Google Updates and SERP Changes - May 2015

[Mentat]

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System: The following 3 messages were cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3003161.htm [webmasterworld.com] by aakk9999 - 4:35 pm on May 1, 2015 (gmt 0)

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Just thought I'd join this thread.

Our traffic from old man google has been consistent +-5% since panda 4 in May 2014. Our main site IS mobile friendly and wasn't hit on the 21st of April, however it suddenly lost 10% of Google traffic yesterday. Many our top 10 positions dropped 1-2 spots.

I'm almost 100% certain it wasn't panda (as other pandalized sites in my niche didn't drop positions in the queries I'm watching).
I'm about 95%% certain it wasn't penguin either as I did a massive disavow in mid Feb and not that many scrapers, weak sites have been linking to us since then


So what the hell happened on the 28th (29th Australia time)?

The rank drops occured on both desktop AND mobile.

@ColdRum

I believe it has something to do with that huge disavow file..

My disavow file is ~ 20 000 domain lines, gathered with a lot of work from a lot of sources, but my traffic follows a very strang downward path in the last 2 years, so I've said that I need to try something.
I've used as source only the info from WMT and I've selected only the worst spammers for 2 of my sites.

Guess what? I see increases in the last week!

P.S. All my sites are mobile friendly.

[samwest]

I hate to say it but everyone needs to get used to this new landscape of thin content on big brand and ad network sites. Stop hoping for change or SERP improvement. There's a thin one page article in my vertical that ranks for every term imaginable. It is on every "Searches related to..." page even on the most remote queries. Why? because it's an ad network partner with 9 ads on the page. It just an aggregation of 8 links to other thinly related ad network sites, and one of the links is broken, yet this POS ranks everywhere.
I've given up weeks ago and stay here simply to observer the carnage. Maybe everyone will soon come to their senses and finally get what's happening. In the mean time, they keep chasing Google's "Simon Says" game and like so many lemmings, end up flying off a cliff to their site's demise. We need a new search engine, not a Goliath competitor. Good luck!

[JesterMagic]

Something definitely hit on Thursday. Friday during the week is always our low point and (it was lower than normal due to whatever happened on Thursday). Saturday was even worse than Friday and it should be up a fair bit over the previous day (if you followed normal patterns).

We gained some traffic since April 21 from the mobile update. Comparing yesterdays traffic with the week before we are down 25%. Compared to the Saturday at the beginning of April we are down about 10%. Not fun.

Our major keywords have not changed to much some our up some our down (maybe a bit more are down than up) so if we lost traffic it must have been through long-tail keywords.

The funny thing is that Bing and Yahoo show similar decreases as our Google Traffic which doesn't happen on a Google update. Not sure if something else is not going on...

North America Info Site.

[getcooking]

The funny thing is that Bing and Yahoo show similar decreases as our Google Traffic which doesn't happen on a Google update. Not sure if something else is not going on...

I was actually just investigating this because I had been thinking our traffic drop might have been from a Panda update but then noticed that it was across the board, not just from Google. (Panda-hit U.S. info site). Yet rankings are all over the place - so something doesn't make sense. Also, our backlink count has gone up in the past 3 days (each day) - nothing overly significant that would imply anything shady but it normally doesn't increase at a very noticeable rate unless an update is going on.

[RedBar]

Certainly something is being well and truly stirred-up since I am seeing the most ridiculous and totally irrelevant results for keyword terms in my industry.

I know it's ridiculous when I start ranking for a three keyword term for one of my products with a totally different product of mine altogether.

The only connection they have is that they are on the same site and when I say different I literally mean Google displaying nonsensical white results when I'm requesting specific black!

[Itanium]

I dont' think the roll out is finished. I still see lots of movement and dancing for different sites and keywords I monitor. It somewhat reminds me of the Pre-October-2014-Penguin-Panda rankings.

