Google Updates and SERP Changes - March 2017

[andymorris]

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System: The following 3 messages were cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4834186.htm [webmasterworld.com] by robert_charlton - 11:19 am on Mar 2, 2017 (PDT -8)

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CTR and position going up on the 28th, not to the december and january levels, but slowly up. Was doing an average of 6000 clicks from search, and on the 28th it got past 1000 for the first time since early feb.

[30K_a_month]

"Im still down by around 500 visitors a day"

I have gone from 5200 u a day to 1800.

its not good is it, i am not looking at any stats for a couple of months, i am done feeling like this.

[masterjoe]

On a side note a website that I use to test spam on is ranking quite nicely with SAPE amd poorly spun content. A few PBN links but it is mostly to test out other strategies. Great "quality" update G.

Another thought I've been having about this is it might be a way to weed out websites that are under suspicion for being too optimized. Too many good links, on page factors, etc. I wouldn't make too many sudden moves at the moment because there is no way the SERPs are acceptable at the moment. Good sites tend to be buried on page 2 and 3 for a lot of different queries I've had regarding technical SEO today.

On another note, it looks like the gmail app is trying to open links in their own buggy browser whereas it just used to go to the www using my default browser. They are getting beyond brazen when it comes to abusing their power.

[Jori]

Looking at my "competitors" : yes, a lot of rubbish. Some of them even copy parts of my content.

My theories :

- maybe I lost the bonus points Google give to older sites when I moved to https?
- maybe I lost when I refresh some of my content, beeing "newer" than copycats ?
- maybe I should post simpler articles, dividing them in two or three? My articles have tipically +2000 words (but some subjects can not really be divided !).
- maybe I should completely remove affiliate links (I juste have one per article, the others are adsense).
- maybe I have to review my internal netlinking?

With semrush, I saw that my main competitors also were impacted. The main change in the serps for me is the 3 or 4 results showed from a single domain, much more common than before : it's seems to me that is better now to have many pages answering the same question ! Completely different of what I thought good quality content should be.

[mosxu]

Just before the weekend like to share a funny story [news.softpedia.com...]

Apparently AI has killed Chamois but nothing yet on the big issue discussed on this forum...

[syedyasir]

In one Niche, I saw one page [of my site] drop by 10-12 positions, then the same happened two times more. For some of the keywords that I monitor, my page has dropped from ~18th position to 60+. Interestingly, the same exact thing happened to few other websites too. They also dropped 10-12 positions three times starting from 13th or 14th March. There are at least 5 websites other than mine that dropped in the same way. I am now trying to find the thing that is common among all these sites and mine to find the reason for this drop, but I had no success. One of these is a huge site/brand, so I am not looking into this one particular site; other sites are small like mine. I have checked backlinks, some of these sites have few to none where others have a lot of them, so I think backlinks is not the common thing here.

Does anyone have any ideas how I can analyze these sites to find what might have caused this drop?

Since 13/14 March, my website's traffic has dropped ~%30.

[lostshootingstar]

My traffic CONTINUES to drop as well. It's been an endless slide since Feb 7th. Now down 35% since the end of January and there doesn't appear to be any end in sight. What's also weird is it appears the first half of the day is significantly worse than the send half of the day. After about 4:00pm things are less bad (but still not good). Very bizarre. I also had to let an employee go on Wednesday; hardest thing I've had to do in a long time.

[deriklogov]

@lostshootingstar : how many pages is your site and how many pages google crawling every day ?

[Nugom]

I read everything available about this update. After beeing angry and frustrated I started thinking more rational. I think my websites are clean, no blackhat things, no dark territory, natural SERP for 3 years, improved a lot since the beginning. 3 ads per page, no affiliate links or other #*$!. My websites are about giving quickly the answer the users need. Once they have it, they leave the page (about 90% bounce rate). No problem for years. Doing similar websites for 10 years now, some with good authority. First time I got hit.

Some websites were hit and the other didn't. The only difference I could figure out was the surface ratio useful infos / ads (above the fold). Sites that were hit were <40%. Sites that were not hit were > 60%.

