Google Updates and SERP Changes - Jan 2016

[Nutterum]

Continuing from:
Google Updates and SERP Changes - Dec 2015
https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4780066.htm [webmasterworld.com]


I was off for the past two weeks, but looking back at the traffic patterns at the mid-end of Dec I can safely say something moved in the non US Google domains. Seeing positive changes in the UK, DE, FR and IT traffic. Asia is same but since we do not get much traffic from there either way I can't say for sure there was no changes in the SERPS there.

Too early to tell as for Jan. because it is the first workday of 2016, but I guess I can confirm my observations on Friday.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 10:56 am (utc) on Jan 4, 2016]

[Nutterum]

What I meant by my stating this is the fluctuations noticed over the weekend were reeking of Panda. The confirmation from G is not news for me as I and others predicted this since September suggesting that the "slow" Panda 4.2 is actually the ongoing core algo. integration of the filter, moving at the pace of general website re-crawl done by Google. That is not to say the effect is immediate, more like once a vector is crawled the Panda factor kicks in shuffling the SERPS further based on quality.

[glakes]

So this is most likely seasonal and unrelated to any core algo update.

Not where I am at in the USA. January is ordinarily a slow month for traffic and traffic from Google has remained much higher since the core algo update. Sales on the other hand have not changed much. Monday was a good day for sales coming from Google, but yesterday was bad. Much like the zombie on/off periods, with the exception that the on period (Monday) produced better sales. But it's too early for me to determine whether or not this update will be fruitful, because my main measurement of success is sales.

[Simon_H]

@glakes Same here, i.e. sales and traffic not related and still seeing zombie days. I didn't mean to suggest no-one saw any changes as a result of the update. Just that JM said the update wasn't anywhere near as big as the flux monitors suggested and so the increase we saw wasn't the update.

@Nutterum Ah, I see. Yes, they do reek of Panda. But the core algo already had significant quality factors outside of Panda (e.g. Phantom), so whether the weekend update was actually part-Panda or a related but different quality factor is unclear. I'm also not sure that Panda being baked into the core algo is as relevant as it has been reported. We already knew 4.2 was going to take a long time to roll. Whether it's part of the core algo or runs separately doesn't seem to affect what it does or how often it runs. The biggest implication seems to be that we'll no longer be able to ask Google when Panda will next run, as they'll just reply that it's now part of the core algo.

[Simon_H]

Gary has just confirmed (again) that the weekend update had no Panda in it. Or Penguin. The mystery deepens...

[highlander888]

I have 3 sites all which were impacted by Penguin (dates match exactly) one has jumped straight back from position #77 to #2 and the only action was a disavow file uploaded in Jan 2015, plus ongoing link building.

The other 2 sites are unchanged.

Also in the data center results which show the recovery two competitors are pushed down by a similar number of positions, and I know for sure they have been building spammy links as I have been downloading and monitoring them every month.

So even though Google is saying not Penguin its related in some way - I can't see any other explanation. One site recovering due to disavowing toxic links - two competitors dropping dramaticaly.

[vlexo]

@Simon_H: SEO's tend to look at their rankings, so your belief that people are just seeing seasonal increases in traffic is not a very good point. We've seen fluctuations for our websites (more than usual) and then have validated that through external weather tools. That's why there is so much attention on this right now - not because of the external weather tools - but because people are seeing unusual changes.

[Jez123]

I have 3 sites all which were impacted by Penguin (dates match exactly) one has jumped straight back from position #77 to #2 and the only action was a disavow file uploaded in Jan 2015, plus ongoing link building.

Are you seeing this on all DC's highlander888? Or are you just seeing those results on the odd refresh? I'm not seeing anything - and I would expect the same as you, sites that I know are building spammy links to take a whack.

[Simon_H]

@vlexo I'm not saying everyone is just seeing seasonal changes. See my response to @glakes. The point is that JM has said that the update was nowhere near as major as the flux monitors report. So, assuming that's true, there will be sites that have seen the flux monitors and then attributed natural traffic changes to the algo update when the two are unrelated for their particular site. If your sites are seeing changes that are attributable to the update, then great.

[aristotle]

Didn't someone at google say a few months ago that they were gaining more and more confidence in rankbrain and increasing its weight in the algorithm. There was some confusion about whether it only affected long-tail, which may not actually be true.

[Nutterum]

I'd be surprised that what I mentioned back in September actually comes true and Panda and Penguin merge in to the Humming Bird Core algo - Behold Cthulu the new AI overlord of the search Universe!

[highlander888]

Jez123

I have a machine running a US proxy and it shows the new results, whilst my regular PC shows the previous results, interestingly the site that fully recovered in the new datacentre is rising every few hours and its now at position #55 as if the data is somehow slowly spreading around. Strange as I never seen changes like this.

Not sure what to make of it - I thought it maybe a test for Penguin, now I have no idea what is going on.

[RedBar]

I have a machine running a US proxy and it shows the new results

I use the TOR browser regularly and that's always interesting :-)

Absolutely nothing like Joe Public sees with their regualr browser cache full of follow me around interest-based garbage.

[keyplyr]

Difficult for me to draw any assumptions since my nich dropped so significantly over the holidays (down 50%) due to everyone buying stuff from all your sites :) However things are slowly swinging back up to pre-holiday traffic & sales.