[SemanticFool]

It is same as old Mayday ( 2010 Update ) Update friends. Long tail Keywords traffic is down by 60% on my major site. Main keywords ranking are still same.

You can understand the patterns from below reference links :
[webmasterworld.com...]
[moz.com...]
[searchengineland.com...]

[Kratos]

Since we have so many german members reporting on their DE rankings, I went ahead and had a look at a couple of our sites DE results. Indeed as of the 28th there have been some very bizarre changes. I'm talking of massive drops or rises on mobile traffic and desktop traffic. These are sites that are being found through google.de but using english keywords.

Daily Google traffic on each site from Germany is between 500 to 1,000 visitors, so it isn't a very reliable number, but I'm looking right now at a site that has dropped 50% in traffic in google.de (mobile and desktop) yet has been steadily increasing in Google US (mobile and desktop).

My belief is that the mobile update was started on the 21st in the USA and then spread to the east, so the guys in Europe have had a delay of a couple of days wrt the mobile update. Add in the fact that Google has yet to refresh their index with their crawled newly mobile-friendly sites and we could still be looking at another week of ups and downs as the new mobile-friendly sites are re-positioned. What I wonder is why desktop traffic on our sites has also plummeted so badly in Germany.

Like someone else posted in this thread, May has historically been a month of updates so I would not be surprised if what we're seeing is either an update or a refresh (or even a new algorithm altogether). I also would not be surprised if Google has gone ahead and activated another update or refresh at the same time as the mobile update so as to confuse everyone. It would not be the first time that they do this.

I think the next 2 weeks are going to be hectic.

[Mentat]

One of my penalised sites (I don't know exactly why) got a bump on 30.04.2015
The penalty was since 27.08.2014!

[i.imgur.com...]

[Spiekerooger]

@Kratos:

thanks for joining our concerns regarding google.de - I don't know about Martin and the others but my findings posted above where in regard of the desktop index - not the mobile update. I've seen sites rising in mobile rankings while plummeting on google.de desktop search - some of them not even mobile friendly. Therefore I assume that google is also rolling out some other algo twists in the shdow of the mobilepedia in the last couple of days. And they do blur the image even more by seemingly applying different updates to the algo or data refreshes spreaded over a couple of days. Doesn't seem to be finished jet.

Today I saw the typical domain clustering taking hold of german SERPs as well - I missed this byproduct that you normally see along big updates in the last seven days.

And as I've written before: only some sites show big movements while others don't move at all (e.g. just taking up the vacated space).

(You don't see a lot of chatter in german webmaster boards as well but that is rather a sign about the state of german webmaster boards these days).

[Martin Ice Web]

first updates starting April 24th were only targeted for the German market/Language while later movements are seen in Google UK etc. as well

this was my first though, too. germany is a big market. testing new algos in german serps makes sort of sense though. In my verticals there has been a lot of changes. Many brands switched the places and high amounts of domain crowding, that normaly is a sign for panda or penguin.
What makes me wonder is a brand that was nailed on 1,2,3 for a certain term lost 4 places now. amazon normaly in top 10 is on page 2 or higher.
In generall this serps look more like guessing than based on query/site analisys.

@spikerooger, donīt forget we have a long weekend. I think 90% are not doing any business these days. But i also think that that many site closed down. Biggest competitors are now multimillion dollar business with 1,2,3 site in serps. In most cases this are ranking very good because of the link juice they pass from one to another. Anyway, my strongest feeling is tat users are searching more for brands these days, just because they get stuffed with ads by these brands. Unfortunatelly google gave the big brands a very big tool to do so: GSA.

[Spiekerooger]

@Martin: with that quote I meant that google.de experienced the doorway algo on about April 24th (that algo is said to have hit google US around April 12th/14th) and then sth. bigger on April 28th/29th.

When you look at the other thread regarding missing indexed pages in GWT, those happened in german GWT shortly before or around the 24th - while being reported just about two weeks earlier here for the US.

