Google Updates and SERP Changes - August 2016

[Jez123]

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System: The following 11 messages were cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4811319.htm [webmasterworld.com] by robert_charlton - 9:11 am on Aug 2, 2016 (PDT -8)

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It seems to me that whatever happened over the weekend / last week has now rolled back. My positions were quite mixed up with some gains and some losses but traffic up overall. And sales were great. I am now seeing the results I have had for months again. It's too soon to tell is sales / conversions are on or off yet. Is anyone else seeing that?

[Martin Ice Web]

This night we got a alltime hit. We now have less than 55% off traffic from google remaining. All zombies, 100% bounce.

I noticed that PLAs display only very expensive resellers. THis might due to the fact that they spend more money. But items that we sell are about 500% above our price!
Who on earth will buy this?

[masterjoe]

Yet another complete zombie day here too. Its strange how things work so well one day then completely dissipate instantly.

[samwest]

Total zombie pattern last few days. Zero conversions on "normal" traffic levels. One thing that really irks me is the same-old-same-old traffic allocation each week. comparing just one day of the week, let's say Friday: week 1 - 727 visits, week 2 - 722 visits, week 3 - 734 visits, week 4 - 726 visits....no kidding! That's a 1% deviation and it's ridiculously unnatural and clear evidence that BankDrain is at work throttling traffic. It's the same with conversions. +/- 2 each week. You can't get unnatural repetition like that without some heavy sophisticated SERP and traffic manipulation.

[masterjoe]

Gotta agree with you there. Had decent traffic numbers, conversions are few and far between... and not only that, they are very small transactions, unlike regular buyers that may purchase multiple items through my websites. I've already started brute forcing some very high rankings and things have improved... but its still nothing compared to just normal traffic. I can't imagine how pissed adwords users must be if they're still getting zombie traffic the majority of the time.

Google's outrageous profit report for last quarter is going to be very difficult to beat, we can probably expect this to happen more and more often until we're all rattling cups for change.

[samwest]

until we're all rattling cups for change.

Already there. What was once a 100k+/year venture is now less that 10k/year. Amazing though Google manages 20%+ improvements each and every quarter. I'm a shareholder and I'm still waiting for a dividend.

[samwest]

Just an odd observation between analytics...I am running GA and PIWIK along with tawk chat agent on a lightly loaded dedicated server. Both tawk and PIWIK agree on current site visitor count yet GA is showing more visits than are actually detected by the other two. I watch it over time to see if it's a delay issue, but it appears GA is padding visits UP...why?

[Wijnand schouten]

Did you alter the piwik code so it bypasses adblock etc. ? A lot of people use blocking technology

[aristotle]

masterjoe wrote:
I've already started brute forcing some very high rankings

How do you "brute force" your site to very high rankings? Is it like a big brute pushing its way to the top?

[glakes]

Agree with the other posters about Google's poor traffic quality this week. Piss poor conversions from Google traffic, though Bing and Yahoo outperformed them on total conversions with just a sliver of Google's total traffic. Amazon sales are very, very strong and eliminate the need for me to waste much time with Google and trying to survive their zombie game. Continued contact with my Adwords account manager is proving to be futile. The recommendation is to bid on more keywords and bid higher. I told the manager to quit spamming me, and I will reach out to them only when I can see proof in organics that they've made some progress on addressing the piss poor traffic quality.

[Simon_H]

Been seeing some very strange SERPs for imdb.com recently from google.co.uk. Search for 'Ron Howard' and result #3 and #4 are both the same page (!) on imdb, the first gb.imdb.com and the second www.imdb.com. The gb subdomain page is canonicalised to the www subdomain page, yet Google is showing them both separately even though they're both exactly the same page. Both pages were last cached a day ago, so this isn't due to some update lag. The same thing happens if you search for 'the secret life of pets'. It's been like this for several weeks now. Anyone else seeing this sort of thing?

