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.

[Shepherd]

google traffic up about 5% Monday 9/21 compared to Monday 9/14.
Bing traffic up 6% same period.
Yahoo traffic up 10% same period.

For us, whatever happened around the 2nd happened across the board, not just google. We are ecom, U.S. based.

[glakes]

I see a similar increase in traffic as you do Shepherd, starting around Saturday. But page views and sales are way down. There's possibly an increased mix of zombie traffic in what Google is sending. I define zombie traffic as non-human bots, and I would gladly take the traffic Google was sending the week before over this garbage.

[Shepherd]

Specifically related to google organic traffic, page views per session up 6.51% from last Monday, conversion rate increased by 4.44% so we are not seeing the same "zombie traffic" as you Glakes.

For those in the U.S. that saw declines in google traffic starting around the 2nd of September, I'm curious how your Bing and Yahoo traffic was for the same period.

[samwest]

@glakes - seeing a similar flood of good traffic and bad (zombies)..for instance, Monday morning was almost a natural flow of human traffic, but afternoon and night was all zombie.... slow moving page hangers, sitting on pages for up to 5 minutes. Human traffic is brisk page to page, sitting between 10 to 45 seconds at most. Overall the month of September has remain flat as a pancake query wise...with one huge peak on the 13th that didn't convert to diddly squat. Likely a bot slam.

[samwest]

Watching Zombie traffic right now..all from Google, all one page and gone, but not after sitting for 5 minutes.

[reseller]

WebmasterWorld member Barry Schwartz has posted today (22nd September 2015) on Search Engine Roundtable under "Google Web Search Ranking Fluctuations In Mid-September? "

Again, the chatter is not significant enough to warrant me emailing Google about to find out if there was an update. Plus, the automated tracking tools from Moz, SERPs, SERPMetrics, Algooroo and others do not show huge signs in the past few days of changes - in fact, they show the opposite.

But there is chatter, higher than normal chatter, but not enough to signal a real significant update red flag. But for those who noticed changes, you are 100% not alone.

[seroundtable.com...]

Hi Barry

IMHO those so called "automated tracking tools" from Moz, SERPs, SERPMetrics, Algooroo, are nothing but a bunch of outdated useless junk which are not able to register clear Google data update signals which WebmasterWorld members have been posting on this thread since around 2nd September 2015.

[superclown2]

I'm watching even further dumbing-down of the SERPs. Sure we've been getting the biggest fruit companies when we've searched for stewed apples and custard or tinned pears for ages but over the last few days it's got much worse with a lot of results barely relevant. Google trying to save on bandwidth perhaps?

The winners, of course, are the mega sites and the losers the specialists. No change there.

[raindance]

Algoroo peaked with 2.31 (3. biggest value this year) Did you noticed something? I see some change.

[push_star]

just subscribing for replies. Noticed dramatic serp loss in geo-modified legal/auto queries Sept. 16/17

[Yayabobi]

My SERPs have been bouncing up and down the past week or so. Traffic has pretty much been stable though but my conversions have gone down.

Too early to tell though what exactly's going on.

[Tauqeeraziz]

My ranking is also Fluctuate.. Few of my website ranking keywords are out of 100.. i don't know what happen with my website..

[glakes]

It's the end of a quarter. Maybe Google is making adjustments to meet end of quarter profit targets?

[engine]

I'd dub this the "Equinox" change.

[push_star]

I am also seeing Google Surveys appear asking to rate the results of the SERPs. I also saw a key ranking drop out of 100 (no traffic or conversion loss though). Good thoughts on profit margins - but with the surveys - I believe it was a major update/adjustment. Still need to research in more detail today.

[withavision]

Yesterday basically all of my pages and terms I was ranking for vanished, but my site was still indexed.

Today I ran a site operator and my site is not indexed.

The site had been ranking 1-5 for many keywords for about a year now.

I made a child theme and rearranged the content on the static front page about 2 weeks ago.

Do you believe this could be the reason? Perhaps my site is being re-evaluated before ranking again?

[Itanium]

Take a look at your Google Search Console. This sound like a manual penatly. Sites don't completely vanish from the index by an algorithmic filter.

[withavision]

There is nothing showing in webmaster tools

[Kratos]

@withavision manual penalty can take a couple of days to show up when a site is deindexed. However for a site to be deindexed you need to have done something seriously bad.

You report in another thread that your rankings have tanked but the site is still indexed. It's a common mistake to call a de-indexation a loss of rankings. If your site is not showing up, make sure that you haven't done anything wrong to it such as setting a noindex (seen that a lot of times). Wait a couple of days if you believe it's a penalty though as the manual penalty warning can take a couple of days to show up after a full de-indexation.

Do you have any beliefs for why Google would want you out of their index? Contrary to popular belief, it's extremely difficult to NOT want Google to have your site in their index (even if its a spam site with stolen content).

