Google Updates and SERP Changes - August 2015

[Babadook]

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System: The following message was cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4755384.htm [webmasterworld.com] by robert_charlton - 3:40 pm on Aug 3, 2015 (PDT -8)

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Zzzzzzz......we've seen quite a lot of traffic, but conversions slow. Anytime there is a major update, this always happen, almost like something shut off.

[jambam]

I think criticizing google in these monthly Google updates and serp changes thread is completely relevant and illustrates the true climate of internet search because afterall this board is run by webmasters not blackhats. What is more if you go on Blackhat forums you don't see blackhats complaining as much over there as much... which says a lot!

I think though that at the endof the day there really isnt much to report on nowadays other than there are 5 amazon listings instead of 4 and stuff like that.

Google has made the internet stagnant.

[Rockzer]

Well, If Google hate small business, they must start raising funds for the small business to grow them up, small business puts their efforts, money, time etc.. to grow and google demolish them. I don't know much about panda, we are effected by the same, still there is no traffic changes in any of these updates. I have seen lot of changes on the web, especially with Google itself. I have attended maximum webmaster hangouts but no updates from them as well, they say you have to work hard on your site. Its almost 3 years as of now we are still struggling for the same but can't see any changes.

[Martin Ice Web]

Could it be that the roll out of windows 10 moved many searches from google to bing? We are seeing a massive increase from bing.


@jambam, it not amazon domain crowding alone. google ignores keywords in searches and presents brands no matter if they are in any way matching or not. I see this "fuzzy" search results growing. While i found the needed information 3 or 4 years ago on page one i now have to refine my search. In most cases this fine tuning has the result that the brands are now in a slight different order. The times when the first 3 results have been "good luck" status are gone. In most cases informational sites are buried deep in the serps.

Try to use google without all the ads around the organics ( adblock plus ) and you will see that the results are mostly useless.

[Shepherd]

Could it be that the roll out of windows 10 moved many searches from google to bing?

We are seeing a slight increase from Bing, although it's really hard to track since the reporting has been segmented (Bing/(organic,referral))

However, we are not seeing any visitors (9 visitors since the release) with the Edge browser.

[Nutterum]

Thank you for pointing this out Shepherd. On my end I see 3 visits from Edge and more than a 1000 from IE 10,11 and 9 (in that order). Since most visitors are not everyday users, but company reps, execs or higher I can safely say that the adoption of Edge and Win 10 in general is quite poor in the corporate world. The data is from the last 7 days. I did noticed slight (less than 3%) increase in bing organic, but the change is small enough to be considered as statistical fluke.

[jambam]

@Martin Ice Web your right.... I searched for something on programming trying to be as specific as possible and the results I got were rude sites.. after being less specific with my search I finally got programming related sites but nothing to do with what I wanted.

[Martin Ice Web]

RedBar posted...

The SERPs are so bad now that no one wants to talk about them plus Google hasn't a clue what to do with them simply because they have lost total control of what they had.

They quiet do know what they are doing. 5 times amazon, 3 times ebay and ebay small local ads on page 1 of results. Guess what users will do?
After the last big jump on Wall Street they now have to show that they are further growing. For everyone who says that this is nonsens, please explain why ratio of organics/ads is >1.2. and ads above the fold are 95% while organics are down the fold?

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 10:21 am (utc) on Aug 18, 2015]
[edit reason] Added quote from original post... [/edit]

[Martin Ice Web]

Since two days a see a phenomen. At midnight the traffic form google reduces ( its normal at nights ) compared to all days before at about 80%. AT 1am in the night the traffic shuts complete off. And at 6am in the morning it returns. 5 hours without any traffic from google? I never ever have seen something like this before, not even in the night. I thought about a server downtime but it wasnīt. And two nights in a row? Someone seeing similar?


ecom, germany

[Nutterum]

Depends on the types of visitors you are expecting to visit your website @Martin Ice Web . For almost two years my traffic has been like clockwork, with periods before big algo changes being off the pattern. Monday 80% of max daily traffic, Tuesday 90%, Wednesday between 70 and 100%, Thursday 40-60%, Friday 30-40%, Saturday 20%, Sunday 20-30%. The reason why my traffic is so predictable is because I target my visitors in a very narrow way and have a good grasp of their daily routines, habits etc. and I know where, how and with what to target them in order to increase my CTR and conversion percentage. For your E-com to have 0 visits during the night, means two things, Google reallocated non converting visitors out of your website, demoting your SERP on their screens, OR Google demoting your keywords SERP positions in general. To figure which of the two is more plausible scenario you need to check whether your CTR and conversion rates increased with the slow-down of your visit count or not. If YES, then some of your traffic was allocated somewhere else. If not, your keywords dropped rank.

