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.

[glakes]

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.

This does not overcome the problem with zombies either. Half the top organic listings for my most important keyword all lead to my products in one way or another. Between my website pages, Amazon, Youtube, etc. ranking well one would think I would be raking in the sales from Google and I am not. I have used paid ads to get above these organic listings to direct traffic to my site to overcome the zombie conversion rate of near 0 with no success. The keyword I am talking about has years of proven sales history behind it, regularly converts on Bing and Yahoo, and it is abundantly clear that a high level of manipulation is going on. One year into this zombie problem I will say that whatever hybrid and low key style black hat link building you are doing carries little risk as what Google has done to your business with zombie traffic has already caused you substantial harm. I know it has caused me a lot of harm, and my site is squeaky clean.

[System]

The following message was cut out to new thread by robert_charlton. New thread at: google/4819843.htm [webmasterworld.com]
9:41 am on Sep 26, 2016 (PDT -8)

Mod's note: I've split westcoast's detailed post about problems with his site, which might apply to others, into a new topic...

Problems with ranking and traffic in old established sites
https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4819843.htm [webmasterworld.com]

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 5:56 pm (utc) on Sep 26, 2016]

[masterjoe]

I would have to disagree with you on that one Glakes, if anything, blackhat strategies have helped my website tremendously but then again I use them carefully and in a way that looks natural. I don't leave footprints behind and don't use the same tired strategies others are using like SAPE or high risk links like that. Rather my own network of sites and some well established web 2.0 properties, a few legitimate blog comments, high authority posts with tiered linked structures. All of this has boosted my site among the morons in my niche who thought they could neg SEO me, and I rank above them for a lot of terms. There were very few paid listings in my niches until they realized that they're plans were foiled and I blasted them back with a few million links so they would stop wasting my time.

Anyway, I still rank highly organically, but now they've had to resort to paid ads to compete with me, and now I have to compete with their paid ads... this is one of the few reasons my distrust in Google is beyond repair, because they created this market, and then on top of that when you even do get onto adwords all their AI, rankbrain, enhanced bidding structures and adwords "technology" are all useless jargon because the traffic still sucks, plain and simple. It has improved marginally over the last few days, but it is still nowhere near as good or reliable as it was a few years ago.

[Ukonline1]

Hi,

I stated in an earlier post on this thread that I've seen no improvement from the Penguin 4 rollout as yet, even after 2 years of removing links, disavowing etc etc. Anyway my question is this:

My internal pages (these are the ones I am hoping to see ranking improvements on) nearly all show a google cached dates of 6th September. So is it safe for me to assume that the Penguin rollout will not affect these pages until google re caches them?

[Simon_H]

@Ukonline1 Possibly, but it's not clear. Google certainly needs to index and crawl pages on those sites that link to you before anything can happen. But it would also need to index the pages on your site being linked to, and potentially other pages as well if it's attempting to determine context or anything else. And Google has said even once it's crawled/indexed those pages, there's still some delay, although there's no detail. So, it's all very unclear, but IMO, we still have a very long way to go before we see the full effects of Penguin 4.

[BushieTop]

@UKonline1 the answer to that question is yes. Google have essentially said that the pages need to be indexed first before Penguin will start having an effect. However, i have pages that are exceptionally clean and have been indexed since that haven't moved yet. So i would assume that whilst other pages are being cached, penguin is in a state of gather values/scores rather than showing results.

[Ukonline1]

Thanks for the reply BushieTop, Simon H.

So just to confirm that if google show a cached date of 6th September that that was the last time they were indexed by google.

[highlander888]

I say Google is referring only to the pages the link is on, that is how they explained how the disavow feature worked so as each page is recrawled the page is re-cached and if a link is present its disavow is applied and then the Penguin "score" for your site updates. The calculations of disavow and penguin being done as part of the crawl/indexing process.

My understanding is that indexing your own pages is only important with respect to the links they point to - ie 3rd party sites.

It follows that a way to speed up a recovery would be to "ping" all your backlinks thereby getting Google to recrawl faster

[Simon_H]

@highlander888 I don't think that's quite right. Penguin isn't just determining if the site linking to you is 'bad'. It's looking for over-optimisation on your site, e.g. determining if the anchor is exact match, keyword stuffing, etc. So it theoretically needs to index both the link to your site and your site page, and possibly more as well!

[lightnb]

The new Penguin is also supposed to be more granular, but the old one (I think) hit a broader set of pages and was maybe site wide. But I think, even site wide, it didn't suppress your own brand name or long tail, just the most profitable short tail purchase intent keywords.

Also, if you were hit by an old Penguin that was less granular that has to clear out too somehow. I'm thinking that if the new one is more granular, then it would have to evaluate your whole site before the old site-wide one released, otherwise spammers would shoot to the top as soon as P3 was disabled and stay until P4 got them. So there must be some overlap, and I think Google would err on the side of caution and not release old Penguin to the new one was completely applied (or not) to a given site.

[BushieTop]

@simon_H @highlander888 I actually think you're both right here. Both the referrer and the ultimate desination have to be scored for the points you both outline in order to achieve ranking results that are consistent.

[highlander888]

That does make sense - so logically - ping your backlinks and use the Search Console to request a crawl to your most important pages or up to 500 pages as that's the max if I recall

[masterjoe]

Had a complete zombie day today, ranks seem unaffected by the current penguin release. I was hoping that this zombie rubbish was a side effect of testing or something they were doing with the algo, but now its clear that its a separate issue altogether. Which makes sense considering webmasters were having issues with this in 2011-2012 before penguin too. The closest algo I recall someone mentioning at the time this started occurring was either the mayday update or hummingbird... both of which I am not entirely familiar with.

