"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]

[masterjoe]

Okay, zombie traffic seems to have disappeared for a little while but is now back. I have barely made any sales over the last week, and it's just as usual - same traffic levels. Actually, my ranks for certain keywords have improved quite nicely, however, I have not seen an expected increase in sales. Yeah, some people will take this as an SEO getting what he deserves for manipulating search because almighty Google told me not to build links, but it is what it is. I do build clean links and often to work on the site to get things moving to make it worth my while. It works and not really classified as blackhat.

Anyway, that was a little bit of a tangent. However, one thing I did notice that one of my keywords dropped temporarily to the bottom of page 2, and then went back up after a few hours. It was just by chance that I saw this while googling it to see where my competitors were at. Could this possibly cause zombie traffic? Perhaps keywords get switched out temporarily, which would make it extremely difficult to track what exactly is happening. Theory: If Google really is taking buyer traffic elsewhere, they could replace it with one of their 2 amazon listings they have on the page now, and simply switch it back for someone who is less likely to buy. Unlikely? sure, possible, I think so.

[SEOcomfort]

So far this week I have gotten a lot of zombie traffic in the morning time. The first half of the month was record breaking for my site but all of a sudden conversions dropped off the table. All my rankings are stable, nothing has completely fallen off and some have even shown some good improvements. This week, however, I am getting great traffic (nearly doubled compared to last year) but conversions are just non-existent. This is primarily in the morning time and in the afternoon I can get a handful of conversions.

I have been seeing this over the past few months. I have said before, it is like a light switch is being flipped on and off. I would understand if my rankings/visibility was falling off but it is actually going up.

[Simon_H]

@masterjoe I guess there are two aspects to that; one is *what* Google is doing and the other is *why* Google is doing it. In terms of the 'what', yes, I also think that Google is switching sites in and out of different serps. So Google may try to maintain a relatively constant number of daily impressions of zombie sites (and hence clicks/traffic), but the quality of traffic (and hence conversions) will depend on what serps you've been switched in and out of.

In terms of the 'why', who knows. The 'big brand' conspiracy theory is nonsense IMO. Given Google appears to be keeping impressions constant but varying what appears in certain serps, this supports the theory that they're testing. However, given that the search appears to be a complete technical disaster (endless Penguin delays, bugs constantly reported, etc), I think it's equally possible that Google is simply broken and the behaviour we're seeing is not intentional.

[aristotle]

However, given that the search appears to be a complete technical disaster (endless Penguin delays, bugs constantly reported, etc), I think it's equally possible that Google is simply broken and the behaviour we're seeing is not intentional.

Well google search obviously has some problems that need fixing, but I certainly don't think it's a "disaster" or "simply broken".

[Simon_H]

@aristotle Maybe I went a bit extreme with that description! It's more the search architecture that appears to be a disaster rather than the search itself, but I do think it's a valid theory that the zombie phenomenon is a problem with Google rather than intentional behaviour.

[Simon_H]

Guys, have any of you seen an increase in zombie traffic on PAID from around Friday (2 days ago)? We have and I'd like to propose another theory.

You may know that Google has just changed how ads appear in the serps on desktop, so search ads no longer appear on the side bar and are moved to the bottom and top. The side bar is now mostly empty, which is likely to result in a drop in ad clicks (and hence revenue) for Google. No doubt Google will shortly fill the side bar up with another revenue earner such as more shopping ads, but for now, it's quite empty.

This is a similar situation to mid-September 2015, when ad blockers were allowed by iOS and would have also resulted in a drop in ad clicks. This was the time when the conversations about zombie traffic took off.

Could Google be compensating for the anticipated drop in paid clicks/revenue by lowering its criteria for what it thinks is a transactional search? So it would show paid widgets in serps where they wouldn't have appeared before, e.g. more ambiguous and longer tail queries. This traffic is going to be lower quality and potentially not even transactional, but if you stick a load of paid widgets above organic, they're going to get clicked. This will affect PLAs far more than search ads, because Google does the keyword matching on PLAs.

Google has said it's been doing limited testing of this arrangement for a while, and so I wonder if zombie days (on paid) are what we see when Google has been testing this. I hope this theory isn't true because if it is true, traffic will now be permanently zombie.