Do you monitor your rankings on a daily or weekly basis? Losing longtail or shorttail? Does the mentioned brand have any english words in their product/brand name?

[Martin Ice Web]

From what i can see, this is the biggest drop in conversions ever. Traffic is looking normal. But no sales at all, not even from GSA. I guess this last update was aimed on ecoms, to kill the last converting traffic. And i see it on different ecoms, i have

germany

[Spiekerooger]

May 3rd/4th:

German mozcast copycat turbulence weather chart at close to a 100° F.

Domain Crowding all over the place.

Lots of projects show movements that had been penguin released back in Oct 2014.

No movements at projects that had been hit in the last couple oft days.

The next update/data refresh is running - at least in google.de.

What's going on in the US market? No turbulences?

[Spiekerooger]

Ok, mozcast shows 91° F for sunday as well. Looks like it is a global rollout.

[netmeg]

One of my clients with a somewhat borked Magento site (we're working on the re-launch now) has seen a big spike upward in both traffic and conversions over the past week. I can't account for it.

[Hollywood]

OldFaces, agree with you 100% driving me nuts.

"We were hit with a similar decrease in most of March & April (e.g. down 5-8% day versus day previous week). Then for about 10 days in April we saw a recovery of 10% each day...until 04/27 when we saw drastic decreases of 20%."

I had Panda and Penguin issues a while back, manual penalty, later removed, seeing what you see, all i have done is massive massive cleanups over the past 1-2 years and original content writing and such, it's really strange how this seems to keep ripping us apart. Seems to never end no matter how much work is done to improve things.

[Mentat]

My search results are a mess!
Spammers are on top, I've lost all my structured data on results, no error in WMT.
I see no content pages ranking very high!

Something very bad is happening!

[disspy]

@Mentat

Yep, something is going on. Strangely I'm not able to find any reliable reports from other webmasters. It seems the SEO era reached an end and oldschool-SEO-geeks got extinct ;)

Since May 1st, we see significant movements in SERPs for our mainstream website (UGC, 10yrs old site, mobile optimized yrs ago). I cannot connect this fluctuations with mobile-friendly update. This is something different for sure. For the last 3 days cca. 15-20% drop for all traffic segments. We'll see what will happen next - that's only what we can do ...

[rlopes]

I've been getting a 15% traffic drop since April 28th on a big and once steady site.

[Itanium]

After an initial boost when the shuffeling began, I saw a drop too yesterday. I'm now conviced that this was the doorway page algorithm, which finally rolled out. Why? Because I can see on my own site and on my main competitors, that especially pages were hit, that seemd to target multiple (high volume) keywords.

For example: A page mainly about "blue widgets", but also ranking for "widgets" and "light blue widgets" lost ranking on the latter. Smaller sites with fewer keywords and a more diverse page profile (not ranking for multiple large volume keywords for with one page) seem to be uneffected or even gained rankings. I can see this pattern with many of my and my competitors rankings. I lost ~15% of my rankings according to semrush, my competitor is currently at -30%.

Maybe Panda was rolled out too - but not entirely conviced, since I did a massive cleanup and don't see _any_ positive movement and didn't read of the typical miraculous Panda recoveries.

Also according to Google ( [seroundtable.com...] ) there was no (new) update: "Update: Google told me that no update happened over the weekend."

[Robert Charlton]

Mentat... sorry to hear of your problems....

I've lost all my structured data on results

Google for a while now has been confirming structured data via multiple factors of "trust", popularity, and authority... so the loss could come from a combination of factors... including from changes in sites that may be linking to you.

Note that on SER, at the end of his article on a possible update this past weekend, that Barry reports a Google denial [seroundtable.com...] though all indicators are reporting massive change.

Update: Google told me that no update happened over the weekend.

Complete conjecture here... I've been wondering just how much of this might be fallout from a great many changes to a great many sites during the recent moves to responsive, which could have also caused a lot of changes to non-mobile versions of these changed sites. Again, this might be affecting both competitors and sites linking to you, positively and negatively. Any thoughts?

