Google Updates and SERP Changes - March 2016

[JS_Harris]

Continuing from:
Google Updates and SERP Changes - Feb 2015
https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4788898.htm [webmasterworld.com]



I think something major might be changing right now, my 'search analytics' data in Google's 'search console'(ie:GWT) has not updated for a full week. The last data showing on the page/keyword reports is from Feb 23rd.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 8:44 am (utc) on Mar 1, 2016]

[glakes]

Having the best products, investing the most in content and striving to perfect the UE results in zero impact on how Google perceives my site. Couple this with worthless zombie traffic, bursts of zombies, few sales that occur at the same time almost every day and other odd reports from other ecommerce website owners and it is clear a heavy amount of manipulation is going on. For me anyway, Google's search platform (paid and free) has become essentially useless and unreliable for producing sales on my website.

[aristotle]

Having the best products, investing the most in content and striving to perfect the UE results in zero impact on how Google perceives my site.

Maybe your site is under some hidden penalty that nullifies all of its good features. In other words, one negative signal can over-ride a dozen positive signals.

[samwest]

AI continues to improve (gain control) on overall traffic, Each week, the variation gets smaller and smaller. Like glakes mentioned last month, one or two good days is always tempered with 3 or 4 bad days, but overall the result at the end of the week is nearly identical. Not sure if I should complain or celebrate.

[glakes]

aristotle, I doubt it's a penalty because it has an effect on both free and paid traffic. It's better defined as manipulation. No worries though, I've written Google off for my ecommerce needs. If Google sends me sales (I could care less about their fake zombies), I look at it as a bonus. I hope one day this will change, but I'll have to see it in free traffic before I waste another dime with Adwords. I'm spending my marketing money elsewhere and it's working out good and without all the headaches Google creates.

[JesterMagic]

In my niche for the last few months I am seeing spam sites that add "-com" to company domain names rank on the first page. It looks like this:

companydomain-com.com

Surprised Google hasn't squashed these guys yet.

[Wurger]

Today Google released an update to some of its SERP features, which includes:

1) slight decrease of queries with breadcrumbs
2) slight increase of queries with sitelinks
3) decrease of queries with video thumbnails
4) increase of queries with answer box
5) increase of queries with featured snippet
6) decrease of queries with related questions (people also ask)
7) increase of queries with related search
8) increase of queries with local pack results
9) noticeable increase of average organic results per page

According to SERP tools volatility graphs, no search algo updates were released today.

[Martin Ice Web]

Whatever they did on friday was not quality biased......

[mrengine]

Whatever they did on friday was not quality biased......

The net result for me are dummied down / lower quality visitors, so in that sense it was quality based. They lowered the quality of traffic.

I did not think it could get any worse, but Google has proven they can lower the bar even further. I'm just curious where the shoppers are going. It's not Adwords because I have good coverage there, although it is getting more expensive and time consuming tweaking settings to produce each conversion.

[Martin Ice Web]

@mrengine, normaly big brands are untouched by this "quality" updates but in my niche even the big brands ( + ebay + amazon ) are hit.
Searching for apples will at least give u 5 results back with oranges. PLAs are affected too.
Every time they are on a way to show halfways good results someone at the plex pushs the Master "GET WORSE" switch.

Silly SE.

[renatovieira]

@Martin Ice Web, I'm new here in the forum and new in SEO. I think I'm having the same problem @mrengine, though I'm just counting my Google organic traffic.

Since the beginning of last week my graphics is remaining OK (Google Analytics & Search Console), but page views are constantly falling.

This would be of low quality traffic? The number of users that Google sends me still the same, but the user is consuming much less than before.

Does it have any relationship with Google update that occurs at this time?

[samwest]

After the best week so far this year, this week has started out with only a trickle of poorly converting, poor interacting visits. Look like bots. All from Google.

[Jez123]

I'm seeing an upswing in traffic today and yesterday. No conversions today so far though (but a couple yesterday) but they seem to be interacting well. Fingers crossed as it's been a very quiet start to the year for me.

[mrengine]

Martin Ice Web, you are indeed correct about Amazon and Ebay losing some ground. The funny part is that I see Home Depot and Sears at the top for a few things I searched for and they don't stock them. Third party product ads and external sellers.

renatovieira, yes page views dropping is normally an indication of lower quality and less interested traffic. I can see in my stats what Martin Ice Web is seeing - some change Google made around Friday.

[samwest]

I'm virtually shut down today. Something must have come through on about Friday / Saturday and it's been down hill since. Hope it's just a temporary glitch. ha!

Actually, whatever hit took hold on March 1st.

[keyplyr]

Traffic way up across the sites I manage... makes me look good :)

[glakes]

even the big brands ( + ebay + amazon ) are hit

Not in my niche. My Amazon sales today rocked. Anyway, if Google knocked out Amazon in my niche they would have to show my site. Organic listings are already filled up with youtube spam, forum posts from 12 years ago (don't come close to applying to modern times), Wikipedia and so on. If Amazon were missing, people would go to Bing or Yahoo or directly to Amazon.