[aristotle]

I've said all along that organic zombie traffic is basically just mis-matched or poorly-matched traffic. If it appears to be turned on and off periodically, this could be explained by changes in google's search results that affect how well-matched the traffic is.

Mis-matched paid traffic could possibly also increase or decrease depending on the quality of the organic results, which ads are being shown, and/or temporary changes in the search results page layout.

[netmeg]

Guys, have any of you seen an increase in zombie traffic on PAID from around Friday (2 days ago)? We have and I'd like to propose another theory.

Is this traffic that actually clicks on the ads, or just on impressions? Is it happening on the Search Network or the Display Network or both?

AdSense users (such as myself and others) are seeing some huge inflated pageview numbers that don't show up anywhere but in our AdSense accounts. They don't click on the ads, but they make our RPMs look like crap. And they don't show up in Analytics, StatCounter, or any other stats program. Google keeps telling me they're bots that only AdSense can see or report (!). If they inflate on the AdSense side, they will no doubt inflate on the AdWords side. But there doesn't seem to be a lot of clicks. You might want to enable your invalid traffic column and see if those clicks have been going up. (Those are the ones you get credited back)

[mboydnv]

My sales are down 75% for February. Yet the unique visitor count is pretty much the same as it was when i was making good money in 2014.

I have been working on the site doing everything that I think would help. I'll post another long list another time...

Basically, I think my site is being throttled. I can't for the life of me get any rankings over 13. It's always the same traffic, every Sunday is the same, every saturday is the same as last Saturday. No matter how much fresh content I add, the site wont bust out.

Been in business with this domain for 12 years.

The top 10 in my niche is all companies making millions. Companies that came after me. Some sites are inferior to mine. I don't understand this. My site is quite good for delivering the user experience.

Yet I put up a site 2 years ago with no real backlinks and 10 posts yet that breaks top 10.

Another day and no sales. While my competition is making bank. =(

[IanTurner]

Thanks for the heads up on the inflated Adsense numbers netmeg, also seeing this in the past week or so. They don't get reported by my log analysis stats package either - so don't appear to be real page views.

[samwest]

They're BAAACK!

[ionguy]

@samwest - same here from thursday mar 10th . no conversions from thursday. zombies, zombies, zombies all the time. i see some strange spike in gwmt crawl stats on wednesday 9th and after then zombies back conversions gone

[masterjoe]

I am building a few more links to my web pages to get them ranking. Once I've gotten to the top (which should in a few weeks) I'll figure out why conversions aren't happening. The conversions were great for the most part through Feb, whatever they just did in March completely ruined it. I know they don't give a damn if webmasters are seeing good results or not, but how they expect to keep webmasters pumping out "quality content" without being able to profit from it in some way is beyond stupid.

[masterjoe]

Here is one thing I've noticed that could potentially:

1). Leave rankings "unaffected" for keywords you are tracking
2). Take traffic away from your websites (even informational queries)

However, it doesn't explain why the traffic remains the same while conversions plummet. The answer box is taking up a HUGE number of searches which are complete rubbish. Even searching for a very neutral term for a highly competitive keyword in my niche brings up an answer box for a specific product on Amazon. Not only is the product garbage (known scam), the description is minimal and the reviews are very poor.

Perhaps what happens is that people go to the Answer box link, go back, scroll, and are then presented with more products after becoming skeptical, which results in less conversions for everybody.

I know, this is a stretch. But after taking a look at the results after the answer box, the first result is from a site with authority, but only has one page dedicated to the topic (and very poorly at that), another is using PBN's to rank for that keyword, and then a few results below that is mine which has more content than all the pages on page 1 combined.

[Nutterum]

@masterjoe - why not try to rank for the answer box yourself? If what you say is true and you have way more content, it makes sense to further the information keyword pool and include the "what is" related content in as well. It makes sense when you are the expert to answer the basic questions, not only the hard ones.

[glakes]

The answer box is taking up a HUGE number of searches which are complete rubbish.

It's possible that the answer box contributes to zombies, but I have yet to see it on searches related to my site. I look at the answer box in the same way as Wikipedia, both are mostly useless for people searching for something and are used by Google as placeholders to reduce the visible real estate for organic search results. This boosts clicks on paid ads, and by reducing real estate for organic results and the lack of paid sidebar ads now, also inflates the CPC beyond its true worth.