There is more to it than just that but it is a good place to start your search.

[toidi]

For everyone who says that this is nonsens, please explain why ratio of organics/ads is >1.2. and ads above the fold are 95% while organics are down the fold?

i am no expert but maybe it has something to do with the simultaneous increase in ads across a lot of sites. As users become numb to the ads and the number of clicks goes down, there is a knee jerk reaction to increase clicks by increasing the number of ads coming from both publishers and search engines.

if the number of users is really on the increase and their behavior is the same, then there would not be the need for the increase in the number of ads, as revenues would increase naturally.

[RedBar]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld Hasteral

I think you've been reading some of my posts:-)

Anyway, I had a first-ever yesterday. For years I have had a niche site on example.co.uk, I decided to construct a fuly responsive html5 site on example.uk and this was duly launched in March 2015. Yesterday this was my busiest site, busier than my 21 year old example.com and so far into Thursday it is still ahead.

Yep, it's doing well in the UK SERPs however it is also doing well in the G.com SERPs, it looks like the example.com is going to have to be reconstructed sooner than I thought.

[Dymero]

RedBar, does the old site typically get a lot of mobile traffic? And was the old site based on a lot of outdated code, or was it fairly well maintained in that respect, just maybe not using all the latest and greatest coding?

[RedBar]

The old site is getting more and more mobile traffic, it needs upgrading especially since we have lots of Asian traffic and much of that is on mobile.

I'm a coding fanatic, the old site was very slick and clean, no one had really considered the mobile web when I first constructed that template, it works perfectly on all devices except small mobiles, something needed to give me a push:-)

[LuckyLiz]

@Martin Ice Web - Is it only Google traffic that disappears? Or all traffic. If it's all traffic, check with your web host to find out if they are doing anything during those hours that would keep traffic from reaching your site. If you're on a shared server, have them check that other users of the shared server aren't getting so much traffic that is slows your site during the time.

[samwest]

Semi normal days followed by huge influx of referral spam today. What mechanism causes that?

[Ebuzz]

Is anyone seeing SERPs that do not move at all for weeks and weeks? It's like they are stuck.

And another thing I noticed is that those keywords that are typically very competitive (read 'spammed'), are now ignored by Google or to use another word, abandoned by them. For example big ticket health affiliate products. They cannot seem to do anything about the spammy throw-away domains coming in all the time, that they now retreated to a 'safe posture'. It's the same with big brands (like Amazon) now. It's safe to stick with Amazon and that's what Google is doing.

Meaning they are not letting new sites or sites with clean backlink profiles to even rank for anything. Just leaving the old sites from 5 years ago pre-Penguin that had a lot of content and healthy backlink counts. New ones post-Penguin just have no chance to rank, or if they do, to have a stable ranking. The entire niche around the keyword and all related keywords is SPAM, save for the top 3-5 listings. Everything below is spam, spam, spam.

I have one such site that I setup few years ago and never constructed a single backlink to it. Till today, in spite of constant new quality pages added in (all highly original stuff written by me), I get virtually zero traffic from Google. They filtered out all my pages (regardless if you have 1 page or 1000 pages). Things were slightly better last year.

All I get is bot traffic from Ukraine/Russia (and the usual suspects) "monitoring" my site and also spammy backlinks constructed to it by those spammers in a halfhearted attempt to sabotage my site. This is a very competitive niche but I never knew it would be sooooo bad like this, today.

Google has admitted defeat. Very simple to see.