Anyone else having very quiet sales the past day or so?

[samwest]

Considerable SERP shakeup in my vertical. A lazy competitor who has not updated his site in over 4 years running Worpress 2.X and severely outdated backend scripts had sunk to page 7. Today he is suddenly at the #1 position on page 1. I sense a re-sort is underway and I would expect to see that site fall back eventually...that or something else is severely broken...again.

[highlander888]

I am seeing similar changes in the UK SERPS big jumps up and down for one of my sites, seemed to start first thing this morning.

[mboydnv]

OMG! No sales in 4 days! Same traffic numbers and increased rankings too. My affiliate is also in the top 10 and no sales. I really believe Google is ripping us off. Unless you pay big money for your ads each month you wont get qualified organic traffic. I'm not even gonna talk about SEO/backlink profile, mobile friendly, SSL etc. My business is 12 years old and I have better SEO/links and all the hocus pocus than the competition who sits at #1 and #2 every month. Money begets money. Once you have made a pile of cash from being at the top, then you can afford $50K (yes $50K) a month is what they pay. They human filtered my business to the second page and we are losing every day. Google wont admit it. But no matter what we do, add 100,000 words of fresh original content, quality links on USA today, we never move pass #11 in rankings. I believe the same is happening with facebook ads. Crappy zombie traffic are clicking on the ads. I wouldn't be surprised if Google has boiler rooms set up in India for them to click on ads all day. This is terrible. Goodbye American dream. Small business has NO chance in being at the top.

[wadsman]

Hi Guys,

On the lighter part of the story. We might all know that the Penguin 4.0 has been released a week ago and it's rolling out since then but the recent penguin update is actually not as vital as what they have launched from 2014. All of the penalties from Penguin 3.0 has been removed and starting to recover from time to time. Now the newest version of Penguin is not as brutal as we are expected.

- The webspam algorithm only "demotes website with spam" and :devalued the spammy link profile of the website"
- Google still considering using "disavow file" to identity spammy links in website
- Penguin 4.0, no longer penalizes the website or a certain page but it "ignores/devalues links and thus rankings are adjusted.

[masterjoe]

I have had yet another complete zombie day, yesterday actually turned out to be very good in terms of traffic and conversions... today, absolutely nothing is happening.

[liamkk]

Interesting last week.

We saw a gradual decline (4-5%) the week before but after ince the Pengiun roll out, traffic started going up slowly and it has really sky-rocketed in last 48 hours. Today's traffic is around 30% higher than same day last week. Conversions are way higher - may be 50% off up.

Most of the growth is coming from high traffic keywords where some competitors have been completely wiped out.

It seems like Google now cares a lot about topic relevancy. For example, if you were a general blog getting traffic for an SEO related post, you probably won't see that traffic for very long. Sites with clearly defined niches and topical links is the way to go in my opinion but lets see and wait for the roll out to get a bit old.

[BushieTop]

We're jumping all over the place at the minute but we are still far away from where we were back in June. Unsurprisingly, i cant believe that we have been stung by penguin, our profile is too clean, especially when you compare it to our competitors. The #1 result for our big £££ term in our verticle is built on spam, but with all you guys noting changes, it makes be dubious as to whether they will ever get caught out..

[jambam]

And the winner yet again of this stupid update is Amazon (must be all the fake reviews and affilate links)! Whats the point of google when you have mutliple amazon ads everywhere and then 4 amazon listings in a row. Even for non product searches you can easily guess what top 100 sites are going to be on top. Google is absolute rubbish.

[robster124]

Am glad someone has picked up on the domain crowding issue. I am seeing 8, yes 8, tripadvisor results in a row in the niche we compete in. In others I am seeing facebook taking 4 or 5 slots for the same result (the same facebook page) but in different languages. I fail to see how providing ukrainian results in cyrillic for a specific UK based search is anything other than a mistake somewhere in the algo.

[Simon_H]

Google is literally right in the middle of turning Penguin 3 off and turning Penguin 4 on. Results are potentially going to be very dodgy for a good while until this has settled.

[highlander888]

Simon H - agree with that I am seeing swings up and down - all over the place, hard to say what where its going to settle.

[samwest]

Seeing 4 or 5 pinterest results in the top 5 of nearly every query in my vertical. Also seeing looong pages using consecutive content (articles) and it's a trick that is ranking high in semantic results across all long tail queries. It is truly a mess. Maybe they are trying to see if poor page one results and crowding will push users to explore pages 2 and beyond. Great UE....not.

[BushieTop]

@simon_h and @highlander888 - it's how long this all takes though. That's the issue.

[BushieTop]

What is everyone's thoughts on the disavow file and its effects with Penguin? Heard some really conflicting reports.

[samwest]

it's how long this all takes though. That's the issue.

Unfortunately it's an issue nobody has any control over. Like everything else, just ride it out.

[lightnb]

Today was a skunk day for us. Just one order from Google organic. Hopefully this gets sorted soon.

[masterjoe]

Yep, been having terrible conversions on adwords and organic results too. I know that some keywords would typically convert, so I can tell when I'm being with bogus zombie traffic... which is all it has been for the last few days.