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]

[SEOcomfort]

@NickMNS Just to follow up, our conversions picked up slightly last Friday afternoon but was still overall a pretty bad day. I cannot say for certain it was "zombie" related but the day had similar attributes as what everyone is saying. Personally, I think we just had a slow down on top of a little zombie traffic.

@aok88 I agree a lot of variables go into consideration when looking at conversions and there are a lot of internal and external factors that can affect a site.

[masterjoe]

I had an uptick in conversions this weekend too. It's hard to describe the exact time for you all because I live in Australia and nobody is reporting in UTC yet -- However, it was quite a dramatic spike in conversions compared what I got for the week previously. And traffic was not substantial either.

I did however notice that I improved for quite a few long tail keywords which ahrefs shows my rankings and history for... these are keywords that don't get much traffic, but are very specific. A lot of #1 spots across the board. Makes me highly suspicious that this is something to do with long tail queries.

[Jez123]

I had an uptick in conversions this weekend too.

Same here. I too also got some slight improvements in some keywords.

I also noticed that on mobile search (I couldn't replicate it on desktop) that I had some major ranking improvements for some keywords. This was off and on on Saturday (in UK) but nothing since and back to normal later that afternoon. Anyone notice anything like that? I was searching on Chrome, incognito, so not signed in to Google.

[SemanticFool]

There is a Huge Google Dance going on in India , Specially in the Niche that i run sites, I have never seen this kind of dance since few months. I can see one of my competitor ( They buy lots of Blog posts) lost top 1 rank for most of the top keywords

[edited by: SemanticFool at 3:05 pm (utc) on Apr 18, 2016]

[renatovieira]

It was my worst weekend in three years. Organic search up, main keywords up, my pageviews falling day after day.

Very difficult to understand what is happening.

[motionz]

Hey guys, I am seeing much increase in worth-ful traffic rather than the zombie traffic. But still I haven't reached the previous traffic quota..

[SEOcomfort]

Today has been a little weird. Traffic is up but all my organic search conversions have happened this morning while paid search this morning was dead. This afternoon is the complete opposite, paid search is generating more conversions while organic is dead.

Usually, all my search traffic is more active in the early to mid afternoon.

[samwest]

Sunday was OK, but back to zombies this week. Same old same old.

[Nutterum]

Over the past few days, I saw something very strange with the SERPS. Many blogs ranked for the /blog overview page instead of the blog post itself. I am not sure whether I fell in to some weird Google test, but I don't like it. On top, all these blogs will have horrendous conversion % with minimal loss of traffic, resulting in Zombie behavior. Anyone else seeing this?

[masterjoe]

Seeing the same samwest. Had an unusually good weekend but it looks like the same zombie garbage is becoming a standard at Google. Also, Simon has gotten in touch with John mueller about the issue so check out SER and pass on your details to so that he can investigate. I dont know if anything will come of it or if itll just get ignored but its worth a try.

[Simon_H]

Traffic quality has seemed all over the place for the past few days, with fundamental changes in what is being added to basket and bought. The 'off' and 'on' periods are a lot more erratic. We're getting a significant number of delivery requests from countries we don't deliver to, suggesting some serious geo mis-matching is going on. There's a particular product range that's quite expensive that we normally sell 5 - 6 of each day like clockwork, but that's much reduced the last couple of days, replaced with products being bought that we rarely sell. Someone appears to be turning some knobs.

[shanrocks666]

Google is sending all the crap and zombie traffic again for the last 2 days. even with adword also traffic is totally crap ,not a single sale with 100+ click.

[SEOcomfort]

@Simon_H On my site, I have noticed a shift in the on and off periods as well. Normally we have a short time frame around lunch where we get conversions, then nothing till about mid afternoon and then just dead the rest of the day. Now we are seeing a lot more conversions at noon, which makes more sense to me given we are on the east coast and the west coast is up and moving at this time.

Today has actually been pretty good to me. My normal conversion rate is there and my paid conversion rate is actually up. We are still seeing the on and off periods but when it's on, it is on. I have not seen any geo-mismatching. I think my traffic today is less "misqualified" traffic and more of normal fluctuations.

This is the first day in over a week where everything seems "normal". I would like to note as well that my traffic is down but I am getting more conversions. I will take the more qualified traffic all day every day.

[Simon_H]

@SEOComfort Interesting that you're seeing a similar flux. Do you know if you're currently hit with Penguin or Panda?

[SEOcomfort]

@Simon_H From what I know and have seen with this site, it is not currently not hit with either. From looking through years of data, traffic and rankings seem pretty stable. They have dropped but that's from new competition coming in and doing everything better prior to my arrival.

[billyfresh]

Zombie traffic week for me again. Poor quality organic and Adword traffic all week. Still can not work out the on and off traffic and conversion periods

[SEOcomfort]

Today:

Organic search: more traffic (not bots), slight uptick in rankings overall, conversions dropped off the table (from 3% normally to .58%)
Google Adwords: less traffic, rankings similar, conversion dropped (from 4.5% to 3.37%)

Yesterday my organic saw a conversion rate of 3.16% just to give a perspective of the drop.

I am on the fences regarding this "zombie" traffic stuff but its hard to see this drop in quality traffic and not think it has to be something. Please note, no changes were made to my site over night.

