Google Updates and SERP Changes - June 2016

[engine]

Continuing from:
Google Updates and SERP Changes - May 2016
https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4802991.htm [webmasterworld.com]



Monday was a public holiday in the U.S. and also Europe, and I know that many kids in Europe are off school this week, probably on vacation with the parents.

Depending upon your sector, you may be busy, or quiet.

Have you seen the branding tests in Google SERPs?

Put in a search and add the brand name. The brand name appears at the end of the entry, slightly clipping the title.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 7:03 pm (utc) on Jun 2, 2016]

[Simon_H]

To be fair, it's great that Barry covers this stuff. He keeps a good eye on what webmasters are talking about and chooses to report it rather than judge it. Just a shame that every article turns into a comment war between the people who want to report what they're seeing/find others who are seeing the same, and the anonymous adversary trolls who sit on the sidelines waiting to belittle/attack anyone who dare suggest something might be happening that they're not aware of.

[ecommerceprofit]

This is interesting from June 2016:

Supreme Court Denies Google’s Appeal Over AdWords Lawsuit

unrelated to this problem but the complaint was that the adwords program may appear on parked domains or 404 type pages.

I may be finally pulling out of my 4 day conversion slump today. Seemed good for a whole month...not perfect but quite good. I am keeping track from now on writing these dates down. When I go into a slump I just turn off my ads...turn ads on and off several times a day as small tests. If it looks like my organic conversions are up then I turn on the ads to see if this truly is a non zombie day. If my cost per conversion is too high I just turn off again.

There may be a lot of webmasters who are doing incredibly well in terms of traffic. However, they may not notice a zombie problem because they are weak in their IT/Marketing department. Say someone like a Sports Authority...who just went BK here in the U.S. or a regional player (with lots of traditional brick and mortar store traffic ) with an Alexa score of less than say 100K. Similarly, there may be some novice webmasters who hit it big by accident 5 years ago and do not really understand e-commerce...they too may not see the zombie problem...

Google benefits from both of these players in the ad game. They just keep paying their adwords bill and hope things get better. Just a theory. I still lean towards Google not understanding any of this mess. If they wanted to take all webmasters down they could just send zombie traffic 100% of the time. I really want to compete on their team against Amazon. They are in many businesses so this is just one front in their ambitions to grow their company. I just hope they wake up or my suspicions will change I guess...

[masterjoe]

Wasn't seeing the issue you guys were having with weird geo-traffic... until last night. Now I have a bunch of comments pending on my site from idiots asking questions in Italian and French. Still very low conversions. I almost thought this issue would have been resolved by now, I guess I was being too positive about what started happening.

[samwest]

Had three solid days of no conversions, a new record...but this afternoon, two sales an hour apart. Off, then ON...now OFF again. I did a couple of Facebook posts and they got about 1000 views and about 100 engaged. That's likely were the conversions came from. From the looks of tonight traffic, its' still deadsville.

All I can say is that these patterns seem to be getting worse. Advice from SEO square table was to keep optimizing, to which I call BS it's pointless. I've been optimizing for 6 years since the MayDay turnaround. Not one iota of improvement in that time.

[Wijnand schouten]

One thing to add here. The country i am in seems to lag behind. When someone here posts spacing, a few days afterwards i see spacing.... Same for the Zombie behavior and ranking / traffic changes. Looks to me like some cycle of a rollout of something, going over and over again.

[Simon_H]

@samwest Do you know what search terms you convert for best? If so, wait for a 'good' period, run those searches and take screen grabs of the first two SERP pages (including the Google Shopping widgets) and also click through to Google Shopping and grab that page too for each of the search terms. Do the same thing for when you're in a particularly 'bad' period. See if there are any major differences in the advertisers on text ads and Shopping. That may suggest the trigger for this is (search term) competitor ad scheduling.

[aristotle]

Most likely the large majority of websites get a lot of stray traffic. This applies to all kinds of sites, not just ecommerce. But I don't see how stray traffic can do any real harm. It's a kind of background noise. My advice is to not pay any attention to it.

[glakes]

Wasn't seeing the issue you guys were having with weird geo-traffic... until last night.

Google sends me a lot of crap traffic, but I see an increase in it the last couple of days too. My last visitor sent by Google was from South Africa. I don't sell or ship outside the USA and Canada, and when people residing in other countries make use of the contact form to ask silly questions I just ignore it. If Google wants to waste their users time by sending them to sites that don't sell or ship to their continent, so be it - I'm not wasting my time responding to people Google should not even be displaying my site to. Yet the poor geo-targeting by Google is another example of how Google is a drain on business profits - whether it be poor conversions from paid ads or by sending unwanted foreign traffic to waste time in responding to.

