Google Updates and SERP Changes - Oct 2015

[charliekoen]

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System: The following 8 messages were cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4765618.htm [webmasterworld.com] by robert_charlton - 11:46 am on Oct 1, 2015 (PDT -8)

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Another long time lurker here, interesting to read all of the previous comments about this and we've definitely seen a big shift.

We operate in the UK market and took over a client from another agency about 6 months ago. Everything seemed ok, link profile wasn't too bad etc. The one glaring thing that worried me was that they had a lot of location-type pages -- e.g. keyword-location.html. In fairness, the company operates across 4 cities, but nevertheless, these pages seemed a bit excessive. I advised our client about this and they wanted to keep the pages as is because they were obviously working for them.

They were doing pretty well in the SERP's -- usually in the top 3 for keyword + location queries. They also had the beginnings of a national footprint and were at the bottom of page 1 for some competitive terms.

All pages have unique content, around 750-1250 words and aren't keyword stuffed so I'm not sure if it's a Panda thing, but my instinct tells me it is.

They saw a HUGE drop yesterday -- pretty much obliterated all rankings. Then a slight recovery today.

Just wondered what people's thoughts are on what this update is. Seems like a mix of reactions from positive shifts to negative shifts.

[reseller]

@adder

I can only say the two sites are unrelated, one is informational, the other one is e-commerce. They're from different countries and serving different niches. Both are affected by the recent Panda.

Why do you think that the two sites were affected by "recent Panda"?

[adder]

@reseller, coz both sites have a long history of Panda penalties. One of them had achieved a successful recovery and I'm thinking something has tripped the "more-refined" Panda 4.2. The other site has been hit by every Panda in succession but the owner just wouldn't learn.

Besides, the dates match. Site A started on a downward spiral shortly after Panda 4.2. was activated. Site B tanked almost immediately after the activation. Panda rollout in Country A was different than in Country B, so it kind of makes sense.

Another clue is the pre-Panda crawl rate. Most confirmed Panda 4.2. cases that I've looked at have seen "suspicious" activity from the Googlebot prior to the activation date.

The thing is that only two sites out of about a dozen that I've had a chance to look at have the 12th September situation. My hunch is - a non-confirmed mini-update unrelated to Panda, but, hey, need more data :)

[wgchris]

Hey folks,

Been getting much better traffic over the past few days. Fingers crossed the rug isn’t yanked out from underneath again.

Something notable is that I can discern no difference in traffic outside of conversions. Hate to do it, but could this be something else outside of a simple algorithm change? We all complained to be experiencing the equivalent of drinking through a straw for conversions. Could there have been a middleman in there somewhere sucking up or monitoring traffic? I know uncle sam has raised alerts on the east coast this past month for certain activities. Maybe they were looking for something? Here’s to hoping they got what they needed.

</tinfoilhat>

[masterjoe]

Still struggling with the same piss poor traffic we've been getting since September. I also see Amazon has taken up a few top spots in my niche, as usual. I lost over 70% of my organic traffic the last few weeks and I've only gotten about 50% of it back in the last week. I think that's the end of this site in particular. Yes it was hit by Penguin, but I don't think it deserves to continue getting punished especially after it's been cleaned extensively and improved in every possible way since the hit.

[Simon_H]

@glakes Change your adwords settings to only allow traffic from your country.

[Nutterum]

Can you guys test something. I was shocked when I found it working for what I see as SERP results. I wanted to check a particular event I am interested in. Query was "Fakuma 2015" , since the entire first page of Google was filled with the fakuma domain and its sub pages I decided to see what was going on on Page 2-4 . 15 minutes passed and I researched the query. This time the SERPs were showing only 6 results with the fakuma trade fair domain and 2 404-ed pages. I was like what the ...happened, so decided to recreate what I did the first time around. Went to page 2,3 and 4, even clicked on a result on Page 3 and waited another 15 minutes. I retyped the query for the 3-d time. The painting was again almost entirely different. 4 SERP results from the fakuma domain, with the 1-st results being heavy in structured data snippets with an embedded exhibitors search, search field and from there 4 absolutely new domains as results.

Since when the SERPs change _THAT_ fast? I haven`t used different IPs or anything. Just a "regular Joe" type of search.

Can you please do this on your end and tell me if you see such detrimental SERP changes on your query of choice? To make it consistent use an two-word organic query not a local one.

[masterjoe]

So this guy decided to copy content off one of my sites, I will be blasting it with exact match keywords from "high PR" sources from Fiverr to see what happens. If this update has anything to do with Penguin/links then we are about to find out.

[hasek747]

@Nutterum

I've been seeing this since a few weeks at least.

EDIT: I started seeing this much earlier actually. Only difference is that sometimes I see fewer results on the first page after going back to it, and sometimes I see much more than 10, seems random. I actually started a thread about this a few weeks back which now that I think back must have been the first sign of this behavior (back then it only happened once a day for a brief period of time, but now seems to happen every day)

[webmasterworld.com...]