[Jez123]

There is nothing showing in webmaster tools

Did you check to see if there have been any crawl errors or pages unreachable? One of my sites dropped out similarly with a hosting issue that I knew nothing about. Worth a look. It cam back very fast when the issue was fixed (some DNS problem)

[samwest]

Biggest problem I'm seeing is that our keywords are quickly being moved to page two. What is replacing us is now non authoritative "one page wonder" articles on unrelated and non authoritative blogs. Google sure goes through their phases...first facebook posts, then ebay, then amazon, then houzz, now nobody bloggers. Apparently way too many switches and dials for them to handle.

[reseller]

@samwest

Have you lost traffic as a result of your keywords being moved to page two?

[reseller]

My guess is as follows:

- Since around 2nd September 2015 we have been watching the rolling out of a Google data update.

- The data update might be related to backlinks and long-tail search queries.

- The data update is neither a Panda nor a Penguin.

- Google engineers have full control over the rolling out of the data update. Nothing went wrong yet.

- We shouldn't expect Google to confirm the said data update.

[samwest]

@reseller - yes, traffic has been lost. Not to sound like a broken record, but this time of year I should be seeing a substantial increase in traffic, but it seems any short increases are instantly bumped down. If they are doing this simply by pushing more terms to page two, then that's the mechanism and it fits my diagnostics. I definitely seeing an OFF traffic period right now, with only a few foreign hits (I'm in the USA midwest). Not sure what's up but it seems like a re-doubling of their punitive efforts of Sept 2. It's a long tail hit for sure.
Almost every term lost from page one now resides at position #1 on page two. I haven't made any changes to the site either. Just outta the blue, as usual.

[Mentat]

Since yesterday I can see another substantial drop in visits, well... not far from now I'll close the gates.
I've lost hope and almost all my resources.

[withavision]

@kratos well I just looked under manual actions and I see I past below here...

This is absolutely puzzling to me. All of my content is original and at minimum 1000 words. Most posts are 1200-1500. There is absolutely zero spun content, it is all original and written well.

Pure Spam action
If you see this message on the Manual Actions page, it means that Google has detected that some of your pages may be using techniques that are outside our Webmaster Guidelines. The site appears to use aggressive spam techniques such as automatically generated gibberish, cloaking, scraping content from other websites, and/or other repeated or egregious violations of Google’s quality guidelines.

As a result, Google has applied a manual spam action to the affected portions of your site. Actions that affect your whole site are listed under Site-wide matches. Actions that affect only part of your site and/or some incoming links to your site are listed under Partial matches.
Recommended action

Update your site so that it meets Google's Webmaster Guidelines.
Once you've made these changes, submit a reconsideration request.

[avalon37]

One of my clients is a franchise with locations throughout the U.S. Organic traffic is down sharply this month, but started declining as early as July. Most locations are still showing up in the 3 local results sections - which had been 7 results. But Google has made it so much harder to actually click over to your website from local results. Clicks now take you to another Google page which pulls info from the Google+ page, but makes it much harder as I said for someone to actually click over to your site. So while keyword rankings are the same, traffic is down a lot because Google has changed the user experience/flow of local results.

[reseller]

During the current Google data update (started around 2nd September 2015) changes use to happen during weekends. Fasten your seatbelts, we might be approaching a bumpy weekend :-)

[Kratos]

Guys, check Algoroo. It's rporting big movements for the last 3 days and I can acknowledge this on our side. However it's the same type of movement as seen since early September and as reported on this thread by us.

@withavision As I expected. Manual actions can take a bit to appear. Is your site by any chance an affiliate site? As in is this site only there to provide reviews of products? The fact that you're not on Google's index tells me your site was very likely a made for Amazon or made for Adsense site. Unique content (whatever that means) or length of posts means nothing. Can you confirm what's the purpose of your site?

[glakes]

You are right Kratos, the serp tools are reporting movement. Unfortunately none of this movement has resulted in an improvement in traffic from Google. I'm seeing about double the sales from Bing/Yahoo traffic then Google, which is just a very small fraction of overall Google traffic. It's like Google can't understand what an ecommerce site is about and what type of visitors to send. It should be pretty basic stuff, but Google just falls flat on their face. Adwords traffic is not converting either. It all boils down to the wrong people viewing the wrong set of serps (organic and free). I find it hard to believe that Google is incapable of sending the right visitors to the right sites. It's far more likely that these periods of irrelevant traffic are motivated by profits - causing frustrated businesses to spend more on Adwords and Google search users to click more ads, refine their queries and dig deeper into the search results to unearth something that the other search engines can do consistently with some degree of accuracy- produce a reasonable set of results.

[Kratos]

@glakes On average, Google search engine users are more aware of ads (not to click them) and have more refined "internet smarts" than those using Bing or Yahoo. They will keep digging if they don't find what they're looking for within their first search (while avoiding clicking on ads). I''m not talking of guys in their 20s, even people in their 50s have learned to use Google effectively and know what's an ad despite Google's snaeky tactics to make them blend into the organic fold.

Think of Google SE as Reddit members, they will flood your site if your link gets any visibility but not a single one of them will convert or buy (Reddit is notable for being one of the worst types of traffic, worse than Digg traffic from back in the day).