"ZOMBIE TRAFFIC" Separating fact from fiction & emotion

[FishingDad]

This recent discussion about "ZOMBIE TRAFFIC" is just utter nonsense. What are people saying, anything worth while or just a communal <snip> because sales are down on the norm? The talk is firmly in the tin foil hat area.

Are you talking about SERPs, if so why, if your positions are dropping then that's that. If positions not dropping are you seriously saying Google is sending you people they know will not buy from you !? REALLY?!

Are you talking about PAY PER CLICK? if so then your talking possible click fraud then, aren’t you?

Giving any constant period on the internet, people buy or they don't buy and there's many many factors why they will one day and might not the next day.

[edited by: goodroi at 5:55 pm (utc) on Nov 10, 2015]
[edit reason] Let's be careful to keep the discussion on a professional level [/edit]

[samwest]

And the best sites are....?

By all appearances in my vertical, the one's with the most $$$, direct traffic and the best chances to churn more ads. In other words, big brands and social portals. Sure seems Pinterest is G's flavor of the month.

[samwest]

After 3 days of absolutely ZERO conversions, today I get one at 3:52am...then a return to the old days of conversions with one each at 11:27am, 11:49am, 12:05pm, 12:35pm and 1:03pm. This short Catch-Up period put me exactly at last weeks total, which is the same +/- 1 sale per week as the last 12 weeks. Yes, there is no throttling, no manipulation and no zombies. I love WebmasterWorld for one thing though, creative speculation. Let 'er rip!

[ecommerceprofit]

I had to laugh at WhiteHatTryHard statement...to say for the millionth time...

1) Traffic remains the same but conversions drop big time
2) Conversions go up and down in wild swings
3) No changes have been made to site...no bugs, nothing
4) Ads and organic conversions drop at exactly the same time
5) We are a semi large company...not small as he and others like to state

Well I went exactly one week with excellent conversions...business was booming...now just like that a few hours ago everything stopped...not saying it won't come back but I have a feeling...was hoping Google moved onto another test company in my industry or in WhiteHatTryHard's industry (would like to see him someday admit to his mistake when it happens to him/her)...one thing that annoys me is most of my competitors don't have to deal with this...not "fair" in my opinion...Google owns the engine and can do as they please because there is no regulation...but using one or two companies per industry as a test case is just not right...

[goodoldweb]

Well I went exactly one week with excellent conversions...business was booming...now just like that a few hours ago everything stopped...

Same here. Amazing sales up to about wedensday of last week. Switch was flipped to OFF (yet again) ever since. 5 ecom websites, more then 450 products. 1 ebay store with 300 products. Zero bids, zero enquiries..... dead as a zombie. Cluless lost window shoppers at best. WTF!

[ecommerceprofit]

I went through the 2012 thread on zombies - here's something interesting.

Posters who had zombie problems in 2012 (same problem we are experiencing in 2015) who don't post to webmasterworld anymore: backdraft7, gadget26 (told everyone he declared bankruptcy in his last post), scottsonline, stuartc1, timwilliams, ohno, rjwmotor, sechecker, xcoder, typicalsurfer, bluntforce, I wonder how many shut their doors for good?

Posters from 2012 zombie thread who still post to webmasterworld: petehall, shaddows, diberry, martin_ice_web, aworn...

My list is not exactly accurate...spent some time but did not try to be perfect. I know some of the posters still around continue to see zombie problems..for the ones still here did your problems get better over the years, get worse or stay the same?

[goodoldweb]

@ecommerceprofit
Worse much worse. Google are truly in total control of the web now.... one must bid very high, trying to compete with numros other google services and other major large market players, or die.

[ecommerceprofit]

I like seeing your updates goodoldweb but I mean zombies from the old 2012 zombie thread...

not talking about advertising cost increases (costs have gone up for sure)...only trying to figure out if the people posting in 2012 have had this same zombie issue for 3 years straight with no changes from Google or has the issue resolved itself somewhat?

[3zero]

Does anyone have any stats on the amount of product searches per purchase? Shoppers compare, browse pontificate, maybe that's the zombie traffic.

[goodoldweb]

I like seeing your updates goodoldweb but I mean zombies from the old 2012 zombie thread...

Sorry should have clarified. What i meant to say is that traffic from "Free" organics is so bad and anemic nowadays one must take paid ads. We did paid-ads up to about mid September but then shut off all the adwords and shopping campaigns due to the flood of dead beats.