[rainborick]

If, as would seem obvious, imdb geo-targeted the 'gb' subdomain while simultaneously using a rel="canonical" tag pointing back to the 'www' subdomain, then they're sending Google some mixed signals that could account for both URLs appearing in the search result. The geo-targeting would say we want the 'gb' subdomain to appear in the results, and the rel="canonical" is saying the opposite. When you add in the enormous PageRank/TrustRank flowing through that site, it all probably trips the mechanisms within the algorithm that indicates a likely webmaster error and causes Google to skip the canonicalization. A dynamically-generated rel="canonical" tag that doesn't accommodate the subdomain could be the culprit here. In any case, I'd guess that the geo-targeting boosts the page from the 'gb' subdomain, and the PageRank gives the 'www' version enough rainking strength to pass through the other filters.

[masterjoe]

Have been seeing this. Forgot what the searches were, but I was getting multiple results for the same article which had different geo tlds. The only thing they had in common were that this was a huge authority site.

Aristotle, yes I am building a bunch of links to all my properties, quality ones and doing a whole lot of tweaking (such as getting rich snippets to show up, putting in more buy buttons everywhere, making it more persuasive overall).

[Simon_H]

@rainborick That's a fair explanation of how Google is getting it wrong, but the duplicate content filter should have kicked in here given they're identical pages. If a page or domain's authority has the ability to override basic filtering such as geo or duplicate content, then that's a serious problem.

[samwest]

This whole Google manipulated landscape is such a joke. A one page article covering a topic in very general terms has extreme long tail reach while an entire site on the topic is no longer anywhere to be found. If I want to rank for a term, I need to write an entire page focusing on that term. Meanwhile, the one page article ranks page one, top 3 for hundreds of terms that are not even on the page. WTF is wrong with this? Zombies continue to prevail. It's like they are doing everything in their power to omit long established sites. I have a friend who runs a Youtube page with travel videos. He releases a new video and withing a few hours he has 30,000 views. Trouble is, they are now beginning to screw with him too by withholding adsense funds. Don't you just love Alphabet.

[masterjoe]

I agree. I have 1 very niche but also extremely targeted website for a broad search term. But its located somewhere on page 6... whereas 500 word articles on random "authority sites" are on page 1 along with a bunch of irrelevant mentions on forums, fb and pinterest. Total zombie week this week, without a push from myself to my email lists and hustling on facebook and tweaking some content I would have been in the negative. Absolutely moronic behavior from Google about this entire issue. They know that 20+ billion dollars came right out of webmasters pockets.

[samwest]

Anyone else noticing a lot of network timeouts when trying to load a page from Google SERPS? Also seeing the same issue on Facebook and sporadically across the web. My connectivity shows no problems, my browsers are clean, yet it almost seems as if someone is intentionally throwing a stick in the spokes to slow things down. Wouldn't surprise me at all.

[masterjoe]

Actually, I noticed this earlier today when I was doing some manual SERP checking and trying to load my site. I thought it was a fluke, but noticed it a few times which is quite concerning. This is the first time I noticed it, and it is a coincidence you just brought it up or I would have just brushed it off. This could be an important observation if anyone else is noticing the same thing. Too early to tell, but it would definitely make a contender for our zombie culprit.

[samwest]

Google could be just serving up a blank page when someone clicks your organic link. Just sits there blank and never completes the transaction. It's been happening a LOT lately. Make a mental note of the number of times it happens to you. Sure would explain how a visitor goes to your site and records zero time on site. Even the most disinterested visitor is going to click one link....unless disinterested visitors are now the rule.

Remember the day when the link you clicked was actually your link, not :

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=7&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwiAnfvCyuTOAhWJHB4KHZkfDLcQFghgMAY&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.yourdomain.com%2F&usg=AFQjCNHLOPQAkQkE9iOw8KxZkSBOO4f3_Q&sig2=pm39Yz8KK1xSGCO7pZA-RA

[glakes]

If I want to rank for a term, I need to write an entire page focusing on that term. Meanwhile, the one page article ranks page one, top 3 for hundreds of terms that are not even on the page. WTF is wrong with this?

