work.

[Sand]

i canīt try to be a multimillion Dollar business.

You don't have to be one, you just have to look like one.

i said it is not worth to put much effort into programming new functions when there is much more money to make with less work.

There are a lot of ways to cook an egg, and there are a lot of ways to make money online. A lot of people have made a lot of money making MFA sites, and a lot of people have made a lot of money making great sites.

But in my personal experience, every drastic jump in revenue I've had has been a result of listing to my users and adding new functionality to my sites. So that's how I spend my time. You're free, of course, to choose your own path.

[Jez123]

+1 @Sand

[elAndrew]

Today I see penguin related movement.

Anyone else?

[Jez123]

Today I see penguin related movement.

Anyone else?

No, I'm not seeing anything unusual today. So far. What are you seeing?

[Wilburforce]

Today I see penguin related movement.

Today I see movement (further shuffling similar to yesterday). Why do you think it is Penguin-related?

[Anon]

Definitely movement here and not for the good. Another 3-4 spots lost on all main keywords.

[elAndrew]

I see several shifts in penguinized sites I track, it could be another thing of course, but is very clear to me that some sites affected by penguin are moving in serps right now.

[Nutterum]

I got modest increases and decreases on most of my keywords but what was interesting is that some specific queries were hit hard between 3-7 positions in the red. After investigating for a good 3 hours what I noticed is that unrelated websites for the query pop-ed up in the SERPS. For example searching for Medica Dusseldorf turns medicaltrade fair in thailand(14th position) and other otherwise non related results. After further investigation I can almost 100% confirm that the majority of the big shifts are due to change in the strength of the domain name resulting in websites with 0 value popping up in to my SERPS and thus dropping me in the red. This repeats for more than 10 clusters of serp queries(roughly 200 keywords) of mine.

Can someone check this on their end as well and confirm or is it me going paranoid?

[Kratos]

I'm editing my post, sorry for the bump.

I'm still seeing movement. HQ websites last week dropped down by about 20% and since yesterday they're back.

Also, saw some big increase in some other sites on Sunday.

As usual: auto/UK/Europe/USA Mostly magazines and HQ amateur reports.

[louieramos]

Lots of SERP movements in Google Australia, seeing a lot of new sites showing up on page 1 for root keyword searches but not city based (ie: keyword sydney), not much changes there. Most of the fluctuations are from money keywords or root keywords search results. That's my observation so far.

[keszi]

We have seen some quite good improvements in rankings in past couple of days. (travel agency)

I do not know if it is because of a link clean-up, we have made back in December-January (disavow file was submitted February this year).

@Nutterum: I didn't observe something like you have mentioned. Instead I see internal pages swapping in SERPs(such as a website's region landing page outranking the country landing page, then next day it is back with the country landing page).

[flatfile]

The Doorway Page Algo is probably on the way.

[meraghu]

I live in India, but I do have clients across the US so I keep track of google US results as well. I did not see any major changes, however I could see a positive changes for the ranking for my clients. But I could not see any major changes in the SERP resutls. However these smaller updates will keep refreshing where some times site comes up and some time moves down to 1 or 2 positions.

[LadyGeek]

We're running about 40 live sites. We noticed a massive change in traffic in some of them. I write and have a team of writers so we do a lot of content. Notably the very content heavy sites rose dramatically, while those that are thinner sank. It appears this is content related? Most of the sites that we have that rose are in excess of 50 pieces of content ( though one has about 600) while anything under 10 seemed to just fall away in search.

[Jez123]

I haven't noticed any significant rises or drops in my SERPS but traffic is converting well today. Wednesdays are usually fairly slow.

[engine]

Wikipedia appears to have returned to the top of the SERPs in some of the checks I ran, and has dropped down in others.

Since last month, there's been quite a shift in some of the SERPs, although i've not yet seen any shifts between the mobile serps and desktop. Only the label "mobile friendly" continues to appear on the smartphones, suggesting those without the label could take a nosedive on April 21.

