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]

[masterjoe]

I am also back to having zombie traffic. February was quite a decent month for me, considering how long its been since my main website was hit by Penguin. My new site now generates about 2/3 of the traffic, but was converting much better. The thing is, some idiot had start blasting my website with exact match anchor texts, and I really held off on disavowing links for atleast 2 weeks.

Firstly, I believe it shouldn't be my problem anyway, but as we all know Google will probably drop another ridiculous bomb on webmasters and not bother fixing it for almost 1.5 years. A lot of the links simply evaporated because of their low quality, but I eventually disavowed at the start of March.

Since then, I've been experiencing "zombie traffic".

Small chance, but does anyone here miraculously have a site that isn't hit with spam, with no disavows filed? And do you still experience zombie traffic or not? Any input will help. Thanks in advance.

[renatovieira]

Dear friend @masterjoe, when you say "zombie traffic," what do you mean by that? How to distinguish high quality traffic with low-quality traffic?

[masterjoe]

renatovieira, we define it as traffic levels remaining stable, but having little to no conversions (no sales, no email sign ups, no interaction with the site).

[renatovieira]

Thanks mastterjoe. Do you believe that this is temporary? It is related to any Google update that might be happening?

[mrengine]

Small chance, but does anyone here miraculously have a site that isn't hit with spam, with no disavows filed? And do you still experience zombie traffic or not?

My site is very clean, has few but quality backlinks and a lot of direct traffic/sales from government and big corporations. We hold patents on much of what we sell. I still experience zombie traffic and believe, along with Google's other updates (front end UI, ad layouts) that Google is attempting to drive both a higher CPC and more paid clicks; resulting in poor / zombie visits. The zombie effect may be a part of that - forcing us squeaky clean ecommerce websites to seek stable conversions in paid ads. But I am in paid ads too, and the zombie effect is hitting those ads also, making the cost per conversion much higher then what I was used to and would expect.

The one thing that zombie traffic has in common with others I've spoken with is that the zombie effect is targeted to ecommerce websites, which again supports my belief that Google is attempting to push paid ad profits beyond a sustainable ROI level for advertisers. None of the info site owners I've spoken with, and those who manage them, are experiencing this problem. Info site owners are least likely to buy paid ads and zombies coming from Google would not compel many of them to spend money on paid ads. Just my thoughts on what I am observing.

[samwest]

Do you believe that this is temporary? It is related to any Google update that might be happening?

It might come back. In the 15+ year history of my site, it's seen countless drop outs, mostly after 2010. It usually comes back, but the slow decline remains. I'm still in Zombies. One good way to ID a Zombie pattern is nothing all day but middle of the night conversions. I had one conversion yesterday at 6:41am, which is usually very light traffic. On higher traffic that day, I made zero conversions, but last night at 2:10am I get one conversion...nothing so far today. It's as if they can redirect all daytime buyers.
Seeing a very slight improvement in engagement, but still a lot of one and done visits.
I won' be counting those chickens tho.

To be honest, this feels more like an entire web connectivity problem. I've been seeing a lot of sites/pages that just time out. During these slow times, even my spam volume decreases. Is the secret police at work? I suspect there's more than just Google's hand at play out there.

[besnette]

Wondering if anyone else is noticing really, super short descriptions - like the description meta tag ignored. For my site, in places, all of a sudden, the description in the search results is like 7 words long. Some other sites this seems to be the case too.

Anyone else?

[masterjoe]

Haven't seen any of the short descriptions mate.

Last night I had one of the worst converting nights ever -- zero sales, zero sign ups. Traffic was however down, and a competitor has been busy building more links to my site which keep popping up daily. I blasted his site with 30000 xrumer links just to waste his time back. Thank you Google for creating an idiotic loophole that wastes everyone's time and money.

[Nutterum]

From my experience if you have decent link portfolio, Google will pretty much ignore negative SEO spam. Unless your competitor is meticulous about approaching negative SEO on your website I doubt you will feel any impact whatsoever. Now if you have like 200-300 backlinks to your website then negative SEO can sink a domain and you will find yourself dedicating more and more time updating the disavow files.

[masterjoe]

Hi nutterum,

It is a fairly new website (worked on heavily over the last 5-6 months), and is fast becoming an authority in my small niche. I built some quality links from social/web 2.0 properties and such, never spammed anything, and attracted a few high quality links from authorities. It is not a huge link profile and probably only had about 150 links -- the spam links have been coming in since march (they were likely built all around the same time, but only getting picked up by ahrefs recently)... so it is very likely that Google would see this as manipulation.

[samwest]

This rash of bad traffic continues. I've checked just about everything...site speed, server errors, etc. Beside conversions turning completely off, traffic levels are also moving much lower. What happened here?

[renatovieira]

@samwest, I'm more relaxed to know that this is not just happening to me. Let's wait.

[masterjoe]

Seeing the same thing samwest. February was actually a decent month for me, it appeared as if traffic had finally returned to normal - the traffic was far better and actually had a lot of inquiries, email sign ups, sales. Now it's all dropped off into nothing. Perhaps they are lining their pockets up somehow since it's almost the end of this quarter, who knows. Whatever it is, I hope they revert back and give us some decent traffic.

