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]

[RedBar]

My traffic has been all over the place as well, not just the UK.

just because people are tied up arguing about referendum and football?

Both over and done with now!

[engine]

There's something going on because i'm seeing some highly optimised pages doing well, and they don't normally appear in the top of the SERPs I regularly monitor.

Have you looked to see what's ranking right now?

[renatovieira]

I see nothing. rather weak traffic (typical for a Tuesday morning). I noticed some junk sites come up in my main keywords. Otherwise nothing abnormal.

Tourism, USA.

[thedonald123]

Came here to see if anyone is noticing an update.
Just got my ratings rich snippets back in Google SERPS, lost them back in early fall of 2015 along with lots of traffic.
Too early to tell if traffic is increasing.
(Ignore the username, not a political statement and I can't change it)

[glakes]

Came here to see if anyone is noticing an update.

I see nothing but it looks like Glenn Gabe posted some graphs of high traffic sites that have seen substantial traffic changes. The smaller players are buried so far in Google's index that they don't feel many of Google's changes anymore.

[masterjoe]

The only way to counter zombie traffic (at least for now) is to amp up your marketing. Work on your sales writing skills, find more keywords to target, and build links to high traffic keywords to get them ranking. I have caught up SOME of the difference, I have figured that I need roughly 3-4 times the traffic to make up for lost sales thanks to these idiotic updates. I suggest you all do the same. If Goofle does fix this problem then you'll also have significantly more sales than when you started optimizing.

[sabaseo]

Not in my case.
Our brand name is coming before the title tag.

[Martin Ice Web]

Super Zombie Day. Could even offer 10 EURO for 1 EURO. None of google useres would buy it......

[masterjoe]

I've had a reasonably good day today. Although I have been answering a lot of queries as well, which might have something to do with it. Sales are still half of what I would normally consider good, but since the Zombies... well, I've had to lower my standards a little.

[mrengine]

Saw all the noise about rank changes yesterday and decided to restore my Adwords campaigns and spending to pre-zombie budgets. I did this yesterday and the losses are mounting very quickly. If by mid-day sales do not improve, Adwords will be set to post-zombie settings (conservative shopping campaign only). Organic traffic is slightly up, but the lack of sales leaves me unimpressed. Is anyone still seeing keywords bounce around to suggest this update is not over?

[samwest]

After looking at my recent engagement report, which shows and incredible about of visits in the 0-10 second range, I am now wondering if the previously reported non converting, "zombie" traffic surges are designed to lower your overall engagement and thus rank. This would artificially make your site look bad. Why?

Take a look at your engagement report. If you see huge peak at 0-10, then a natural sine wave pattern for the rest (mine peaks at the 61-180 second mark, then we are seeing a similar pattern.

The huge 0-10 volume indicates that we are getting a LOT of poorly targeted visits.

[samwest]

Over the past few weeks I've been A/B testing a $1 signup for $100 worth of product but no conversions whatsoever. This has got to be artificial traffic or the worst visitor targeting scheme ever.

[Rasputin]

@samwest, as I understand it google can't actually measure how long people spent on the last page they visited on your site - so if someone enters your site, looks at the page for 5 minutes, then leaves the site without going to another page google will list the 'time on page' as zero.

"zombie" traffic surges are designed to lower your overall engagement and thus rank. This would artificially make your site look bad.

The idea that google would send traffic surges in order that stats look worse so they can then lower your rankings doesn't make any sense. Why not just lower your rankings without the intermediate stage if they want to? Not to mention that most user engagement factors apparently have no impact on rankings anyway.

[samwest]

Rasputin, ok, let's not take my question of of context OK? I actually said...

I am now wondering if the previously reported non converting, "zombie" traffic surges are designed to lower your overall engagement and thus rank.

Cutting out the first part makes it sound like a statement, rather than the intended rhetorical question.

If they can't figure out how long someone was on a page then what use is it in our stats? Are you absolutely sure this is how it works? I see no other rhyme or reason for these odd "one page and done" surges.

[NickMNS]

0-10 seconds includes all the bounces which are equal to 0. As rasputin stated, if the user has no interactions with the page before clicking back GA is unable to detect how long the user spent time on the page, thus the time reported is 0. So the peak in the 0 - 10 range includes all the traffic that bounced. Now a user that bounced may have stayed on the page and read a full article, so these user could have actually stayed for minutes be time would still be reported in GA as 0.

But all is not lost, if you subtract the number of bounces reported from the number in 0-10 range, then you will see how many users landed, click on a link to another page and then left in 10 seconds or less. My guess is that that number will be very small.

[aristotle]

Sometimes i keep waiting and waiting for the page to load, or even a small part of the page to become visible, but finally run out of patience and close the tab. So that might be measured as a quick bounce.

[Shepherd]

finally run out of patience and close the tab

Just throwing this out there. We have over the past few years had instances were we had trouble accessing our site, painfully slow loading even to the point of timeing out. We would contact the data center where our servers are housed and they could find no issues and they were able to access our site without issue. Long story short, turns out the ISP we were trying to connect with via our computers, an ISP that has over 12.7 million users in the U.S., was throttling traffic trying to access the IPs on our data center. When it would seem like our site/server was having trouble, if we switched ISPs we would have no trouble getting on the site.

So, it could be when someone is seeing zombies, and everything on their site seems fine when they access it from ISPatt, 12.7 million people using ISPtwc got tired of waiting for the site to load because ISPtwc decided to throttle traffic from your server's data center.

And maybe, if there are some real trouble makers in a specific data center, several ISPs may be throttling traffic trying to access that data center.

[ecommerceprofit]

Interesting theory shepherd. Something to think about. I moved from one of those SaaS platforms to an open source cart...so I moved to a different hosting provider in early 2016 and still had zombies. It's possible that the different data centers were seen as trouble makers...but the odds are lower. In addition, many of us were infected in Sept 2015 at the same time so all of our data centers would need to be seen as trouble makers at the same time. However, I would say your theory is still possible.

[Shepherd]

I use the "trouble makers" label loosely. In an ISP's eyes, a data center housing a Netflix regional server might be considered a trouble maker.

Also, could be the data center where one's server is located or the data center where the DNS server is located.

[samwest]

Had "normal" conversion between 1pm and 4pm today...just like old times, but it didn't last.

[mrengine]

Had the new normal bad conversions all day today. No search position changes.

[System]

The following 8 messages were cut out to new thread by robert_charlton. New thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4811319.htm [webmasterworld.com]
2:20 pm on Jul 2, 2016 (PDT -8)

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 4:05 am (utc) on Jul 3, 2016]
[edit reason] Fixed link... [/edit]