Google Updates and SERP Changes - July 2016

[aristotle]

If you see a big upheaval taking place, especially on multiple sites, then you should report it. Also anything unusual. But minor hourly fluctuations don't have much significance.

[edited by: bakedjake at 2:39 am (utc) on Jul 3, 2016]
[edit reason] Create new July update thread [/edit]

[AMC4x4]

Big change for our corporate website as of June 22nd. Not sure what happened.

Last September (around the 20th), our impressions just dropped on Google. The metrics sites I tried showed our SEO visibility going from a decent number to absolute zero. We had been ranking first or second page for many keywords related to our industry (SAN storage and data migration). I agonized over it, wondering if I had done something. We had no manual penalties. The only thing I could think that might have affected us was some cross-posted blog articles. One site we regularly post slightly altered versions of our own blog posts to had reproduced some of the content and had used it on multiple of their sites. But after consulting with some other SEO experts, we gathered it was just Google doing what Google does.

So fast forward to June 22nd, and all of a sudden, all our impressions are back, and we're ranking again. It has fallen slightly off in the last week, but still fairly decent. It's like everything that had been broken in September was suddenly fixed. Funny thing is, I was on vacation for the past couple weeks and didn't even really touch the site.

I should be happy, but really, I wonder if it could get taken away again?

[azlinda]

The Zombie period for me has been going on since April 7, 2011!

[samwest]

If this traffic were compared to fishing; the lake would be almost completely dried up. Just a few rubber lips left flopping and gasping in the remaining mud.
I'm running ads on both Google AW and Facebook...and nothing is biting because nothing is left to catch....apparently. Gone like FM.

[jcjchung]

We are an ecomm company in Asia and often experience week on week off zombie traffic or flood gate sales traffic. We are one of the top 3 brands online locally with an average conversion rate of 9% across organic/ PPC/ direct/ media links. I did notice a major shift in competitor sites overnight for english search terms which accounts for 50% of traffic, half of the competitors disappeared from first page to second/ third page. Coming on the first page are user non-friendly sites (non ecomm) but are well known brands (brands people would type in the google search engine to find their brick and mortar locations but are non ecomm players). Never seen before and is getting shown on the first 3 pages are sites from UK, UAE, Germany, Switzerland which are completely irrelevant. As for us, sales have come to a halt today without seeing any change in ranking. Any seeing similar?

[shanrocks666]

Any one noticing any fluctuation in ranking . All automation tool like accuranker grump ,Mozcast showing huge fluctuation . All keyword that i track showing little fluctuation , like 2-3 position drop. However overall traffic drop of 10% i can see in last 10 days.

[masterjoe]

Yes, I am noticing some flux in ranking although it could be attributed to some new links that I've acquired across the board. Anyway, Since yesterday I've had nothing but pure zombie traffic. This happened last week too (on wednesday/thursday). After a record breaking week and weekend, sales simply come to almost a complete halt. This week was another record breaker, but since yesterday conversions have all but dropped off on organic as well as paid. I've paused my campaign again, until this zombie traffic shows itself the door.

Another interesting observation - I mentioned last week about a keyword that Google can't decide which page to rank. An informational one (which is most relevant), and a commercial one (which is only somewhat relevant). On zombie days, the commercial page ranks only, but its on page 3. On NON-zombie days, the correct page (which is most relevant) shows on page 1.

It is just a chance observation, but I believe it is another clue as to what's really happening behind this tyre kicking traffic.

[samwest]

As for us, sales have come to a halt today without seeing any change in ranking. Any seeing similar?

Yes, we are seeing the same issue. I am wondering how a site can have good page 1 rankings and yet no traffic? Appears to be an increase in reports of this happening across many sites.

[mosxu]

anyone has any experience launching a new site, if still hit by zombies ?

[samwest]

New site, old site, the traffic landscape is basically the same.

[shanrocks666]

Google Paid Search traffic is completely Zombie traffic, Zombie visit ,browsing several pages and just leaving. This is happening from last 2 weeks and continuing. One of my client also complaining about no conversion at all from google adword.