But yes, there has been a change for the worse in crap foreign traffic from Google over the past couple of days. Maybe it is Rank Brain having another aneurysm or Google trying to generate more worthless clicks on the paid ads they display, who really knows. I do know Amazon is producing a lot of sales for me and Google could not even come close to matching the ROI I get from Amazon because of all the crap traffic Google sends in free and paid ads. My advice to those in ecommerce, with unique products, is to move out of Google and into Amazon. You'll have a lot more money at the end of the day if you do it.

[glakes]

Most likely the large majority of websites get a lot of stray traffic. This applies to all kinds of sites, not just ecommerce. But I don't see how stray traffic can do any real harm. It's a kind of background noise. My advice is to not pay any attention to it.

Stray traffic, which suggests an innocent low percentage of traffic, is one thing. I saw stray traffic for many years prior to September of 2015. Now when the percentage of stray traffic swaps with valid traffic, we get into the zombie zone. Many others running ecommerce sites have experienced the same massive increase in useless traffic from Google. And zombies are pretty much the crap Google has been sending to my site since September of 2015.

Regarding your comment about stray traffic not doing "any real harm" and being just "background noise."

Information sites don't stock inventory, typically have few (if any) employees, don't have a physical location except for their home or a very small office and don't invest much (if anything) in paid advertising so they have little to nothing invested to lose. For the most part, many information websites primarily exist to make some spare change from free traffic that clicks/buys from affiliate links or from Adsense clicks. I think a lot of people that dismiss zombie traffic as noise overlook the large investments ecommerce websites make in comparison to information sites because they just don't know any better.

[aristotle]

glakes -- By "stray' traffic, I meant people that seem to stray in where they don't belong, as several recent posts have mentioned visits from people in countries that the business doesn't ship to. Similarly, an information site about old almost-forgotten backroads in rural Tennessee is likely to get some visitors from all over the world,.

As for "zombie" traffic, I've said in a number of threads that I think it's mis-matched traffic.

[glakes]

Aristotle, the term zombie traffic describes more than mismatched traffic. Zombie traffic may have a mismatched component to it, but the scale of unwanted visitors is likened to zombie herds - where the level of zombies greatly outnumbers legitimate traffic. I see this on an almost daily basis, except for one or two days a week where there is a reprieve. This traffic cycle is nothing I would describe as mismatched traffic but instead a heavily manipulated traffic pattern. To me the terminology mismatched traffic implies some level of innocence through a random and uncoordinated effort on Google's part. Rest assured, the zombie pattern is not a natural occurrence, which I know other Google zombie victims can attest to.

[aristotle]

well glakes -- In order to convince me, you need to provide a motive for why Google would go to all the trouble to do what you're describing

[glakes]

well glakes -- In order to convince me, you need to provide a motive for why Google would go to all the trouble to do what you're describing

I'm sorry if I gave you the impression I was trying to convince you of something. I'm only responding to your comments because they downplay/minimize the impact of zombies on smaller ecommerce retailers and so other current/future Google zombie victims can view the opinions of someone in the same boat. If it's motives you seek to formulate an opinion on zombies, ask John Mueller. I personally don't want to get into a debate about why a publicly traded multinational corporation would make changes within their business to produce more revenue. Every business does this, just some are better positioned to use their political influence to avoid regulatory obstacles and are geographically disbursed in such a way they can take advantage of tax liability optimization.

[masterjoe]

I turned on Adwords. I turned off Adwords. It is still a black hole for good money to go into, all I got in return were a bunch of idiotic questions which were already answered on the page (and even if I answer these low quality visitors, they'll rarely buy anything). I also get a bunch of foreign questions like I am somehow able to answer them in different languages when the articles I write are clearly in English. Ridiculous.

[samwest]

Ok, now that you guys are discussing the WHY of zombie traffic, I have an analogy that I keep posting and taking down because many may think it is silly...but it makes perfect sense and may explain how we got where we are today and also why endless optimization may be pointless. I posted it on SEO RT, but as I was editing it, I may have double posted it and disqus marked it as spam. It may seem obvious, but here goes anyway...again.

