Google Updates and SERP Changes - Feb 2016

[Nutterum]

Continuing from:
Google Updates and SERP Changes - Jan 2015
https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4784754.htm [webmasterworld.com]


I just started checking my properties when I realized most of them experienced a crawl uptrend starting from 20th of Jan. No big spikes just 20% or more pages being crawled on a daily basis. Something that I am not sure how to interpret yet, as since the 20th there were ~2-3% of the pages being de-indexed, which is always sad to see.

That being said can you guys check your crawl rate and index status in the period 20-30 Jan?

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 8:34 am (utc) on Feb 1, 2016]

[Nutterum]

This feature may be an old one, but I see it popping up more and more often. I type something generic on the chrome URL bar and I see the result pop-ing up in a bold red text. Anyone else seen this appearing up more often?

[Shepherd]

Yes, I did read that they we're expanding the answers in autocomplete, not sure where, it was just in the last week or two though.

[Nutterum]

It's disturbing. It's like asking Siri and not Google. I don't like it, as it forces an opinion or information, it does not let me find it, which is the point. I hate being force-fed intellectually.

[samwest]

I was on a roll...but of course that can't last. This week has started out with higher traffic (much higher one day) but pathetic conversions. Sunday saw one of my pages suddenly get over 200 unique visits within a few seconds, all from google, all unique IP's. Typically my site sit between 2 and 20 current visitors, but on that day, one sub page suddenly went nuts, as if they used it for a knowledge graph result for a few seconds. It didn't last and disappeared as fast as it appeared. Adwords still don't covert. Same old same old.

[Martin Ice Web]

Today seems to be a very low google traffic day. Traffic doesn´t convert either.
bing/yahoo/direct hits are normal.

Some of the searches in my niche are full of shallow, never been seen websites. As a user i only need 1/10 second to make me leave this sites. It is not in all niches only high search volume.
It has the pattern:
1-4: amazon
5-9: shallow silly keywordstuffed sites
even known ecom shops or price compare engines are out of sight.

The user has the choice: amazon or google shopping ads.

ecom , germany

[masterjoe]

Okay, after I made my post earlier, I actually had one of the highest sales day ever. It's hard to determine the time zone so you can interpret it in my most recent post. If anyone else also received conversions at around the same time, I wouldn't be surprised, but many of you are still experiencing poor traffic to the start of the week (which could also be attributed to valentines being celebrated. And maybe a bunch of broke guys and gals, lol. Hold onto your hats people.

[Shepherd]

35% jump in hourly organic traffic from google starting at 3pm eastern standard time, U.S.

[Shepherd]

Nice 2 hour test, back to normal at 5pm eastern standard time, U.S.

[Nutterum]

How many visitors are you talking about Shepherd? In the thousands? tens of thousands? I've seen a similar bump in traffic around the same time, mainly from Europe. (the ~32% increase, my average visitors rate is in the thousands per day)

[Shepherd]

hundreds of visitors/hour from google organic, very constant week over week, I would say statistically significant. Probably penguin testing if i had to guess.

[Simon_H]

There was a 14.5% drop in review snippets yesterday according to Mozcast. Perhaps this would explain the behaviour you saw, e.g. if a competitor was appearing in those snippets and was then temporarily gone?

[Shepherd]

Plausible Simon. During the time period we saw some positive ranking movement for a couple of short tail keywords that have been known to be penguin adjusted, not enough movement to increase visitors but many times for us when the short tail keywords move so do the long tail.

[Martin Ice Web]

Is amazon and google now one company? I ask because i can see amazon winning many spots again. Meanwhile 3-4 entries on first page are norman. But i just got 7 amazon entries in a row ( 1 to 7 out of 9 ). And this seems to expand on more and more search results with shopping intention.

I ask myself if google is doing itself any good with this?

[Simon_H]

It's really not in Google's interests to list multiple Amazon results. One of Google's biggest challenges is users who are starting to bypass Google altogether and go directly to Amazon, eBay, etc when buying. Listing multiple Amazon results will only make this worse. Users will only continue to depend on Google if the sites in the serps are both diverse and high quality.

[Jez123]

Users will only continue to depend on Google if the sites in the serps are both diverse and high quality.

