Google Updates and SERP Changes - September 2016

[NickMNS]

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System: The following 4 messages were cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4814310.htm [webmasterworld.com] by robert_charlton - 3:01 pm on Sep 1, 2016 (PDT -8)

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I agree with you that features such keyword, location, browser type and so on (not set) may well be someone blocking the info for privacy reasons.But @ionguy my understanding is that whenever the hostname is set to anything other than your domain name then it must be a bot, this includes (not set). In so far as hostname specifically is concerned (not set) is always a bot and not a privacy issue. Filtering out the hostname (not set)s and other foreign domain from your data is essential to getting accurate stats.

This is applies to piwik and other analytics tools as much as it does to GA.

[renatovieira]

hummmmm.... This date for the new Penguin, seem coherent. After all, fall starts tomorrow... ;-)

[highlander888]

Quite a few of us around here could use a break - so lets hope Penguin does arrive...

[Shepherd]

The Minnesota Zoo will be feeding the Penguins on 9-23-2016 at 10:00 and 2:30...

[mnzoo.org...]


Where did this whole 9-23-2016 prediction come from?

[NickMNS]

This is a great way to learn more about these active animals and ask our zookeepers any questions you may have.

I guess this will be like the Webmaster Central Office Hours Hangouts!

[hopepro]

Update for today: I see some huge changes in my position and I found this out:

1. In mobile search, one of my kw rank on the 1st and now there's an image of the product beside the serp (only with my site) which I have never seen this before

2. Traffic seems to be very fluctuated, one day high, one day medium, one day low. But the clicks for targeted products up 70% and climbing (not sure if this was caused by the bot)

3. Conversion down to about 40%

4. in webmaster tools, starting from 18 Sep, I see high crawls up until today

5. The avg position dropped during last 2 weeks but this week it started to climb (from 7.9 to 7.1)

More info about the site

I"m using wordpress as main traffic source, framework for conversion page. the site rank in 35th in my country. Shopping site, comparison site, promotional news site all in one domain.

[glakes]

@hopepro

Thumbnails began showing up (again) on mobile in August for some queries (likely Google was testing). Google tried this a couple years back and the thumbs never made it to the mainstream.

Thanks for sharing your info. I see the same fluctuations in traffic as you describe, though my conversions have been in the dumps shortly after 9/1. It looks like the SERPS are still in a state of flux and hopefully your site will rebound when it settles down.

[Shaddows]

Penguin has been updated and is now realtime
[webmasters.googleblog.com...]

[Shepherd]

Gona wait to see what shakes out but so far it is pretty funny. Have not engaged in any link building for a site since 2012, been slowly creeping back up to page 2 for keyword, this morning back down to page 9.

[Jez123]

So, it looks like it ACTUALLY rolled out some time ago and they are just now announcing it.

[Shepherd]

And now back to page 2... amazing how much flux there is from search to search.

[BushieTop]

What the hell, I agree, that does sound like it rolled out some time ago. So this is it now.... if it is it hasnt worked...

[lightnb]

I imagine that it will take some time before people notice changes as it rolls out. Just because it's "real-time" doesn't mean that changes are instant. There's probably some deliberate delays built in to obfuscate how it works, as well as technical limitations to how many sites can be "Penguin scanned" at a time. Old Penguin updates took months to roll out, so I expect there will be flux for a while.

I'm watching traffic now and it's dead as a doorknob.

I also think the "granularity" they are referring to is a quashing of commercial word rankings when the searcher has commercial intent. That seems to make the most sense since that's the basic premise of "Zombie theory" which started when Penguin 4 started getting tested, and makes the most sense from Google's standpoint, since spamers only make money on commercial keywords, but Google makes money on non-commercial traffic. ie. Google wants to show your company blog when the searcher isn't going to buy because it helps Google, so punishing an entire site (when the content is good/relevant) actually hurts Google's own credibility.

But then again, I'm pretty sure that old Penguin worked that way too. Our commercial category pages are ranking unnaturally low (ie. 40 or 70 when there are only two competitors), but blog posts and specific product pages rank first page.

[renatovieira]

My four best keywords, almost in 1st place on the first page. Better than never.

My traffic now is ZERO!

Things are very hooooot in the core. Penguin set fire! :-)

Tourism, USA

[highlander888]

Interesting I've seen slow improvements again for last 3 days - moving up 2 positions each day. I expected a more dramatic jump, but as others are saying its probably slowly rolling out.

Previously the disavowed tool applied only as the page the link was on was recrawled, so if this now applies to penguin also it makes sense that they are applying fresh calculations as crawling proceeds rather that uploading a new dataset. If that is the case it will take a whole crawl cycle to fully implement.

Hopefully I'll recover now even if it takes a few weeks. :-)

[BushieTop]

@lightnb I dont disagree, its just i've heard reports of others seeing an instant hit. I do believe it will be quicker than months, I'd probably anticipate to have a good idea of how we have performed in two weeks.