[frankleeceo]

The serp shuffling has been happening for a long time? It's not new. It started picking up its frequency in my niche for roughly 1~2 year now and maybe they're pushing it out to more queries.

I remember once I got some information aka script code I needed off the serp, and 1 day later for the love of god I cannot find it again, I happened to clear my browser history that day, but nevertheless that 'useful' particular site disappeared from my serp completely. I went as deep as 100 top results to look for it and end up giving up.

Domains and landing pages appear in and out of the results, which kinda correlate with the site wide traffic throttling and shaping, which make serp position almost irrelevant. I would rather appear 100,000 times as position 5 than a single time as position 1. Even though the latter gets a nice "your position is 1.0" for all the queries with a CTR rate of 100%! Yet the traffic volume is #*$!.

It's about the impressions and traffic that sites actually get at the end, which gets a nice throttling or ceiling unless certain conditions are met. And only god knows what those specific conditions are... only thing is that links play a major weight.

[zapmachine]

I'm seeing a huge shift within the past week. Ecommerce site, was ranking very well, now getting clobbered. Just about out of the top 10 for all the big keywords. At first I suspected neg seo but I don't think that is the case here. A quick perusal of the 'new' serps. Lots of spam pbn powered sites that last year got smacked down for doing the same black hat seo. The thing is these guys are increasing their use of these obvious pbn spam machines. I'm in a niche where 550k backlinks is completely absurd and impossible without pure spam (and lots of it) involved.

I'm at a point where I'm seriously considering a spam hunter service to go through ahrefs, maj etc and pick out the pbns and en masse report them to googles spam team. Anybody else feel the same way?

It's bad enough a 2 month old site immediately has 500 5 star product reviews but keeping up with the Spam Kings is getting out of control, again.

Cutts quits and it all goes to hell?

Mozcast has been relatively quiet during the period. Site is Cloudflare pro powered (very responsive), sitewide ssl, clean bl profile, mobile friendly.

[timemachined]

Excuse me but I am very angry as I actually spend time writing content, so angry that I haven't posted on here in over a decade and it has taken this event to do so and have named my user after Google. A search engine that has spectacularly managed to return itself to the state it was in 15 years ago.

What have I noticed? I'm not sure on the rules but if you want me to post examples after, I can.

1. Keyword similar phrased meta description stuffing is back with a vengeance
2. There's a brilliant new affiliate link cloaking trick, it goes like this: Indexed doorway page > land page link to internal doorway page > cloaked affiliate link via a website article that ends in ?mn=2842 which somehow picks up the embedded affiliate link in the final external page and then sends to the merchant via an affiliate link. Which miraculously fools Google and ranks the page.
3. and they use wordpress.com platform as a doorway page - yes they're back too!
4. Mobile optimised text free pages rank overwhelmingly on desktop search, forget unique content as I can see pages that have no text whatsoever and are as bland as a 1995 internet page. No text, no images, just automated content. Different industries granted - this is templated discount code voucher sector.
5. Get millions of pages up, Google doesn't care, so put your hands in the air. If you want to rank for a million pages, just use standard text and change the main keyword string. Dup content with only keyword phrase changed working wonders.

I know things tend to change but really, to push Google back so it looks like it was 2002 is crazy. But if it stays this way, I will join in and upload 5 million dup keyword phrased, meta desc stuffed pages for Christmas as I need the money.

[Leosghost]

You won't be allowed to post examples..
But what you say about current Google SERPs is 100% true..

[masterjoe]

I've also seen the same thing. I recently was doing some research on a topic and the SERPS were unbelievably poor... this was not in my little corner of the internet that I'm familiar with. But all I could find on page 1 was a broken website that didn't load, a thin "authority" article, a few amazon links (even though it was totally unrelated), and some forum posts which were not substantial enough to answer my questions.

I found a smaller website on page 3 that was well written and designed. It solved my problem.

[petehall]

@timemachined I couldn't agree more. For the first time in 15 years, having survived every single update, I finally have no clue what they are doing.

All I can hope is this is a temporary state until the index is re-built, and a return to normal awaits.

If not some tough decisions are around the corner....

[SuperT]

SERPs have been gradually sinking since 10/08 and even more so on 10/14. Anyone else see this? I have an e-commerce site.

[aakk9999]

Mod's note:

A large number of messages from this thread has been split out into a new thread:
Google Zombie Traffic Observations [webmasterworld.com]

Please continue your Zombie conversation there and usual monthly SERPs observation in this monthly thread.

[mrengine]

Serps have been sinking for other ecommerce sites since Sepetember SuperT. Have your ranks fallen or is something else to blame?

[SuperT]

@mrengine, serps fell quite a bit about a year ago. They started to balance out a bit (not recovered) - mine didn't fall in September. But they did drop more on those Oct dates.