[Mentat]

I've been badly affected by Panda 4.0 and I've lost 75% of my traffic in a very strange way, like a poison.
Each week a little bit less traffic!

I had a lot of thin content pages and I removed them a year ago, but without success in the Panda fight.

My sites are mobile friendly, but the amount of mobile traffic was less than 15%.

In my industry, there are a few brands that break every "rule in the book" without penalty in the last 5 years and they seems to be unaffected.

Frustrating, very frustrating.

BTW, on Google Support forums there are a lot of topics about Google News traffic falling like a rock in the last week for small/medium sites.

[twitter.com...]

Google is black box now.

[Mentat]

It's madness!

if I search for my brand, on all the pages I see results that have in URL

"mybrand-cialis" (all return 404)

[Itanium]

@Mentat: That has nothing to do with Google - you obviously got hacked.

Go to WMT and crawl you site with the google bot or change your browsers user agent to the same as the google bot.

[Robert Charlton]

"mybrand-cialis" (all return 404)

Mentat.... it's very late here. I think Itanium is right... you've been hacked. These are from black-hat links that were pointed at the hacked content. Two rushed links to threads here. Read the threads, follow up on the destination links too...

Understanding hacked sites that rank in Google
April, 2013
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4561487.htm [webmasterworld.com]

Google launches new tool to identify site security issues
Oct 31, 2013
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4620501.htm [webmasterworld.com]

Good luck. I think that Google is very sympathetic to hacked sites if you follow up and get things fixed. You will recover.

[Martin Ice Web]

Also according to Google ( [seroundtable.com...] ) there was no (new) update: "Update: Google told me that no update happened over the weekend."

i was thinking that google would tell something like this. google announcment two years agao, to be more open to webmasters was a big fat joke.

I've been wondering just how much of this might be fallout from a great many changes to a great many sites during the recent moves to responsive, which could have also caused a lot of changes to non-mobile versions of these changed sites. Again, this might be affecting both competitors and sites linking to you, positively and negatively. Any thoughts?

and this oes not fit to this "non" update, because it hit from one second to the other. It was not a slow decline in traffci we saw, but a switch that turned off. Before this switch all was ok, since then we only have zombies.

[Kratos]

Mentat, if you can't get hold of WMT go to web-sniffer DOT net and crawl your site with the Googlebot usr agent (it's in the drop down menu). You should see something very different to your site. Likewise, you can go to any of your google cached pages in the SERPs and go to the Text Version of your site. Again you should be able to see the hack.

Everything you've mentioned is signs of a pharma hacked site, it isn't Google going crazy.

[Itanium]

The recent algorithm and SERPs change caused my bounce rate to rise by 25 percent, with no change whatsoever on the page itself. Let's hope the roll out isn't done, because at the moment it's not really good for me and visitors too are obviously not finding what they are looking for.

[Kratos]

@Itanium we're seeing some absolutely crazy traffic movements in our industry and verticals. I've spoken with about a dozen other webmasters who handle sites of our size (50k to 100k visitors/day) and they're all seeing the same. We're talking desktop traffic and not mobile traffic. Huge variances when a 20% drop equates 10,000 visitors down.

Google has confirmed nothing happened this weekend, but we've started to see the huge changes on Monday at about 4am Silicon Valley time. We've seen changes during the weekend, but what we're seeing in the last 30 hours (starting Monday AM) is impressive and we aren't alone in what we're seeing.

I'm watching expectantly, will try to update as we see since we have a good number of sites with other webmasters as a test group.

[Mentat]

Those links are NOT on my site! So, I'm not hacked!\

ex: search for webmasterworld (site name)

And you will find a lot of xxxxx.com/3355-40-mg-cialis-webmasterworld.html

[edited by: Mentat at 11:24 am (utc) on May 5, 2015]