Google ZOMBIE Traffic Observations

[samwest]

Mods Note: Split out of the October 2015 Monthly Observation thread into a separate Zombie Traffic Thread
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Sunday morning, usually banging away, but nothing but slow moving Zombie traffic, one or two at a time and sitting on the same pages for several minutes. Switch is currently OFF.
Still in decline. No sign of any seasonal upswing, which is way overdue.

[edited by: aakk9999 at 7:08 pm (utc) on Oct 19, 2015]

[heisje]

@mpman : exactly as per my own (and many others' here) observations. Not a phenomenon of the last few weeks. Going on since early September, thereafter getting worse. Thanks for providing data from your perspective, one more piece of the puzzle.

Something very SINISTER is going on. "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark".

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[edited by: heisje at 11:07 pm (utc) on Oct 30, 2015]

[reseller]

Hi folks

Updating my conclusions regarding Google Zombie Traffic:

1 - Google Zombie Traffic is neither related to the conent of the site nor its baclink profile.

2- Google Zombie Traffic isn't generated by bots.

3- Google Zombie Traffic isn't the result of negative SEO.

4- Google Zombie Traffic isn't related to whether the site is mobile friendly.

5- Google Zombie Traffic isn't the product of RankBrain.

6- Google Zombie Traffic might be the product of a filter/system (Zombie-filter, Zombie-system) which is incorporated in Google Core Search Algorithm to assist in generating more revenues of current AdWords customers, and to force owners of business websites who are not already using AdWords to join AdWords advertising.

7- It seems site owner can't do much to escape Google Zombie Traffic. However site owners whos advertising on AdWords have been damaged by Google Zombie Traffic, have the choice to pause their AdWords campaigns or to entirely leave AdWords program.

8- We don't really know yet the exact or approximate number of site owners who have been affected by Google Zombie Traffic. We shouldn't expect all site owner who have been affected by Google Zombie Traffic to be aware of that. As @aakk9999 mentioned correctly "not everybody can recognise it. It takes quite a bit of analysis going through lots of historic data to come to Zombie conclusion".

Your feedback is most welcome :)

[Itanium]

I agree with the observations about zombie traffic. On some days I have 12 percent conversion rate, on others zero. On some days 20 members register to the community, on others zero. That's definitely not a regular pattern and clearly some kind of heavy traffic shaping is going on.

I don't think it has something to do with mobile friendly layouts or mobile users:
From 2013 to 2014 mobile visits to my sites rose by 10 percent: from 24 to 34 percent.
From 2014 to 2015 the usage only slightly changed from 34 to 36,6 percent.
Conversions in 2014 were perfectly fine, while in 2015 - especially since April/May - they are very, very bad.

I think there's a huge problem with the quality of Google's search results for quite some time now. I find myself more and more frustrated with using Google as a user. Yesterday I was searching for something very specific and only found what I needed after chaning the search parameters maybe 6 to 7 times. And even then, most of the results were absolute crap. 1 year ago I put in something specific in the search and got highly relevant and mostly specialized results. Today I mostly get websites with general and often shallow information on the subject, but not what I'm looking for.

Whatever changed in the last 12-14 month about long trail recognition, is clearly not working. I think that's one of the major issues with zombie traffic too, because those long trail searches are the ones Rankbrain/Phantom is (imho) all about. When the update hit in April, my indexed keywords almost halved according to SEMrush. Traffic wasn't hit that hard, but still saw a serious decline. Even for sites that weren't hit as hard, conversions are still jumping up and down since then.

[heisje]

@reseller : is repeating the phrase "Google Zombie Traffic" ad nauseam some kind of early 2000's SEO?



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[heisje]

@Itanium : +1 : same here. Coincidence? Don't think so.

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[Simon_H]

@mpman Wow. Thank you for sharing that. According to semrush and ahrefs, organic traffic on etsy.com is increasing. So if you and others are seeing on/off conversion jumps from the beginning of Sept, then that suggests etsy may be seeing the zombie phenomenon. That's significant because it would contradict arguments that Google is passing all the good traffic to the big brands/payers, as etsy is a big user of Google paid.

Do you have a link to where other etsy stores are discussing this? It would be interesting to know if *all* etsy stores are seeing this or just some and if it really is the on/off effect or just people angry that their sales are declining over time.

[glakes]

No sales from Google today until early evening. Then three sales from customers in the State of California came through. This is the first time on a zombie day I've had a break that led to only sales restricted to a specific geographic region. I sell across the USA and am located in the midwest. It's highly peculiar to see back to back orders from California, let alone three in a row. Converting traffic was then swiftly shut down after those three sales. Other places I am visible at converted throughout the entire day.

