Google Updates and SERP Changes - January 2017

Have been getting zombies since Monday. Only made enough sales for 1 day the past 4 days. It seems their brief Christmas spirit has come to an end and we're all back to square 1 with this irritating issue.

@masterjoe
@renatovieira
@mosxu
@BushieTop
@samwest

I understand that your websites are attractive to non-productive Google organic traffic (Zombies). Has it been like that for months or for years?

The bad news is most websites which are attractive to non-productive Google organic traffic (Zombies) might stay like that for ever. Do you have any plan-B ready to at least try to escape the Zombies?

By now we should realize without any doubt that keep posting sad Zombies stories on this thread for months or for years wouldn't bring back your affected websites into business again, unfortunately :(

@reseller there is only one good plan-b; stop rely on google traffic; stop read sad stories; focus on your business like there was no google ;) 100% works..trust me

@reseller, yes there are some plans for new websites. However, they will be targeted at getting buyers from FB, Pinterest, and Instagram. I have already made a beginning. If Google wants to bend over for Amazon and send crap traffic to the rest of us then we don't really have another choice. I am also doing a lot of brute force stuff, simply targeting more keywords and building links to move my ranks a bit while it still works.

there is only one good plan-b; stop rely on google traffic; stop read sad stories; focus on your business like there was no google ;) 100% works..trust me

I subscribe to this model. However, it took me wasting a lot of time and money trying to fix what was not broke. Ultimately I came to the conclusion in early 2016 that there is no correlation between good ranks in Google and conversions nor high bids/landing page quality in Adwords and conversions. I've been doing fine in Amazon and the other search engines which has freed up time to focus on new product development. And though Google is doing its best to suppress small businesses in their search results, our customers are still finding us elsewhere. Instead of chasing our tails as Google wants us to do, while draining our wallets and time, it's best if our efforts are focused on tasks that provide a stable and positive ROI.

I have the impression that websites attracting non-productive Google organic traffic (Zombies) are mostly USA websites or websites targeting USA. I might be wrong, of course.

And though Google is doing its best to suppress small businesses in their search results, our customers are still finding us elsewhere. Instead of chasing our tails as Google wants us to do, while draining our wallets and time, it's best if our efforts are focused on tasks that provide a stable and positive ROI.

I agree with this 100%, however I have tried many forms of marketing and unfortunately targeted search from Google is still by far the best ROI. This past holiday I tried Facebook ads...it brought a good deal of traffic, but no actual sales. The bottom line is the best type of traffic is traffic that is actively looking for your product, and not marketing to people that may or may not be interested at all. For my business, which is a type of luxury brand sold at high prices, the only other viable alternative is selling through bricks and mortar retail. I am in the most expensive retail market in the US, so I won't be opening my own retail space any time soon.

I have the impression that websites attracting non-productive Google organic traffic (Zombies) are mostly USA websites or websites targeting USA.

That is somewhat true, but I have clients sites in the USA that "occasionally" do great. I also know of several UK and Germany based sites that have died the same slow death.

The general consensus of the last few comments is very correct and should be encouraging. Concentrate on all things OTHER than Google. Until they decide to play fair, start using other services and traffic sources. I think sharing these services and sources might help the community at large and could be a good new topic of discussion. I think everyone has just about had enough of the Google games. It's been days without a conversion. I suspect I know why but will refrain from sharing it here.

@reseller

You do not understand, zombies make up at least 50% of any website traffic including yours. I promise you if you give up google analytics and use some proper analytics you will see the difference.

Try to use segmentation and offer zombies gold they will not take it...

That is somewhat true, but I have clients sites in the USA that "occasionally" do great. I also know of several UK and Germany based sites that have died the same slow death.

As such, I wonder whether its safe to assume that majority of websites which are attracting non-productive Google organic traffic (Zombies) are USA websites!

@mosxu

I'm listening :)

Not only USA websites,

@mosxu

I'm wondering whether its safe to assume that majority of websites which are attracting non-productive Google organic traffic (Zombies) are USA websites!

Not at all, UK, Germany, Holland and USA as well

I'm in meltdown again. We've seen generic drops again and we do not use interstitials whatsoever. Whats more puzzling is that one of our competitors does... AND the drops are on Desktop not Mobile. I'm beyond confused, looking for answers. I'm afraid im seeking answers that aren't there.

@BushieTop a decrease of traffic might not necessarily be linked to a single change in the Google's algorithm. There can be plenty of factors.

@Dimitri, granted. However it coincides with Googles announcement and im not talking traffic, i'm talking rank.

I'm under the assumption that when they released this update, they did so targeting other factors than just interstitials. Whatever it was hurt us to the tune of about 30% down!

It might have nothing to do, but verify that your host is not facing network issue.

10 years ago, i was with a host with which all was working fine, then I faced a 20% decrease of trafic from one day to another without "reason". And after weeks of investigations, I discovered that it was my host which had network "difficulties", because some other servers were receiving DDos , and it was impacting their whole network. The result, is that some of my traffic was not reaching my site, as well as Googlebot (back to that time, I didn't have an account with the Google wembaster tool, I assume that this would have been reported there).

A relevant article from Search Engine Roundtable.

Google Algorithm Update On January 16th, MLK Day? [seroundtable.com...]