[Babadook]

I think I've said this before, it's best not to pay attention to any Google updates. Even if you knew what it was, you couldn't do anything to change it. You should also not care about the whole white hat / black hat thing, it doesn't matter anymore. Do what you want to do. If they penalize you big time for trying to do the right things, then you're no worse off by doing whatever you want. Who cares about their algorithm quality?! In fact, whatever they suggest as good seo, do the opposite, I'm being serious. It works for me. And by the way, stop using Google for search and especially drop GA.

[deuces]

Agree with +Babadook, I think a lot of people are way too angsty with updates and that hurts your morale. Just keep creating good content and getting quality links and no update will be worth fretting about.

[keyplyr]

I think I've said this before, it's best not to pay attention to any Google update threads. Even if you knew what it was, you couldn't do anything to change it.

[Robert Charlton]

I'm suggesting we split off discussion of Google's new core algo update to this thread...

Google confirms Jan 2016 core algo update was not Panda
https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4786324.htm [webmasterworld.com]

[Instanker]

Still seeing huge fluctuations for the serps I track (.be and .nl) and seeing two different datasets when I search myself.

[jambam]

@Babadook is 100% correct. There is so much more to the internet than some scraped answer googles got from Wikipedia or whatever tripe googles is trying promote broaden your horizons and actually search the internet via other means and you wil be surprised on what you can actually find.

[Itanium]

@Instanker: Same here - germany.

[Jez123]

Not sure what to make of it - I thought it maybe a test for Penguin, now I have no idea what is going on.

Is it still propagating or has it rolled back @highlander888?

[highlander888]

deuces - I understand what you say - but back in 2014 one of my sites was page #1 for a dozen phrases and signed up 500 new customers a week - a competitor hit us using Xrummer type of software - a month later Penguin ran and the site has been on page #11 or #12 ever since - 5 staff laid off. Even though we disavowed and removed a huge % of the links within week of Penguin hitting - 16 months later there is no recovery.

So unless you have felt pain like that you can't know how important it is to watch Google and try to understand what they do.

[keyplyr]

I agree highlander888. I learn a lot by these update threads. Even the "me too" posts show me that some assumptions are shared by at least one other person.

[Simon_H]

@highlander888 Really sorry your site got hit like that. It's very rare to see a site get hit by Penguin purely due to negative SEO. There are often other factors involved; Penguin is an over-optimisation filter that allegedly looks at bad vs good signals, not purely a filter based on bad links. Which is why many believe it is not subject to negative SEO. Does your site have a good natural inbound link profile and are the internal links on your site clear of over-optimised anchor text?

I apologise if I sound like a busy-body, but just trying to help. If you've simply disavowed the bad links and are expecting a Penguin recovery when Google runs the update, that might not happen if there are other factors involved in the Penguin hit.

[Nutterum]

My observations on several leading b2b companies is very interesting with the latest core algo. They lost quite a bit of the long tail SERP positions in favor of the niche services. Something these big websites will not notice impressions/clicks wise but I am sure will be felt once they look at their goal completions reports. As another proof of this I made a quick check on the adwords competition front and I can see some advertising accounts stopped pushing the long tail ads, probably due to the higher CPC followed by the lower quality score due to their demotion in the organic SERPs. Anyone else seeing similar movement?

Global B2B travel vertical.

[highlander888]

Simon H - Glad for the input - prior to taking the hit we used to monitor page 1 and 2 and keep the balance between money phrases in the anchor text in line with our competitors - historically the majority of links where either our brand or the url (90% or more) but then we picked up 100,000 + links with the main phrase in it - which slammed the site as the ratio then swung to be 90% money phrase.

We spent ages trying to find out who hit us, but never got to the bottom of it. Sometimes we felt like buying Xrummer ourselves and hitting everyone in the top 100 results with it, but we are good guys and did so nothing other than wait!

Correcting that is basically the only action we felt was needed and it does seem to have fixed it - now the question is what is the link between penguin and the core algo update.

[Simon_H]

@Nutterum That's interesting. And you also asked on the other thread about the impact of the algo on zombie traffic. I'll try to answer all in one...

We had our highest revenue ever consistently from 26th Dec to 9th Jan, the majority of which was Google paid with a little bit Google organic. On each day, revenue was within 20% of the other days. Then on 10th Jan (algo update day, but also a Sunday which is usually our highest revenue day of the week), everything died, i.e. conversions from both Google CPC and organic just plummeted. And it's been poor ever since. Organic traffic levels still as high as before and paid click volume still as high as before, but conversions are gone. So the zombie phenomenon has kicked in.

As you say, there's an indirect relationship between paid and organic, and for us things seem to have severely impacted paid as well. I may have misunderstood your post, but are you suggesting that quality score on paid is related to organic rankings?

[BlueDanube]

Whoa! - some big moves and flux early morning of 16th in the UK (US domains). Algoroo is also smoking so something quite big looks to have happened over night and could still be in progress.

I'm seeing page-based (vice site-based) promotions and demotions......

[chalkywhite]

@ Bluedanube, im seeing the same lost 66% of traffic from around midnight UK time, biggest changes i ever seen.

[SnowMan68]

Seeing the same thing with page based, vs. website based. We are seeing swings on phrases that have held solid on page 1 for 12+ months, move to page 3 and beyond. Meanwhile other phrases have moved to the middle of the 1st page that haven't been there for 12+ months. Crazy swings.