[jambam]

The very fact that they add penalties shows that google cannot rank sites or knows what it is doing. Google shouldn't be "penalizing" sites it should be google who should be penalized for getting it wrong in their main algo in the first place.

Ebuzz is right and I have seen very much the same as him.. I sell a product that only I and a select few other even sells on the internet but Google seems to want to give amazon 4 places even though it doesn't sell it. :).

I actually gave into Google extortion and tried adwords for a bit but when you spend Ģ200 and end up getting one sale it really is not worth it.

spammers in a halfhearted attempt to sabotage my site

Sometime spammers will add non spam site links to a site to make there spam appear natural. I have one site which I created and forgot about after checking it within a year it had quite a collection of spam link positing to it that I didnt put there.

[EditorialGuy]

The very fact that they add penalties shows that google cannot rank sites or knows what it is doing.

Apples and oranges.

The algorithm is about ranking. Penalties are about encouraging good behavior.

[samwest]

^ ROTFLMFAO

[Robert Charlton]

I have one site which I created and forgot about

In this case, penalties might also be trying to encourage better memory.

[Nutterum]

I have a question. Have you noticed any changes on the mobile SERPs lately. I am usually hovering between 6-9 spot but looking at the past two weeks I see a lot more volatility accross the board (top 600 keywords in 20+ niches). Can anyone else check on their end? (organic international SERPs)

[Martin Ice Web]

From a users point of view:

German serps are realy useless for searching information, google keeps ignoring keywords und funnels new keywords to the search. I search for apples and 8 out of the 9 result are about peaches. Refine a search, same domains in a slight different order. It seems as if google has a simple base of search results and they try to serve all searchs with this. -> this would save enormous power.

When i am lucky, there is more than 3 domains but in most cases domain crowding is ruling, sometimes 6 ! pages from the same domain. All of the pages are very similar and are linking to each other,
It is so annoying to search with google.

A very,very frustated user.....

[Babadook]

I can't emphasize how important it is to stop using Google search, it's worse than it ever was even at it's inception. Bing has much better results and I always find what I am looking for very quickly. Love Bing.

[Itanium]

I tend to agree. Bing is much better at the moment - but of course not perfect either. It puts too much weight on exact match domains and isn't as good in identifiying outdated content. But other than that, the search results are much more precise.

Google Germany is still a big fat mess. I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft snatched a little market share with the launch of Windows 10, with cortana and edge.

[samwest]

Wow - just checked my index status and they dropped half my pages. First they dropped all my images, now they are eliminating pages. Incredible! Guess they've harvested all the content they need and will serve it up through their own platform. Nice.

Not much interest in these boards either lately. It's a virtual ghost town.

[Martin Ice Web]

@Samwest, i donīt know what you want to hear. This august is going to be the worst month ever. German serps are full of foreign sites, 6 times amzon, ebay in a row. Low content sites mixed with irrelevant brand sites.
Sites with complete same content / title / meta from the manufacturers CSV files are in a row ( 10-20 times).
Seeing this mess is a real pain.
I wonder if this still is panda or this is the final stage of google killing all organics.

Edit:

and my WBT Account now shops 404 errors for page that have been deleted 5 years ago. ?!

[Robert Charlton]

Martin, sorry about the bad month. If it's any consolation, the reappearance of old 404s suggests some sort of major recrawl is in the works, and that Google is rechecking old data, perhaps prior to a large update. Best reference I have are comments I made in this thread, particularly in the last post....

17 May 2013 - GWT Sudden Surge in Crawl Errors for Pages Removed 2 Years Ago?
https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4575982.htm [webmasterworld.com]

[Martin Ice Web]

@Robert, german serps are a mess.
[dropbox.com ]
[dropbox.com ]

first link that is what serps look like after Panda in Germany
second link: this is what Panda deems to be good content

[silentneedle]

Searching for openlitespeed amazon ec2. First 4 results are chinese, and I thought it stopped with the foreign results. -_-

[Martin Ice Web]

@Robert, i guess that this must be an error from Google as now errors show up for duplicate title for an erased page verses the new page. Clicking on the link in WMT the header is 410 gone. So it is correct but Google does not get it right ( since a few days ). And some of the none https pages are back in crawl error stats. What a Horror.