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 9:10 am (utc) on Jan 18, 2017]
[edit reason] inadvertent edit in removing duplicate posts [/edit]

@Reseller, we get zombies sure, but my main issue is rank. I've seen some people get shot down recently on other forums saying things like "spam works, build EMAT" etc and while i would NEVER go down that route, i'm inclined to agree.

Some of the smaller businesses in our vertical are getting more aggressive and taking bigger risks, and frankly, for the short term, it seems to be paying dividends. There are examples of domains that are less that a year old and have built thousands of links in a six month span and climbed their way onto the first page of what are the most competitive keywords in this particular niche. It's unbelievable.

I completely get that these types of examples paint a negative picture and look like i'm just some bloke in the UK, moaning. But the cold, hard truth is that this will ultimately end up costing me money and challenge business morals.... the longer this goes on, the harder its going to be to not join the party.

It's endless, but the best thing to do is to forget everything SE's tell you. In fact, it may be best to do the opposite of what they say. If they say certain things don't matter, they probably do. If they say they do matter, then they probably don't.

I keep saying it, just use common sense when you elaborate a site. Don't try to "optimize" for the purpose of gaining ranking. Just do your site, and if they are good, interesting and pleasant, trafic will follow, and people will share it.

@Dimitri, fine in a perfect world. But at the minute, i think thats like asking a body builder to just eat healthy and throw him in a competition where more than half of the participants are taking steroids..... You feel better for eating healthy, but, ultimately, you dont end up taking home the gold.

Apologies for the analogy

Yes, Bushie, it's not an even field but that's the illusion that SE's say it is. I've been wondering if what we are experiencing is not search engine related.

Churn & Burn has always been a successful strategy. It's just how you fuel the churn that is complicated and evolves, and the lifespan of churn sites is extremely short, and getting shorter.

I mean sure, your site might be held at #3, but the sites at #1 & #2 are constantly changing.

I personally could never go for churn and burn, despite the promise of riches. I would rather build a brand, and see a greater profit in building repeat business, establishing a reputation, and attracting business off-line.

But if you are in a cash-rich niche, like insurance arbitrage, payday loans, adult content or whatever, then you will encounter sites who's owners are happy being on a hamster wheel of constant churn. Google could probably do more about it, but that causes a load of complaints about "false positives". It's the engineering challenge; be quick, be comprehensive, be proportionate- pick two.

What is this Churn & Burn Strategy?
can any one help me out as today i analyzed i have more backlinks than my competitors but still i am way behind them.. And i don't want to do any short time tricks. As 2-3 of them is adopting short time tricks. But I want to keep myself for long term. Suggest me what should i DO.

These really aren't the fora for a how-to on churn-and-burn. In general, self-declared black-hat forums are your source, though there are warriors who might give a bit of balance.

Apparently, backlinks are dead. YMMV; mine do. But regardless, everyone sensible will agree that "more" is not really the aim. You need "better".

"Better" requires hard work to get good sources to like you enough to give you a link, from relevant content. You need to spend time reading, cos a short post it not going to cover it.

Otherwise, though it's basically trolling at this point, "content it king"

@thenortonsetup:
Churn and Burn:
To create a website, promote it using any or all black-hat methods. Those methods should (not guaranteed) provide boost in traffic and revenue followed by swift penalty from Google. Rinse and repeat.

The assumption is that the short period of high traffic will provide sufficient revenue to cover costs and generate profits. Once banned you start over. Generally speaking you would launch sites in staggered succession so that when one is banned the next is already generating revenue.

I believe that Google is pretty good and getting better and better at detecting this spam, so the window of revenue is becoming shorter and shorter.

My guess is that the real money to be made with this strategy is by those that sell the spammy tools, domains and links to unsuspecting people who think they can get rich quick. It is a great revenue model, you can sell the same useless links to same person over and over again.

As Shaddows explained link quality counts far more than quantity, and there many other factors beyond links that influence ranking.

2-3 of them is adopting short time tricks.

There is no way to know exactly what is causing a competitor to rank above you. Actually it is almost as difficult to know what is causing your own site to rank (or not rank). Just because a competitor employs a spammy tactic, doesn't mean that that tactic is having a positive impact. That tactic could be holding the competitor back.

The key to success is to focus on what you can do for your website. If you are being out-ranked, you need to make your site better or promote it more or both.

With regards to the MLK update, I'm seeing a sudden and very sharp upward tick in traffic since Tuesday, but the rumblings did start on Monday.

I don't know if it has anything to do with Google algo changes, but one thing I can say for sure...I updated a number of 301 redirects and made site wide changes to page titles and descriptions to make them more unique around the 12th of December and my traffic plummeted and stayed down for a month. Then a sudden spike upward. I have seen this a few times now when I have made changes to my site, and especially redirects. It's almost as if you go into a temporary sandbox for a while.

On December 15th Search Console suddenly reported almost 700 404 errors on my site, some pages dating back to pre historic times. It took me a while to address those, but as soon as I did traffic was improving within a few days. I cannot say for certain whether this is the cause for losing 30+% of my traffic from 15th December until this week, it could have also been the Google update, or both.

made site wide changes to page titles

I believe that suddenly changing the title of an old page is a big change, likely to be a red flag for google's algorithm that usually causes a temporary drop in rankings and traffic.

In my opinion it's very important to always choose your page titles very carefully before you launch the page, and then leave them alone from then on. This is part of my belief that you should plan everything very very carefully for the long term when you create a new site. If you rush into it, without much thought and planning, and keep making major revamps every so often, the site may never do well in google search.