[masterjoe]

Whatever they changed on Good Friday is definitely playing a part in reduced conversions. Sales were actually going quite well for a few weeks before that, and I suspected it may be because people were busy with their families which is perfectly reasonable. However, it was far below what I would consider normal and brushed it off... until just a few days ago when I realized I have only had 1-2 sales the entire time since then. I would normally have between 10-15 on non-zombie days.

Maybe it will go back after April once their pockets are lined to their first quarter report.

Can anyone else comment on whether they are seeing reduced conversions too at the moment? (organic or paid)

Sidenote: I just searched the particular keyword I mentioned again, and it looks like the ads that were there a few hours ago are gone. Not sure why that is, but I doubt 2 competitors would just happen to remove their ads at the precisely the same time. I searched using incognito as well as changed IP and a different browser, as well as disabled adblock. This could be some clue as to what's going on.

[mrengine]

Can anyone else comment on whether they are seeing reduced conversions too at the moment? (organic or paid)

I am seeing poor conversions from Google in both free and paid. Hopefully tomorrow things will improve, because I think you hit the nail on the head when you stated:

Maybe it will go back after April once their pockets are lined to their first quarter report.

If the poor conversions from Adwords continues into the new month, I will stop all spending. Conversions have been bad for a while, but have become even worse lately. The problem is definitely with Google because our paid ads elsewhere are converting at their normal rate.

[masterjoe]

I've tried to give Google the benefit of the doubt for quite some time now, but this was beginning to happen at roughly around September when I first started experiencing it (surprise surprise, end of q4), then around Jan things picked back up again. Feb was off to a rocky start but became stable until this last week (q1 '16).

I am looking for alternative sources to advertise before I give another dime to Google too. Bing, Facebook, and other engines have been quite profitable from what little tests I've run on them. Parallel industries are also an option I'm looking into.

[Simon_H]

JM said some helpful related stuff during the Webmaster Hangout earlier. Firstly, he said that Google doesn't have a test set of sites, so that would potentially exclude the theory that zombie traffic is due to certain sites being targeted. However, he did mention things like "1% launches" where a small proportion of traffic is redirected to the algorithm change being tested. Very interesting, but need to think if/how this explains the zombies.

He also said that some or all of the query processing code base (Rankbrain) is potentially shared across multiple widgets, e.g. PLAs/shopping. I think this is very significant, as it means that algo updates can impact paid as well. It would certainly explain why zombie traffic is seen across both organic and paid, and also why we can get turbulence in paid traffic around the time of a major organic algo update. My money is on Rankbrain testing/learning/problems as the cause of zombie traffic on organic and paid. I also suspect that something major happened with Rankbrain during Sep 2015 (even though Rankbrain has been running longer than that) which suddenly caused many of us to see on/off traffic quality issues.

I'm going to investigate more, e.g. at the next hangout. I'd really like to find out why some sites seem far more susceptible to this than others, and how we can break out of it.

[aristotle]

I'm going to investigate more, e.g. at the next hangout. I'd really like to find out why some sites seem far more susceptible to this than others, and how we can break out of it.

How do you know that some sites are more susceptible? Why couldn't it be that some keywords, and/or keyword sets, and/or product categories, and/or types of sites, are what is more susceptible? Also, I believe that most sites, including informational sites, get large amounts of mis-matched traffic, but most webmasters just don't pay much attention to it.

[ecommerceprofit]

* My money is on Rankbrain testing/learning/problems as the cause of zombie traffic on organic and paid *

Rankbrain...not so sure...looking back in webmasterworld this same problem existed back in I think it was 2012

[ecommerceprofit]

* Why couldn't it be that some keywords, and/or keyword sets, and/or product categories, and/or types of sites, are what is more susceptible? *

because the whole site virtually shuts down...same traffic but sales conversions go to zero all of the sudden when before there are lots of orders one after another...

[mrengine]

My money is on Rankbrain testing/learning/problems as the cause of zombie traffic on organic and paid.

