Google Updates and SERP Changes - October 2016

[Ukonline1]

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System: The following 2 messages were cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4817284.htm [webmasterworld.com] by robert_charlton - 3:06 am on Oct 1, 2016 (PDT -8)

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Starting to get a bit concerned now. Saw very good improvement in serps on 1st September, then fell back to previous levels/slightly worse on 15th September. Seen slight improvement in one keyword and that's it. GSC shows big spike in pages crawled over last couple of days.

I'm starting to think this is how things are going to remain for me now; and after 2 1/2 years of seriously hard work! I really did expect this Penguin update to be good for us!

[mosxu]

@nick

Are you filtering out ghost traffic in analytics? Are you seeing in server logs many Chinese IPs? The spikes we get in traffic from these locations with us generally is ghost traffic no IPs landing on our servers

[NickMNS]

Yes I am filtering out ghost traffic in GA, if check my stats without the filters there still is no Chinese traffic.

I am not seeing a spike seeing traffic, I am only seeing spike in impressions. Data was updated this morning and for the 21st I am seeing an additional 30% spike of impressions in China and still 0 clicks from search. That is 130 x more impressions from China in the past two days.

[aristotle]

If I understand it, impressions in GSC are just appearances in google's search results. They won't show in your server logs unless somebody clicks them. So Apparently Google is showing links to your pages in its China SERPs, but nobody is clicking them. Or am I confused by what it means?

[NickMNS]

@Aristotle, exactly right.

[mosxu]

@nick

We filter out anybody who we cannot drop a cookie on in analytics, so hardly get any traffic from China, Brazil and so on, before we had high traffic from these locations but actually only one Ip was showing in the server logs. That Ip was sending unlimited requests to our google analytics id and ghost traffic from China was huge but not sure you are experience the same since your server logs are really getting many Ips from China

I am also concerned if our sites have quota imposed imagine how much damage can this ghost traffic do to a site under a quota!

[NickMNS]

@mosxu we are not getting traffic from China. The only thing that is happening is that suddenly we are appearing in the Google search results in China but no clicks, CTR = 0%.

[mosxu]

@nick

Yeah that is even more crazy,

Let's assume you got so much ghost traffic from China that google changed the geolocation of your site and it is now displayed in China

It is just a guess but Google should only look to server IP, tld and country targeted in webmaster tools.

A lot of traffic from a certain region could be subject to spam

[sench]

Nick, what are the actual queries? Have you checked that? Sometimes there can be overlap between your brand word (or some product you offer) with something that is being actually advertised currently in China, some similarly worded product. I'm not imagining this scenario, something very similar happened before for someone in my local industry
Maybe viewing it from a wider perspective like that could help you figure out the cause

[sench]

To get back on topic - I'm seeing everything fluctuatuing a lot, but the fluctuations are taking twice as long (in comparison to the period of Sept 15 to Sept 30), which means I've been getting slow ranking increases for the last week or so, and slow decreases for the week before that. Hopefully that means stabilization

It is a rather competitive market but never before have I seen 8+ change of positions week after week (negative then positive). Turmoil

[highlander888]

Sench

I also noticed a ramp up in the crawl rate and fluctuations in rankings some queries have gone from page #1 to page #10 and others back the other way. Not sure if its another update or just differences between data centers.. Analytics seems stable so not too concerned just yet

[BushieTop]

Guys i have a question about link building that might be effecting our SERP changes.... Do you build links to your http or https (live) version of the site?

[NickMNS]

@sench my site doesn't target any specific keywords, but rather a wide array of long tailed terms. The keywords, listed for China are the same as for any other region.

The impressions have gone down to more normal levels, we are now at only 5 or 6 times the previous average. No increase in clicks either.

[westcoast]

Really weird action over the past 2 days. One of our main keywords is just plummeting, losing 4 spots every 8 hrs or so. Makes no sense to me. At the same time, traffic for the site as a whole is up 10% over last week.

[BushieTop]

@westcoast weird we're seeing the opposite, traffic down, ranking up.

[samwest]

Haven't reported in for a while, ranking up, traffic up but conversions to actual sales is non existent. Obscure blog post pages are getting hits but home page and core product page see very little traffic. Odd.

[MrSavage]

I'm not sure if this is random or if there is something significant going on here. It's almost October 31st and I'm experiencing a lot of ghost traffic. It's ghosts or zombies, I can't quite tell. Is this a some twisted Halloween traffic pattern?

[Robert Charlton]

Do you build links to your http or https (live) version of the site?

BushieTop, there shouldn't be two versions. You should 301 the http version to the https version of the site.

While the old http urls might continue to appear in the index for a while, urls with the https protocol should eventually replace them. The 301 redirect will redirect both your users and search engines to the new https pages.

How you "build" links... vs say "developing" them... is a whole long discussion, which we've had many times in the forum. I've be careful about "building" them.

[Jez123]

I am seeing my results as of this morning as pretty much exactly the same as pre Penguin 4. All lost positions are back and all gained ones have dropped back to where they were.