[masterjoe]

Same here. This is beginning to sound like a silly parrot kind of thing but conversions have been off all week since the weekend. Last weekend was outstanding which is very unusual. But this entire week has been an absolute joke for getting anyone to buy anything across a few completely different sites. Also, adsense users are reporting huge losses while google profits continue to soar. If we don't hear back from John Mueller on this issue or we get somw stupid excuse I think we all know what it really is.

[samwest]

Half day today...things were fine until noon, then BAM off again. Man I miss the days when traffic flowed all day long and every day of the week. Damn that throttling algorithm.

[motionz]

Amen to that brother. I miss those days too.

[Simon_H]

I find it extraordinary that the norm is to talk about traffic volume, e.g. "my traffic has gone up by 10%", which is a largely meaningless statistic, yet when we talk about changes in traffic quality or conversions (a far more sensible measure) separately from changes in traffic volume, this is often dismissed as nonsense.

The fact is that any site will rank for an almost infinite number of search queries, from the simple through to the long, ambiguous, misspelt queries. Some of those queries will have stable serps, but the vast majority won't because Google has barely or never seen them before. It's hardly a leap of faith to accept that if a lot of a site's traffic is made up of those unstable types of query, then that site is going to see mismatched traffic. And if Google is playing with those unstable queries (e.g. to train Rankbrain, to partition certain sites off for testing, etc), then the mismatched traffic will be intermittent. I don't know why people have such an issue accepting this happens.

[sqimul]

Worst Week for me. Organic Traffic is high, around 17% from Last day's Higher Traffic with a Drop of 80% conversions gone. Peoples are here and Gone. I don't think it's Ad blockers, cause I'm using an affiliate banner ( Image Hosted on my own server ) .

[masterjoe]

My patience is wearing thin for Google to sort this out. It's simply beyond my understanding why they continue to try and suck every last dime out of my pocket while I get nothing in return. I turned off my adwords a long time ago and I am using my organic conversions as a testing stick for when I have zombies to not waste a whole bunch of money. So far, they have proven over and over that they simply can't relied on.

Over the last few days I've noticed my bounce rate go up and sessions reduced across the board - which makes it pretty clear to me that Google is having a hard time matching the right traffic to my website. I also ranked #4 for a very highly searched informational search where it was at #17 before that. I haven't targeted it specifically, but it was quite strange to see because there are far more authoritative sites on the subject. It's gone back now, but this goes full circle back to when we were discussing whether informational/transactional searchers may be presented with different results.

[NickMNS]

Here is a theory, maybe Google is not having problem matching user to the sites, to the contrary it has suddenly improved. It is now able to better match the user's intention and not just the keyword, and Google has found that a competitor's site better matches the users intention. The site seeing the zombies continues to receive traffic based strictly on keyword matches for users who's intentions are ambiguous, thus these users are more likely to act like so called zombies. Traffic, doesn't drop because your site gains this "zomby" traffic from your competitor.

When the webmaster checks the rankings they see, that they are still ranking in the same position maybe even higher, that is because the webmaster is checking a specific keyword instead of using an intentful search term or search pattern.

[SEOcomfort]

@NickMNS I agree with you to a certain extent. I guess my only question is if Google has improved matching visitors to sites based on intention, then why the in and out for traffic quality? If Google knows a site matches intent better than another, why would the less get spikes in quality? Wouldn't Google want to send users to the better all the time?

I still think you make a good point and one that appears to not have been brought up.

[NickMNS]

@SEOcomfort, I do not know, I am just putting out a theory for discussion / speculation. The simplistic answer to your question is that the changes may not be fully rolled out, so we are seeing the impact of testing.

Personally I see it more as having to do with randomness. The user that comes to the site with ambiguous intention is not necessarily landing on the wrong result, so the user could well be a target customer or they could just as easily be a zombie, how many zombies vs target customers the site gets is a matter of randomness.

What I am saying is that when Google is unsure of the customers intention G sends that customer to the site, could be good could be bad. But when the customer's intention is clear then they are sent to the competitor. The result is that the competitor receives a consistent stream of converting traffic, possibly even a drop in traffic overall, but consistent traffic. Whereas at the zombie site, the traffic may increase but there is very high variability in the conversion rate.

The one thing one might expect, is to hear some webmasters gloating about how their sites are perfect, and have even improved (ie: the sites that benefited from this supposed change). I haven't read any of that here, possibly last week during the discussion that occurred of at SearchEngineRoundtable. But I am simply speculating.

[samwest]

There ya go...a usually busy Saturday with zero conversions and Adwords turned ON. What a joke.

[masterjoe]

Yep, weekend far below average here. The fact we are seeing such similar patterns tells us that there is something in the works here that Google has not let on yet. I don't know they could be testing this for 6 months and still not have figured it out or become clued in to what they are doing.

[ionguy]

Same here - from Friday conversions dead.
Apr 1 - 9 massive conversions. Since then poor (with few exceptions) and finally this weekend is totally dead.

[glakes]

Conversions on my website are still following the zombie pattern, and Google is inclined to send good traffic only a couple days a week. But I see what may be a pattern in sales, which I posted in the zombie thread. I'm seeing sales spikes in Amazon, eBay and my website - never on the same days. An easy explanation for this would be Google rotating buyer traffic to the different marketplaces, with it weighted heavily towards Amazon (spikes in sales 4 days a week).