Here's an analogy of why continued optimization is pointless and what has happened to Mom & Pop sites: Remember Route 66? Say you owned a hotel on that once popular road. For decades, every night all your rooms were booked and you had to turn away business with the ubiquitous neon NO VACANCY sign. Business was booming! Well along comes the interstate (MayDay?) and the nearest exit is 10 miles away. On the closest interchange, they pop up a big box store and every corner is filled will brand new shiny hotels and fast food joints. Now you're wondering why you can't book a single night. So, you change signage...no joy. Offer free coffee and breakfast, still nothing. Offer a free night’s stay for each night purchased...still nothing. Paint the place, change out the mattresses install new TV's...You could offer entirely free stays and nobody would take you up on it...why? Because first traffic was diverted and second along that new interstate there are preferred, trusted, comfy hotels AND free camping (free blog articles) and no matter what you do, you could never get another customer to stay. Maybe you get an occasional motorcycle group riding through and staying because they like the back roads and old drive up hotels (I'm a biker too, those are my favorite places).
So what are the zombies? Probably just people who took the wrong exit and are trying to find their way back to the highway, or kids on bikes just riding by or solicitors trying to sell me shower curtain rings.
The new rule seems to be get big or get lost; but is that Google's fault or is it pure capitalism? I knew this would come eventually but came here mostly for verification and I got it. Moving forward, I have ideas for ways to fix this, but I'm not sharing that here, let's just say it does not involve "working on optimizing the current site more".

[edited by: samwest at 3:35 am (utc) on Jun 26, 2016]

[ecommerceprofit]

aristotle...I am on the fence if this is intentional or not...in about a month if John Mueller is asked the right questions we will know if Google is serious or not. I wish I was in a position to ask him directly. I would not let him give me an easy answer...I would push him in a respectful way. Anyway, hopefully we will know more soon. It is impossible to fulfill your desire for us to convince you and the others in roundtable. This is a black box - how can we convince anyone if we don't have access to the black box? Why would we reveal our identities? This already happened on roundtable and the brave soul who revealed his identity now regrets it.

Just for the sake of example - say there was a search engine called searchinc. It would not be hard for a high level programmer to insert code into the soup of other code at a massive search engine. Someone who was paid a million a year or someone with the highest level of access on the executive level with programming experience to insert code into the black box. If that one or two people kept their mouth shut no one would be the wiser. If they then wanted to delete to erase evidence they could easily. Now I am in no way saying anyone is doing this but for the sake of example at searchinc someone could do this...there is no regulation on having to show your code. Not saying anything is happening but it could be done.

Here are two examples...there are a ton throughout recorded history. I just need to take the time to think of more. Why did Martha Stewart go to prison over a few 100K on stocks? She was already raking in the money. Why was the Soviet Union invaded in WW2 when there was only so much manpower and supplies? Ego and greed...absolute power corrupts absolutely...not always...but sometimes.

I think Google is great - they helped me build my first business. I'm on their side but I don't trust blindly either.

[Mentat]

Sometime in the last two weeks I've lost again the Rich Snippets on some of my subdomains.

The "funny" thing is that I also got a slight bump in keyword position.

[aristotle]

glakes wrote:
And zombies are pretty much the crap Google has been sending to my site since September of 2015.

In previous threads about zombies, several members have mentioned that this might be about the same time that Google began making Rankbrain an important part of the algorithm. As I understand it, Rankbrain is supposed to steadily improve as it digests more and more data over time. But in the meantime it could be making a lot of mistakes, causing a lot of mis-matched traffic.

This seems like a more plausible explanation to me than the idea that Google is intentionally flooding certain sites with zombie traffic for whatever reason.

[samwest]

Try MayDay Update 2010 - it all started that far back. Maybe it just spread or was fully deployed in Sept. 2015.

[ecommerceprofit]

Exactly. This problem was first documented right here starting in 2010. I would have agreed with aristotle's Rankbrain theory but it does not take into account 2010 and 2012 threads. Take a look here for 2012 thread summary - would have to take some time find 2010 threads:

[webmasterworld.com...]

jan 2011 [webmasterworld.com...]

[samwest]

I have them bookmarked ecomm...

6 years ago, WebmasterWorld user Backdraft7 (my old account) started noticing these on/off patterns shortly after the MayDay update. On that day I had zero conversions for the every first time in over 10 years. Here's one of the first posts: [webmasterworld.com...]

If you scroll back to May 18th 2010, you'll find the (backdraft7) post about zero conversions. [webmasterworld.com...] I frequently quote the 10th of May but I think that's when they (MC) announced MayDay...or something like that. It must have taken a week to matriculate.

On June 7 2010 at 10:35am was the first mentioned the issue of "Zombie" traffic. Page 5 of the June 2010 SERP updates topic : [webmasterworld.com...]

Reading those posts today is very interesting because we are seeing the same issue now spreading to other M&P sites that were previously unaffected...