@mpman

Good info and thanks for sharing. Please post to this thread of you hear any response from Etsy. Many of us here, myself included, are not selling on that platform. But just looking at the Etsy forums I see we are not alone. Yet on ebay I see they are experiencing technical problems with outages and images not loading. That may explain why people selling on ebay are seeing a drop in sales.

[WhiteHatTryHard]

"On some days 20 members register to the community, on others zero."

Sorry but these numbers are far too low to make any kind of statistical analysis. You are making us look bad.

If you had 2000 members register and on other days 0, that would say something. But at such low numbers, that does really not say anything.

Such low numbers are always going to fluctuate heavily. (Got some smaller websites myself)

You need at least an average of 5000 visitors a day, ideally 10000+ to make any kind of accurate assessment. Ideally you would also have 100+ conversions.

On smaller sites you will ALWAYS have heavy fluctuations, such is the nature of statistics.

That's also why political polls ect are usually done using at LEAST 2000 participants and still they can be +-2% inaccurate.

In addition your site has to mostly rely on EVERGREEN CONTENT. Because doing this kind of analysis on short-life content is useless as well. - Because the "zombies" could in that case just mean that no one wants to buy 2014 calendars anymore.

Also the lower your conversion rate, the higher the fluctuations relative to the number of visitors. So if you have a conversion rate of sub 1%, then not even 5000 visitors a day will cut it for accurate analysis.

Im leaving this discussion. Its not professional.

[Itanium]

Sorry but these numbers are far too low to make any kind of statistical analysis. You are making us look bad.

It's a community with over 10000 members. There _never_ have been zero registration days before this year. No need to have have registrations in the thousands to see something wrong here.

You need at least an average of 5000 visitors a day, ideally 10000+ to make any kind of accurate assessment. Ideally you would also have 100+ conversions.

Why do you think that's not the case? I'm also not talking about 1 site here. Not that it matters, but the smaller ones have 500 - 2000 visitors per day, the biggest had an average of 12000. After Phantom 2 the average of th largest site sank by 20%. Still more than enough to make observations.

Oh, and those conversion jumps are equally present in the largest (and 2 medium) sites as in the small ones. There's really no difference.

Don't just make wild guesses on a few numbers.

[Simon_H]

Im leaving this discussion. Its not professional.

@WhiteHatTryHard If, for example, a site sees a regular 20 conversions per day for many years and that then suddenly starts switching from zero conversions per day to 20 and back again, that's a valid observation. No need whatsoever to only include sites with thousands of daily conversions.

[edited by: aakk9999 at 12:35 pm (utc) on Oct 31, 2015]

[heisje]

@Simon_H : +1.
@WhiteHatTryHard : This is an important discussion, everybody here is striving for some explanation to the zombie phenomenon - please, let us not tarnish it with negativity.

@reseller : excellent summary of observations to date.

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[samwest]

As someone who has seen this from basically day one and who presumably resides permanently in Google's "Test Pool", my 15 year old site started in 2000 and never saw a zero day until May 18th 2010. Prior to that, sales went UP each year, right until the MayDay update. Penguin and Panda followed shortly thereafter and did their damage, but MayDay is when the ON/OFF periods really started. I've explained why it seems to have now spread to a wider set of sites, because they are pushing the knife in SLOWLY to avoid a complete and total backlash of outrage . It's pretty much accepted that Google is forcing PPC down our throats, it's accepted that longtail volumes of the past have disappeared. The natural patterns started decaying as of the MayDay update 2010.

Since that time, natural conversion totals of the week would be (using widgets as an example) 800, 1200, 700, 900, 1400 etc...a very natural variation. Since then, it's has slowly been "quotaed" down to more like 805,810, 805, 800, 810 and as of April 1st 2010, halved to 402, 403, 402, 404, 403 with very little variation.
My weekly totals for the past 9 weeks have been +/- 2 sales. There simply is no more natural variation, so the assumption is that traffic is being throttled, and a quality quota in place. It's extremely accurate. I have 15 years of data to examine and it's ridiculous to watch this slow progression towards extinction.

I understand many of the factors that have changed over the years, the proliferation of mobile, and we've adapted to everything along the way, but when I see GOOG making consistent 21% increases it's easy to follow the money trail. Manipulation of the serps for their own profit is evident. You'd think that would violate net neutrality in some way, but not for the 800 lb gorilla. Bottom line is accept it and die or find a new way to do business online.
In the past few weeks I started pounding the pavement and landed a decent contract to redo a site for a 60M / year company. Sometimes change FORCES use to think differently and that can be good.

