Google Updates and SERP Changes - November 2016

[jmorgan]

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System: The following 8 messages were cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4820506.htm [webmasterworld.com] by aakk9999 - 10:16 am on Nov 3, 2016 (gmt 0)

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Something really strange happened yesterday. Analytics showed a complete tank of traffic for a duration of 2 hours between 10pm to 12am Melbourne, Australia time (equivalent I think to 7pm to 9pm EDT).

My revenue dip seems to reflect this. No server outages were reported during this time. Was there some kind of event happening out there, an internet outage or something?

Traffic today so far seems normal.

[imbckagn]

mboydnv I'm with you and came here to see if anyone else is seeing this: Thurs 9:05 MD.

I have a website that is static HTML maybe 20 pages or so. Google has the date "Nov 15, 2013" at the beginning of the meta description in the SERPs for the home page which was about 7 days after the website was created. All rankings except for a few have pretty much disappeared. This is the first time Google ever placed the date in the SERPs as well. This isn't a news website or blog it's a sales page. I don't even have any meta info. for Google to pull that date from.

Website has been updated many times since "Nov 15, 2013". Even just a week ago a large amount of changes were made to the home page and it was cached the same day.

[ionguy]

do you see any changes in gsc? e.g. avg position. just checked gsc and see strange dancing since oct 24; longtail mainly but not only.
anyone?

[Robert Charlton]

Two of my sites which is 10 year old and has always been on top #1 & # 2 spot on Google, just stumbled to # 3 & # 11 this morning.

mikejag, because of the age of the site you specify, I'm wondering whether there is a mobile version, and whether testing of a new mobile-first index might be a factor.

I should add the I'm seeing some similar tiny "shakeups" in a niche I watch, where the consistent #1 site is now sometimes #2, for a range of short tail queries it had previously dominated, and that Google appears to be roating different sites into the slot it had occupied. Different knowledge cards are also being tested in the place of the card this site had monopolized. The knowledge graph results are all paraphrases of one another, albeit this site was the first to the market with in-depth articles for these terms. I'm assuming that precise content is not the factor, but UX aspects might be.

This site is one I'd optimized but which has since changed hands, with new owner not putting in much maintenance or upgrading. It's held top rankings without maintenance for a long time, but conceivably that neglect might now be catching with it.

[mikejag]

Can someone here tell me why website that was penalized in 2012 now emerged and ranking ahead of my website that was ranking on # 1 ?

[glakes]

Traffic predictably dropped on election day (like on Halloween for my demographic) but is still staying oddly lower than usual here... after effects?

I am seeing the hangover effect from this election too. Seems like on election day and beyond people are just holding onto their wallet with a tight fist. Though we are getting closer to the holidays and many consumers may be holding off on purchases in anticipation of Black Friday deals.

[westcoast]

Our traffic is dropping day by day again as it did right after p4. It's almost like the P4 alg was rolled back and is now being applied a second time. Hope our traffic bounces back in 7 days like it did the last time.

[lonewolfseo]

@Lake I am seeing the same for both US ecomm sites I monitor--traffic is down 10-15% and has yet to bounce back since Tuesday

[lucsar]

@imbckagn What you're seeing with the date is what is happening on one of my sites since yesterday (italian time). I found out that the date comes from the date of youtube videos embedded. Have a look and check if you have the same situation. I'm sure with the fact that an old date stamp is a factor that hurt the rankings. I've notice drops in the serps on all the pages that have youtube videos embedded and the date stamped at the beginning of the meta description in the SERPs. I only hope this is a short time bug.

Please let me have your opinion on that.

[mosxu]

the zombies are taking over

[imbckagn]

lucsar very observant and you nailed it.

I do have a Youtube video on the page(s) and that is the date it was published. My rankings started returning today some a little better and some worse. What I did was fetch as Googlebot in WMT and submit to index last night on the pages that were having this problem. Not sure if this helped speed up the recovery/fix but you may want to give it a try. I am still seeing the date stamp on some searches so it hasn't totally reversed. I know there is always some algorithmic changes going on but this seems a little bigger than that.