I really miss tedster's input as he took great interest in investigating and trying to describe this "traffic shaping". phenomenon.

[glakes]

In previous threads about zombies, several members have mentioned that this might be about the same time that Google began making Rankbrain an important part of the algorithm. As I understand it, Rankbrain is supposed to steadily improve as it digests more and more data over time. But in the meantime it could be making a lot of mistakes, causing a lot of mis-matched traffic.

This seems like a more plausible explanation to me than the idea that Google is intentionally flooding certain sites with zombie traffic for whatever reason.

The Rank Brain explanation for zombie traffic was something I at one time seriously thought could have been the problem. But the lack of learning and traffic quality improvement ruled that theory out for me. If anything, the quality of traffic Google is sending now is even worse then it was back in late 2015. If Rank Brain needs 9 months to learn, and still can't figure it out, I think it needs to get unplugged because traffic quality from Google was just fine for a number of YEARS prior to late September 2015. If I had to briefly describe Google's traffic quality today it would be botlike.

Those of us getting herds of zombie traffic from Google would certainly like to know why, and it's entirely possible the reason why I have zombie traffic differs from the reason why others here are experiencing it now and those who fell victims to zombies years ago. Regardless, I have a number of people depending on me to make the right business decisions to stay in business and grow. The right decision for my business was to cut ties with Google. Freeing up all that wasted time and money on Adwords has allowed me to pursue new opportunities, and I must say Amazon has been a blessing thus far. Later this year we will be expanding into other big brand marketplaces like Sears (if they open it back up), Wal-Mart, Home Depot, etc. My goal is to be in front of people searching for my products and the big brand site searches are not broken and useless like Google's is for products. My own website will continue to be updated and modernized because we do get a consistent level of quality traffic from Bing, Yahoo and Facebook. But for many other businesses I can see that Google is pushing them into Adwords, and when that fails they will likely follow the same path as I and expand into the bigger marketplaces and some may convert their ecommerce websites to "where to buy brochure" sites. That's the problem with having a dominant broken or corrupt search monopoly that does not work for paying advertisers.

[Simon_H]

@aristotle Personally, I try to be objective on these things and am certainly no conspiracy theorist. But we've been studying this in detail and gathering data, and we have strong evidence that the paid side of things doesn't work as Google says it does which could result in what people are seeing.

A real specific example... Google claims that for some auctions they enforce a minimum ad rank. But we've found that to be misleading. We have examples of queries in Google Shopping where only a single mismatched product from one store will appear in the Shopping widget on the homepage, but a good match different product from a different store will appear in Shopping itself, i.e. mutually exclusive results. That rubbishes the minimum ad rank claim. What Google appears to be doing is enforcing a minimum *bid* on PLAs shown on the homepage irrespective of QS. The point is it's not in Google's interests to allow a user to easily complete a conversion with minimal clicks if the bid is really low, so Google will intentionally replace good match results with bad match results if it's not making sufficient CPC on the good match results. If you were to plot a graph of number of paid clicks Google forces the user to make to convert vs Google revenue/advertiser charges, there's a sweet spot. Too few low bid clicks means unnecessarily limiting their revenue, whereas too many means the user will abandon their journey due to not finding what they want. So Google appears to manipulate paid results to increase the average number of clicks for users to convert, but not so much that the user will abandon their journey. Based on our findings, if your site happens to get caught in this, you may be omitted from SERPs that have a high likelihood of converting and included in SERPs that are unlikely to convert.

I apologise for posting a paid traffic example on the June organic update, but there is such a huge dependency between organic and paid traffic that changes on paid impacting competitors are often the actual reason why some webmasters believe an organic algo update has happened.

[aristotle]

Okay i'm going to withdraw from this discussion since I don't know much about paid traffic, nor have I given much attention to non-interacting traffic on my own sites. I'll just say that i still believe that most sites get a lot of mis-matched organic traffic, due both to flaws in google's algorithm and also to poor searching abilities of users.

[ecommerceprofit]

Simon - based on what you are saying it seems that Google is "damaging" our businesses. I am not saying that you think there is a problem and I am not saying there is a problem...I'm just saying that there could be a problem. If there is a problem we could all join together under one umbrella. Just offering this up...

I'm still waiting on John Mueller but perhaps we should all be contacting someone high up in Google's executive structure with one representative speaking for us all. Someone with experience in matters like these?

[Simon_H]

@ecommerceprofit I'm still trying to piece everything together and already have several calls in with Google. Another simplified example...

Site A sells red shoes and lists on Google Shopping with high bids, but uses ad scheduling to lower the bid after 10pm. It doesn't rank highly on organic.
Site B sells red *shoelaces* and lists on Google Shopping with high bids.
Site C sells red shoes and is on organic only.

