Google Updates and SERP Changes - April 2016

[masterjoe]

Continuing from:
Google Updates and SERP Changes - March 2016
https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4793805.htm [webmasterworld.com]


Still suffering from zombie traffic. Not a single conversion since Good Friday. The "pocketliner" update is really aggravating me, not to mention they still haven't released Penguin. I should also mention that conversions have been dropping off slowly since my site started being blasted with exact match anchor texts and I submitted disavows. Maybe it has something to do with it, but I will wait to hear back from webmasters with clean websites.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 8:15 am (utc) on May 1, 2016]

[masterjoe]

Okay, I am fairly certain this is some penguin flux because I'm seeing movement on some pretty random keywords. It's been quite stable over the past week only moving between 1-2 spots max. But today there is fluctuation from #1-#9. If anyone else can confirm that would help.

[Jez123]

I'm seeing small movements but not convinced it's Penguin. I'm not seeing any movement of any competitors that were hit with Penguin.

[Titi12]

I'm seeing movements in my niche since 2 or 3 days
I think I'm recovering for my main keyword (+77 positions yesterday and +98 the day before, I was for the last two years between position 200 and 220 and what ever I tried to do, the only result was drop and drop a little more...)
What I also see is some "bad" sites dropping... Bad because of no content or bad because of a poor french translation of an english website, but those that have "bad" links are still in positions
Not sure it's penguin

[mrengine]

I see a little more traffic too, but its of the same low quality traffic Google has been sending off and on (mostly on low quality) for a while. Is anyone that runs an ecommerce website noticing any changes in traffic quality from Google?

[SEOcomfort]

@mrengine I run an ecommerce site and traffic quality is up and down. There are times during the day where I will get handfuls of conversions then it just all of a sudden stops. Traffic stays the same throughout the day but the quality plays hide and seek with me.

[Marketingdude]

I'm seeing small fluctuations on the (small-ish) sites I own, nothing out of the ordinary. Spread out in a wide variety of niches.

[masterjoe]

Okay, now it looks like this update has (so far) brought an issue to the surface that I was completely unaware of. It seems as if I am experiencing some keyword cannibalization, even though this was not an issue for the last year and a half.

Here's what seems to be happening: Basically, I have a "company" page for each company I promote on my website.

On this page, I have about 200-300 words about EACH of their products, and then I link to another page which goes into full review of the products. Now Google can't decide where to put either of the pages and has instead demoted me to the bottom of page 1, instead of number 2-3 where it normally resides.

I said this yesterday, but now it looks like another page is also experiencing something similar -- the page seems to have dropped out of the index and is only ranking on the home page for this particular keyword.

Some incredibly bizarre changes so far, but if it settles out okay I will be pleased. Last night I had an uptick in conversions even though it looks like my rankings are all over the place.

Still too early to say much more.

If only I was Amazon and had multiple listings in a row for the same keyword... *sigh*

[WhiteHatTryHard]

Back to normal numbers. That didnt la long.

[Lake]

Back to average numbers after a gigantic spike over the weekend

[renatovieira]

Certainly, it is not penguin. Since last year I cleaned all low backlinks. I update my disavow file every week.

Yesterday was the worst day of the year. Nearly half of the access that I had normally... And keeps falling...

It is certainly the RankBrain, Panda or some other silly animal. :=)

[mrengine]

None of the serp trackers picked up on anything out of the ordinary. Maybe what we saw was a brief test and that was it. Even during the test, prior and after too, Google traffic is not resulting in sales like they were. This is definitely discouraging.

[Jez123]

I would definitely say SOMETHING happened as I got movement in the right direction on some KW's. Whether they stick or not is another matter...

[DirigoDev]

I own an agency and work for clients, but, I also own several ecom sites. I've been busy for a long while and I've not touched one of the ecom sites for 4+ years. Hardly a single edit. Orders are up significantly - over 100% sales growth (and I sell thousands of widgets a month - only a few SKUs centered on several KW groups). I have a weekly sales cycle with Wed-Thur being the slow days in my week. I've never seen a Wed-Thur like this week. I'm seeing much better traffic. Amazon and ebay have also seen gains in the past few days (e.g. 25% more sales). If it lasts I'll dig into the analytics and ranking reports next week. Something is going with Google.

[timemachined]

To masterjoe, G has been unable to rank the correct page for the correct term on a website for months upon months now - intentionally, how can a multi billion pound company not realise its main asset can't index properly.

Two years ago I removed the side bar of latest posts because thanks to the engine indexing a page with one phrase reference in the sidebar instead of the page with title, keyword mentions, related and a full article on, the correct pages were also not indexed properly and page chosen showed further down than it should have been. G is now a rubbish engine awaiting a rival to take its place, it is unable to rank pages correctly.

By the by, I'm sure G is far more intelligent these days, it just answers to shareholders and is there to make them money. Wait for mods to turn around and say "G has to return good results" My reply in advance is, no it does not, it has to return the most profitable ad results to make shareholders money. The sooner webmasters turn analytics off, ban robots from Google tracking sales to the end of a basket and recommend users switch to another search engine, the better.

Quite, we'll all still be competing against each other for a sale, but better that we compete in serps for a sale, rather than compete against a search engine that uses all our data against us to get money from paid ads and demote any other channel that makes money for webmasters and not Google.

Google chooses not to index the correct page so it shows further down. Why else would it choose one phrase on an unrelated page or show home page, over the correct page with article and title on. It figures if you have money to procure content or write then you have money for paid ads. But fails to realise, if you don't get sales, you don't have money and then content stops.

Others will say, try other means and don't rely on G to get a sale, well fold the forum then ha.

