Google Updates and SERP Changes - June 2015

[netmeg]

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System: The following 2 messages were cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4744522.htm [webmasterworld.com] by robert_charlton - 10:38 am on Jun 1, 2015 (PDT -8)

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netmeg -- we don't know for sure how big of a role user metrics plays in Google's algorithm.

No, we don't, but I do know my own experiences and so far in my experience, sites that are really really loved by users who come back to them over and over again tend to rank pretty well and stay ranked. Pinterest is one of those sites.

[flanok]

A good 6 months ago, I moved around 1800 or so thin pages to a separate sub domain for a site that had been hit by panda. I left the sitemaps (50) of the original pages in place so Google could find them and 404 them.(I did not redirect)
Over the last 6 months never more than 30 404s a day have been found, sometimes none.

However, today 1850, 404s (in WMTs) from a full crawl of all 50 sitemaps that contained those urls.
Including many recognized as 404s before.

This happened on the 22nd june

May be coincidence, but to crawl all 50 sitemaps in one go and recognize 1850 404s like this is not the usual behavior for this site.

Nothing different on other sites on same server, so could be nothing, could be the beginning of a clean up

[Robert Charlton]

flanok - Thanks. That's an interesting report. A deep crawl like this is often a sign that an update is in the works.

Anyone else seeing this... perhaps with many old 404s being reported again?

[Shepherd]

404 spike on 6/14, from 2260 to 7272 continuing through 6/23 to 8226.

[EditorialGuy]

We had an unusually deep crawl on June 19. Still, I'm not sure that means anything. We also had unusually deep crawls in March and April with no obvious aftereffects. I think the era of "If you see a deep crawl, look for an update five days later" may be over.

[webcentric]

Anyone else seeing this... perhaps with many old 404s being reported again?

My deep crawl came on the 18th of June along with a spike in 404's. Stuff that had long been removed from the index and my sitemaps. 404's are still increasing (slowly but still a few more every other day or so). It's things like this that have me convinced that Google is just processing old data these days. ;) Oh, did someone say a Panda update is coming (speaking of old data)?

[samwest]

404's could be from DDOS attacks. My hosting company was hammered today and down for over an hour. Likewise, many corporate networks were reporting systems down for much of the morning hours. Sometimes it seems more like global network issues than "manipulation", but when a search engine constantly plays coy and so many "games", it's hard to diagnose what is what anymore.

[flanok]

"However, today 1850, 404s (in WMTs) from a full crawl of all 50 sitemaps that contained those urls.
Including many recognized as 404s before. "


The 23rd June scan has updated in WMTs and I have gone from 1850 errors to 19344? WOW!
Obviously I can only see 1000 of them, This is 4 times more than the amount of pages, I ever thought existed on the site.

Still no big stuff like this on other sites.

[Martin Ice Web]

Beginning last night we see a noticable shift in traffic. Bounce is up again. It seems like very, very unrelated traffic is coming from g$$g. It is funny ( or not ) to see, that every time after a update when traffic and conversions are better, soon g$$g will undo the changes.
This behaviour is against the unproofed opinion that they are using user metric for their serps.

ecom, germany

[samwest]

Not seeing any major crawls, but I DO see that Google has over 3000 "pages" indexed on a site that has less than 50 pages and 100 posts in it's site map. I have my robots.txt set up to prevent unwanted areas to be indexed so how are they finding and why are they indexing so much "trash"? It's like me putting everything in hefty bags and cans behind the back shed, yet they go dig through it anyway like a bunch of racoons. They seem more interested in what plugins I have installed that my actual content. Prevent access to those and your blocked resource count will soar. No win.

[RedBar]

Great stuff G, let's promote spammy scraper blogs to the fore! Here is the #1 image SERP result for a keyword1keyword2keyword3 search with the scraper hotlinking 14 different images and preceding keyword1keyword2keyword3 with:

famous
favourite
perfect
greatest
most excellent
remarkable
amazing
outstanding
most useful
best quality
great
trendy
excellent
fabulous

Needless to say this site is on Blogger! Absolutely NOTHING is original on this site yet it ranks #1!

[samwest]

Pretty sad results there RB...When you see that kind of regurgitation, something's gotta be brewing.

[netmeg]

I have my robots.txt set up to prevent unwanted areas to be indexed so how are they finding and why are they indexing so much "trash"?

Because that's not how it works. robots.txt will prevent it from being crawled. It doesn't prevent it from being indexed. If you don't want it indexed, then you need to put a NOINDEX in a robots directive in the header.

If you link to that content, or anyone else links to that content, or that content was indexed before you set up the robots.txt, then it gets indexed. Only without your meta description.

[samwest]

so I need to add NOINDEX to about 2800 pages...
as an example, they are indexing stuff like wp-includes/js/swfupload/plugins/ - damn racoons.
one day I'll have enough time to start working on content again...
that and now I have a family of woodchucks living under my deck.
seriously!
It's always something, never nothing

[samwest]

Whatever the latest round of updates were, it's been pure punitive. Traffic now zero for most of the day. Beautiful. First two days in a row of zero sales in 15 years. It's been a slice! Good luck to the rest of you.

[armstead98]

Still ramping up. Over 70% growth in organic from mobile since mobilegeddon. Desktop up about 10-15% MoM too.

[giggle]

samwest I think you can add a line to your robots.txt to exclude wordpress pages

Disallow: /wp-admin/ using this none of my wordpress pages get crawled

[petehall]

Still ramping up. Over 70% growth in organic from mobile since mobilegeddon. Desktop up about 10-15% MoM too.

