Google Updates and SERP Changes - July 2015

[Johan007]

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System: The following 4 messages were cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4750188.htm [webmasterworld.com] by aakk9999 - 12:18 pm on Jul 1, 2015 (gmt 0)

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My panda effected (feb 2011) UK site with a 8 month complete overall is showing no uptick in Google traffic or crawl. All is calm. Fridays are generally good days for updates and this Friday being the first of the month.

No twitter chatter regarding Panda yet by @seroundtable @sejournal @rustybrick (Barry Schwartz) and @glenngabe (Glenn Gabe - Glen I think is the biggest Panda authority name who is most likely to post first though Barry also has a number of Panda sites and a heavy user of social media). I will be posting recovery story first at @futuremovies (Future Movies) though mine is a UK site and may lag behind the US sites.

[Atomic]

Did anyone experience any ranking changes Saturday night? My rankings increased significantly. Visibility shot up 20% overnight. I am surprised no one here is saying anything.

[OldFaces]

Negative Atomic. Although, there is chatter about another phantom update to the core algo that has impacted searches around the 14th of this month.

For what it's worth, we've started to see slow consistent improvements beginning this month (read: 2-5% increase each day compared to the previous day last week).

[Baby_Moos]

@OldFaces where is the chatter you refer to? I ask as I've seen shifts from around the 14th

[vlexo]

@Baby_Moos: [seroundtable.com...]

Seems to be more info there. I've personally not been seeing many changes around that date. A site I work on was impacted as a result of the Phantom update in May, so I would have expected changes if it was Phantom. :/

[Atomic]

I also benefited from the May Phantom update. I am now ranking above well-known household brands for highly competitive keywords.

[samwest]

Just because one site move up 20% doesn't necessarily mean any others would do so in lockstep. Somebody would likely have to go down to make room for you. It's all in flux.

That said, yesterday demonstrated another 4 hour period of lucidity where things snapped right back to the old "on the hour" or twice on the hour conversions, followed by nothing for the rest of the day and continuing into today. In this case, the observed pattern matched with another unrelated ecom in the UK. Whatever happens during these brief periods must briefly revert to a very old data set or a reboot of the reverse Robin Hood algo.

[aok88]

yesterday demonstrated another 4 hour period of lucidity where things snapped right back to the old "on the hour" or twice on the hour conversions, followed by nothing for the rest of the day and continuing into today.

I noticed this exact same thing yesterday and today with a site of mine.

[Johan007]

@atomic

I also benefited from the May Phantom update. I am now ranking above well-known household brands for highly competitive keywords.

Had you been hit by Panda in the past? Did you make any Panda related changes? (remove duplicate content, ads above the fold, thin content etc...)

[Atomic]

Had you been hit by Panda in the past? Did you make any Panda related changes? (remove duplicate content, ads above the fold, thin content etc...)

Yes, the site in question was probably suffering from Panda when I took over running it a year ago. I immediately started beefing up thin content, axed duplication. Ads remain above the fold. I don't really see any problem with those as long as you don't have more than one or two at most. We more than doubled traffic following last October's Panda refresh and have continued to climb ever since. We still had work to do--beefing up old content and adding new content, complete site redesign, and reducing page load times to under 2 seconds--so we've been expecting a lift. The last two weeks have been epic for us.

[samwest]

@aok88 - weird stuff right? It makes me think that my site is just fine, but the quality of traffic they throw at it is is very bad. You'd think that kind of traffic shaping would violate the basic concept of net neutrality.

[shyamster]

Atomic, same on my site. About 22% higher compared to previous week since last Saturday night around 10PM.

[Atomic]

I noticed that key rankings improved at about 11:30 PM PT on Saturday.

[RedBar]

On one of my niche widget sites, I own the emd, trademark, etc, and it is a sole subject site with everything about the widget one would care to ask plus loads of images, I have seen more than a doubling off traffic on Monday, Tuesday and still into today. For the first time it has actually achieved Google.com's first page even though no other site comes anywhere near to it.

I assume something's released it, Pandathom?

[panos]

I own a 10 year old website that has been affected by Panda the for the first time in September 2014 (-70%) and then by the May Phantom update (-10%).
I've noticed an increased traffic on Monday that persists, so i think that there is definitely something - hopefully Panda related - going on.

[netmeg]

Panda supposedly started this past weekend. I posted an item about it but it hasn't been "approved" yet. Google says it will take months to fully roll out; I haven't seen anything in any of my stuff or any client's stuff.

[Robert Charlton]

Thanks, netmeg. Your new thread here....

Google Panda 4.2 Rolling Out
July 22, 2015
https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4758647.htm [webmasterworld.com]

[RedBar]

Oh yeah ... even more pro-US biased businesses in the UK SERPs that are totally unable to supply ... phenomenal stuff Google.

