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.

[Kratos]

Does anyone think that the weird patterns of traffic since the 2nd/4th September could be due to kids going back to school, college starting, people coming back from their holidays etc?

Isn't the third week of September when college starts in the US? Same as for the UK? College students could easily skew the amount of traffic a site gets although with mobile traffic, who knows. Maybe they're all getting drunk (ie ready to start college).

We've seen two definite dates where traffic has gone down on some of our sites and our competitors sites, on the 26th August and on the 4th September. This could easily coincide with simply lower online traffic due to the aforementioned causes, but I'd like to know what the rest of you think and know from experience. Thee was labor day in the US on the 4th September too but traffic has gone steadily down ever since. Perhaps this coming second third week of September will get traffic back as a whole on the internet?

[glakes]

Does anyone think that the weird patterns of traffic since the 2nd/4th September could be due to kids going back to school, college starting, people coming back from their holidays etc?

No. If it were related to seasonal trends or current events, traffic would be down from Bing/Yahoo as well. Our Bing/Yahoo traffic is stable, but will double or triple (yesterday) when Google traffic hits low points. People can't find us and our product in Google and appear to be going to Bing/Yahoo instead, which would explain Bing/Yahoo traffic peaks during Google traffic lows.

I'm not sure about the UK, but many schools in the USA have been in session for a couple weeks now. All indicators point to Google tinkering around with something.

[Kratos]

I was almost positive that college starts in the United States somewhere around the third week of September. Can anyone confirm this or correct it? Same goes for public schools.

@Glakes how much traffic from Bing/Yahoo are you talking about? as in how many uniques/day. Is it really that high to draw any conclusions? I have sites that will vary between 20 and 60 uniques per day on Bing while the uniques from Google are 5,000.

[samwest]

@kratos - of course every vertical is different, but in mine, late August into September has historically marked a pretty aggressive upswing in both traffic and sales conversions. This is based on data collected over a ten year period, with each year showing an identical upswing...well, of course until THIS year. It's pretty obvious that they (whoever THEY may be) have become much better at throttling / controlling traffic.

Just when I was about to see a minor 2 day uptick, it was followed immediately by a severe downward trend...just like a PID (Proportional, Integral, Derivative) control loop response with over shoot then ringing right back to the set point.

The other odd shaping behavior is that I am seeing much better sales conversions on LOWER volumes of traffic and almost non existent sales conversions when traffic is at it's HIGHEST volume...you'd think just the opposite would be true.

My week still has a very slight bump on the weekends with Sat, Sun, Mon having the most traffic, but least sales. Oddly, Wed, Thurs and Fri have the least traffic but it's the best converting...go figure.

You're theory is correct, but we should be seeing higher, not lower traffic...again, depending upon your vertical market.

[reseller]

God bless Matt Cutts, his two cats and the good old days where he had kept us informed during times of Google changes and algo updates. Nowadays Googlers don't say much of value for the webmaster communities ;-)

[Kratos]

@SamWest Glad to hear from you. I think we had a bit of a disagreement some months ago (I haven't logged in for months) and I think I read that you're seeing some increase in traffic, so hopefully things do well for you. I remember looking at our DE traffic and it was an absolute mess and still continues to be. Google is known for not using the same algorithms on all countries so they could very easily be using data from 2012 in Germany. I know they do that for other EU countries and Asian countries (outdated data).

@SamWest You're in Germany, right? When do schools/universities start there? I don't know but Labor day on the 7th September could mean a lot of US people are milking the last of their holidays prior to starting tomorrow with their routines. Possibly lots of people took advantage of the 7th September Labor holiday day to extend their holidays all along this whole week. Tomorrow (Monday 14th September) perhaps everybody will be back to their usual routines of browsing sites at work. That plus colleges and schools starting at around this time of the year in the US have me hoping that this weird traffic pattern is at least partly due to this external factor.

I do agree as I've said before that Google has done something. My money is on backlink webspam and link schemes and not Panda. I am analyzing some of our test sites and the sites of our competitors (friends) and we are coming to conclusions that this could very well NOT be the long roll-out of Panda.

I think this next week starting on the 14th will give us some more clues. Everyone on this thread is seeing some crazy traffic changes starting from the beginning of September, so something is giving.

[glakes]

@ Kratos

Michigan State started fall classes on September 2, Ohio State started on August 25th and Florida State on August 24th. I'm sure there are some variations across the country, though most major universities started late August into early September, with many parents helping their kids move into their dorms just prior to the first day of class.

Bing/Yahoo only sends a fraction of our overall visitors, but it is still predictable enough to come to some solid conclusions. Plus, other properties where we advertise at are driving stable sales. So if Bing/Yahoo and our other advertising pursuits are generating the same or better traffic, the drop in Google traffic can be only the result of Google changing something. Especially with wild daily swings, as others have reported, I have no reason to believe anyone or anything is responsible for this other than Google.

