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.

[Johan007]

My summary- Not a Panda update according to Google and my own findings. Wounder if it is anything to do with the doorway page update at the end of last month first rolled out in Asia?

[philipboyle]

Saw some small increases in traffic on mobile after the mobile algorithm update, but since the weekend I'm seeing a 10% increase in traffic across the board on our site, desktop and mobile, multiple geographies. No clue as to what changed but it was something substantial. We run a medical directory site with 1.3m uniques per month.

[Martin Ice Web]

to all, who are seeing traffic increases, what about conversions? drop / same / rise?

[jebernier]

Yup, seeing big brands moving back up in the rankings.

[webcentric]

Definitely seeing a lot of flux in the system the past couple of days. Some pages are moving up in unexpected ways which is encouraging but I've seen this before...big moves then blam! Back to the dog house. We'll see if this time I get some real traction. I'm thinking my situation may have more to do with the stream of new content I've been adding recently than whatever is going on with the algo(s) these days. Once thin but now thicker pages getting the recognition they deserve (well, that's how I'd like to see it).

[MrBlack]

Well whatever happened over the last week in the UK has completely rolled back today.....back in the dog house for me.

[samwest]

@MIW - conversions in the gutter.

[keyplyr]

@ColdRum , Mentat
I removed my disallow files completely after the last big update a couple months ago and saw all sites shoot back-up to where they ranked prior to that back-link fiasco. YMMV.

[vphoner]

I see authority sites moving up in rank, pushing us down. Traffic has dropped overall on all devices about 20% month to month. How much of this is the new algorithm change, and how much is seasonal (good weather). The reason that I ask is that I also see Bing and Yahoo down month to month about 15%.

Is there a seasonality traffic change (spring and summer) where clicks are lower than Winter since people are out more, and outdoors more?

[EditorialGuy]

Is there a seasonality traffic change (spring and summer) where clicks are lower than Winter since people are out more, and outdoors more?

I think it probably depends on the topic. Browsing for entertainment, or to kill time, may decline when the weather is nice. But for some topics (such as vacation planning, baseball, or barbecue recipes), traffic is likely to increase during spring and summer. It certainly does for us. We've had the same seasonal traffic pattern since the days of dial-up modems.

[RedBar]

Nice for you..:-)

[keyplyr]

We've had the same seasonal traffic pattern since the days of dial-up modems.

"He not busy being born is busy dying." - Bob Dylan

[Jez123]

I removed my disallow files completely after the last big update a couple months ago and saw all sites shoot back-up to where they ranked prior to that back-link fiasco. YMMV.

that's interesting @keyplyr. Can you keep us updated on what happens in the longer term?

[keyplyr]

It *is* the longer term. It's been 8 months.

What I'm saying is... I saw my sites tank like almost everyone else did when that (whatever name) update hit us and everyone was talking about disavowing back-links. So like many others, I scrolled through thousands of back-links putting together a list of bad neighborhoods and uploading disavow-links.txt files with little or no results.

Then a few months later I saw some webmasters talking about deleting these files and getting better results restored, so I did this also and saw all my sites go back to where they were prior to all this B_S.

Google said "jump" and I jumped. Now it's back to giving users great content.

[masterjoe]

Okay, in my niche there are amazon shopping results first,2 amazon results, 2 very thin "informational" articles, in between, some spammy affiliate site, then my site (which has more content than all the results above it combined). Now Google has either really screwed something up... or they've gotten extremely greedy. My site has much lower conversions than before this mystery update. They've definitely pushed up authority sites even if they are poorer search results.

[Lorel]

My site has experienced a drop in traffic since around the first of the month but this happens every year when highschool and colleges break for summer as I have a lot of students checking out my site. I get very few mobile visitors and haven't had the time to fix my own site (and I don't need to rely on SERPs anyway) however I wish Google would have picked another date to launch the mobile algo as I can't tell if there is something else that caused the usual spring drop.

[Lorel]

Re big brands moving back up in SERPs. I think it was John Muller in a recent video, who said big brands will likely not be affected by the mobile algo and also websites who rank highly for certain terms who are not mobile friendly may also still continue to rank well for those pages.

[tmno]

It *is* the longer term. It's been 8 months.

What I'm saying is... I saw my sites tank like almost everyone else did when that (whatever name) update hit us and everyone was talking about disavowing back-links. So like many others, I scrolled through thousands of back-links putting together a list of bad neighborhoods and uploading disavow-links.txt files with little or no results.

Then a few months later I saw some webmasters talking about deleting these files and getting better results restored, so I did this also and saw all my sites go back to where they were prior to all this B_S.

Google said "jump" and I jumped. Now it's back to giving users great content.

Very interesting.

Which penguin update were you hit with exactly? If it was 8 months ago, was it Penguin 3.0? (Oct/Nov 2014)

When did you upload the disavow file? Did you initially see a drop in traffic after uploading it?