[smilie]

samwest

Tuesday = Highest traffic day since April 1st, worst conversions (zero). Site did 7 conversions last Friday on less than half the traffic. F.M.

Our ecommerce shows the same thing, pop in traffic with barely no referrers by 20%-30% since July 6th.

Zero conversions from that traffic.
None other sites show it.

Suspiciously, users look from around the world... very suspiciously distributed just like botnet users we've been fighting to block for year+.

Worthless , mobile botnet clicks. Now delivered to a commerce website of yours. So that you don't panic, fire people and quit just yet.

Somehow Google decided they no longer should filter these for some sites.

[smilie]

In the mean time, we are being outranked by site.google.com, blogger and facebook doorways.

[grippo]

Started one hour ago, my site, which is in spanish language, and has subdomains for every latin country, has lost one of those countries, meaning 75% drop in traffic. Entire country has vanished. Some rare countries, have new 10/20%, like India. It's is very extrange.

[samwest]

This is such utter BS. Gone from $2k/week to $200. Meanwhile, the MONSTER makes $2k/second and improves every quarter. Seriously! I'd love to know what it feels like to make 7 billion in 24 hours...more money than any one human could spend in 1,000 lifetimes, yet they are still compelled to trick us all out of any kind of viable, living income. Yeah, it's all theirs now....and YOU ain't getting any of it!

The observation today is that I'm 3 sales away from my weekly "quota" but two days early, so I won't get diddly until late on Saturday when they open it up for a half hour and I make those three measly sales for my pizza money fund. And they wonder why there is no love.

How can one be ranked #1 for dozens of keyphrases and hundreds of other 2,3,4 positions (used to be 15k) yet have zero traffic on the site? Nothing but page sitters, even on desktop. That's just not natural and not human visits.

Odd foreign traffic too..like some bloke in the UK right now...it's like 3am there, but not one visit from the US. Oop, back to zero.

[Leosghost]

Tangent..@samwest..it is only around 9.57 pm now in the UK as I type this..( so only 9.27pm or 21.27 hrs when you posted about it being 03.oo am in the UK at the time you posted ) you might want to re-set your "time zone clocks"..

[samwest]

Yeah well a few minutes later hits were coming from India and Australia...point is, foreign traffic late at night when not a hit from the USA in broad daylight.

[samwest]

...to follow up, last night 2:28 am, a sale comes in from the US, while NOTHING the previous day. Almost seems like they lock out traffic during the day. Again, a violation of net neutrality if that's indeed the case. I'm not sure what mechanism is being used, if any, but if so, it's highly anti commerce. In the words of Tootsie Roll - "The world may never know".

[jambam]

This is a panda refresh so nothing has changed it just refreshing the filter right? So why does this only affect 2% of queries if a)The internet is growing so there are more sites than there were before and b)loads of people have been working on improving there sites to try to recover?

5 amazon listings showing up in a row on google now for a product I sell...... wow.

Talking about net neutrality I have a blog and it was marked as pure spam by google because I criticized Google for censoring the internet basically in a 1000 word essay I explained why Google were fascists... which kind of says it all really.

@samwest Sorry to hear that. If it makes you feel better i only make £10 a week now :/ Im 22 years old built up my eCommerce shop for 2years.. peaked at £200 a week for a month and these last couple of months seen my rankings keep going down as amazon takes more and more places.

[samwest]

Anyone noticing that Google is dropping a lot of their images? I have 400 images in my site map, all mine and 100% original. A few weeks again they had about half of those indexed, but today it's dropped to 26.

[RedBar]

Yep, I have had thousands disappear, all mine, all unique, all scraped and all ranking well on other sites.

[supercyberbob]

re Goofle dropping images, see this:

[thesempost.com...]

May or may not apply to you.

[Robert Charlton]

supercyber... thanks for the SEMpost article reference. The SEMpost analysis includes the possibility of Google's 'little known “image mismatch” manual action'.

Dedicated discussion of the images situation in this thread...

Google dropping many previously indexed images
https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4759288.htm [webmasterworld.com]

[smilie]

>> @Robert Charlton - Google's 'little known “image mismatch” manual action'.

Let me get this straight. Google stole images and majority of click-though to owner websites with it's new "google image display"... when was it, 2012? Now they are PENALIZING sites for building image protection and owner copyrights into its images?

Is it just me or are they blatantly violating copyright? In your face? And penalizing for people trying to protect what's theirs?

Smells like class action?

We as webmasters need to get together to form a protective body. Such as Webmasterworld version of a webmaster-lobbying website. So we collectively keep them in check and answerable. This is ... gasp... risking a ban.... instead of money-making conferences would be very beneficial to all webmasters and to what's left of the free web.