[mikejag]

I don't know what is happening. I agree with lucscar & Robert Charlton. I'm also seeing a date stamp against both the sites and it says 2013. I'm getting very worried. I do seo myself. Yes my site has responsive and showing mobile speeds around 93 on Google page insights. I see new websites showing before mine, most of these websites I never saw on page 1 & 2. These are websites that were tanked in 2012 due to Penguin update and have DA of no more than 15. Is it possible to share my websites here for someone to review ?

[mikejag]

both my websites have a time stamp of April 5,2013.

[mikejag]

Problems on my started at 8 am cst yesterday, did you'll notice problems around the same time ?

[Ceej]

Mozcast is going off at the moment, reporting 106'.
Whatever it is/was, I have seen a decent increase in both traffic and rankings for an ecomm site here in Aus. (tracking circa 1k keywords)
So far, so good!

[lucsar]

I can confirm that the date stamp taken from embedded youtube videos is having a big impact on the serps. Out of a website with 12k articles those with embedded youtube videos all dropped (some more some less). It must be a bug, otherwise what's the point for google, switching to Vimeo, facebook videos?.

Let's see.

[mikejag]

This is a big relief. How did you find out it's a bug?
I've been so upset for the last few days because it hurts to see rankings fall in spite of sticking to Google guidelines and to see spam ranking ahead of you. I will ask John Mueller about this on Goohle hangout on Nov 15th. Thanks!

[mboydnv]

imbckagn, did you reup the youtube video so a new date could be stamped or did you remove the embed from your post page?

[ichthyous]

Our traffic is dropping day by day again as it did right after p4. It's almost like the P4 alg was rolled back and is now being applied a second time.

What the hell is going on with Google? I saw my traffic more than triple from 11/5-11/9. On 11/10 it maxed out and by 11/11 it crashed totally and went down back to where it started or even lower it seems. My site was completely redesigned and went live at the end of August and has had very low traffic until this surge...I suspect this new P4 penalty is affecting it due to so many redirected pages in total, or whatever other factor google is applying. All I know is that in the four days of normal traffic I suddenly had a huge surge in business as well.

[Dimitri]

I faced similar thing as ichthyous. Excepting that it was around the 15th of October that my traffic tripled , during almost a week, then returned to the "normal". The excess of traffic was from real visitors, not bots, or unrelated things. I don't understand.

[lucsar]

@imbckagn I've made a test on a page. Removed the youtube video embedded (two days ago). Today the page regain all the previews positions on the serps and the data stamp is gone. The other pages with a youtube video embedded remain damaged. It seems a nosense. Let's test more.

[Dimitri]

Sorry, I am a newby and not fluent enough in English, and I don't understand the story about Youtube videos and problems with your position ?

[SnowLeppard]

So many searches now are showing full pages of youtube videos in the results with maybe one other link that seems unrelated to what I am actually searching for.

[SnowLeppard]

It is like the sites I actually want to find have already received their ration of traffic so not showing up for me (except maybe buried deep in the results). If they want more traffic from Google they have to pay. This makes Google less useful for finding the most relevant content.

[Uber_SEO]

My site was slowly removed from the SERPs starting from end of September. On 26th October we saw a partial rollback of whatever was affecting it. Starting Friday (11th) we saw a complete rollback. As mentioned previously, my site isn't something that I thought would be hit by Penguin. So very confusing. Looks to me that Google rolled out some kind of filter (either as part of Penguin or separately) that didn't work as intended, and they've had to roll-back.

[Jez123]

It's almost like they removed a lot of Penguin and made it realtime but then added something else at the same time that looks exactly like Penguin.

[mosxu]

received their ration of traffic ....

but webmasters can still see their rankings and traffic level in analytics is the same or even higher, what is the trick then?

[jambam]

I think that when they released penguin they must have released an algo to boost topic authority or something.. but it hasnt worked and instead of boosting legit sites google is boosting spam affiliate junk sites that just have lots of really long anal articles and the site is just focused on their keywords.

[ionguy]

@mosxu
'ration of traffic'
ie z guys

[mosxu]

@ionguy

yeah where is the garbage coming from?

[ionguy]

it seems so