Keep the observations coming....
My oddity of the week has been on sale every day at 7am +/- 15 min. Just like some switch is turned on and then off.
BTW, in the good days, you could tell time by our sales conversion frequency. 1 conversion every 30 min from 6 am to midnight +/- natural fluctuation.

[reseller]

@samwest

Am I right in assuming that Google Zombie Traffic is killing fair competition among AdWords advertisers.

It seems that at present we have two categories of AdWords advertisers:

1- AdWords advertisers which their AdWords conversions are not affected by Google Zombie Traffic. They are having business as usual, you might say.

2- AdWords advertisers which their AdWords conversions have been damaged by Google Zombie Traffic. They are losing considerable portion of their AdWords conversions.

[heisje]

70% of our sales were wiped out as of June 2015. Half of this damage from end August to date. No seasonal upturn, as would be natural.

Expect these sales went somewhere?

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[samwest]

@resller - It's possible...of course you might have those who spend $10,000 per month on adwords vs. those who spend $1,000 per month. I would expect conversion rates to be equal, but I doubt they are. Seems the higher bids are getting the cream positions while the lower bids get the husk. This is why I have a big problem with PPC. Google sure was smart...in the past they complained about those who game the system, so they just turned the game around so those who game it by buying up all the traffic now benefit Google. I'm just speculating and discussing though...I don't presume to know what really lurks behind the monolithic curtain. [youtube.com...]

[Simon_H]

@heisje There were a lot of pre-Panda/Phantom tremors recorded around June 2015. See [hmtweb.com ]

When your sales dropped by 70%, did your traffic drop too or did traffic stay the same?

[woodpecker]

I started reading this thread and thought OMG, this is exactly what we see, I thought it was just us.

We're a small UK ecom, 12 year old domain, conversions from organic and adwords have fallen through the floor, I'm sat here watching traffic, an ad was clicked 42 mins ago, the clicker never visited a second page and is just sat there, a zombie I guess? I see this all the time.

Every now and then the magic switch is thrown and things go back to how they used to be, but the on seems to be getting less and less.

I think we've done everything we can to our site, I've burnt so many hours trying every improvement and optimisation I could possible try but none of it has any effect, its got to the point where I feel that if we listed the products as free they wouldn't convert.

I don't know what's going on but the big UK tax dodgers, Google, Ebay and Amazon seem to rule everything now, us small businesses are the ones left paying the taxes and achieving nothing else.

I've started using Bing for personal searches the Google UK results are so bad, I see results for Australian websites appearing before UK companies, all I see is organic and adwords results hogged by the same big few, it's poor for consumer choice, its poor for small business its only good for Google.

Is it just time to accept that Google is too broken (or corrupt) to continue with, time to spend the money elsewhere?

[Simon_H]

@woodpecker Thank you for posting these details. The poor country matches have been mentioned a number of times on this thread. I posted something on seroundtable about this; if you search for 'blown glass chandeliers' on Google UK, page 1 is full of non-UK results including Chinese import/non-UK shops. There are only 2 UK shops shown, neither of which allow online ordering. Yet the Shopping widget appears and shows only UK stores, which suggests Google understands the search intent is transactional, so it's unclear why the organic results are so poor.

I wonder if the zombie phenomenon is a combination of two separate things:
1. Severe problems with Google understanding geographical search intent within organic results. If Google has started intermittently showing results from inappropriate countries on page 1 of the serps, it will result in similar traffic to stores but far poorer conversions as users discover they can't order or delivery costs are prohibitively high.
AND...
2. The Shopping/Adwords widgets being shown on far more pages than before. Search for 'Panda 4.2' and you get no widgets. Search for 'Nike trainers' and you get the widgets. Now imagine the paid widgets have started appearing on serps that aren't quite so obviously transactional, especially the long tail ones. This will result in lower conversion rates on paid. It would be very stupid of Google to do this because a lower value-per-click results in sites lowering their bids, but I wonder if it is unintentional. The ad blockers of ios9 would have resulted in a sudden drop in paid ad impressions in mid-September. Google's system may (automatically) compensate for this by showing more ads, but they'd appear in serps that are less likely to convert.

[glakes]

It would be very stupid of Google to do this because a lower value-per-click results in sites lowering their bids, but I wonder if it is unintentional.

