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.

[Simon_H]

@Dmitri, @Uber_SEO There does seem to be a problem with Google wrongly handling 301s at the moment: [twitter.com ]

[mikeinjersey]

Not quite sure what they did (or I did) , but my traffic came back fully today. seemingly right at midnight too.

Guessing they must be doing on-the-fly tweaks right at midnight. Since it's not the first time i've seen drastic changes from 1 day to the next....starting at midnight EST.

[RedBar]

So, what's just passed through the Googlesphere?

An almost 20 year old niche trade directory site with never one hint of any issue, suddenly has its lowest PVs ever.

It started Thursday, jumped off the cliff Friday and is heading rapidily towards the rocks below with yesterday's PV 41.75% of average.

The site is not responsive, 66% of visitors are by desktop.

Is this a pre-Thanksgiving anomaly or did I miss something?

[reseller]

The site is not responsive, 66% of visitors are by desktop.

Google update of 10th November 2016 could have been some kind of "All-In-One update" which might have negatively affected sites which are not Mobile-friendly!

[SnowMan68]

Google update of 10th November 2016 could have been some kind of "All-In-One update" which might have negatively affected sites which are not Mobile-friendly!

Definitely seems like it was the mobile index test on the 10th with a rollback on the 18th. My bet is that it's coming very soon.

[redgorillas]

We have 3 sites that are using responsive design for last 3 years.
One that was recovering from Penguin last 2 months got hit on November 18 and lost 20% in it's visibility according to Semrush.
Other site that never been hit by Penguin also lost 20% of visibility from November 17 to November 19. Now i can see slight signs of recovery.
I can see same problem for 2 our competitors in same niche. So there should be some other reason for losing ranking 2 days ago. I hope that it's some glitch and ranking will recover soon.

[Lake]

Also down from November 17-18 here on a site that wasn't really impacted by the November 10 update.

[BushieTop]

Desktop SERPs have chyanged dramatically for us this morning and it seems that we are the losers. We have a domain now that has appeared from the second page ranking 5th on the 1st page. Analysis is short and sweet. They have 300 plus links built for that exact term from 4 domains. FML

[Martin Ice Web]

@bushieTop, u are german located, arenīt u?

[ichthyous]

I had a surge of traffic from the 7th-13th, then it slowly deflated right back down to what it was before from the 14th-21st. Very discouraging, but I also have been changing a lot of 301 redirects on my site and I suspect that all the changes have something to do with it.

[BushieTop]

@Martin, no UK based. Automotive vertical.

[Martin Ice Web]

Yesterday was a next big hit in traffic from google. Sales from google Shopping Ads are flat. Big black money eating hole.
Amazon sales skyrocked. Wrong way google, wrong way. This way u push users to amazon not the otherway.

@bushie, sorry, i had something different in my mind.

[Halaspike]

When I fetch as google and submit to index using desktop bot will the mobile smartphone bot also fetch and index the page automatically?

[ionguy]

after 3 good days z guys back; conversions dead
30% drop of traffic

[mosxu]

Wait let's all offer this black Friday our products free, how much do you want bet that the z guys do not want your products even if they are free?

[glakes]

Amazon sales skyrocked. Wrong way google, wrong way. This way u push users to amazon not the otherway.

I saw the same Amazon sales increase substantially as well. But this is somewhat normal around the holidays - Google thinks no other ecommerce sites exist except Amazon and eBay. It might be best to stop or dramatically scale back your shopping campaigns during the holidays, especially this year since Google has become really good at sending mostly deadbeat non-buyers to smaller ecommerce sites. With more of a budget to play with, you can try or increase your spend on Amazon's sponsored ads. From my perspective, the ROI on Amazon's sponsored ads are far better than Adwords.

Overall my Google traffic is solid, but I see the rapid swings in conversions from my site to Amazon. As long as I'm still selling, making a good profit and not pissing away money in Adwords, I'm fine with that.

[Kelowna]

We have many sites both responsive and desktop and have not seen any negative movement across close to 100 sites USA and Canada e-commerce over the last couple months.

