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.

[nomis5]

There's always at least five sides to a story and that's true for backlinks as well. There are many, many pages ranking high in G for relatively popular terms without a single external backlink. It's not unusual.

Just the same as there are rubbish pages that rank high in G with quality backlinks.

Maybe the better question is which pages still rank high after twelve months of them achieving the good rank.

I know where my money goes. Of course, I tend to look in my subject area so i can't be sure that applies to all subject areas.

What I am sure of though is that quality shines through in the end. And the readers of a page determine the quality in the long term not clever manipulation of backlinks.

[reseller]

@johnhh

Hi John

Thanks for feedback.

I think there have been algo changes around 2nd September as well as on 12th September.
My qualified guess is; those changes are not necessarily Panda 4.2 related. I also guess those changes might affect the quantity as well as the quality of traffic (conversions) a site might receive from the good old Google.
As such I wouldn't be surprised to read about sites which lost much traffic around 2nd September and/or 12th September while the remaining traffic to those same sites resulting in high conversions!

That was my qualified guess ;-)

[aristotle]

quality shines through in the end

Does that mean that the garbage shines through in the beginning? Or does the garbage start on top and later the quality shines up through the garbage. Or does the garbage sink and the cream rise to the top?

[frankleeceo]

Whatever with the links shine at the beginning with freshness and discovery period boost. If there's constantly "new" garbage with links, then that's all you see, garbage all around from beginning to the end.

Quality without links gets buried indefinitely in those niches with constant new garbage with links.

[Kratos]

Something is going on. Me thinks it has to do with backlinks, not Panda. Too many swings and too crazy to be Panda if this is a slow roll out.

Automobile/sports cars/motorcycles

@frankleeceo What?

[Kelowna]

Ranking high without any back links is impossible, we have always blocked the spiders from ahrefs and others to keep what we do private just as most other seo's do.

This latest swing seems to be the same as most others, Google cutting low quality backlinks. If you see drops then the sites that link to you or the 2nd tier links pointing to them have been cut.

Sites that we have been pointing fresh backlinks to are rising as usual, sites that have been sitting for a while without any new links are dipping a bit. On page does not seem to matter. Spun crap content doing just fine. Nothing new here with this update. It's all about the links once again just like 90% of these updates with there many names.

[Kratos]

THIS:

Spun crap content doing just fine. Nothing new here with this update.

Anyone thinking that nice beautiful sites with nice graphics will rank in a competitive niche without juicy PR backlinks isn't going anywhere. It's all about backlinks and spun content is ranking fine. I'm seeing it right now and anyone who knows a tad about BH stuff will know the tricks to do that.

My guess? There's something going on about spammy backlinks (NOT Panda related).

[syedyasir]

Lost 50% traffic starting from 3rd September.

[reseller]

Hi folks

Are we witnessing a Penguin algorithm refresh?

If we assume that changes which have happened around 2nd September and 12th September are backlinks related, then we are talking about something a la Penguin algorithm refresh!

However, if we are talking about a Penguin algorithm refresh then we should expect sites that have taken action to remove bad/spam backlinks may regain rankings and gain more traffic. Lets wait and see :-)

[supercyberbob]

reseller

The latest from the G idiots is that a Penguin refresh is "months away".

See here: [thesempost.com...]

But they're a bunch of liars who don't pay taxes, so it's entirely possible that a Penguin refresh could have squirted out of some hole.

[Kelowna]

You can put whatever name on it that you like if it makes you feel better but it is still all about links once again. I believe all the animal names are a thing of the past and more of a publicity stunt to keep google in the spotlight over bing, and only there to try and confuse by getting the so called seo community looking at the wrong ranking factors. What has google said lately that has helped anyone rank their sites? They say build great content, ya right.

It's the links and always has been.

[reseller]

@supercyberbob
@Kelowna

Thanks for feedback.

In short:

- We guess that what happened on 2nd September and on 12th September is a Google data update/refresh related to backlinks.

- We conclude Google has kept quite and hasn't announced anything related to the above mentioned data update/refresh.

