Google Updates and SERP Changes - Sept 2015

[silentneedle]

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System: The following 17 messages were cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4760634.htm [webmasterworld.com] by robert_charlton - 10:16 am on Sep 3, 2015 (PDT -8)

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So is/was Panda 4.2 a "slow rollout" or "no rollout"? For me it looks like they just announced 4.2 so that the webmaster community shuts up.

[reseller]

Could be a "Panda rollback" took place around 2nd September 2015. Who knows :-)

[samwest]

Or.....there's something more nefarious going on and it has nothing to do with Google...if the Washington Post reports on the tip of the iceberg, what mechanisms are lurking beneath the waves: [washingtonpost.com...]

[glakes]

Could be a "Panda rollback" took place around 2nd September 2015.

Unlikely. Conversions prior to and after the last panda were fine. What happened on September 2 is an entirely different animal IMO.

[Maleda]

I'm seeing the same as Jessica and Sam west. From Sep 2nd there's been a 10-15% drop in search traffic but core keyword positions remain static (1st/2nd place).

[glakes]

I'm seeing the same as Jessica and Sam west. From Sep 2nd there's been a 10-15% drop in search traffic but core keyword positions remain static (1st/2nd place).

For some the loss in traffic could be the result of a long holiday weekend for Labor Day. Though Google is known to push changes around these types of holidays.

[Maleda]

Hi glakes, we're UK based and 98% of our traffic is from the UK.

[reseller]

Lets assume for a moment that what happened around 2nd September 2015 was a Google update. Which kind of update?

[Rhythm]

BlackHat Update.

Backlinks for keywords/keyphrases
Keyword Stuffing for longtails.

[Rhythm]

I'm re-christening this the Spamdexing Update.

[johnhh]

We have a traffic loss of 20%+ since 1st September. We had the same thing happen around the same time in 2013. Looks like rollback of several Panda updates to me.
SERPS, for the few keyword combos I do check, look the same, so it looks like a longtail traffic loss.

Off to check for any tech errors.....

[reseller]

However, if we assume what happened around 2nd September 2015 was just a stage of a multi-stage Panda 4.2. We might conclude we are just watching a temporary state on Google SERPs which would be changing several times as Panda 4.2 progresses. That might be good news for some and bad news for others. Long Live Panda 4.2 :-)

[samwest]

I agree with glakes...this appears to be a ding in traffic quality. It's not related to the holiday, if it were, I'd be seeing a bump UP in conversions.It's always done that on Labor Day, but not this year. On Sept 2nd search queries also started to go below the weekly low/low point. This would indicate another loss of long tail since the the main set I monitor seem to be unchanged or in "normal" flux.

With the April 1st Phantom update, weekly income was cut in half that of previous weeks and has stayed that way since...I suspect this will be another phantom update and another "halving" of income...and will continue until we hit zero. Nice. They just seem to hate ecoms.

[reseller]

Within this week we might see the rolling out of the next stage of Panda 4.2, Very exciting indeed.

[Nutterum]

@engine - I completely feel your pain. The AI that is behind the personalized search makes it more and more difficult for the searcher to get out of his search bubble. They track you through your phone and desktop and match your geolocation with the geolocation of the your top CTR websites you search for. In the end even if you go Google.com/ncr , you still get country based traffic. I am a victim of my very own work related search. More and more I see German websites for searches I make for GB or US or even ASIA. The AI is just tuned to get me inside the search bubble as much as possible.

As for the SERP changes in Sept. - I just hit my all time highest Google Organic daily traffic last week. Very pleased with my work in the past year that is finally giving the results I strived for! It's not zombie traffic either, conversion rates jumped from 2.3% to 3.1% . Too soon to tell whether this will stick but I am happy overall! I believe the Panda reverse helpmed me as well though.

[Martin Ice Web]

it is amazing that they are able to push serps from converting to non converting within a second. There you ask yourself, they can do this, but they need month for panda to roll out?

ery pleased with my work in the past year that is finally giving the results I strived for!

I cross my fingers for you.

[Jessica]

Within this week we might see the rolling out of the next stage of Panda 4.2, Very exciting indeed.

Source of this information?

[toidi]

I notice more and more posts about sites maintaing the same serp positions but losing viewers. I know that when i do a search, i normally ignore all the stuff at the top of the page and immediately scroll down to the bottom, and sometimes i go strait to the 2nd page. If i am shopping, i know that product prices are the highest at the top of the first page and prices go down as i go further down the serps.

Maybe consumer habits are changing in response to the poor quality serps and the way those sites at the tops of the serps take advantage of their position.

[aristotle]

I just noticed that a page on a competing site to one of my sites for an important keyword has apparently plummeted into oblivion in Google's results. It had been ranked number 1 for that keyword for a long time, but now it has dropped out of sight, and my page has replaced it at number 1.

I'm not sure when this happened but it could have been some time last week. Does anyone know what could cause a high-ranking page to suddenly drop out of sight?

[Kelowna]

I agree with glakes...this appears to be a ding in traffic quality. It's not related to the holiday, if it were, I'd be seeing a bump UP in conversions.It's always done that on Labor Day, but not this year. On Sept 2nd search queries also started to go below the weekly low/low point. This would indicate another loss of long tail since the the main set I monitor seem to be unchanged or in "normal" flux.

Looks like they turned off or changed some sort of filter for geo-targeting that may explain the low traffic quality. For instance our stats show visitors coming from google.co.il (Israel) and hitting our USA pages for IL, (Illinois) and many other mis-matched hits.

