Google Updates and SERP Changes - May 2016

[Robert Charlton]

Continuing from:
Google Updates and SERP Changes - April 2016
https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4798794.htm [webmasterworld.com]


Mod's note: In the April thread, Simon_H did an excellent job of saying something that needed to be said about off-topic discussion in the Google Updates and SERP Changes thread....

Irrespective of the rights and wrongs of Google's business ethics, moaning about it on here is counter-productive. When SER covered zombie traffic recently, there was a backlash of the type "it's just another conspiracy theory from the idiots at WebmasterWorld". That's very difficult to argue against.

If you believe that there's no hope because Google hates you, then there's no point posting on here about it. If you believe that there is hope, then try posting unemotional details of what you're seeing and we can collectively try to work out what is going on.

We try to keep the Updates thread primarily about ranking and traffic changes. The point of the thread is that by comparing changes, we can sometimes see patterns with Google that are not otherwise clear, and give those topics dedicated discussions when a pattern is observed.

[Titi12]

Also thought at Panda or quality
but still no conversions

[Andy Langton]

I'm seeing an interesting test in US results at the moment - grey background for the page, with results in white boxes and no content whatsoever on the right hand side. More interesting still - no ads at all!

[NickMNS]

I'm seeing 5 links on page, first link has site links, page 2 has only 4 links and a bunch of white space at the bottom, Page 3 back to 10 links. On Google.ca.

I have seen this before, about a week ago, but with ads filling the white spaces.

@Andy SearchEngineRoundTable reported seeing the testing your describing yesterday.

[Kirock]

Beginning April 23, I noticed an overnight doubling of pageviews in Analytics. I thought maybe it was a hot article or something, but it has remained at that level for a month now. Oddly, the number of sessions never changed. I'm not really sure what to make of that.

Did anyone see a big change around 4/23? And why would pageviews double while sessions remain flat?

[NickMNS]

I am seeing a gap in the search analytics reports, May 18th is missing. Anybody else seeing this?

[Simon_H]

Yep, GSC is broken yet again. May 18th missing for us too.

[ionguy]

@NickMNS same here. seen that before - we can expect it will be fixed soon

[NickMNS]

@ionguy, It seems that your are psychic, fixed it is!

[jambam]

Looks as though paying bloggers to write disingenuous reviews about their product for a link is the new trend in my niche now and works for the brands.

"All opinions are my own but the site I am linking to seems to have the same keyword rich anchor text from all its reviewers for some odd reason."

[Martin Ice Web]

german serps are full of foreign sites. Even us, uk and in sites show up. Something must be messed up or something is going through.

[glakes]

Martin Ice Web, I am seeing more than the typical amount of foreign traffic on my USA site. A lot of traffic from Bahrain, Japan, etc. When I see these spikes in traffic from regions we don't sell to, it's a reminder that for whatever reason Google just flops on their face when it comes to relevant results. Who knows, maybe Google's index is so heavily manipulated that covering the basics becomes next to impossible.

[renatovieira]

Someone noticed something bizarre on Google today? I say this negatively.

[engine]

Quick analysis:-
Gone are some, not all, of the highly optimized individual pages, and back are the home pages of those sites.
That's good in one respect, but not in another because it means users will have to make more clicks on a site to find the information. So, what it means it is showing highly relevant sites, not necessarily long tail pages.

Mobile is working very much the same, however, i'm seeing more ads on mobile, pushing organic down even further.
Interestingly, i'm seeing the same sites in the mobile vs. desktop SERPs, but the sites are in a slightly different sequence. All are tagged "mobile friendly"

[msenza]

german serps are full of foreign sites. Even us, uk and in sites show up. Something must be messed up or something is going through.

Been seeing the same thing since the 18th in Canada and Australia, TLD's from all over the place but principally Indian websites coming up (as well as Malaysian, Singapore, and as far as United Arab Emirate)
These sites seem to be dropping back down in positions, but were holding 1st positions on very big search queries for the past couple days..

[superclown2]

Someone noticed something bizarre on Google today? I say this negatively.

Yep. Some really unbelievable junk here in the UK, mostly on page 2.

[Martin Ice Web]

@glakes, @msenza,

i have never seen this before. Only constant in this game is amazon. first three slots are amazon pages ( german) then foreign sites mixed with some very unrelated german sites,
Even russian sites show up in german serps!
Maybe this is penguin in a test state?

[aristotle]

Sometimes I get very frustrated trying to find information. I just did some searching with a very specific term looking for specific information. The top search research titles and snippets seemed to indicate that those pages had exactly what I wanted. But all of them turned out to just have general information of no help at all. It's really a bad experience.

[mrengine]

The top search research titles and snippets seemed to indicate that those pages had exactly what I wanted. But all of them turned out to just have general information of no help at all. It's really a bad experience.