That's certainly not true for Adwords ads though. If it is true for organics.

Many times I have clicked on an ad where the advertiser has either moved a page or linked it incorrectly and the ad takes you to a 404 page or an unrelated page. Or a page that has sold out of the product it is advertising or the prices do not match what the advert says. I think that their quality has some distance to go. And they have incentive to do this with the paid - what's the incentive for the organic? (apart from a placeholder for the ads that is).

[Martin Ice Web]

@Jez what is the incentive for google to push amazon - biggest shopping competitor for google? Doesn´t it make google needless? You know many poeple think google is allways right. What if poeple come to the conclusion that if google shows multiple entries in a row , why not go directly to amazon?

The only thing i can think of is: never milking the cash cow to much but give it much to eat

by the way: ebay is getting pushed by google, too. And i bet that if u could see the list of the biggest advertisers amazon + ebay are on top.

[Jez123]

And i bet that if u could see the list of the biggest advertisers amazon + ebay are on top.

They are Martin.

[Simon_H]

@Martin_Ice_Web I doubt Google is doing this intentionally. Perhaps something (else) is broken or they're testing again.

[glakes]

I think the relationship between Google and Amazon is not that of competitors, though they would like the general public to interpret it that way. I see Amazon and Google as part of a oligopoly, whereas they work together to maintain each others strongholds. Amazon CEO Bezos was an early investor in Google and received just under 3.5 million shares of Google. Who knows how many shares of Google Bezos now has or how much influence these shares gives him today.

I've competed directly with Amazon ads that pointed to pages without the products even on them. There's no way that I should have to bid over $1 for first page placement when Google's quality score ratings of competing Amazon ads do not apply. If the product keywords on those Amazon pages do not even appear, how can any reasonable quality score rating give Amazon positions 1 and 2 for paid ads? The gentlest way I can put it is Google's competitive bidding market for Adwords is rigged. Google uses Amazon ads to drive up the prices for those of us that really sell the products people are looking for, particularly in cases where Amazon does not even sell the products in their marketplace.

Though I see all the evidence I need to come to the conclusion that Google gives Amazon special privileges in paid search, I also feel that any regulatory action to remedy these problems likely will not occur because both Google and Amazon are well connected politically. If you can't beat them, or have your government regulatory agencies at least try to do their jobs, join them. That's why I've been driven onto Amazon. Paying $1 a click on Google to outrank Amazon, which did not even sell these products, was out of the question. Instead Amazon now gets 15% of each sale, which is still far less than what Google was trying to gouge me for. Still, Google gets a cut of the action anyway, since I'm sure Amazon is taking a portion of that 15% a sale they get from me and gives it to Google to buy paid ads. In this sense, both Google and Amazon profit from how I was driven into Amazon.

[Simon_H]

@glakes It's not just Amazon where paid results are manipulated. We have strong evidence of manipulation of CPCs all over the place. I won't go into detail here as it's inappropriate for this thread, but I wouldn't assume this is Google + Amazon against everyone else. This appears to be more Google playing with CPCs such that everyone suffers, but perhaps Amazon is one of the players that can absorb the damage due to their high conversion rates.

However, back to the point, your comment describes exactly the situation Google wants to avoid, which is why I don't think Google is (intentionally) prioritising Amazon. If small businesses aren't ranking on Google such that the business owner gives up on Google and sells on Amazon, then the net result is users going directly to Amazon.

[glakes]

Simon, the reason why I mentioned Adwords because it is not subjected to the hundreds of obfuscating ranking signals that Google hides behind, making it much easier to see bias in their bidding platform. As we both indicated, there is strong evidence that Adwords CPC is manipulated. I feel strongly that organic search is being manipulated in the same way - driving businesses off of organic and into paid ads. Whether these businesses decide to advertise with PPC in Google or list their products in Amazon, Google still wins because Amazon advertises heavily in Google. So for Google, it is better to earn something from frustrated business owners advertising in Amazon then giving them free traffic in organic search. And since Amazon does advertise so heavily in Google, and also gets preferred search positions, customers will be able to find what they are searching for even if frustrated business owners block Google from indexing their self-hosted product pages.