Just wanted to throw that out there to the many people that are saying there's been some update. Maybe smart black hat is the way of the future as so-called white hat techniques seem be getting hit.

[renatovieira]

@ionguy - Same here. But much worse :-(

[ionguy]

@renatovieira today our traffic seems to be a little better however conversions are still dead; z guys rulez. how about you?
world ecom nonseasonals

[mboydnv]

Haven't made a sale in 4 days. had to turn off adwords. nothing converts anymore. I sure hope GA isn't what is doing this. We are feeding Google too much info in my opinion.

Wish to heck the world would dump google and use duckduckgo.

[johnhh]

@reseller normally calls it correctly - look for his/her post

[reseller]

@johnhh

Thanks :)

[ionguy]

@mboydnv hope ga isnt what doing this; actually you never know; nobody knows only g
duckduckgo yeah! some wish a peace in the world ; im using duckduckgo very often but its only me; small engine but often gives a lot better results than g

edit: voted your post ;)

[MrOnTheRopes]

@mboydnv - sometimes it's just quiet out there due to people not wanting things right now (time of year, economic worries, etc). Can't always blame Google/Algorithm/etc. My niche has been quiet for a few weeks, but from speaking to people it's niche-wide, and when it's happened in the past it's always picked up again later.
Hope it picks up for you.

[mosxu]

Yeah,
Sometimes demand is weak, hey z guys use code BF50 I hope AI understands the code

[samwest]

sometimes it's just quiet out there due to people not wanting things right now

Sorry, but I just don't buy that at assumption all. Long before all this "traffic shaping" garbage, traffic and conversions flowed naturally. I could set my watch by conversion consistency. Demand was always there. To now attribute these incredibly obvious on / off periods to user demand is just accepting the manipulation. One site just went 3 days without a single conversion, then suddenly without any change in rank or volume, conversions opened up on the hour and even one double header (two conversions withing seconds of each other). This lasted from 8pm CST on 11/21 to 4pm CST 11/23. It's been off since...and now it's Black Friday where we used to absolutely kill it. Historical data does not correlate to what is happening today. It's not demand. it's just fubar.

[ionguy]

@mrontheropes im sorry maybe its natural in your niche; but not at nonseasonals - see, my niche (10+ yr old domain) was always and i mean always hot btween the end of aug and mid of dec and blive me or not 4+ days of delay is something very unnatural.
since last year googlequake im noticing a number of unnatural conversions delays; many of us noticing/ i think i can say that

[Aussy]

The keywords I been tracking for a while have all gone up, and most of the important keywords are now on the 1st page but for some reason my organic search volume per day has gotten even lower? I don't understand....the logic seems wrong, you would think if your keywords that were sitting at page 2 or 3, that moved to page 1 would see more visitor volume.. but nope, very strange.

Anyone else notice this?

[ecommerceprofit]

"no credit history? No problem, Lenders are looking at your phone data" article is, IMO, largely related to all the discussion this past year on traffic shaping.

[reseller]

@samwest

Sorry, but I just don't buy that at assumption all. Long before all this "traffic shaping" garbage, traffic and conversions flowed naturally. I could set my watch by conversion consistency. Demand was always there. To now attribute these incredibly obvious on / off periods to user demand is just accepting the manipulation.

@Aussy

The keywords I been tracking for a while have all gone up, and most of the important keywords are now on the 1st page but for some reason my organic search volume per day has gotten even lower?

Maybe its time we take a fresh look at the issue(s) related to Google traffic and conversions. Maybe we need to forget all about the "Traffic Shaping" and "Google Zombie Traffic" theories which haven't been of much help to resolve the said issue(s).

Maybe what you both have reported are main- or side effects of the way Google Algorithm function in practice. And it seems that the folk of Google like what they see :)

I guess webmasters need to change the way they look at the relation between ranking high on Google and the quantity and quality of organic traffic their sites are receiving from The Almighty Google.

Maybe we need to look at the possibility that Google algorithm updates are taking place as All-In-One updates which cover the whole range of quality signals in successive steps of the same Google algorithm update.

Maybe..................

Thanks for listening and God bless :)