[Shepherd]

what happened on 2nd September and on 12th September is a Google...

For what it's worth, we've seen a decline in traffic since around the 2nd, BUT it's been across the board, google, Bing, Yahoo.

[samwest]

Been out riding for the past few days but had the phone along to monitor sales...it was pretty much silent. Coming here today I see we're all pretty much in the same boat. The 2nd of September marks a MAJOR 30% loss in queries and thus traffic. Clearly another round of silent punitive updates. I suspect it's another clipping of longtail because my main keywords look pretty much unchanged...unless this is all related to something completely different. Think I'll load up TOR and go explore then next "so far" unpolluted frontier, the dark web and launch a new site at ea825jdsy4932ho4212me84ba528r304pl12an348s.onion :)

[reseller]

So it seems that the Google data update/refresh on/around the 2nd September 2015 wasn't related to Panda 4.2. Furthermore it seems the said data update/refresh wasn't a Penguin one.

We might conclude what happened on/around 2nd September was a new animal. We might call it "Google data update Orangutan" :-)

[glakes]

It was a very bad weekend for me, though the month was actually pretty good. I'm thinking this weekend my main customers were busy watching football in the USA. I hope Monday I see a return to normal sales.

[Martin Ice Web]

very big changes over the weekend in germany in my niche. Furtunatelly we gained a lot of very good positions back we moved frompage 2 to 1. Domaincrowding in many serps are a bit reduced but still visible. Unfortunatelly we lost a high amount of traffic, that is something i donīt understand! But we see that complete telecom carriers are not among our users.
I think that panda is live now and what we see is continious switching of data input and refining.
I donīt belief the story about a slow roll out and internal problems. The gguys counldnīt be so stupid to push an unstable system for month. Could they?

EDit: the more i look at the serps, i think it is a roll back ...

[Nutterum]

The German SERPs are moving alright. I can't tell if it a roll back though. We lost ground on some good keywords but gained ground on others. Overall it's the same. Weekend conversions dropped to pre-August levels however (I expected a drop but not as severe). I guess I`ll have to just sit back and watch how will this story unfold before I can confirm anything more than a shift in the German SERPS.

[Martin Ice Web]

@nutterum can you confirm a small "downgrade" of brands? It looks like they are playing with autority.

[Nutterum]

It is a tough call. On some keywords, like big venues (Messe Cologne and similar) there is a slight downgrade, but I don't have big enough data pool to back any serious claim.

[samwest]

When I wake up and see flat line traffic on GA, I know it's going to be a bad day. Now what? My server come unplugged?

Hmmm? I fired up PIWIK and I'm seeing traffic there...looks like Google Analytics is on the fritz ATM. Anyone else noticing this? Time is 7:13am CST.

Now it just popped back to life...with a flood of obvious referral spam.

[Kratos]

Huge movement during weekend.

For whoever said that it could be or could not be Penguin. Google pushes out edits to its different algorithms. It need not be Penguin the only one related to backlink spam but more subtle link manipulation such as other forms of backlink manipulation aside from the usual blast your 807 tiers with GSA contextuals and nofollow blog comments to balance your backlink portfolio (u wot m8?).

I'm not even joking when I say that it could easily be the above and that Google could be true to their word in that they won't be touching Penguin (because they have other unknown to us algorithms or because they're making edits/refreshes they will never tell anyone).

What I'm seeing is becoming more and more backlink related. But that's just what I'm seeing.

[sench]

Thx Robert and Nutterum for your welcome (and responses).

The more I read about backlink methods, the more I realize it is a creative process of spawning value (whether online or offline) and hoping to exchange a) either the value itself or b) a fresh enough information that the value exists, for an online vote - or less poetically a backlink.

Of course there is the presentation aspect that's pretty important - so in this regard I wanted to ask (Nutterum and the others who feel they want to answer): which channel do you most often pitch through (or pitchED, before you acquired a certain track record that I'm sure you have now)?