Would assume, US first followed by the ROTW

[glakes]

I also think the "granularity" they are referring to is a quashing of commercial word rankings when the searcher has commercial intent. That seems to make the most sense since that's the basic premise of "Zombie theory" which started when Penguin 4 started getting tested, and makes the most sense from Google's standpoint, since spamers only make money on commercial keywords, but Google makes money on non-commercial traffic. ie. Google wants to show your company blog when the searcher isn't going to buy because it helps Google, so punishing an entire site (when the content is good/relevant) actually hurts Google's own credibility.

For me Google organic and paid has been completely dead since the beginning of this month (zombies the year prior), and I doubt this penguin will change that a bit because SERP positions have not changed. If you are seeing a lot of blog posts showing up for commercial queries, maybe focus on getting those bloggers to talk about you and your products. Even if Google is slapping small retailers with a small e-biz penalty, at least you may get some sales from referral traffic. And keep on building relationships in the same manner. As long as my fax machine can still accept incoming POs, I know that's one area it will be hard for Google to destroy in their quest to make a buck.

[masterjoe]

This month has also seen the lowest traffic quality I have had ever since Zombies went to town on good websites that were profitable. Then I even caved into their most likely reason for all this in the first place, Adwords... and it still simply failed to convert. I am not a lazy marketer, I now split test multiple headlines and different content to see which one gets the most conversions. It failed too.

Only the last 2 days have sales even somewhat returned at random intervals... I suspect it is Penguin at the moment, because nobody tracks their keywords around the clock (unless somebody knows of a service that might do this on the hour or other set time to see what happens when we're not watching). It could explain some things.

I have also been doing some search for products over the last few hours, and I am getting much more informational pages ranking than commercial. No vendors for products, but blog posts, old articles, and other information shows up but very few commercial websites.

[jimfgodoy]

I am seeing big changes in snack packs right now . I do not know if everyone is seeing , big shake up going on right now

[Ukonline1]

@BushieTop

We're based in the U.K. Had exact same experience as BushieTop... sept 1st saw big improvement in rankings then on sept 15th all ranking to previous or even worse. Not seen any improvement at all since Penguin rollout so far. Obviously early days and some of my internal pages showing cached date of sept 6th so I'm going to ramp up googlebot spidering in GSC and fetch pages.

I'm hoping I've not seen any improvement because :

1. Early days of rollout. Maybe not reached UK yet or even my sector.

2. Google hasn't reindexed my pages yet, even homepage showing cached date of Sept 22nd.

If anyone has any similar experiences please let me know.

Also has anybody in the U.K. seen any improvement since Sept 23rd when Penguin started to rollout?

[masterjoe]

I seem to be completely unaffected by this Penguin rollout, if anything, some of my traffic has been converting a bit better than it has over the last few weeks (which was on the verge of zero), but traffic seems to be a bit higher quality the last few days. If there are any zombie victims please chime in with any changes you are seeing and particularly conversions.

Also, my CPC has mysteriously gone up on the few test keywords I am running for no obvious reason. I am fairly experienced with adwords, although I'm no expert. No additional competition, just raised CPC's.

[highlander888]

One of my sites in the hosting/domain sector UK has been seeing steady daily rises starting wed last week. So I think it started to impact on UK result last week - other results I watch seem unaffected so far.

[renatovieira]

About the Penguin 4:

This update started rolling on January 10, 2016 and was only finalized on September 1~3, 2016.

I think this official Google announcement is only for webmasters stop asking when the damn update will happen.

After the update announcement, everything is very quiet. That is, this update was rolling a long time.

Just an opinion.

[javadth]

what do u advice ?

start with new domain or recovery penalty ?

[westcoast]

We are a large, 20 year old site. Our traffic is down noticeably over the past 48 hours. Saturday's traffic was the lowest in probably 15 years for a Saturday, with a 5% drop from last Saturday. It appears to be largely side wide.

It's extremely frustrating, because Google seems to just apply site-wide after site-wide algorithmic penalties on us. Our SERPs have been sinking for many years now (in Google, and only Google).

We have never had a manual action, never used link farms, have watched and followed M Cutt's videos, and have followed Google's guidelines as closely as possible. I have followed this forum, and attempted to appease Google in every way for a long time now.

The most vexing part is that Bing and Yahoo still keep us up at the very top of the SERPs where (we feel) we truly belong. They still love us.

It's just Google that seems to have a vendetta against our site, and it appears to get worse and worse with every passing year. If they have a grudge against our site, I wish they'd explain WHY. We have a ton of backlinks (all organically acquired -- we have never spent a penny on advertising, let alone buying links), and most of the "authority" ranking sites rank us higher than competitors in the SERPs. Yet, we are constantly dropping.

I'm actually starting to think that Google has problems dealing with long-lived sites with ours, and is getting confused by legacy data, ancient 301s, etc. A few weeks ago 100,000 legacy 404s popped up in Webmaster Tools. Links that haven't been used in years.

Anyway, I'm at a loss as to what to do at this point.