I don't think for a minute that Google is trying to avoid pushing people into Amazon because some of that money gets filtered right back to Google. Instead of avoiding it, I'd venture to say they designed it that way - not necessarily to push businesses into Amazon but to push them into giving something to Google. That's how I envision their oligopoly operating - both 800 LB gorillas supporting each other to maintain and grow their market dominance.

I don't doubt that Google drives up the CPC by giving preference to other websites. I've seen this preference too, when Google sees fit to give a search clone website a better paid ranking position then a company that actually makes and sells products. A lousy search box on the page and they get a great quality score forcing real retailers to pay over $1.50 a click to appear above them? Not only do I not think that Google overlooks their poor quality score, but they also are not charging them $1+ a click. Those search clone sites would go broke if they had to pay $1+ a click and retailers will go broke just trying to get to the top.

Much in SEO has changed dramatically. Big brands are dominant for product searches, Google has expanded their investments into many service sector companies and we are told by Google that basic things like title tags don't really matter anymore. Maybe what we are witnessing is just a phase in Google becoming a mostly paid search engine, which probably will happen if there are enough ad buyers to fill up the page 1+ of the serps. But I'm not liking what I am seeing at all. The evidence of manipulation in Adwords is irrefutable. Couple this with zombie traffic, heavy brand bias and other factors and it appears organic search is being manipulated in the same way. Google wins regardless and small businesses are squeezed out of existence.

With a family to feed, I must survive and am doing really well. Things only started to really improve for me once I quit resisting the decision to sell on Amazon, other marketplaces and good ole fashioned marketing. At least on Amazon my costs are fixed per sale, and I'm not dealing with zombie traffic or ridiculous bidding wars with other websites that don't even sell what I sell. And I no longer stress about Google organic search anymore because I know my Amazon pages will most likely always be on page one of the search results. As far as being found, that nothing a targeted direct mailing can't handle. My biggest worries there are non-deliverable addresses. I'm not sipping a cocktail on the beach by any means, but I have a much clearer vision of who Google is, what they are about and what kind of future I would have if I continued relying on them as a significant pathway to customers.

[webcentric]

I don't think for a minute that Google is trying to avoid pushing people into Amazon because some of that money gets filtered right back to Google.

I recently put some Amazon stuff on some pages. Adsense's response was serve up Amazon ads on my other ad slots. Just another way they're trying to get a piece of the action. I've seen Adsense serve up the exact same ad as the one in the Amazon link I posted. I know this is Adsense related but at the same time, but it's a sign that Google will find ways to compete with Amazon as it promotes it in the SERPS. A little here, a little there.

[Simon_H]

@glakes I don't mean to sound patronising, but I have a huge respect for business owners such as yourself, who have issues with Google but then adapt and pivot such that Google is not a major dependency.

Regarding organic search being 'manipulated', I think the difference between our views is that it's free traffic so I feel that Google is entitled to do pretty much whatever it likes. Also, 'manipulated' is a somewhat meaningless term when it comes to organic traffic, as the whole point is to 'manipulate' results into what Google feels is best. You may disagree with what Google feels is best, but it's up to Google. Whereas any manipulation of paid traffic is unacceptable as that's supposed to follow certain relatively clear rules on ad rank/quality score, and so if Google deviates from that, then they should certainly be liable.

Unlike you, though, I think the reason for the huge flux in Jan/Feb 2016, for zombie traffic (on both organic and paid), for Penguin delays, for Panda 4.2 doing next-to-nothing, for the constant questionable results in the serps, for unnatural CPC charges, for domain crowding of big brands, for GSC data to be rubbish, etc is simply that Google is completely broken. Frankly, the conspiracy theories about Google being evil/teaming up with big brands/etc give Google too much credit. I think it's far simpler than that. There is so much evidence that Google has major technical issues across all of its products that either they're *pretending* to screw everything up in order to cover up their evil intentions, or they really do have major technical problems. I think it's the latter. We've heard a lot recently of Google experimenting/testing on live, but that's just a euphemism for Google releasing bad code onto live and then fixing/tuning it as they go. A company with the resources of Google shouldn't need to experiment on live so, again, all of this points to Google having major problems with product management, project management and code quality.

[aristotle]

glakes wrote:
And I no longer stress about Google organic search anymore because I know my Amazon pages will most likely always be on page one of the search results.