When did you finally remove it? Did you see your pre-penguin ranks return, or just pre-disavow ranks return?

Thanks for the info. I'm considering doing this myself...

[keyplyr]

Firstly, I don't keep track of these names y'all give to the index updates, that's why I explained it the way I did.

My sites were ranked excellent with almost all search terms putting them above the fold, page one. Then they were dropped to page 15 or worse for all searches. Then everyone here went nuts talking about back-links & bad neighborhoods.

When I first uploaded disavow-links.txt ranking or traffic did not change. After a week ranking did get a little better (page 9), traffic got a little better. After a couple months, ranking and traffic slowly continued to get better (page 3.) During this time I also was tweaking page factors, removing over-occurrence of some keywords (even in navigation) changing page titles and <h1> tags, etc.

I got a gut feeling that the approx 200 disavowed domains I had in the disavow-links.txt were now actually hurting my ranking since a few were questionable as whether they were actually considered spammy, and they had the potential to boost my ranking if allowed. So I removed the disavow-links.txt and a few days later my sites returned to where they were PRIOR to all this. Since then they have done much better due to mobile weight.

My guess is that the algo filter causing that big drop in index ranking was removed or modified after Google saw the SEO abusers change their tactics.

[Itanium]

Whatever happend with this unknown update, it's still going on. Right after it began, I gained traffic (+10 percent), then I lost 20 percent and up until yesterday the loss increased to 30 percent (!). It's really frustrating not having any idea what's going on. My main competitor lost even more of his rankings, however a smaller competitor gained A LOT. Whatever this "not-an-update" is, it's huge.

[Nutterum]

I do not think it is global though. For most of Middle East and Asia countries my ranking and traffic is mostly static. Biggest losers are in UK, US and Germany. France on the other hand is up 12% (but I am pretty sure it is seasonal) . I tend to believe this is some country specific algo tweaking, aimed to better deliver content for the search intent of the local users.

[Martin Ice Web]

I read an very interesting article today. It was about links and mobile usage. And with growing mobile traffic poeple donīt link anymore. It seems a big deal for SEs whos serps depend on links.
I guess that if it is realy true that there is more than 50% mobile traffic, than links are a factor that cannot take any influences into serps in near future.

[vlexo]

I work for one of the largest websites in the UK. We're definitely seeing fluctuations for some very big terms.

[SnowMan68]

Maybe they are not reporting it yet, because it isn't the actual update. This could be some sort of large scale test, prior to the full rollout. Wouldn't be the first time.

[RedBar]

What a mess...I have just been trying to source spare parts for a popular Japanese car in the UK, the first 18 of 20 results were ALL US sites however, surprise, surprise, all the ads were valid!

[Martin Ice Web]

Worst traffic i have seen ever. Traffic itself is up but bounce is too. I canīt rember i ever saw so much bing/yahoo users in germany.

I wonder if it has something to do with links that point to non-mobile pages have been devalued?

Edit: I see amazon internal result pages are returning into serps? Did they just pushed this result pages into index by using a sitemap or do they get this pages into index?

[snippet]

Just to add to the list of believers. We had 2 completely different niche sites, 2 different CMS's (one custom, one WP), different content authors (one user gen, the other expert blog), different site ages, different servers, different who-is... completely unrelated sites.

Both saw a 20% drop starting the weekend of May 2nd and the drop stuck on both sites. The drop was Google only traffic. Bing/Yahoo traffic remained constant/steady.

[glitterball]

One of my competitors has come back from the dead in the last few days after several years absence from Google.
It is a good site, so definitely didn't deserve to be gone, just wish it didn't occupy the position above my site!

Site is a destination guide aimed at a mainly UK audience.

[vlexo]

^ Interesting. The site I'm working on is travel related and we've seen quite a bit of fluctuating going on. Anyone else who might be in the travel niche that might be seeing such changes?

[BertjeBel]

I'll join with my findings.

I see this happening on my sites (from 27th of April)

Less indexed pages
'duplicate' productpages droped from the higest DA stores and indexed at lower DA stores
Fluctuation of rankings higer than #30 from ( aprox. -10 to -60)
Rankings higer than #30 appear and disappear
Little fluctuation rankings lower than #30 ( -1 till - 3 )

Lot of bad converting traffic and huge movement in the converting time and day ( as if Google is sending traffic on demand)
All stores Mondays convert great with a low bounce and high traffic
Thuesday till thursday bounce is high and convertion lower and ok traffic
Frydays till mondays conversion is dramatic bounce is avarage and lower traffic

I also see a huge difference in searches converting to visits for identical rankings. As if the users click behaviour has suddenly changed.

I dont have a lot of Yahoo or Bing traffic but rankings in these search engines are stable.

For who wants to know. Traffic is down aprox 20% Sales are down even more

I have different stores but the one i sell <snip> and has the higest DA lost the most

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 7:08 am (utc) on May 12, 2015]
[edit reason] removed link per forum charter [/edit]