I'm sorry if this is going too offtopic, couldn't find another topic to place it (so @mods feel free to move it if it's too offtopic).

sench

[Barbados]

Two clients have contacted us today complaining of loss of rank but there are no obvious indicators on any of the tools we are using. AWR hasn't even registered any movement for these guys so not sure what they are seeing.

[mrengine]

Kratos, what country do you operate in that you are seeing big fluctuations?

Sales from Google went flat since this weekend (USA ecommerce). Both Adwords and organic traffic are not of the buying type. It has me wondering what the heck is going on. Without adequate conversions, I'll have to pause Adwords. I can understand some lack of predictability in organics, but swings in traffic quality in Adwords is becoming rather costly.

[johnhh]

@reseller + all

It def seems to be long tail. But there may be a backlink element in the mix. I checked WMT this morning and on one site where we know we have 9 backlinks (not paid for ) it shows over a thousand in the summary, if you drill down it says 9 ( as it should be ). Even allowing for confusion between non-www/www that is an over estimate of some magnitude.
Guess the fat lady hasn't sung yet...
<edit>spelling (: </edit>

[reseller]

@Kratos

For whoever said that it could be or could not be Penguin. Google pushes out edits to its different algorithms. It need not be Penguin the only one related to backlink..

It was me who posted:

So it seems that the Google data update/refresh on/around the 2nd September 2015 wasn't related to Panda 4.2. Furthermore it seems the said data update/refresh wasn't a Penguin one.
We might conclude what happened on/around 2nd September was a new animal. We might call it "Google data update Orangutan" :-)

As you see, we agree that the data update/refresh of on/around 2nd September could have been something else than Penguin. In fact I suggested it could be an "Orangutan" ;-)

[Kratos]

@mrengine We've been seeing big swings in rankings in USA (automotive) mostly but we cover UK/Western Europe (with UK/French portals too). We have different sites in different countries within the automotive industry and in select sub industries and niches. Interestingly we don't have anything in Germany, but I've mentioned in the past how I agree that Google DE is an absolute mess (or was until last time I checked it some 2 weeks ago).

@reseller Yep, I wasn't sure if it was you or someone else who also added something, and I agree with you even with the dates too. Smells backlink-ish (this is my observation, could be completely wrong but have enough sites to be more than a wild guess) and only related so far to the US. Do you happen to be in the US too?

I would not be surprised if big G was doing something "big" without telling us. Remember Hummingbird? Not a single SERP forecast caught on it but we knew that there was something big as not only our traffic increased massively almost overnight for just about all sites but it we were getting some very weirdly long questions as referring search keywords (back in the day when you didn't have just 1% of referring keywords revealed by Google in the name of "buy more Adwords if you want to know converting keywords sukka" ... I mean, in the name of privacy of search users. That said Hummingbird wasn't suppose to cause a big impact on rankings, instead it was (partly) focused on bringing Google's search users closer to the correct and most related page (which indirectly increases traffic).

It's also true that Google has specific algorithms like the Payday Loans one for select industries/subs, so we may be seeing something like that (an unnamed or yet unknown -to us- algorithm). Or t could well be Panda going industry by industry as part of its slow roll out.

One thing I can tell you is that the automotive industry overall is full of spam of the most basic form (both off page and on page) while also inundated by the huge brands (goes without saying we ain't BMW here nor the bigger automotive magazines). But spammers find time and time again how to rank badly written content (whether spun or written by someone who can barely write). When you dig deep you can see the content has hundreds of thousands of links created via spamming tools. Churn and burn all the way.

[reseller]

@Kratos , @johnhh , @samwest , @Nutterum , @syedyasir , @Barbados , @mrengine , @Kelowna

It seems we suggest that since around 2nd September 2015, we have been witnessing the rolling out of a Google data update related to backlinks and long-tail queries.

I don't think that we should expect Google to confirm the said data update.

[Nutterum]

Unless someone with more authority with Google (think Search Engine Land reporters or Barry Schwartz who frequents here) asks Google, they will keep silent until the official blog post. Long past is the time where the revered Matt Cuts, could quickly hint a yes or a no to the community. As for the update itself, yes I can get behind the claim as well, even though the change in my niche was far less visible than yours.