In the "good old days" (only 2-3 years ago) we used to get a constant flow of sales the week around, day in day out. Weekends in particular (using free organics only). What we see nowadays are off/on periods. OFF periods in particular for most of the week except for maybe mid week. Mostly Window shoppers from the "wrong" countries hitting one page and gone. So yes, in answer to your question, the "zombie" situation is much much worse now (if using organics only). Google are in total control and they play with the tap at will...

[Awarn]

I can't says its better. More like treading water. Very frustrating to tell you the truth. I had thought I had an algorithmic penalty for a long time. I upgraded servers. Put the speed through the roof (was decent before). Made a few programming changes and then magically one day the pages read in WMT went to 30K overnight. Usual had been maybe 1000. Structured data doubled overnight but was still half of what it should be. Then amazingly the Google Gods intervened and issued me a partial manual penalty. Guess what pages read per day dropped to about what it was before. Structured data is on a slow steady decline.

I guess the bright side is now I can submit a reconsideration request. I know many of us are ecomm related. Do many see that the traffic is price related? I have 2 competitors that are dead set on just churning cash and sell at a point where I can't see how they can be making much profit. I am sure they are selling a lot because the prices are so low I know one said they were losing money on a lot of the sales. This mindset of being the cheapest could kill off all the businesses.

I used to really follow my stats because they really reflected things and I could kind of project the income from the hits etc. I have given that all up. It just is so frustrating to look at any more. It about makes me sick. There is nobody to talk to about it because it is so bizarre. Nobody even understands it. Most of us are pretty smart people. I don't see how a company that averaged more than 25% growth a year for 20 years all the sudden just stops. That doesn't happen naturally. I picked up on the odd behavior quick in 2012 so that helped allow me to cut back. I do see more and more garbage links all the time. I can't honestly say it is Google for sure. It could be an effect of Google and how they rank sites now. I think they have really opened the door up for others to destroy long established sites. A big part of me says to tread water and just wait. This garbage will get international attention sometime and things will change. If you can't make a profit with it why do it. I see so many ecomm sites with free shipping etc. If you don't cover your costs and get a bunch of returns you can actually be losing money from the sales. I think a lot will change in 5 years.

[masterjoe]

Unfortunate to hear, Awarn.

This past week has been bone dry for me too. I get short bursts of sales here and there, and was hoping I may have been moved out of the zombie box or test, or whatever other theory is floating around about G manipulation right now. I am only left with the option to rank existing pages higher (which is more than possible), and have seen some good results with it. The new site I started building about 3 months ago is already getting about 30% of the traffic my old site was getting.

The original site got hit with penguin and they haven't left me any choice but to restart the whole thing. Now there are 2 results for a lot of search terms on page 1 and they are both my sites. I haven't completely recovered my original traffic levels since last year, but thanks to learning SEO the right way I think I have a good chance of getting it back + interest.

Everyone likes to take crap advice Google gives to heart, like "building links violates webmaster guidelines"... well, stealing peoples PPC money and giving nothing back violates my trust. G may have come up with all sorts of insane guidelines and new ranking tech but it is still an algorithm that can be manipulated. If they manage to stop irritating webmasters I might go all whitehat, but for now it's just too late.

Just a side note -- on friday night, my traffic actually TRIPLED... and then went back to standard traffic saturday and sunday. I made some sales on Sunday and that was all.

[ecommerceprofit]

Thanks Awarn - interesting info - will be interesting if other 2012 zombie people post if they have been removed from zombie test set or are still on it.

[mrengine]

Everyone likes to take crap advice Google gives to heart, like "building links violates webmaster guidelines"... well, stealing peoples PPC money and giving nothing back violates my trust.

I just got one of these "how are we doing" emails from Adwords. I'll respond in a way that is similar to the way you feel - violated. Adwords PPC traffic is atrocious, and with the poor conversions does not justify its use at all.

Just a side note -- on friday night, my traffic actually TRIPLED... and then went back to standard traffic saturday and sunday. I made some sales on Sunday and that was all.

Sounds like typical on and off zombie patterns, but my off periods persist for a week or more. Google organic traffic was terrible (bad quality but high numbers) this weekend, though Amazon sales were steady with consistent product page views and user sessions. The buyers are out there, it's just that Google can't or does not want to send very many of them to my site. Selling on Amazon seems to be the way around this Google zombie problem for me.