[samwest]

One more serps note for the day...US based site, yet only UK and Aussy traffic this morning. Haven't had a conversion from these two countries in many months.

[seohhh]

I've been noticing a lot of UK and AU results as well (Ecom, US). You'd figure with geo-location, Google would be able to do a little better job. Most of the UK and AU companies don't even ship to the US and even when they do, why would customers want to pay an exorbitant amount and wait longer? I suppose some of these companies could have warehousing in the US, but I would expect large companies with such capabilities to have secured a .com in addition to their .co.uk or com.au to better serve the US market.

edit: Obviously a different problem than what samwest is seeing but could certainly be related.

[samwest]

Feb 5 2001 - July 15 2016 : I'm calling it. Today my site is officially dead.In the past 72 hours I have lost all traffic, not just Zombie traffic, but ALL traffic. Sure one or two bots come through and some previously paid members, but nothing even slightly viable. The site will never recover. Time to stop kickin this dead horse. It's been fun posting here, but it has been an exercise in venting more than finding any useful information. Have fun folks.

[Jez123]

Sorry to hear that Samwest. What have you traffic levels gone from to nothing over the last 72 hours? And what do you think you SHOULD be / used to be getting per day?

[RedBar]

Non-responsive, spammy, keyword laden sites are ruling my sector, they've just had a boost to completely dominate, fubard Google, fubard.

[samwest]

Jez - From 2000 unique/day to now less than 200 /day. That was since 2010, but in the last 72 hours, went from 200 to 20 /day. They must have released another beast. I went through something like this about a year ago. I decided to start chopping pages by no-indexing them. The site came back slowly, but really tanked in April. Might as well start chopping again. I suspect a hungry Panda is on the loose.

[msenza]

Sorry to hear that samwest... hope you can get back up on your feet...

With all this going on, has anyone noticed a strong change in their rich snippets (stars, reviews, price, etc) ?
My Canadian site went literally +100,000 daily rich result impressions (on a good day) to ~200 rich result impressions per day almost over night (my heart skipped a beat when I saw it happening..).
The drop started on the 22nd of June, and finished on the 28th, where it levels around 0 and stays there..

Google communicated on the fact that they were reviewing their way to enrich descriptions on the SERPs, especially the number of pages that show these results on the SERPs, but this seems to be all across the board for our brand.. Not only in Canada (where it hit the hardest), but Australia, Asian countries, South America etc.
Seems to be directed toward brand name and not each individual domain.. (or even page level..)

Has anyone noticed their enrich snippets just disappear like this ?

On another, animal like note, I share your suspicion Samwest.. But it possibly already came through
While our rich snippets disappeared hit, our lower quality pages also took a strong hit (on the 23rd of June), reducing by at least half the traffic they had.. and this across multiple countries, that aren't on the same databases at all.. (Oceania, Asia, North America)

[Nutterum]

I've seen several local focused websites and listings get abysmal organic traffic as of late due to the heavy ads, maps, knowledge graph, etc. information played above the results. I've seen a spike in "SERPless" above the fold results where one needs a full scroll, especially on smaller screens to be able to get to the organic results. Sad time for search has cometh.

[NSikes]

I'm starting to notice a comeback in non-branded keywords for the my site. I left the website alone after seeing 20-30% organic traffic decrease because I wanted to see if I could gather some more information on any Google algo update. Still not even close to where it was before, but I'm glad I'm seeing a slight rebound. Planning on testing some Panda like changes on a few pages to see what type of impact it has.

My question is...has anyone seen a large increase in June/July? I'm curious to know if any specific industries or niche websites were positively affected. We're a B2B SaaS company, and I noticed that our international rankings actually went up, while our U.S. based traffic took a major hit.

[AMC4x4]

data migration software and services here - all our page rankings were restored after completely being *gone* as of late september 2015. They just completely dropped September 2015. As of June 22nd, they completely re-appeared, as if nothing had happened last September. I don't understand it at all.