[samwest]

@kratos - I'm located in the upper Midwest, USA. School has already started, the weather is cooling off and football season has started (Go Pack Go...dead giveaway of my location), all positives for my niche....usually. Sunday, the day I usually kill on, netted one whole conversion even though traffic went through the roof yesterday (up 30% for the day as compared with previous weeks). I see quality of traffic as my biggest issue, they seem to be sending different demographics on different days. I prefer the natural mix of demographics like the good old days. Too much mobile, not enough desktop and tablet. Think I'll start using the new Google Pay for Android....just saw it on the news this morning. lol

[13Cube13]

I gave up on SEO after about 10 years (5 years ago) and I no longer monitor Google Serps. I can't remember the last time I checked. I rarely look at the analytics account anymore.

Business still goes along well. I don't think about what could have been, just accept what is, which is good enough. Then again, we never had first page ranking anyhow since around 2000 so I don't really know what were missing, though it was exciting when it did happen.

After analyzing the time and effort to monitor position, competitor position, paying so-called seo's or doing it in house I concluded that anything that was being done would last only until the next update. Conclusion, all the past time and work would be in jeopardy of now being worth nothing, like being knocked out in the stock market. Lost money and time. It all seemed to be a rolling ball and nothing cumulative.

And whatever it was it was never going to be fast enough, good enough or lucky enough to outwit sites numbering the sand on a beach until the next change came along.

I guess I gave up.

I now focus on customer service and improving the site for visitors without thinking how it would effect rankings. I also have the satisfaction of knowing that all that effort, time and money is not being flushed.

[Robert Charlton]

13Cube13 - Lots of food for thought in your post. I do think a lot of time is wasted tracking rankings, particularly in volatile areas. Too many webmasters focus on trophy words, or on queries deep in the serps, which aren't inherently stable.

I now focus on customer service and improving the site for visitors without thinking how it would effect rankings

This comes before anything, though I think that analytics could in fact help you here. Your approach may depend a lot on the scale you're dealing with.

[RedBar]

I guess I gave up.

I'm not surprised, I've read this post half a dozen times and wondering why?

I'm not being rude however do you know what you're supposed to be doing?

Honestly, your post does not make any sense, for instance:

I gave up on SEO after about 10 years (5 years ago)

If it's a joke fine, it it's supposed to be your reality, wtf?

[13Cube13]

Go read it again a 7th time.

[Kratos]

@13Cube13 SEO is a popularity contest, that means he who gets the most (best) backlinks, he who takes the trophy home. Forget about awesome content, forget about great site architecture, forget about UX.

It still baffles me how many people say SEO is dead or give up on SEO because some scammer SEO sold them on the "you need social signals and a great UX" to rank on Google. LOL as if... it's the same as those scammers saying how you should focus on MOZ Authority when rogerbot is the worst crawler I've ever seen in my couple of years on this.

I'll give you a tip about SEO, or better, about "ranking high" in Google (and Bing): it's all the same as it was back in 2002. Exactly the same.

By the way we're seeing the same swings from Google. Some serious stuff continues to go on, gentlemen. I don't know what you guys are seeing but we're seeing some massive gains or massive losses. This has been gogn since late August and early September.

Industry: automoviles/cars/motorbikes

[Martin Ice Web]

@131Cube13, well said. You know what annoys me at most? It is that google is lying all the way about UX, content .... When u look at the serps 90% of the brands are from low content and horrible UX while smaller niche sites with deep content and a better UX are burried deep down the serps.

[nomis5]

@13Cube13 SEO is a popularity contest, that means he who gets the most (best) backlinks, he who takes the trophy home.

It all depends on how and where and when you are looking at SEO I suppose. But from where I'm sitting that is the opposite of reality. Getting mountains of backlinks to a site that doesn't engage users just doesn't work anymore. G has grown up from that type of SEO years ago.

Informational sites, UK and of course, YMMV.

[hasek747]

Getting mountains of backlinks to a site that doesn't engage users just doesn't work anymore.

Are they solid backlinks though, quality wise? I'm in the info/reviews segment (9 websites) and my observations are exactly like Kratos'. User engagement seems to help some, but good links are significantly more important than everything else combined, by a mile.

[Kratos]

@nomis5 I'm in a very competitive industry (covering several niches) and I can tell you that high quality backlinks are the number 1 factor in ranking and by far. I'm not saying to get mountains of "backlinks". Instead get mountains of "high quality backlinks" and you can rank a blank page with a .JPEG drawing (or even a blank page itself, I've seen it happen) in your industry and on any industry.