What clear is that Google SERPs are getting more complex. For example,
Adwords "ad", a couple of organic results, then "In the news", then an organic entry, the seven pack local, followed by a couple of organic results, then some images, then some in-depth articles, followed by some more adwords. Total of seven organic results on that example. Note, the seven pack was in the SERPs, and not to the right. Just the map was to the right.

Some might say that's good, in that it's spreading the love.

What's clear is that you have to be in local, and you have to have mobile friendly (for the smartphone serps), and you have to start to look for opportunities for coverage in the in-depth articles.

Of course, when you search for a celeb, the serps, with the knowledge graph, are going to be completely different.

I'm concerned about the complexity of the SERPs which are confusing. One thing that concerns me greatly is the AdWords on the right which are only showing the little yellow "Ad" symbol on the first ad, and not on subsequent entries in the column. Some of these text-based ads are really looking very similar to an organic entry. I can imagine someone clicking on them thinking it's an organic result.

Note: this is just one analysis of a sample keyword and the resulting SERPs.

What this tells me is that there's still plenty to do, and there's more shake-up to come.

[Wilburforce]

There has been a LOT of shuffling today in my UK niche sector, much like the Google Dance days.

Traffic is up, conversions are up, but terms I monitor are predominantly down in the SERPs (insofar as I can have any idea of what they look like with a cleared history and my IP address masked!).

My server logs have been showing fewer Google referral terms than usual since yesterday morning, which often seems to happen with the more substantial shake-ups, so it does look a bit like something might be going on.

[netmeg]

I saw a weird title on one of my SERPs that I'd never seen before. Instead of my page title, they used the page URL. Let me see if I can explain this.

The URL was example.com/city-event-celebration

The page title *I* added was 2015 Event in City

The one that showed up in the SERP was:

city-event-celebration example.com

Never saw that before. Google is so weird.

[Atomic]

I am seeing titles truncated to one or two words across many searches. It looks terrible. The titles no longer describe the page.

[Kratos]

@Atomic Actually, I noticed that today on some random mobile searches I did. I didn't pay that much attention to it and thought it was just the type of query as Google will sometimes do that depending on the query.

Are you referring to mobile or desktop queries?

[Atomic]

Desktop. And only when using Chrome. Searches using Firefox and IE showed normal titles.

[Atomic]

Here' an example with made up specifics:

Bob Roberts Service Type and Goods

Changed to:

Bob Roberts

How unhelpful is that?

[Atomic]

A city specific search has the top 5 listing showing only the name of the city! What a disaster!

[Atomic]

This went away after clearing my cookies and rebooting my computer. Still, never seen anything like that before and hope I never do again.

[louieramos]

@flatfile i dont think its doorway pages update, i can still see a lot of doorway pages in the search results for various keywords.

I can however see a reduced organic search results on some keywords from 10 to 7 as mentioned by another poster here earlier.

[Nutterum]

@Atomic - I replicated your "squeezed SERPS" on Chrome. This happens only when you have some search history with the query though. Testing the same query on a fresh device gave me normal results. This however is very concerning as most Google users will see these types of results more often, should that change becomes permanent.

What I further noticed is that in local with high ad competition this quelching of the titles becomes "visible" way faster than for general queries or low traffic queries.

Can you guys try to replicate this for your local verticals as well? I think we might be on to something here.

[Anon]

Is it still normal to see new sites with hardly any links shoot up to first few positions on Google? (Which tends to be only temporary).

[Nutterum]

Depends on their content quality. If it is unique and fresh - yes. If it is a rehashed old hat - no. It depends on the vertical as well. In some niches new content is something that happens once or twice a month in general so the rule there is First-come, first-served.

[Nutterum]

I am sorry for the double post but the SERPS just went complete bonkers. I see mozcast at 86 degrees as well. Google is rolling something...and I dont think its doorway page algo, looks more like pre Panda SERP mayhem, because almost all spam websites that were buried since last year are now back to the front.