A user searches for red shoes during the day. Google shows Site A in the Shopping widget on the homepage and Site C in organic. Site B isn't shown as they sell shoelaces not shoes, and shoelaces are a poor match. Traffic is hence split between A and C.

A user then searches for red shoes at 11pm. Site A's bids are now very low, so Google won't show them on the Shopping widget on the homepage even though they're a great match. Google doesn't have any other good match results to show yet identifies the search as transactional, so instead shows Site B's shoelaces in the homepage Shopping widget as the shoelaces are a high bid. This is a poor match ('shoes' vs 'shoelaces') but will always get some clicks as it's at the top of the SERPs with a tiny photo and truncated description. Google also shows Site C in organic as before. So now, everything has turned to crap. Site A loses all of its paid traffic even though it's a perfect match and users are likely to convert. Site B suddenly starts getting paid clicks on its shoelaces which will never convert as the user wasn't searching for shoelaces. And Site C will suddenly see a jump in its organic clicks as many users will notice the PLAs in the Shopping widget are poor and so will scroll down to organic.

These are the kind of scenarios I'm investigating.

[ionguy]

"Google is "damaging" our businesses"
@ecommerceproft
i actually wanted to say that. i was wondering last week - should i fire my last four employees and close the door? well, probablyit will happen this week(?). we had never as bad june as on 2016
this weekend the traffic is - or dead (all morning) or visitors comming from middle of africa (?!?). I dont think the zulu tribe wants to order something from me!. dont get me wrong please. i have nothing against the zulu tribe. however our main target is north/south america and europe. crazzyy!

[glakes]

Google claims that for some auctions they enforce a minimum ad rank. But we've found that to be misleading.

And Google also claims to utilize a landing page quality score to determine which paid ads are shown and where they are ranked, which is a flat out lie. I've seen many Amazon paid ads and organic listings that were displayed at the top but their landing pages were not even remotely close to the product being searched for (keywords or close variants not even on the page). Knowing this, it was clear Google does not apply a quality score to Amazon's listings and my best bet was to be on Amazon and not try to get into a bidding war with a large multinational that Google gives landing page quality score exemptions to. The Adwords marketplace is corrupt on many different levels, but does give us the most data where we can see with our own eyes just how corrupt it actually is.

[Simon_H]

@glakes The overall Amazon store will most likely have a superb QS at the account level. That means that even if an individual ad has a dreadful landing page, the overall QS may still be high enough that they can achieve a good position with a low bid.

But, yes, that does mean that if you can find a marketplace with a high account level QS, it can end up cheaper to sell on there than on your own website, even taking into account any commission you may have to pay them.

But that's a subject for another thread...

[NickMNS]

@Simon I was a little skeptical by your first explanation but what you explained with the scenarios sounds plausible. A slight tweak to the algo, changing the set point of the trade-off between price and the relevancy could explain this.

I do still see some issues with this:
First, your scenario occurs in an over simplified universe (obviously for clarity of the explanation), however in the real world there are many more web-sites competing for the top ad positions as well as the top organic positions.

Then there is the other end of the equation, the search terms. For any given website there are a wide variety of search terms that can drive traffic to it. For each website despite potentially being similar, there is different list of search terms that drive traffic.Some of these terms are the same, some are similar but not the same and others are totally different. The mix of sites can appearing for slightly altered search term can also vary greatly.

My biggest qualm with this example is that explain "zombie" traffic for paid traffic, but it suggests for sites getting organic traffic that a worst it is a status quo, and at best there is sharp increase in high quality traffic.

One final issue is user intent, a search for "red shoes" has ambiguous intent. Is there a movie or a song (or some other entity) called "red shoes"? Does the user want information about shoes that are red? Does the user want to buy shoes that are red? So site "A" is targetting "Red Shoes" with an equally ambiguous ad "Best Red Shoes". There you have it a 2/3 probability that the user that clicks you ad isn't looking for what you are offering. Are those Zombies?

The bottom line is that search is so complex, that you could make up any multitudes of plausible scenario and stories that can explain Zombie Traffic but in the end there is no way to conclude anything. The only thing one can conclude, is that if these Zombies have been around since 2010, then there is pretty good chance they are not going away any time soon. We should probably shift our focus to something more proactive like trying to find ways of converting the web-surfing dead.

My understanding of what Zombie Traffic is, is an usual inflow of traffic that has very low to no conversions. The problem I have with this is that this definition is in and of itself vague and ambiguous.