[highlander888]

westcoast - if you suffered from a drop following the penguin update then that suggests your links are not of the profile that google expects. I would review them all and disavow any that appear toxic - given Penguin is now real time you can expect to recover promptly.

[lightnb]

@westcoast: what you described is exactly what we're seeing. We're an e-commerce with over 20 years online, and we always follow the rules and get no where. Every time we do what Google says, Google traffic drops. Every time we do nothing, Google traffic drop.

The problem (probably) isn't your site but with Google. We switched to https everywhere, invested in full responsive design, got our pages to load in 55ms and made a much better looking and higher converting design. Conversion rate doubled, Bing traffic doubled, Google traffic plummeted the day after the new site was launched by 45%. And for over a year since that launch our Google traffic is consistently down 45% month over month. There were no technical mistakes in the implementation.

Before that, we updated all of our site descriptions. A real person actually TRIED the thousands of items we carry (this process took years!) and we hand wrote thousands of unique, detailed and useful descriptions. No improvement.

We had tons of spammy links pointed at us by someone. It's obviously spam and it's still constantly being built, about five links per week. We went through Majestic, hrefs, and the GWMT reports and disavowed all the junk in May. Every week, I add and update new disavow files. No change in ranking until this September, where, our actual keyword positions have not changed, but converting traffic seems to be turned off. We should have recovered.

But then, all of the other improvements we've done at Google's behest over the years should have gained us something too. We're the best looking and easiest to use site in our niche. We meet all of Google's guidelines. There are only five competitors (and that includes "no-service Amazon" and "we-don't-actually-carry-it Walmart"), so we should be, at the very least, #5. But for many of these words though, we're in the #40 - #70 range. And if you go, page by page through Google results, you will see that after page one, it's just irrelevant junk for 6 pages, then finally there we are. For example, if our page was "Tennis Rackets" and someone typed in "Tennis Rackets", we would be #70 and you would get gems like, "kitten humps tennis racket" (youtube), and random news articles about Clinton and Trump and pretty much 50 random pages from Google's index in between the real competitors and us.

So at this point, I'm calling for a vote of no confidence in Google. They are either incompetent or malignant and it doesn't really matter which. I'm going to give Penguin/Google a few more weeks to see if ANYONE is recovering, and if not, then I'm going black hat because it works. Totally serious by the way. Why would I follow Google's guidelines to avoid a penalty when following their guidelines results in nothing at best and a demotion at worst? Our competitor makes over $50mil a year running a site that's built on paid links, do-follow affiliates and spam. They rank #1 or #2 for almost everything.

[masterjoe]

lightnb, I build backlinks from PBN's but also mix it up with paid links on high authority sites and so far my websites appear to have survived the latest penguin updates. Using blackhat smartly can go a long way and I started doing this once I started having huge zombie issues.

While it hasn't completely cleared up, things seem to have improved over the last few days... however, it is not a good feeling being on the verge of a switch being pulled which shuts off all the converting traffic. That's the sad part about all this, even if Google's main aim was to get more people onto using pad methods, it's still a crapshoot 6/7 days of the week, and I'm still seeing these bizarre patterns where nothing appears to be happening on the site and then suddenly have a huge string of conversions all at once.

Even high organic rankings are meaningless unless you have plenty of them, but with 4 ads dumped on top of all that work its difficult to put any more faith in Google.

[Robert Charlton]

A few weeks ago 100,000 legacy 404s popped up in Webmaster Tools. Links that haven't been used in years.

westcoast, welcome to the forums. Regarding the 404 errors, those shouldn't be of concern. You've posted also in our current legacy crawl errors discussion, and I've posted a fairly detailed response to those issues only, which I think might help reduce your cognitive load regarding the number of urls. ;)

Massive jumps in GSC legacy crawl errors - who sees this?
9/8/2016
https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4817870.htm [webmasterworld.com]

If those 404s are legacy errors, I doubt that they're connected with your sitewide drop. I'm assuming that much else, though, has gotten changed or recalibrated in the past month.

We don't do site reviews in public areas on WebmasterWorld. I'd give it a bit more time, start looking at your analytics, etc, and look carefully at what the issues might be. When you've got specific questions that can be exemplified without leading us to your site, by all means post about it.

PS: Mod's note regarding the above: Westcoast, when I suggest posting about your site, I should have added, and please post in a separate thread. Long posts about individual site problems throw this discussion off topic, and make individual posts hard to follow. Thanks.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 5:37 pm (utc) on Sep 26, 2016]

[BushieTop]

@UKonline1 It is kind of a relief to have people in the same boat.

I not ready to believe that Penguin has fully rolled out yet. Still seeing the same results. EMAT rules, PBNs work fine, etc.

If things dont take a noticeable change in the next couple of months, I'll have to seriously think about reevaluating my strategy....

[30K_a_month]

westcoast "never used link farms, have watched and followed M Cutt's videos, and have followed Google's guidelines as closely as possible. I have followed this forum, and attempted to appease Google in every way for a long time now"

Sorry I am not being pedantic here, but there is your problem, this is why you are sinking.