It might be, but at some point over the past months I would think the problem would have been addressed either by Google monitoring how well or poorly RankBrain is functioning and/or by reviewing the logged complaints from advertisers such as us that have complained to Adwords about zombies. Next comes the problem of Google stating that nobody really understands how RankBrain works. If nobody in Google understands how RankBrain works, how can we expect it to get fixed? Many months have passed with this problem, and I'm thinking it will never be fixed or at least in a time frame that most businesses can tolerate poor or negative ROI on their Adwords campaigns. The ditch Adwords theme many smaller businesses have adopted seems like the best strategy moving forward. I can't even get anyone at Adwords to even admit there is a problem despite having years of data to back it up.

[ecommerceprofit]

I remember perhaps 20 years back a bunch of smaller companies hiring a law firm to represent them against "I think" Microsoft. They all hired the law firm "anonymously" - I believe these companies did not know one another...only the law firm had access to the names of the companies. They were all scared of retaliation...what if we all found a law firm and hired one...if we spread the cost between say 50 different companies the cost would be super low.

I'm not saying Google is committing fraud...it may be unintentional...but having a law firm filing motions, etc. may get their attention. This may also get the attention of government. Again, I have no idea what is happening but we need more attention to this matter from Google. This goes back to at least 2012 so there may be a lot of people who could participate.

[Simon_H]

@ecommerceprofit There has always been query processing to determine synonyms, intent, etc even before RankBrain, and so there will always have been the potential for issues with mismatched traffic. But it seems to have kicked off big time in Sep 2015, a few weeks before RankBrain was officially announced.

@aristotle I agree! I'd like to know what '1% launches' mean. Like you say, Google may, for example, test on a consistent set of keywords and so any sites that rely on those keywords will get messed up every time. If I were testing, I'd certainly do this, or I wouldn't be able to measure relative changes over time. So that '1% launches' may indeed impact the same sites every time. I also think that sites hit by Penguin and/or Panda may see zombie traffic more, simply because their mainstream traffic has potentially been filtered and so the longer tail/ambiguous queries may form a larger part of their total traffic. These are things we need to find out!

[ecommerceprofit]

Simon_H - I love your analysis so no argument from me but to help with everyone's analysis I have to respectfully disagree. This may have kicked off big time for you and I and many others in Sept. However, there were a ton of posts on webmasterworld about this from many others (many who seem to be out of business). If you look through my old posts on other zombie threads you will see my research. I tried unsuccessfully to tie the 2012 people to 2015...I asked many of them for updates...some responded and some were no longer on webmasterworld...this was a "big problem" in the past just like it is now...but eventually those people faded away and gave up and Google was able to ignore the problem.

I wish I could agree this may be rackbrain but I don't think so...you seem to know more about this than me though so if you disagree then I would side more with you :-)

Here's an old post I found that I wrote on 12-6-15:

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?

[edited by: ecommerceprofit at 4:23 pm (utc) on Apr 8, 2016]

[Simon_H]

@ecommerceprofit You're very kind and this is all just my opinion! Tedster also used to theorise on this, so I know it's been going on for a long time, even if some of us have only seen it kick off recently. I do think it's odd that no-one has actually asked Google about it until now! I meant to have a chat with JM about it during the Hangout, but there wasn't time. So I'll try to do that on the next Hangout. He was helpful today, I'm sure he will be next time.

I also think that there probably isn't a single explanation for all zombie traffic. I think that the explanation for organic and PLAs/Shopping may be similar, but search ads may be something different.

[ecommerceprofit]

I would love to hear from JM on this too...this guy seems quite helpful. Your theory about unintentional / not a single explanation is excellent. I'm hoping this will be solved by Google seeing the problems they created so we can go back to concentrating on our respective businesses instead of this junk.

Several of us hiring a law firm where the firm only knows who is involved (we don't even know each other) may be necessary though if we cannot get any help. Again, not saying Google is doing anything wrong...just need someone to show we are serious and need answers.

I just found this from Jan 2011...problem even older than I thought...deeper into thread one user talks about how it's on and off...

[webmasterworld.com...]

[petehall]

Posters from 2012 zombie thread who still post to webmasterworld: petehall

I'm still here; there's just so little happening with Google (IMO) I never bother posting. It's incredibly stale / boring.

As for zombies, I've said time and time again they are robots clicking through to websites from Google results...