[samwest]

I think EVERYONE saw an unnatural decline in September. Usually Sept beats August and that trend continues (in my vertical) until Dec 26 at which point it goes CRAZY for (used to be 3 months) a few weeks. Something rolled through, but was likely related to a core update rather than Pen or Pan or dare I say it...Z. lol - Pure speculation, sorry.

[Nutterum]

I didn't quite catch the deal with the stuffed meta descriptions. If they are of no value to Google why stuff them? Do they actually play a role in this scenario?

[Mentat]

In my niche I see something very disturbing:

1. Thin content does not seem to be an issue for the first page of results. I have big doubts about this Panda signal in the latest incarnations!
2. The first page is full of big brands or very new sites. The content seems to be second! The TITLE is the most important element!
Even affiliate duplicate content is ranking very high on big/brand sites.
3. I see old articles, since 2007-2008 ranking just because they are on very big sites!
big/brand sites = many links = PR!

[raindance]

Something big is happening. SERP changing hour-by-hour. Algoroo, Accuranker, Serpometre peaking.

[Kratos]

@Mentat

1) What do you call thin content? Your view of thin content can be different to that of Google, and it usually is to that of anybody. Thin content can rank easily by the way.

2) Google cannot interpret content. This whole "content is king" thing is a scam. Any content can rank fine, even "duplicate" content can rank fine. If by duplicate you mean content scraped and posted in other sites.

3) Older articles tend to rank fine because the page code is usually less full of useless mumbo jubo by the likes of the pretty content CMS scripts. Back in 2007, pages had less code clutter. I just saw a classic example today of this. Give me (and Google) a back to basics 1998 coded HTML page over any fancy Wordpress theme and thou shalt see the magic. By the way, age has nothing to do with ranking-just letting that out in case someone is wondering if I approve of that by how I wrote my reply).

[Mentat]

Let's not get very philosophical, please.

1. Thin content: a few (less than 100) words/page, in the "main content area".

2. Well, if they do not interpret content, we are all in trouble! The "magic" is how do they interpret it ?

3. My code is very clean! The only big difference is that now we do not use tables, but CSS code and external css file!

[Kratos]

@Mentat:

1) LOL at calling less than 100 words/page thin content. So Twitter is thin content right? Do you have any idea what thin content really is? -hint, it isn't words per page.

2) They interpret content by how many links a given page has. That, and topically correct text, correct code and architecture.

3) So?

[aakk9999]

Well, if they do not interpret content, we are all in trouble! The "magic" is how do they interpret it ?

They interpret content by how many links a given page has. That, and topically correct text, correct code and architecture.

@Kratos, @Mentat,
I wish it is that simple. If we knew this, we would all rank great.

[goodoldweb]

Was conducting a search on google yesterday and noticed an "how do you rate these search results" pop up survey box. "Extremely dissatisfied" was my selection.

Anyone else seeing this survey popup lately?

[timemachined]

Nutterum

I didn't quite catch the deal with the stuffed meta descriptions. If they are of no value to Google why stuff them? Do they actually play a role in this scenario?

Because recently google seemingly wound down thesaurus algo and increased exact match. Meaning if you have 11 of 12 similar phrase / keywords on page but you don't have the 12th, the single competitor with the 12th may rank above you. Whereas previously you was more than covered by the other 11 variations for the 12th exact match search. Even getting stuffed on not having plural or no gap between words.

That's what I'm seeing. And in these instances, properly written sentences have been pushed down (as don't include so many similar phrases), while similar phrase keyword crammed meta descriptions have overwhelmingly risen - with other on page weight factors but meta desc is the change here. I honestly think a google engineer has got drunk and mixed up the meta keywords field with meta description as it is that stupid.

Google is like the cat next door. Every year a few months before Christmas they shaft all the websites that ranked for the majority of the year based upon good practice, and rank the "we're not stupid enough to follow google guidelines" websites instead. Then come February they will let most of our pages come back. Why cat? because it knows you're home and you'll give them food no matter what. If every website blocked Google, the engine would not exist but who's going to do that?

Hopefully it won't stay this way but it is October and this is usually the month to stuff the well behaved turkeys for Christmas. I get fed up playing by the rules, automated website, little to no content, duplicate text, keyword stuffing and tons of fake link building from networked websites and social, that's what works for the competitors in the season that matters most unless you're selling garden chairs.

And I don't know who told you meta descriptions don't matter. There was some people a few years back telling their clients they don't need the field because google dropped that aspect. Not that I believed that for one second and even if they did, they would always bring it back leaving those clients needing to backfill thousands of metas. Though as shown above, automated process for that winning hands down.

[Nutterum]

@tmiemachined - I asked because I saw a similar website ranking very high for a several very competitive keywords. 50+ meta keywords, entirely copy-pasted content from other websites including their direct competitors. Even after 3 dmca requests some of their landing pages are still up there rank 2-5 and Google could not care less. So yeah, that is why I asked.

[Jez123]

Have google changed the rating stars colour slightly? Seems worthwhile... :) The results might be poor but at least aesthetically pleasant.