Awarn, it's terrible to hear you have been dealing with this for years. I do hope your reconsideration request results in a full recovery.

[masterjoe]

mrengine, I have had the zombie thing affect my website since September, but I haven't had any noticeable spikes in traffic like that before. I did have massive dip in traffic (lost about 80% over a few days but recovered back to my fixed traffic level due to penguin). However the spike was from the new website, perhaps it was some kind of test because I built a few links that day and sent them through an indexing service. I don't know. But I can see a steady increase in my traffic. The old site probably had better content but it's been suppressed for over a year and the new one is already outranking it for some keywords. It's actually much easier than I thought to stay safe and continue jumping Googles "guidelines".

It's not making much right now but it's still profitable, it just needs a little more time to develop authority.

[goodoldweb]

The zombie phenomena has a very simple explanation really...

The New York Times reported this morning that the Federal Trade Commission is preparing a recommendation that the government sue Google for allegedly manipulating search results to favor its own products and big brand shopping websites
[infowars.com...]

[EditorialGuy]

A link to an obsolete 2012 news story is an explanation of "the zombie phenomena" (sic)?

Is Webmaster World caught in a time warp?

[goodoldweb]

If that's what they've been doing in 2012, when the zombie phenomena just about "started". Imagine what they are doing today.

Here are some links to more current stories EditorialGuy. Just for you.
[consumeraffairs.com...]
[wsj.com...]
[businessinsider.com.au...]

[masterjoe]

I think I may have found a solution to the "zombie traffic" issue, but I am still in the experimenting phase. Will probably take a few months to really get to the bottom of it, but so far I am about 90% sure what I've found is the culprit for crap conversion rates.

GOW, It doesn't seem like all that happened over the years, but when the evidence starts piling up it becomes very obvious that they want to promote businesses they are invested in.

[tangor]

I think it is sunspots. And maybe the weather. :)

There is something going on. I grant that. And I suspect that G is behind it, one way or the other. But I don't see it as either excessive or debilitating as the cycles are not all that frequent or run for all that much time and what do you expect for free?

Last time I looked, there were no contracts either offered or signed.

Believe me, I am not a G apologist. just look at my posting record, so... is this a tempest in a teapot, or a general revolt against the sugar daddy?

[glakes]

what do you expect for free?

The same junk traffic was coming through Adwords too in late September at the same time as organics, swiftly draining accounts without producing much in conversions. It's one thing to lose conversions because of junk Google traffic in organic, but it's quite another to pay for something with some expectation of ROI and instead lose quite a lot of money. Profitable campaigns were turned upside down because of Google's poor traffic quality.

My question to you is what should I expect for paid traffic? Traffic that was converting just fine until late September when Google changed something so significant that the quantity of traffic remained similar but the quality of traffic became so poor the users look botlike. I can tell you what I expect, and that is a refund from Google for the junk paid traffic I paid for. I lost enough money to paid Google junk traffic to make it well worth the time and effort to dispute those charges on my credit card.

[masterjoe]

This week so far has been absolutely appalling in terms of sales. I made 2 yesterday and since then (small orders), and then nothing. My traffic has gone up a little bit, but there is ZERO converting traffic 99% of the time. If anyone is still looking into this and doesn't believe Google hasn't deliberately screwed webmasters around they are kidding themselves. They know exactly what they are doing, and it's sucking you guys dry. The other thread got locked because people kept bitching, but the reality is people are not just going to evaporate thousands of dollars on a campaign for no ROI. This is fraud, plain and simple.

[ionguy]

Masterjoe we are getting almost the same. The end of november (cyber monday, thanks giving, black friday [sales record - 50% discount for one product only] ) was quite good - actually very well from the sales point of view. But December is total mess again - positions still the same for all the most important keywords (only small fluctuations for very few languages - Google.es, .it, .gr, co.nz) - com, .ca, and much more keeps the same as last months. What we noticed yet is decrease in traffic especially from Europe, most of our sales this week comming from US. The traffic from Europe comming from some countries we had never the sales from so,all we get is the Z guys disappearing after 5-6 minutes.

So, we are in "good traffic OFF area" from a week again :(.

[Simon_H]

Interesting, @ionguy, that you're noticing discrepancies in user location.

In the UK, geographic search intent on Google appears broken. Go to google.co.uk and start typing 'cheap furniture transport'. Autocomplete will append this with 'interstate', 'melbourne' and 'nz', i.e. completely wrong. Or search for 'boys pants' (sorry!). The first 4 organic results on page 1 are UK. The rest are US. Or search for 'blown glass chandeliers'. Most page 1 organic results are non-UK, e.g. Chinese exports, US. The rest are UK, but none are sites where you can buy anything.