[Kelowna]

Does anyone know what could cause a high-ranking page to suddenly drop out of sight?

@ aristotle - #1 is a very dangerous place to be, why? Well the site has to be almost perfect in googles algo to reach there and one small move in the algo knob could change the site to being over optimized (filtered) and boom gone. I like to think of the #1 spot as walking up to the very edge of a cliff. This is an interesting find as we are seeing as well that it is getting easier to over optimize now so we have to adjust our numbers a bit to avoid the filters.

[Jessica]

Looks like they turned off or changed some sort of filter for geo-targeting that may explain the low traffic quality. For instance our stats show visitors coming from google.co.il (Israel) and hitting our USA pages for IL, (Illinois) and many other mis-matched hits.

Then you'd see a significant increase in traffic. And it's hardly a bad thing

[engine]

@Nutterum You know, if it was personalised search it would be easier to play with, but, I search some really diverse topics, totally unrelated, and Sept 3, 2015 was a mess!

I made the same searches today as i did on Sept 3, 2015 the index is now showing country-specific returns, as it should do. However long those particular SERPs from Sept 3, 2015 lasted I don't know as I was so frustrated by Google search I gave up.

BTW, I used Bing and found country-specific results, but i still didn't find exactly what i was searching for.

When Google's SERPs are as mixed up as they were, how is someone supposed to find what they want! That impacts traffic for all of us.

[samwest]

back to referral spam from garbage sites and even non existent domains.

[Robert Charlton]

engine, FWIW, I find that when I can't find good results on both Google and Bing, it means that the information isn't there, at least not in an accessible form.

Mod's note: I'm removing some of my comments, which are off-topic to the main thrust of the thread.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 10:22 pm (utc) on Sep 7, 2015]

[Kelowna]

Then you'd see a significant increase in traffic. And it's hardly a bad thing

@Jessica -- It's actually a very bad thing for sales right now, if searchers from say Dallas TX are being served pages from Dallas, GA or Dallas, OR.. then they are getting very poor results and our sales drop off. The Geo-targeting or personalized searches, for the USA at least, are not very good right now. They must be updating something right now as this is not the first time we have seen this sort of thing.

[glakes]

They must be updating something right now as this is not the first time we have seen this sort of thing.

I agree. The 50% reduction in traffic Google from 9/2/2015 has returned to normal today. Though the pages Google is sending visitors to are not our products but instead more or less informational pages. Traffic is coming from all kinds of international Google sites, which is terrible since we only serve North American markets. In that sense, I am seeing the same poor geographically targeted users as you are Kelowna. Conversions originating from Google are very poor.

It is important to note that our Bing and Yahoo sales have been consistently good/converting well through this long American holiday weekend, so it is easy to conclude that Google is up to something. This something is not a Panda rollback either since we had good traffic throughout Panda updates and even after the last update.

[Robert Charlton]

glakes and Kelowna... your last two comments have rung some bells and crystallized for me what's been described earlier in this thread.

Sounds like what happened on Sept 2 might be the beginning of what has been characterized as "traffic shaping", in which some of the traffic introduced is outside of normal patterns and doesn't convert. This often includes what appear to be intentional geo errors... the same placename but in different countries... which are added to the mix. We've called this "zombie traffic."

In the traffic shaping process, some sites ultimately gain conversions, and some lose.

I know that some members here are already aware of this, and that it has a name, while others might not be aware of this history. I've seen over the years how frustrating this zombie traffic can be in particular to members who have remained on the testing list.

Nutterum is describing some of the issues in the abstract very well. We've got a whole library of discussion on this, though the algo has evolved considerably in some areas. Am not yet sure whether a separate thread regarding the issue is warranted, though I'm suspecting it will be.

[samwest]

RC - Like this sh - stuff hasn't been going on for years? They keep traffic shaping (throttling) and sending zombie traffic, but each time they either knock us down in long tail more and/or step up their shaping & zombie campaigns. My conversions are usually 100% once a member starts signing up, but since sept 2 only 50%. I can't for the life of me figure out their purpose of manipulating traffic in such extreme ways as to interfere with normal commerce.

[Robert Charlton]

samwest... you're one of the people I had in mind who I know has been dealing with this for years, and I'm sorry about that situation.

It's been mentioned in discussion that you have a forced sign-in page, so I'm not revealing anything about the site... but I'm guessing that the forced sign-in is what Google doesn't like. I've seen analogous situations where that was the problem.

I suspect that Google may require first looks free, or free trials, like the NYT, etc, before they'll forgive what otherwise would be considered something analogous to a "squeeze page". Squeeze pages might be great for email campaigns, but I'm virtually certain that Google does not like them for organic results.

YMMV... but those are my thoughts. Most who wouldn't drop them that I've dealt with have said it would affect their business model. If that's the case, then, IMO, you need to adjust the business model, perhaps to reveal enough free without giving away the farm. I can't say.

PS: To add that technically the purpose of a squeeze page is to get your email address, whereas the purpose of the type of page I'm talking about it is to get your money... kind of a paid squeeze. I've seen several ways that have been used to get these to work, and generally there's a mild extortion aspect to them... ie, they tend to pull the users in, get them engaged, and then to frustrate them unless they pay to go on. I don't want to turn this into an off-topic discussion on free trials (which should be a separate discussion), but I did want to clarify how I'm describing the issue.

[Martin Ice Web]

@robert, why should bad intentionel geo targeting be in any way good for the user?