[masterjoe]

timemachined, I share your sentiments but I think that's reaching a little bit. A search engine that's supposedly got AI handling unimaginable amounts of data should be able to work out where to place 1 or 2 pages in a set of results, not just demote them and put them near the bottom where nobody gives a damn about it. Especially when they are highly relevant to the search.

I still haven't worked out a solution to this, perhaps no-indexing a page might solve it... but then again, these are both completely unique pages and both relevant to the search. It's ridiculous that I would have to decide to even remove one from the index because Google can't handle it. Especially when they have no problem putting Amazon rich snippets 2-4 times in a row for some searches. It's beyond stupid!

I have already begun my leap into Facebook advertising... and seeing some pretty good results. I'm actually enjoying playing around with it a little to see what happens. Its a lot less complicated than Adwords and a whole more profitable right now.

[timemachined]

In my experience, G purposely chooses the lesser and less irrelevant of the pages it can index and that alone ensures it shows further down. If I do G fetch one or several times on the correct page, it tends to show where it should. It does work out where to put the page, it does choose the most irrelevant and because of that people / business pay to be shown instead.

Because of this, I block tags, block categories, don't allow for sidebars with key phrases I wish to rank for. If I could go as far as blocking the home page from Google I would as it shows latest news stories with phrases in titles. If blocked that would stop home page showing instead of the correct post. This is how ridiculous Google is right now.

[flatfile]

One of the craziest things I'm seeing right now is a spammer owning those cheap .xyz domains. They all redirect to a p0rn site. Google catches them and he just pops another one, he's buying them everyday many of them with unique IPs!. All I'm thinking is, how does a person maintain all of that?.

[Ohno2]

It's not hard (pardon the pun). Google gives away traffic then takes it away. Like an EVIL drug dealer. It's all about links. Links take them out of the equation. If you can't see that then burn. Their #*$! made people too scared to link (those that were here in 99 will know that's all that matters). Ignore the #*$!. Forget https. Quality. Mobile ready. If they say do X do Y !

[MrBlack]

Did anyone notice anything yesterday, the 8th, on Google UK?

Traffic has been cut in half on my squeaky clean, 12 year old UK e-commerce site. Now seeing a lot of mismatched traffic from random countries in Europe and Asia.

[renatovieira]

@MrBlack - I noticed that too yesterday. My site operates in the USA, but many sudden access of Eastern Europe at unusual hours.

[nomis5]

Did anyone notice anything yesterday, the 8th, on Google UK?

Nothing out of the ordinary here. UK informational.

[robster124]

Did anyone notice anything yesterday, the 8th, on Google UK?

Yup, traffic down 20% on long established UK informational site. Big traffic moves for us are 5% here and there so something seems to be up.

[RedBar]

Did anyone notice anything yesterday, the 8th, on Google UK?

Several global sites with traffic down ~30%, more fiddling and messing by incompetents.

[renatovieira]

Today is scary! :=(

[samwest]

It's an indication that the discussion is more about traffic quality then it is about actually getting traffic.

Oh, we are getting plenty of traffic, over 1000 unique visits per day. In the past, this would translate into a solid 2.0% conversion rate or 20 sales per day. Now we are lucky if we can do .< 0.2% (1 or 2 sales) per day. Same site, just terrible (and obviously filtered) traffic quality. If you're not concerned about conversions, what's the point of your site? No doubt that mobile users have taken a big bite out of conversion rates. If you sell a product, move it over to Amazon and watch it fly out the door. They haven't gotten too greedy...yet.

Today's observation...the 7am sale window anomaly is still happening. One sale in the early morning...nothing the rest of the day.

[MrBlack]

Even worse today. G is sending me a trickle of visitors from Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas but nothing from the UK. Checking the Google UK serps for my niche I see first page with lots of US sites with $ denominated pricing. If I add UK to the search term I then see UK sites with £ prices.
Maybe they had someone in for work experience turn some dials on Friday and then left it and all gone home for the weekend?

[billyfresh]

Bad weekend for coversions on G. Everyone knows the quality of the organic results in G are a complete mess but you would expect adwords to covert but they don't. I have been using adwords for the last 7 years, they always used to convert but as of 4Q 2015 to the current day adwords just dont covert and the quality of traffic coming from adwords is really poor quality. I seen quite few people saying the same thing on various sites, what is G upto?

[motionz]

I am not so sure that what is G doing or trying to do but I will say that some of the things have gotten way too much for me.
I am getting plenty of traffic which is of worthless quality. I am not making any conversion from them though ok I get it because the traffic quality is poor. But just think about this my fellow webmasters even the Google Adsense is not getting any impressions of this traffic. Then what's the point ?

[Martin Ice Web]

What a bad weekend looking at google quality traffic. Today we are seeing a 30% drop. User engagment is near zero. PLAs are even worse. Dig a hole and put our money in, that the same thing as giving it to google.

The german serpos are full of double listings, same page 2 times in a row. Listings from big brands with 6 entries in a row are growing.

ecom, germany

@samwest. conversion rate from google shrinks, you are right. I can see it on several domains. And traffic quality shrinks, too. With every update they are doing, quality shrinks a little bit more.
And everyone saying google uses user engagement for ranking sites, yes they do, but in a negative way. Seeing sites that have good user engagment within organics get dumped.

[glakes]

Those experiencing Google zombie traffic quality problems with Adwords, have you spoken with an Adwords account manager? See worldwide Adwords support at [support.google.com...] for appropriate phone numbers for your country. Or have you reached out to someone at Google (John Mueller) during a hangout about organic traffic quality problems. I know Simon has asked some questions and plans to ask more during future hangouts. It would be nice to know what Google says to you. Though highly unlikely, Google may not be aware of the traffic quality problems plaguing both organic and paid search results. If more people start reaching out to Google about the traffic quality problem, they may allocate some resources into correcting it. Otherwise it may never change.