I was almost about to invest in some adwords, because sales were going quite well through organic, but these major shifts in traffic quality are just way too concerning to even bother.

[samwest]

Hey guys, good to at least see some common reporting.
In doing some more investigation, I see a message in my hosting companies support page that says:

On 02/29/2016, several undersea cables in the Asia Pacific region experienced major fiber cuts. These cables are responsible for carrying a significant portion of Singapore's international internet traffic. This loss of capacity has caused recent increases of latency and packet loss in our Singapore data center during peak times when traffic is heavy. Unfortunately, there is currently no estimated time-to-resoluition available from the undersea cable owners.

The timeline matches our observations. Maybe this is causing the apparent slow down globally.
When will it be resolved? The ticket says:

03/04/2016 8:25am EST - Cable repair is set to take place beginning 03/25/2016 and is scheduled to finish on 03/31/2016. Please note, these dates are dependent on sea and weather conditions allowing the repairs to take place.

More about this : [theregister.co.uk...]

Note: while this may not be directly affecting my connectivity, perhaps Google Analytics is using that route an indirectly slowing my site down. Temporarily stripping all tracking code.

[edited by: samwest at 2:36 pm (utc) on Mar 10, 2016]

[Martin Ice Web]

@mrengine, it would not nealry give our post the necessary recognition if i give you a Like Vote. So this small thank you sentence for summarizing up zombie traffic and the possible background.

[samwest]

Looks like this crap pattern is going to stick. Summer slow down / traffic harvest is about 3 months early this year. Figures.

[Kelowna]

@masterjoe

we define it as traffic levels remaining stable, but having little to no conversions (no sales, no email sign ups, no interaction with the site).

Seeing the same thing here, BUT, it is not quite what we call zombie as we can see why the poor quality is happening in our stats.

Google appears to be screwing with their geolocation knobs today, at least in our sector. What we are seeing is google serving up the wrong info to the visitors based on their location. People from Texas getting served up pages about Florida, that sort of thing, it appears to be wide spread across our USA based sites today. I am sure the visitors are saying WTF and leaving when they want local stuff.

Maybe our Jacksonville FL page is being considered over optimized now so the Gorg in their great wisdom think that the Seattle WA section would be a better fit... who the hell knows for sure when they all get together at the plex and play with their knobs.

[MrBlack]

Something happened for me around 6th March on Google UK. Quality of traffic on my squeaky clean widget price comparison site is the worst I have seen since I started it back in 2005. Traffic levels only ever so slightly lower, however I have had 0 conversions for 4 days running! This has not happened ever. If a Google search engineer is reading this, congratulations, mission accomplished, you just squeezed out another little bit of competition.

[samwest]

MrBlack - +1 I agree. When thy squeeze us out, those buyers go SOMEWHERE. They go to Google's interests. Many are seeing a very un-natural cessation of conversions. What did they do?

[Frank_Rizzo]

I don't know if this has been mentioned on different thread but this new panel at the top of serps, with a feedback link. Is it directed at me? Can I give feedback even though it is my site? And why is it not there for all phrases?

Search for acme widget food and I see the panel with one of my long standing pages (created in 2003).
Search for acme widget toys and it's just the normal serps.

Anyone else see that? Is it worth giving feedback? Loathed to do so incase there is some penalty for doing so.

[Shepherd]

Likely penguin testing going on right now, U.S., 6pm est.

[keyplyr]

@Frank_Rizzo - you may be seeing the local search listing

[renatovieira]

Penguin? Are you sure?

[Shepherd]

Penguin? Are you sure?

No one outside of google (and most people inside of google) can be sure.

[samwest]

Likely penguin testing going on right now, U.S., 6pm est.

Sure wish they wouldn't do animal testing. Sorry.

From what I'm now seeing, the homepage is no longer showing in the top 10 for many long standing queries.
Sub pages do appear if related to the query. In the past both the home page AND the sub page appeared. Maybe it's a crack down on domain crowding. I've never seen so much zero time.

[masterjoe]

Actually, I am seeing some issues in my stats recently since this "low quality" traffic started appearing too -- I took a look over my sessions (reduced), and bounce rate (increased) -- which indicates that people are not finding what they're looking for.

If this IS in fact penguin testing, then hopefully it will stop happening once they're done. Playing around with a live index is a pretty dumb idea though.

[Martin Ice Web]

which indicates that people are not finding what they're looking for.

google answer: Please refer to googles ads to find what you want. We are no longer support organics. We are in need to make money. You have money, we want it.

If this IS in fact penguin testing, then hopefully it will stop happening once they're done. Playing around with a live index is a pretty dumb idea though.

Havenīt there be a post over on SEL that penguin will be going live while google robots fetch the page. So now overall penguin/panda but page by page.

[xjukyo]

but when I analyze my pagviews, are in constant decline since the week beginning.

[Martin Ice Web]

Something just started in germany ( 10.30 am )
Traffic -90%, bounce 100%. The remaing traffic from google is just 5 times the same site in a row. Never seen something like this before.

What a mess.

[KiffTay]

@renatovieira @RedBar same here, I've seen a significant drop in sessions and pageviews from February 29th. Rankings don't seem to have changed much but traffic has been in a steady decline.