Google Updates and SERP Changes - March 2015

[Itanium]

---

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)

---

@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.).

---

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]

[Sand]

Could be, Nutterum.

I have a site with a 3 year history with Panda, and my traffic patterns have been crazy the last couple days. One hour I'll be even with the week before, the next hour I'll be up 50%, the next hour I'll be even, and then up again the hour after.

Usually, I have very stable and predictable hourly search traffic, so that isn't something I usually see unless an update in the works.

Edit: Looking at my keywords report, search referrals are up for all non-branded keywords, so it isn't a single page driving this, and could very well be something like Panda that impacts things site-wide.

Edit 2: So far, it only seems to impact US traffic.

[Kratos]

I can confirm on my side that something is going on. For a couple of sites with big daily traffic (over 150k daily), we've hit our lowest hourly traffic today consistently in all morning. I don't recall this low traffic for the last year. Mind you, we've now been through a couple of troughs in the last 10 days that we've experienced, with the last peak just some days ago. These sites have passed every single Panda and Penguin update and refresh with merits ever since the sites were created. I am not paying too much attention to it as for now though.

There's hardly any chatter on black hat forums and there hasn't been any for the last 4 weeks (and even longer). Usually when it's Penguin related, those forums burst with threads from amateurs who have been building the lowest of the lowest of links (which get killed on every refresh or update). These guys will open threads even if it's just to speculate and nothing has been confirmed b Google. Since these amateur spammers aren't complaining could add more to the hypothesis of this being a Panda refresh.

I for one wasn't seeing it as Panda yesterday, today I'm beginning to think it could well be.

As usual, my industry is Automobiles. Location: UK, USA and some Western Europe.

[imbckagn]

Google has rewritten the meta title that is displayed for every website on the first 5 pages in my niche. In most instances the website business name is displayed. Also the description displayed has been cut down to maybe half of what it was.

[Wilburforce]

The SERPs in my UK niche service sector are still changing frequently and substantially. I am surprised that what looks from here like a fairly substantial shake-up - my own and several other sites in my sector are moving by 10 places or more at a time - seems to have attracted almost no comment anywhere.

I hadn't seen a Facebook page on page 1 for my main key-term before (it was only there for a couple of hours), but that is another thing I have seen today, and in the last ten minutes my site (highest postiton this week #6) has dropped from #13 to #28. Oh, and the Facebook page is back again. Perhaps I will call it the Helter-Skelter update.

[thereign]

The page title has long been one of, if not the strongest on page ranking factors. What better way to control how a website ranks than by "rewriting" its title? Less descriptive title means lower CTR in most cases. Purely speculative at this point but I think very logical. As previous posters mentioned, Google seems to be stripping out most of the title content except for the brand name. The rest of the content is the keyword rich part, and that is what they are removing. They don't want anyone seeing the titles of the top ranking sites. They want all keywords completely hidden from non paying users. They look at them as assets. They didn't start the whole "not provided" thing for fun. Reading in between the lines, they realize that with access to highly converting keywords, some people would rank despite their best efforts algorithm wise0. Moreover, if no one knows your brand's name it makes it harder to find your business. If no one can find you then what do you do? Buy ads. My opinion is that Google cannot *easily* stop well optimized sites from ranking via algorithm changes, or not to the degree they prefer, so they are choosing to change the very content of the sites (as they process it), resulting in complete control over their SERPs regardless of optimization or links. I believe it is entirely profit driven and they are taking the stance that anyone who is trying to rank for commercial intent keywords who is not already very well established must pay them for it. The same goes for if you are too established and making "too much" cash from your organic listings: eBay and Amazon both took hits in terms of where their product pages rank. These are two of Google's biggest rivals and they have systematically made sure they cannot dominate their natural SERP real estate. They are also I would imagine, 2 of Google's biggest advertisers in terms of ad spend. I think they want complete control of where each and every site ranks and will use their own data to make sure that 99% of every $$$ related click resulting from Google search ends up in their pocket in one way or another. I have been doing SEO since 2000 and this is just the prelude to the "kill switch" that will be "no one ranks for any keyword they don't pay for" aka "full monetization" time for Google. Sorry for the run on, condensed as much as possible.

[EditorialGuy]

The page title has long been one of, if not the strongest on page ranking factors. What better way to control how a website ranks than by "rewriting" its title?