[aristotle]

Several members have mentioned that they saw big changes on June 22. Evidently some kind of algorithmic update must have occurred on that day. Maybe one of the mods, or someone else, could start a thread for taking a closer look.

[AMC4x4]

@aristotle - [gsqi.com...]

[masterjoe]

Still seeing some bizarre traffic patterns too. Had a good day in terms of sales but zero sign ups to the email list, as well as a whole bunch of Italian traffic and Indian, I don't know why they think I can answer in their native language either.

[seohhh]

Still seeing a ton of mismatched foreign sites for US searches in G. Sometimes I even see multiple listings for big brand .coms at the top of the SERPs but then G lists even more results from the same brands but shows their .co.uk or other TLDs on page 2 or 3. If domain crowding wasn't already enough of problem, it's now even worse with mismatched TLDs.

I've also found that a few my site's pages aren't in the index at all, but it's not a widespread deindexing problem. They are in the sitemap and if I do a Fetch as Google, the pages show up in the index almost instantaneously. There are over 80,000 pages on the site, so why deindex just a few? Also, why deindex a page that when indexed ranks in the top 20 results? Let's say for the sake of argument that it's low quality that's caused it to be deindexed (it's not technical, I already checked), how is the page still high enough quality to rank top 20 for multiple competitive keywords yet low enough quality to be deindexed?

I almost wonder if the geolocation is affecting what appears to be indexed. If I search from a UK proxy, it shows US results before .co.uk results even when it's the same company. Weird stuff...

[masterjoe]

Complete zombie day here too. Traffic from foreign countries, pages not showing up in results that are relevant to queries. Dont know why Google is sending this traffic since none of my vendors ship to their countries. Unbelievable that this is still an issue for them. I also turned off adwords again and it stays off until I see conversions happening from organic too.

[masterjoe]

Some domain crowding appears to have been fixed a few hours ago, but Im not seeing any results from it. Very low conversions for the amount of traffic, especially considering the weekend was highly profitable. Similar to last week and the week before, this has been a noticeble trend when wed/thurs comes around. Sales and conversions drop off around the same time and same days.

[seosutra]

Is google doing away with Meta Title & Descriptions with the new updates?
For one of our keywords, I am seeing a new listing come up consistently in SERPs sine last few weeks:

Title: XXXXXX
URL: www.XXXXXX.co.uk/
Description: Asian Fashion, Bridalwear, Menswear, Evening Wear.

The page source shows:

<title>XXXXXX</title>
<meta name="keywords" content="Churidar, Lengha, Menswear, XXXXXX's, XXXXXX, Partywear, Sarees"/>
<meta name="description" content="Asian Fashion, Bridalwear, Menswear, Evening Wear"/>

XXXXXX = Brand Name

To my surprise, this particular website is not mobile friendly too.
Maybe they got an inbound link from some famous site?

[edited by: seosutra at 5:49 am (utc) on Jul 20, 2016]

[Vimes]

something i'm seeing more and more regularly on sites that are having large amount of movement in the SERP's is when using the site: operator on the domain name the home pages aren't ranking as the first page when the results are returned.

any one else seeing this, it seems to be coming and going depending on what index you hit, but when hit that indices i am seeing common ranking issues.

Could this be inbound link based filtering, Maybe? i'm still researching that, trying to find common factors across a large enough data set.

Vimes

[glakes]

Today I am seeing Google sending an excessively high number of foreign visitors to my site - all markets that we do not sell in. Conversions are obviously poor thus far and mimics yesterday's abysmal Google traffic. Thankfully this garbage traffic Google has been sending since last year has been replaced by Amazon sales. I'd highly recommend other ecommerce operators who are losing Google's war on small retailers to check out Amazon.

[linkbuildr]

NA Travel Niche went from decent Google traffic to twice as much traffic form Google all 0 seconds on site and everything that comes with that.