Looks like you've outwitted google :)

[glakes]

Regarding organic search being 'manipulated', I think the difference between our views is that it's free traffic so I feel that Google is entitled to do pretty much whatever it likes. Also, 'manipulated' is a somewhat meaningless term when it comes to organic traffic, as the whole point is to 'manipulate' results into what Google feels is best. You may disagree with what Google feels is best, but it's up to Google. Whereas any manipulation of paid traffic is unacceptable as that's supposed to follow certain relatively clear rules on ad rank/quality score, and so if Google deviates from that, then they should certainly be liable.

Manipulating organic traffic is not the same as using an algorithm to apply the same set of rules to all webpages. You see ranking and manipulation as being the same whereas I define manipulation as special rules (algorithmic or manual) that boost Google's own interests. Organic food that is full of preservatives is not organic and can't carry the organic label. Google's organic search results are so heavily biased that they should not carry the organic label or be referenced as organic results by Google.

Google is so well entrenched in the global economy that their ability to do what they want with their search engine does have major implications across many industries in many countries. I'd feel more comfortable with Google being able to do what they want with their search engine if they were not stuffing the results with other businesses that they own. I remember when Vimeo videos would actually be seen in the first page of the search results, but now they are gone and replaced by one or two YouTube videos. Now there is no room for competitors or alternatives to be seen.

Unlike you, though, I think the reason for the huge flux in Jan/Feb 2016, for zombie traffic (on both organic and paid), for Penguin delays, for Panda 4.2 doing next-to-nothing, for the constant questionable results in the serps, for unnatural CPC charges, for domain crowding of big brands, for GSC data to be rubbish, etc is simply that Google is completely broken. Frankly, the conspiracy theories about Google being evil/teaming up with big brands/etc give Google too much credit. I think it's far simpler than that. There is so much evidence that Google has major technical issues across all of its products that either they're *pretending* to screw everything up in order to cover up their evil intentions, or they really do have major technical problems. I think it's the latter. We've heard a lot recently of Google experimenting/testing on live, but that's just a euphemism for Google releasing bad code onto live and then fixing/tuning it as they go. A company with the resources of Google shouldn't need to experiment on live so, again, all of this points to Google having major problems with product management, project management and code quality.

I've seen periods of zombie traffic since September of 2015. I don't believe this is the result of Google having major technical problems because if they did exist we would see it in Google's bottom line, just like we can see zombie traffic hitting our bottom line. Through these alleged technical problems, Google's profits are soaring. I'm not saying Google does not have technical challenges that they are dealing with, but I think most of those challenges are secondary to profits. And if Google were having major problems, I would think they would come forward and say something like "sorry for sending you zombie traffic for five months" or "we will credit your Adwords account because we were testing." Matt Cutts got out for a reason, and I think a lot had to do with what took place after he left - much of what I feel he did not feel comfortable with. Though that is pure speculation on my part, that's about all I can do with a company that has become less transparent over the years.

[samwest]

The real difference is that the "early" Google sorted according to relevancy, but the "new" Google sorts according to $$$. I have had great authority pages (at least they used to be) usurped by totally meaningless pages on highly financed sites. Houzz is one example.

As far a what we're seeing today, the high traffic days are doing the least number of conversions while my lowest traffic days are doing the best conversions...plus they seem to throw in a catchup day or a holdback day so my weekly totals come out almost exactly the same every week.

[mrengine]

This morning I am receiving a ton of traffic from foreign countries. Besides the manual scrapers and form spammers from India, I saw a lot of traffic from UAE, Egypt, Belgium, Saudi Arabia and other countries that we don't sell to. Is anyone else experiencing a similar massive inflow of irrelevant traffic from Google? This traffic is completely worthless and our desired North American traffic is substantially lower today.

[samwest]

mrengine - yes. Beside the cold surge (which is most of the time) I also experienced a hot surge yesterday between 5 and 6 pm where I had 5 conversions in and hour. Most days I have to wait all day to do 3. In the "natural" days, the daily average was 13 or more.

[Martin Ice Web]

Today = 100% Zombietraffic

germany

[ionguy]

same here from yesterday - 3 conversion between 4:00 and 5:00 pm gmt - otherwise we are getting zombies whole day