[BushieTop]

@Rob Charlton sure i understand that and we obviously have that implemented. http > https via 301 - but one of my colleagues raised a good point. we've had our external links fail, because they link to a https version of a site... and we have encouraged citations to the https version of our site since our change. I'm wondering if these links are being accredited and could have been the reason for our drops recently..?

[Robert Charlton]

we've had our external links fail, because they link to a https version of a site

BushieTop - Very rushed thought, and forgive me if this has been covered too, that you need to check your redirects with a server header checker to see if they are in fact correct. The 301s shouldn't take very long to propagate.

If this has been happening for a while, and your inbound links aren't connecting (if I'm understanding you correctly) that would certainly account for your drop, and it's urgent that you get it fixed. I myself wouldn't reverse it or to change the links back. It's something that needs to be fixed.

Perhaps rel=canonical might work as a band-aid with Google, but I certainly wouldn't rely on that. If you're using Apache or IIS, review code at our appropriate forum.

[BushieTop]

The http to https happened months ago, we dont have any http urls in the index anymore and we do self cannonical all https pages. I might not be explaining this properly. We have outbound links going from our site to other sources using https absolute URL on recent posts. I have noticed that these links have failed. Since we have been encouraging sources that link to us, my question is... If webmasters on here have a live https version on their site, with the appropriate redirects etc, are people building to the https version of their site (https://www.examplesite.com)? or do they simply build links to www.examplesite.co.uk?

[highlander888]

If you have a 301 in place then the link value that gets attributed is slightly reduced compared to a direct link, I always remember this from a Matt Cutts youtube vid from years ago. So its best practice to use your https version and if you can gradually contact your existing link owners and inform them of the new https version

Having just a single working version of your domains is always best as even given the 301 dilution at least all link juice goes to same place.

[BushieTop]

@highlander888 yep, i remember the same video, hence the reason i went direct to https. Maybe its a coincidence then. Strange that some of our outbound links would fail going to https version though... i have crawlers flagging them as a 404..........

[glakes]

If you have a 301 in place then the link value that gets attributed is slightly reduced compared to a direct link, I always remember this from a Matt Cutts youtube vid from years ago.

That was years ago and Matt Cutts has been away from Google for a long time, therefore the belief that Pagerank gets diluted from redirects is also dated. In 2010 Google did dilute Pagerank from redirects but it is 2016 and Gary Illyes from Google stated this year that any 30X redirect passes full Pagerank. See [twitter.com...] where Gary Illyes states that 30X redirects don't lose Pagerank and specifically referenced that old/dated Matt Cutts video by stating "I stopped reading when you brought in a years old video to support your argument. Search is literally changing every single day"

[aristotle]

Strange that some of our outbound links would fail going to https version

If the other site is still http, then your outlink will fail because it points to something that doesn't exist.

[Spiekerooger]

Also seeing several pre-P4 serps since Sunday/Monday.

As well as traffic up & rankings down and traffic down & rankings up.

[mboydnv]

Sales are down 75% Since Oct 21 Fri. Ranking have improved with lots of #11 positions. Traffic looks the same, repeating visitors etc, but noone is buying. Never seen anything like this before. Had to turn off ad words, can't afford it anymore.

[Simon_H]

Anyone noticing any massive problems with Google Analytics today? We've been monitoring paid and organic traffic hourly. Paid has been identical to 7 days ago, organic substantially higher. We've seen exactly this since Sunday; looks like we got another massive traffic increase on Sunday 23rd Oct.

But... just refreshed the page and suddenly everything has changed. Paid is down 25% on 7 days ago, organic is now the same as 7 days ago. Before you ask, no, we didn't break anything. GA really has changed its numbers all by itself.

The other interesting thing is that the massive organic increase we've seen from Sunday onwards isn't showing in Search Analytics in Search Console and there is nothing on SEMRush. It's as if GA has just made this up, and Google has just started fixing GA to revert numbers back to the correct amounts. But, to make things even more confusing, on Sunday, our sales were the highest in history and Monday was huge too, which correlates with the high figures in GA. Even though Search Analytics doesn't show this. But to confuse things even more, we do very comprehensive attribution modelling, and the huge increase in sales is predominantly attributed to Google Shopping, not organic, even though it's proportional to the organic increases showing in GA. Aarrghhhh! Is anyone else seeing this kind of mess?

[westcoast]

Something feels like it has rolled back. I reported yesterday that traffic was up and ranks were plummeting from sun to mon. Today ranks are back up where they were a week ago and traffic has dropped to a week ago.

[Ceej]

Something has definitely happened for us (Australia) on the 25th! SEMrush reported a 2.5% overall gain across ~1000 (mainly longtail) keywords. On the 26th, our traffic according to GA has dropped by a third, which I've not seen happen! Obviously various keywords see different volumes, but it's quite the opposite of what I expected after a quite sizeable 2.5% gain the night before.

Someone did mention that Google still had one part to roll out at the end of October, I wonder if we're seeing something else happening here - Visible on Mozcast as well.
CJ