Even if titles still carried as much clout as they used to, why should we assume that the title displayed on a SERP is the title that was used for ranking purposes? It could just as easily be something that's rendered by Google's UI independently of the ranking process.

[mrengine]

Snipping the title also takes away a lot of information for their users. I for one look at the titles when I am searching for something. Then if a title appeals to my search, I'll read the description. Is Google is doing this to give paid ads more relevancy? And if so, this seems like an act of desperation on their part. Quarterly revenues must be really, really low to stoop to such a level.

I have been doing SEO since 2000 and this is just the prelude to the "kill switch" that will be "no one ranks for any keyword they don't pay for" aka "full monetization" time for Google.

I agree that Google will show only paid ads when they can - using organics only to fill in the blanks when there are not enough advertisers. It's only a matter of time before more people start realizing the trend developing.

Google is just beyond comprehension at this point. Yes, money motivates all businesses but Google just went off the deep end. Hacking up titles is a sure fire way to ruin the user experience.

[imbckagn]

Google has rewritten the meta title that is displayed for every website on the first 5 pages in my niche. In most instances the website business name is displayed. Also the description displayed has been cut down to maybe half of what it was.

Just to add a little more info. the titles are very short - one and two words for most websites "Brand", "Brand Name". Google Ads look MUCH more appealing now and I would bet that's the reason for this change. This is an extremely high competition niche with crazy expensive Adwords keywords.

In my eyes this is clearly a move to push webmasters towards Adwords.

[frankleeceo]

I saw that with a few of my searches too....Maybe they were trying to truncate more titles for mobile users. Then they broke something that relate to their title rewrite engine?

[EditorialGuy]

I suspect that titles are being rewritten mostly to keep them to a reasonable length and to keep the SERPs from being loaded with keyword spam. There's only so much room for a title, and a fairly succinct title like "Wally's Widget Emporium" looks better on the SERP than a sliced-off title like "Wally's Widget Emporium - Red Fuzzy Widgets and..."

As for one-word titles, I can't remember the last time I saw one of those. Even two-word titles aren't common on the informational and commercial SERPs that I see. (I tried a number of commercial queries just now, and the average title was four, five, or six words in length.)

[imbckagn]

I suspect that titles are being rewritten mostly to keep them to a reasonable length and to keep the SERPs from being loaded with keyword spam. There's only so much room for a title, and a fairly succinct title like "Wally's Widget Emporium" looks better on the SERP than a sliced-off title like "Wally's Widget Emporium - Red Fuzzy Widgets and..."

That's not the case here. If your website title before was "Buy Widget at Brand Name" before it's now "Brand Name". If your brand is one word then your title is now "Brand".

Every website is like that in this niche to about page 6 then it goes back to normal.

[Biggy]

< moved from another location >


Just woke up to see many of my sites wiped out from SERPs. Definitely a Penguin or something related to links.

Major worry is couple of sites that never built a link to them have tanked.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 4:53 am (utc) on Mar 27, 2015]
[edit reason] moved from another location - see my followup post [/edit]

[Robert Charlton]

Biggy, I've moved your post to our March Google Updates and SERPs thread. It's obvious that a major update is going on. It's not at all obvious that it's Penguin, and some changes I see don't appear to be related to Penguin at all. Until we have a better read on this, this thread is the best place for your observation.

[Mentat]

Big drop on my India visits especially (-20%).
I'm usually not happy about indians, but it's a trend in the last month.
Smaller drops on other locals.

I do not know that Google is tweaking, the problem is that each tweak is bad for me in the last 2 years...

[Pudders]

These updates really frustrate the hell out of me!

Currently dropped position over the last 10 days in the UK from top 4 to bottom of page 1, top page 2

[RANT ON]
Over the months/years, they say their updates will push out 'spammy' sites, EMD sites and sites that don't have any fresh content...

Well how comes every time there is an update/refresh I see the same crappy ass sites in my niche appear in the top 4, that do nothing with their sites and have content that relates to 2 or 3 years ago? All the while it's my site that seems to get hit and then takes time to crawl back.

My site is 10 years old, update it regularly, have fresh pages, fresh blog posts, healthy social media pages and yet it's me that suffers!

I really feel that sometimes I waste my time doing all the crap I need to do to make it back up in the ranks.. just to be hit again a month or so later... GO FIGURE!
[RANT OFF]



...feeling drained :(

[toidi]

I don't know how y'all can constantly monitor the serps and not go crazy.