I have 1 very niche but also extremely targeted website for a broad search term. But its located somewhere on page 6... whereas 500 word articles on random "authority sites" are on page 1 along with a bunch of irrelevant mentions on forums, fb and pinterest.

Targeted websites are likely more specialized, and more importantly to Google more likely to spend money on Adwords. It's no coincidence that specialized sites are being sent to the back of the organic index in favor of more general and loosely related sites. Not only are the specialized sites more likely to spend on Adwords, but searchers are more likely to visit the random articles and return back to Google to click on an ad. In other words, an attempt is being made to herd us into Adwords, while still satisfying users. But it definitely aint working with me.

Don't you just love Alphabet.

Alpha = Dominant
Bet = Bet
ALPHABET = Dominant Bet

Oddly enough traffic from Google was 20% higher for me today then normal. Not surprisingly conversions were flat and easily outnumbered by Bing with 1/10th the traffic. Now tell me, how can anyone come to the conclusion that Google does not blow chunks when they send ten times the traffic as Bing but less conversions? These days Google traffic converts about as good as popunders did right before the fad wore out. And that's pretty crappy for the people that never used popunders.

[samwest]

Traffic down about 30% down over the weekend in my world. Site must have been clobbered again. Listen Google, I'm NOT buying your ads. I can't afford them anymore. Enjoy the $70,000 I spent on Adwords in the past...when organics were doing fine.

[masterjoe]

Sunday was pretty decent for me traffic wise, conversions would have been the same at a quarter of the traffic though if they weren't complete zombies. I've already deleted my adwords campaigns and am having success with Facebook, I'm sure with a bit more time I can get it to where it needs to be at a small fraction of the cost, which would be a tremendous advantage over the carrot stick chase with adwords.

I would definitely recommend people look into instagram, pinterest and FB marketing because it doesn't look like things will be improving any time soon. Of course, we've all said that were moving on from Google but let's be honest, the transition to a brand new platform is tough so I can understand people wanting this resolved and still trying to figure out what this is about.

But it's been happening since September last year, and all we've seen are more zombies, whereas Googles bottom line continues to skyrocket at an astronomical rate... if this doesn't set off ANY red flags for you, I would be concerned. The fact is, this has been happening for a while, and if you dig up old threads from 2012 and beyond people were saying the exact same things about this type of untargeted tyre kicking traffic. And it still hasn't resolved... our best bet moving forward is to stop spending money on adwords and look to other avenues as soon as possible.

[samwest]

Update: Now the tables have mysteriously turned. Three conversions in the past hour. Sure looks like a different flavor of traffic this morning. Won't last though.

[masterjoe]

Same on my end too. Pure manipulation.

[masterjoe]

Conversions appear to be holding up. But this is merely a perfect example of google knowing exactly what they're doing. Ive made more sales in the last 2 hours than all weekend, which is highly unusual.

[samwest]

Holding up here too...very strange these common denominators.

[samwest]

Now getting traffic floods on one particular page...must have crept onto page 1. Very bouncy tho.

[Nutterum]

Well if you guys were doing OK in the Golden days of organic search, you should perform well on amazon and e-bay? What is so special about your products that only Google can bring relevant leads?

[Martin Ice Web]

Something change at 5 pm yesterday. And it isnīt for good and it sticks until now.
Conversions dropped by 99% from google. Bounce went up to 100%.

Amazon and ebay sales are keeping up.

ecom : germany.

[Wijnand schouten]

Everything still stable and on the rise slowly here in Netherlands for desktop.

The mobile SERP results were fluctuating last 72 hours

( GA still off )

[rustybrick]

Are you all based outside of the US?