Now once the visitor gets to your site and sees the amount of crap on it (if your content is crap) is another story. But bounce rate, UX, time on page etc are shenanigans that online gooroos talk about because that's what the herd wants to hear. It will always be about backlinks, always. Unless Googlebot can learn to read and discern content quality based solely on what's written. Not happening for a good amount of years.

[Nutterum]

Talking about backlinks.

I never focused on the "easy" backlinks. I always did my homework pitched ideas and articles to serious relevant websites and got my backlinks using this approach. That is not to say I don`t use directories, in fact Europages and Viesearch funnel quality traffic (even if it is miniscule) to my websites and I am happy I register my websites there. My point is that my best backlink portfolio consists of 110 backlinks. 90 of which are from websites like CIO.com and americanexpress.com . Yes they are hell-of-a-hard to get, but its worth it. I outrank websites with tens of thousands of links, simply because one of my links has more weight than their entire backlink profile. So as much as Kratos is correct in his post, he is equaly wrong as well.

[Kratos]

How am I wrong, Nutterum?

[Nutterum]

You did not specify which types of backlinks are needed. You can build a skyscraper or link pyramid for any given website, but in the end if you don't have relevant quality backlinks, any competitor website with 10 on the spot backlinks will perform better. You are correct, backlinks are as relevant as they ever were, but this time around you need quality not quantity.

[Kratos]

@Nutterum Read my penultimate again where I say that you need "high quality links", the more the better. It's that simple. I never said anything about getting lots of "backlinks"; I'm talking about getting as many high quality backlinks as possible. That's the sureway to achieve high rankings no matter what other gooroos claim like UX, how great your article is, how beautiful your infographic is and all that.

I see day in and day out awful websites with WRONG advice on our niches outranking high quality websites because those sites have paid all in all close to 20k USD to bribe a good number of editors to link to them, not just that but also from high PR pages.

Here's my reply again, see how I emphasize high quality backlinks, not just any type of backlink.

@nomis5 I'm in a very competitive industry (covering several niches) and I can tell you that high quality backlinks are the number 1 factor in ranking and by far. I'm not saying to get mountains of "backlinks". Instead get mountains of "high quality backlinks" and you can rank a blank page with a .JPEG drawing (or even a blank page itself, I've seen it happen) in your industry and on any industry.

[Lorel]

@ Kratos "Does anyone think that the weird patterns of traffic since the 2nd/4th September could be due to kids going back to school, college starting, people coming back from their holidays etc? "

This is the case with my site as I get a lot of student traffic. My traffic started exploding about 4 days ago- doubling every day - but this is normal after the summer slowdown.

[reseller]

Google Updates and SERP Changes

Anybody has any news about a possible Google update or SERP changes?

Thanks.

[sench]

90 of which are from websites like CIO.com and americanexpress.com . Yes they are hell-of-a-hard to get, but its worth it.

Sorry, I was following this forum as an unregistered visitor, but this statement practically made me register :D (say thanks to nutterum webmasterworld :P)

Anyway, I was checking out the entire americanexpress.com site and can't find links to anywhere. Are you like exaggerating or do you mind to let me into some hints of which section you got backlinks on? Thanks, I'm a new spawn in the SEO world

[Robert Charlton]

sench, welcome to WebmasterWorld.

Nutterum, there's wisdom in never posting such information ;) ...unless these ^^^^ were only examples.

[Nutterum]

Hi sench,

First of all welcome to WebmasterWorld.

As for the backlinks - I do have them. Of Course they are from their business blogs where after almost one year, I gained enough trust with their editorial staff to become information/idea supplier and thus earn my backlinks via unique content pitches I offer. There is nothing secret about it (though I hear you loud and clear Robert :) ) . It`s just how it works. Even Huffington Post will be more than welcome to give your website a dofollow link if you have a good story to tell. If you, or anyone else thinks they are up for the challenge, by all means go for it. Be advised though, their editorial is very professional, so unless you have something unique to provide to the table they will just ignore you.

[reseller]

Hi folks!

Have any of you lost traffic around 2nd September 2015 and/or around 12th September 2015?

[Nutterum]

I can confirm a drop in CTR on the 2nd of September with a slight drop of average position for my main properties. While off-trend it was small enough not sound any alarms. As for the 12th, I think everything was in the norm.

[Paperchaser]

Hello, yes I did on my end homepage playing games again and just moved from first page to god knows where hehe. Working on solution right now but im pretty convince everything shall come back to normal after couple days as usual.. Hope it will be fix on ur end as well reseller!

[johnhh]

@reseller

We compare day to same day previous week, Monday to last Monday etc.
We had a drop during 1st September which was then daily until the 12th Sept. when traffic rose, increase again on the 13th Sept.

Now we are just flat-lining +/- 1%.

I would guess that we got too strong and throttling kicked in, again as a guess, it may be all long-tail traffic as for the sample SERPS keywords I do check the positions have hardly changed.

UK Info site