Well done but bear in mind there's been no quality control!

The state of the SERPs right now is unbelievable. So many sites with thin or repeated content, poor backlink profiles (if any!) and usability are ranking high. I see so many sites which violate quality control ranking now. Even doorway type sites - it's driving me insane!

I don't know what to do for the best... praying for a Panda update right now.

[Johan007]

praying for a Panda update right now.

Not long now. Best estimate from next Wednesday.

(Note: Officially panda striking is supposed to happen in real time but recovery only on a data refresh - I don't believe this official line)

Anyone who has got duplicate content get it removed this month and use "Fetch as Google" in WMT.

[chrisv1963]

Anyone who has got duplicate content get it removed this month and use "Fetch as Google" in WMT.

Yes of course ... lets run for the big almighty Google again. Run and do whatever Google wants or you might get punished since the entire Google algo, Panda, ... is based on punishing and hurting.

Before Panda and the other crap I spent 95% of my time on creating good content and maybe 5% on SEO and worrying about what Google wants. I had an extremely successful website with lots of return visitors, emails from visitors, positive feedback, ...

Since Panda I spend less than 20% of my time on creating content. I spend the rest of my time on trying to find out what Google wants (no longer what my visitors want ...) and keeping my website alive.

[Johan007]

@chrisv1963

...lets run for the big almighty Google again.

Yes, like you so have I changed focus; however, while the content is on hold I have focused on every aspect of the UX. A complete overhaul of the UI through a UCD process as well as pandering (no pun intended) to Googles needs.

I think it was time well spent, but understand the danger that is Google who are in control and ultimately the risk of Google being *the* content provider. But we are powerless (I even gave Bing a go for a week but it was rubbish) and so must follow Google. Good luck with your site recovery.

[Nutterum]

An interesting question I was asked today, that I can`t definitely answer. So let me ask you guys. "SERPs are moving up this month by over 30% on Google but bing and Yahoo are almost 20% down. Are we doing something wrong and will we get Pandaed?"

I haven't seen such big discrepancies on my domains but I have a suspicion that these guys are doing something tricky intentionally or not. Your thoughts?

[RedBar]

Not long now. Best estimate from next Wednesday.

Looking at some of my sites I think something's happened today, they've not had even 5% of their average PVs yet and one of them is especially focussed upon Indian widgets which basically means if there is no traffic by now then there will hardly be any whatsoever.

Why would these sites which are totally unique be hit?

[samwest]

I'm done running for Google...the web has become an unprofitable venture for me...luckily I have my new woodchuck pelt business to fall back on. LOL

[kenroar]

Seeing some strange things in my analytics. At 9:00 PM Thursday, June 25, eastern time, my numbers suddenly jumped 68%. They've come down a little since then to a 46% rise. International traffic saw a 37% rise in the early morning hours today. I've seen this before only to have it return to normal a few days later so I'm not getting out my party streamers or confetti yet.

[Martin Ice Web]

@chrisv1963, nothing to add to your post but +1

[Robert Charlton]

SERPs are moving up this month by over 30%

Nutterum, I'm not fully understanding your description. What do you mean by "SERPs are moving"? Are you saying that traffic is up 30%, or rankings are up, and whose serps?

I'm assuming it's someone describing a situation on a site you both work on, perhaps saying that things look too good to be true, and therefore wondering whether you're doing something that might get the site penalized. Is this basically it?

[Nutterum]

@Robert Charlton

No, it is not my website I just did a favour, making an SEO Audit and suggesting several points of improvement. That was a few months ago. Now after they have implemented most of their on-page SEO changes and improved the site structure they see their positions on the SERP suddenly scoring a big increase. At the very same time though their positions are down on Bing, so naturally I was asked whether my suggestions were too "Google focused" and artificial enough to score a penalty from any of the algo updates. I was surprised to see such data myself, usually Bing responds well with improvement changes done for Google, yet at this particular website (niche high-tech industrial fishing equipment) their website is going up on Google and Down on bing in terms of SERP rankings for the top 50 keywords they are most interested in.

[asinah]

Have not posted for a long time. :)

Added a lot of fresh unique content over the past one month and changed the complete structure to html 5 and traffic today is up, from Google by 50% for the first 7 hours in the day focusing on Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, the Middle East and China. I decided to remove Adsense from the website last month and the site doesn't have any advertisements. Bounce rate over the past month changed from 74% to 59% and I am working on it to bring it down to below 50%.

[Robert Charlton]

Nutterum... Where Bing and Google seem to diverge the most, in my experience, is in their different treatment of links, and that Bing favors title text and url word matching as a ranking factor more than Google does. In truth, I haven't paid that much attention to the Bing algo, which is perhaps something I should try to watch closer.

Again, we've only half-communicated, though, because I'm not getting why you would think "these guys" (I assume that's Google), are doing something tricky after they've ranked you well. The tricky part might come in if Google ranks you lower than where you feel you should belong after a change, and it then waits to see if you try to compensate by making adjustments. If you'd done something that to Google had appeared borderline spammy, further tweaking might be a sign of manipulation. See [webmasterworld.com...] for discussion.

Since you've dropped on Bing, maybe it's Bing that's being tricky. ;)

In any event, I wouldn't fiddle with the changes you made. Leave them alone for a while. I'm curious about whether you eventually move back up in Bing.

[Martin Ice Web]

Starting last friday we are seeing a big drop again, every day a little less for our main site. Bounce is almot 90% right now ( used to be less than 40%). Our second site that had only 10% traffic is now on the way up, We changed something significant on this site and yet some keywords shot up from page 3 to #1.

ecom, germany