[JS_Harris]

John Mu did say that Google's search console data delay was a bug. It's a bit hard to believe than when no sooner do they fix that 'bug' it strikes analytics and during this time my visitor metrics go up, then down, and now back up again.

That doesn't sound like a data reporting problem since traffic had been steady before these bugs.

[Nutterum]

A websites I monitor got a nice bump of traffic and conversions since second of March. Investigating the cause turns something very interesting. Two competitors got obliterated from the SERPS. They both had dodgy link building done and both had thin content issues. Can't tell which update hit them first, but they are not even in the top 300 anymore for any keyword (they used to have ~1000 long tail keywords on page 1 and ~10/20 generic industry relevant keywords). Have to say it feels good to expand my property in their keyword niches.

On the flip side, I now have a problem with another property where out of ~20000 pages Google re-indexed only 700 dropping the rest from the index entirely. Fearing thin content that is just phased out by the search engine. Time will tell though.

All in all Google are churning something because I see movement and changes pretty much everywhere.

[Martin Ice Web]

My Amazon sales today rocked

Are you sure that this is because amazon rules ion google serps or is it because google serps are as bad as they could be and poeple canīt find anything and go directly to amazon?

The last 3 month we had the best user engagement since 3 years. Since friday we have back the worst user engagement. 90% Zombies, 5% foreign traffic, 5% good traffic.

[notinmybook]

Time to go from lurker to poster. Hi guys awesome work here.
Strangest thing happened this Sunday, lost 90% traffic, yet all the main keywords are still ranking nr 1 as always. Checked several trackers, tried incognito search and a few searches over proxy, but indeed, I'm still number 1. The crumbs that do come in have the same spread of incoming pages as always, just a factor 10 less. Even switched hosts today but doesn't seem to make any difference. Pretty much checked and tried everything possible on my end, but it really seems something google. But what?

[Nutterum]

Hi notinmybook, welcome to Webmasterworld. This is very unusual. I've seen what you are experiencing but not as sudden as you, more like gradual decline over the years, as if the users stopped searching for the keywords and moved on to something else. Now in your case you might want to check Google Analytics and compare the GEO location of the visitors before and after as well as time on page and bounce rate. Also compare google search console for the last 7 days compared to the 7 days before the sudden drop and see which keywords stopped bringing you traffic. If everything is the same before and after par the traffic, then it might be Google showing some new/different search result pages to the users entirely. Such tests are not uncommon. For example the accommodation related queries changed dramatically over the years and many websites did experience huge losses in traffic from "pure organic" results and increases in local searches.

One more thing, have you checked what tools like ahrefs or screaming frog tell you about your property? Any sudden drop in links, or increase in 404/500 errors? You might still be on Page 1 on Google but if your website returns errors to your users, traffic will drop.

In conclusion, I hope you find out where the problem is and report back to the community so we can have a heads up if it is something Google or something on your end.

[notinmybook]

Thanks Nutterum. Geo location, time on site, bounce, etc was all unchanged. However, I just noticed that my traffic numbers are slowly increasing again. It seems the dns propagation after my server/host switch was slower than usual - guess I should have hold my horses until after a proper propagation time. Anyway, we're not 100% back to old levels, but it's clear enough to say that the old server/host was to blame.

[samwest]

I'll back up what notinmybook is seeing. As I mentioned in a previous post this week, I just got through the BEST week of the year , but over the weekend, conversions evaporated while the serps look unchanged. Traffic levels (visitors) are pretty much the same too. Page view are way down though. Just watching in PIWIK is ridiculous. Nearly every visitor leave the site after one page with very low engagement times. I suspect the same, a possible hosting issue or slow site response, but that's not the case either with most pages loading in 0.15 seconds. Something's up.

[renatovieira]

@samwest - it is exactly what is happening to my website, but the 1st of march is that things started to get weird. Users remain the same, but they do not consume more my content since. Today was different. I hope that things return to normal.

[samwest]

renato... User engagement just went right out the window. At least I know it's not just me. It's not the site. Just more damn Zombies.

[almo136]

Has anyone else noticed a spike in pages crawled? Since Feb 15th our pages crawled have been increasing all of the time to a point where we are seeing double the amount of pages crawled compared to early February.

We have also noticed some really old pages (now 404's) appearing in our Google Crawl Errors. Some of these have been 404's for 3-4 years so it seems like Google is doing some deep crawling?

Possibly signs of an update on the horizon?

[anneconq]

That was my issue last week because a sudden spike of our 404s... I mark as fixed and let me see in the few weeks if those URLs will appear.

[renatovieira]

Here the same thing, hundreds of Soft 404 errors.

[Martin Ice Web]

Today our traffic is back. User engagement slightly up.
Seems to be 2 sets. One with no user engagement and only zombies the other one good user engagement, conversions, user interaction......

I wonder if google sees gaings and losses in traffic when they do silly updates like the last one.
Or are they to big to see this immediatly. Is it that they need two or three days to gather all the traffic data?

[Martin Ice Web]

Since 12am today, user engagement is down the drain again..... Zombies are back..