This is likely contributing to the low quality traffic Google is sending. It's as if Google is trying to save computing power by not understanding the full context of the page. I've been using Bing for more precise results with a higher degree of success.

[masterjoe]

Seeing garbage traffic come through once again the last 2 days. Even though I am now ranked for a few extremely competitive keywords and traffic has gone up significantly, conversions for whatever reason seem to have dropped off completely. On non zombie days, I get roughly 2x conversions with half the traffic. Might have something to do with links, as I have had to submit quite a few disavows lately thanks to a competitor spamming my site with exact match anchors.

[SEOcomfort]

@masterjoe seeing the same thing (minus the spammer annoyance haha)

[msenza]

@aristotle
Noticed the same thing last night, on a very specific query, title and description bringing forward content that seemed totally related.
I landed on a forum thread on a totally unrelated subject.. so I started snooping around (obviously ^^). Nothing seemed to explain it, nothing even remotely related to the subject on the page, nor the website
Almost dropped it and I notice that one of the members name's was an exact match on my query.
Two posts on a page needed to rank on long tails ?

Maybe this is penguin in a test state?

If it is, we're in for a hell of a ride and some ugly looking serps... but with all this testing going on lately, the huge and sudden changes, dont you think something bigger may be going on @Martin Ice Web ?

[seosutra]

For one of the websites we manage... the # of sessions have been gradually reducing in last few months... since 1st week of March 2016.

Google Analytics > Organic Search reports

Jan 2016 = ~7900 sessions
Feb 2016 = ~7200 sessions
Mar 2016 = ~6700 sessions
Apr 2016 = ~6100 sessions

The stats during the same period last year was an average of around ~8500 sessions.

- 1st thing we checked was if we had any server issues or errors... Everything looks OK.
- We haven't made any changes to the site during this period
- Google Webmasters shows reduction in Pages crawled per day & Kilobytes downloaded per day starting 1st April. This has reduced to almost 40% of what it was. while the
Time spent downloading a page remains constant. No errors or any other alerts reported in GWT.

We had rather stable SERPs for many keywords for the past 3-4 years. And I am wondering what changed in the Google Algo recently?

I will appreciate if anyone can advice on how to go about analyzing this further....

[Martin Ice Web]

msenza,

i donīt know what is up, but it is a slow growing process. Sudden big change and serps seem to get worse every day. I can see the same as u. Two words on a page are enough to match the query. Very disapointing.

IN gernerall i use bing. Only when bing does not give me answers i switch to google but only to see they are way worse now.

[Simon_H]

@seosutra Google Analytics, Acquisition, All Traffic, Source/Medium, Google/Organic. Click 'Other' next to Primary Dimensions, then Acquisition/Landing Page. Enter a date range of the past 4 weeks, then compare with date range in January. You'll see which landing pages have been hit the most. That'll give you a clue as to what's going on.

Also, try using GSC Fetch & Render on a selection of pages just to make sure Google is seeing them (and indexing them) as you do.

[seosutra]

@simon_h : thanks for the reply...

I see the report for 25 days in May compared to same duration in Jan... and it shows:

Sessions -32.43%
4,382 vs 6,485

Homepage has been hit hard with -40% and few other pages too... overall all pages are down.

I tried to fetch and render one such page from GWT and it works fine.

[Shai]

I'm afraid you are going to need someone to look at this properly for you. There are just too many possibilities to gauge without knowing more details.

[seosutra]

@shai - sure I understand...if you where me.. what would be your checklist? I am trying to figure our what could cause such a slide.... a bad backlink maybe? i think it has to be something external only... if it helps.. we are using CloudFlare with Shared SSL.

[samwest]

And I am wondering what changed in the Google Algo recently?

Not sure about your case, but seeing the same. In my case, mostly due to domain crowding pushing me to page two.

Thursday was a record conversion day for the year on low traffic volume. Yesterday followed by a total skunk day. Traffic has suddenly disappeared...no help from the holiday weekend I'm sure.

[renatovieira]

Penguin rolling today?

My Google Real-Time says yes.

Let's wait. I hope it's not just another test.

[samwest]

Some kind of testing happened on my site today. I was watching GART which is usually at 0-5 active users at a time, but one specific blog page focused on a higher volume key phrase suddenly went crazy with a sudden surge of over 120 active users, This went on for about 10 to 20 minutes then fell back to the usual 0-5 volume of traffic. Of course none of it converted and was all coming from distinctly different IP addresses referred by google organic results. I figured it's a test of some kind, but to what end?
This is not the first time it happened, probably happens once every few weeks. Weird.
All conversions shut off on Friday. This dropout was across the board on several different sites.
As noted above, this follows the best converting / low volume traffic day I've had all year.