These are obvious examples where Google search intent is broken, but, statistically, there are likely to be far more cases of Google misunderstanding search intent that aren't immediately obvious to the user, i.e. poor matches are being shown and good matches being excluded, but the user wouldn't suspect anything was wrong. And I think it's fair to extrapolate that if there are search intent issues, these will not be restricted to geography only. The impact of these issues will be lower conversion rates on both organic and paid results due to users clicking on low-relevance results, i.e. what we're seeing.

What this doesn't explain is the on/off nature of the zombie phenomenon. However, I should add that when I search for 'cheap furniture transport' on google.co.uk on an iPad rather than desktop, an additional 'singapore' result appears in the autocomplete results. This suggests that results are not consistent for all users/devices and so perhaps Google is dynamically playing with the long tail (given that autocomplete essentially is the long tail) which would explain why things seem to switch in and out. But there's not really any evidence of this.

Anyone else noticing this?

[goodoldweb]

The almost 1 week of lull on all our 5 ecom sites as well as 1 eBay store is deafening. No sales no enquiries. Very sick window shoppers traffic at best. And this at the "hottest" time of the year.

How on earth could anyone think it is a good idea to let an advertising company run the order of information on the world wide web? with almost zero government regulation or intervention. How can this world be so dumb?... It really sucks!

Google needs to be broken up and the sooner the better for the world of "e" commerce/information age.

An open source, not for profit search engine. That's what this world really need... not a commercially biased "AI" ad stand...

[masterjoe]

Gooldoldweb, I am seeing the exact same thing. Traffic actually has gone up a fraction, but there has been absolutely zero contact from the apparent "visitors", no sales, and a couple of blank contact form enquiries. What the actual... it should have been quite busy, but my regular non-zombie day has been zombified. I normally have a good amount of sales around this time of year, but now... nothing.

[ecommerceprofit]

From the 5th until this morning the 10th we were on HOT - almost too many orders. Now nothing. Staffing is a nightmare - makes it almost impossible to plan for the future with this up / down. BTW, during down periods seems like we get more people trying to commit credit card fraud.

My theory after all this analyzing of other people's experiences is we are on a test list that Google runs. Would like to hear from 2012 zombie thread people like shaddows ...only one has posted so I'm hoping they are now off zombie test list...

I'm Google's pet hamster...constantly climbing up on the walls of my cage looking out...

[masterjoe]

This effect has trickled down into major companies as well. I used to work for one of the largest tourist clothing/hats factories in Australia. Last year, they expanded their market to the USA and had to pay for a new mezzanine and staff etc... however, that has since dropped off from last month, when the previous 4 years have been absolute "monsters" in terms of sales. This year is the only year they have actually had to cut back on staff because there hasn't been a huge surge of traffic to people ordering online, which is one of their core avenues.

I have known the owner for a few years as a friend, and even worked as a factory hand there a few years back. I know how the business works, and it is directly because they are draining their PPC accounts as well as getting poor traffic conversions organically. Safe to say, google has lost about a $100000 in revenue because they failed to deliver conversions.

[Awarn]

How are your stats in WMT. The pages crawled per day. Are they pretty flat meaning same amount each say or are they peaks and valleys. Are there huge spikes? I have reason to believe at times Google may only be looking at a fraction of a site. Maybe as little as 20%. We can't make sales when just a fifth of a site is being looked at. Throw in their love of blogs and all the foreign garbage that is trying to manipulate the SERPs and you have a bunch of garbage and garbage traffic. That is exactly what I am seeing. I personally feel my sales come from mainly repeat buyers, very few new ones. Another issue I ran into were issues with IE and how they handle cookies. Adwords is a total joke right now so I question where is their revenue coming from? I am really surprised that Apple hasn't entered the market and tried to control the flow of traffic. With them controlling the device market I would think they could kill Google by controlling the data.

[ecommerceprofit]

You are right regarding Apple...they really dropped the ball regarding setting up their own ad platform...they could take a lot of traffic away...I don't want to get off topic too much...zombies is my sole focus...WMT pages indexed have gone up a lot and now leveled up so this looks good...

[Simon_H]

Another issue I ran into were issues with IE and how they handle cookies.

Could you please elaborate?