Highly doubtful what Google is doing is unintentional considering how long it's been going on. There's enough discussions about zombies here, on Barry's site, Reddit, Etsy and other places that Google employees visit to check the pulse of the webmaster community. Call your Adwords rep and they deny any problems and advise us to bid higher when we were already bidding the highest (duh). It's intentional and it is clear that most of us dealing with zombies just happen to operate ecommerce websites.

Yes, manipulating the quality of Adwords traffic would only work for the near term and CPC would begin to drop. But if one were to employ such a strategy, the holiday shopping season would be a good time to do it. And what's right around the corner? The holidays.

[masterjoe]

I was doing some research on a supplement called pregnenolone (don't ask) earlier today, and I was just stunned at how much more commercial everything is. Firstly, there was the shopping results, a sponsored ad below that. An answer box on the right, then more ads below that. Page 2, ads ads and more ads. This was an INFORMATIONAL search (name of the supplement only). Not buy pregnenolone, not pregnenolone supplement, nothing remotely commercial. But as per usual, their money grabbing is at an all time high and needs to be shoved in my face even when I'm not looking for it.

Discussions here have gone onto some pretty crazy theories, but could it simply just be G commercializing more and more informational queries?

[Simon_H]

@glakes I think you're right. My theory also doesn't explain why some sites are seeing this and some aren't, and why this seems to be switching in and out.

@masterjoe Yes, I also think this is explained by Google showing the Shopping/Search ads widgets more than before, hence reduced conversion rates on paid. But it doesn't explain why organic traffic on some sites is seeing no change/increased traffic but reduced conversions. So something seems to be happening in organic too.

[heisje]

@Simon_H

Here is aggregate data for all ecom sites for period 1 April to 31 October 2015. Base for traffic and sales for April is 100. All organic. No fundamental redesign other than mobile-friendly adaptation. No penalties.

Month / Traffic / Sales

APR 100 100
MAY 101 102
JUN 91 85
JUL 89 82
AUG 92 66
SEP 80 78
OCT 86 51

Of particular relevance to this discussion are results for August and October. Also no seasonal sales upturn for October as expected, on the contrary.

- August: traffic loss: 8% - sales loss: 34%
- October: traffic loss: 14% (instead of upturn) - sales loss: 49%



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[reseller]

@heisje

Thanks for sharing your data with us.

Btw do you advertise on AdWords?

[heisje]

@reseller : No AdWords - all organic, legitimate, no spam.

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[aristotle]

Maybe I missed it, but I still haven't seen anyone explain the difference between ordinary mis-matched traffic and zombie traffic.

Most websites get considerably more mis-matched traffic than well-targeted traffic. This has always been true and will probably always be true in the future. Perhaps the problem has gotten worse for some sites in recent months, except that this isn't the first time that we've had a long thread here about "zombie" traffic.

So can someone give criteria for distinguishing between zombie traffic and mis-matched traffic.

[heisje]

mish-mashed or zooby > conversions tanked > whodunit?

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[reseller]

@heisje

- all organic, legitimate, no spam.

I really don't think that Google Zombie Traffic (GZT) is a Google penalty. Furthermore I don't think either that GZT is the consequence of any of Google animals updates as Penguin and Panda for instance.

[glakes]

So can someone give criteria for distinguishing between zombie traffic and mis-matched traffic.

In the past a certain percentage of visitors were always definitely mismatched, but there were always matched visitors that kept sales going. Now we see multiple days in a row where Google is incapable or unwilling to send well targeted traffic. In the end zombies and mismatched traffic are the same for ecommerce websites because none of them buy. We could add bots to the list too because the net effect is the same. However, I never had problems in the past with mismatched traffic depleting my Adwords account so quickly. And mismatched traffic in the past would normally have some page views, time on site whereas zombies don't. During major updates mismatched traffic would fluctuate for a week or two, unlike the zombies we have seen for the last two months. These zombies appear here to stay and have devalued Google as a stable paid source for sales, which is why my Adwords campaigns remain off.

[heisje]

@reseller : agree : mentioned legitimacy of sites just to disperse any shadows.

Well, seems little to do for now than wait and see - and save diligently our historic data just in case someone may finally get interested in having a look.

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[ecommerceprofit]

Agreed - nothing more to do except collect historical data and spend my time in other places...Google found the golden goose in 2000 and is in the process of killing off a perfectly good business "long term"...Facebook/Instagram will find something like Google shopping soon...Pinterest, Twitter. Then there are companies that have not even formed yet - they will come on the scene...killer mobile app, etc. IBM is nothing like before, Microsoft the same, etc.

I'm fine with this thread being locked.