[guggi2000]

Maybe the Doorway Page Algorithm?

[Mentat]

I do not think so.
When Doorway Page Algorithm is live I should not see <snip> spam in serps!

This is a type o algo with big impact.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 6:13 pm (utc) on Mar 27, 2015]
[edit reason] No outing of specific sites. [/edit]

[EditorialGuy]

That's not the case here. If your website title before was "Buy Widget at Brand Name" before it's now "Brand Name". If your brand is one word then your title is now "Brand".

Every website is like that in this niche to about page 6 then it goes back to normal.

Testing, maybe? Sounds pretty strange.

[Nutterum]

I do believe this is heavily smelling like a Panda update as my prediction from a week ago. However the oddball here is that there are some more subtle algo changes going through in between as well. You can see it and I can see it but we just can't place our finger on it.

[johnhh]

Don't see any changes - at least not yet - Friday is always a slow day for us.

UK - info site.

[EditorialGuy]

It's obvious that a major update is going on.

Maybe it's affecting certain sectors or types of sites, but not others?

I'm not seeing any bumps or dips. Yesterday's hourly traffic graph is almost an exact overlay of the graph from the previous Thursday and the Thursday before that. Today is looking "same old, same old" so far as well.

(Information site, nearly 15 years old, U.S.-based with international topics and audience.)

[Wilburforce]

Maybe it's affecting certain sectors or types of sites, but not others?

My UK niche service certainly isn't mainstream, so doesn't usually get affected much by sector-specific changes, although a lot depends on the target of the change. I'm guessing from what I see here that the effect is fairly widespread.

On short key terms the effect on my site has been generally negative, although that could be because a lot of other sites have risen rather than because of any penalty factor. Obviously long-tail and locality factors are harder to evaluate, but so far traffic and conversions are up, so the negative effect I see in the SERPs is offset by a positive end-result.

I wonder what they will call it, if they ever give it a name.

[EditorialGuy]

I wonder what they will call it, if they ever give it a name.

Search Engine Land has an article today that may be relevant:

They Fooled Us All:

Why Google May No Longer Announce Major Algorithm Updates
Google’s investment in artificial intelligence does more than just create better search results; it allows Google’s engineers to make constant algorithm changes right under our noses. Columnist Nate Dame explains.

[searchengineland.com...]

[thirtyottsixx]

Looks like a test results page for the mobile algorithm update. The truncated page titles and shortened descriptions are likely how the new mobile search results will appear. Whether or not they change the desktop results page to match, who knows. More of the results are now above the fold on the page on a desktop machine. That may make the Click through differential between positions lessen if all of the results keep truncated titles and descriptions. Things are still switching back and forth between old and new. I definitely agree that there is little separation between the ads and the organic results now. There is no box or anything defining the boundaries of the ads. So ad position #1 virtually has the appearance of Organic result #1.

As for the ranking fluctuations, that could be explained simply by the changes of user interaction based on the new display of the results pages. It doesn't appear to be link related.

[imbckagn]

Google has rewritten the meta title that is displayed for every website on the first 5 pages in my niche. In most instances the website business name is displayed. Also the description displayed has been cut down to maybe half of what it was.

A few of you mentioned this may be mobile testing and you may be correct. Today for now at least the titles and descriptions have reverted back.

[Kratos]

@imbckagn Yes, I posted about this some 2 days ago. Google seems to be rewriting titles for their mobile search, making them shorter. This could easily be affecting CTR, which could just as easily be what's behind all this commotion we're all reporting has been happening on the last few days.

It's one of my theories, at least. I have a couple theories right now explaining what's going on but I won't decide on what has happened until at least next Tuesday when I've gathered all the information from our portfolio as well as all WMT data.

[mrengine]

A few of you mentioned this may be mobile testing and you may be correct.

I hope it was a test I saw last night. Orders were coming in faster than the printer could print them off. Unfortunately it was short lived. But if it's a sign of things to come, I will have to hire some more help.

[toidi]

Maybe the goog just shuffles everything up every now and then to keep everybody in a state of confusion. It is hard to reverse engineer something if you are not sure something happened.

over the years i have seen my sites occaisionally nosedive, only to come back after i did nothing.

[RedBar]

My USA traffic is way down, so far it's at about 20%, UK traffic is at 50%.