This update seems to be a mix of a lot of things but maybe this criteria was taken in consideration for me.

Similar experience here or not? What do you think?

[Nugom]

Addition to my previous post:
I've removed 100% of the ads of site1 and added some more useful infos to make the ratio 100%.
On site2: the ads are still there but changed the ratio to 60%.

I will share the results if something is changing in the SERP these next days/weeks.

[lostshootingstar]

@deriklogov: About 2000 pages indexed and roughly 500 page crawls per day by Google. Also, I have never had a single ad on my site, ever, so I'm fairly certain this ad theory you guys are chasing is a red herring.

[Vantelli]

Guys, what about your title tags? Mine are keyword stuffed up to some level. Now I'm trying to remove all unnecessary keywords from title tags.

Also, what internal link structure do you have? I assume some of my internal links are with overoptimized anchor text. Not sure if I should get rid of them as well?

[LuckyLiz]

or example a fact site, someone searches for 'how many miles to the moon'

The thing about questions that can be quickly answered in a sentence or two (and how information sites might be affected), is that Google is now including many more answers in the drop-downs at the top of the SERPs. If people get the answer from Google without ever clicking to a site, sites that have the answers lose traffic. I have to admit that I've found myself entering question in Google a number of times in recent weeks, and because I got a quick answer, I never bothered clicking on any links or reading down further in the SERPs to see if there were other answers.

About current fluctuations, some of what I've seen is authority sites ruling, but also sites with the newest original date for information queries outranking equally good articles with older dates, even where the older articles have been updated recently.

But LOL.. that's yesterday and today's look. Who knows what it will be tomorrow., Maybe Google is just alternating results so searchers can find new pages they hadn't seen the last time they did a search :)

[30K_a_month]

@Vantelli my pages that got deranked have no tags

I can confirm that today is the worst day I have had since I started doing well over 2 years ago.

To confirm with everyone

NO ADS
1 AMAZON LINK PER POST
100% quality unique written content
Well over 500 posts all over 500 - 1500 words depending on whats needed.
Perfect structure/ sitemaps
NO errors or performance issues ( dedicated server and IP)

I am not

HTTPS yet

[Vantelli]

@30K_a_month + Not simple tags, but Title Tags (or SEO titles), I'm sure you have them on each post/page.

For me today is the worst day since it started on March 10 as well.

What about link building? Do you create any links?

[jeremyers1]

One of my sites that I hardly use actually experienced a 30% INCREASE in traffic in early February, around Feb 5-7. It's not a large site, but the jump was noticeable, and the Google referral traffic has been increasing slowly since then.

So I looked around... here is what I have noticed on this site so far:
1. No ads of any kind. None. Nada. Zilch.
2. A few affiliate links. Mainly to Amazon, but also to a few others.
3. No https.
4. No AMP.
5. The pages that got a bump in rankings and CTR are quite thin in content. 300-400 words max. One image each.
6. Several of the posts that got a ranking boost are list posts .... 20 ways .... 50 insights ... 10 steps ... etc. But they are just lists. No explanation of each item.
7. Time on site is about 1 minute.
8. Bounce rate is 79%
9. Avg pageload time in GA is 7 seconds.

Anything else you want me to check?

[Vantelli]

@jeremyers1 that's interesting. How old the website is? Did you created any backlinks for it?

[deriklogov]

@jeremyers1 what is brand anchor % rate on that site ?

[andreiut]

same here, switched to https a month ago and site was doing well till yesterday. now i even can't find it in search results when typing the name of the domain without the .com extension. don't know what happened, hope it will revert back..

[Vantelli]

Just checked one more site that outranked me. It has 3 adSense ads above the fold, so I'm pretty sure it's not about ads, at least not about AdSense ads.

[westcoast]

Site traffic has plummeted today. Got hit for 8% at the start of the week. Down yet another 10% today alone.

Very large site (800k+ pages indexed), 20 years old, not excessive ads, have kept up with SEO trends over the years. Strong editorial control, keeping things up to date, etc.

This is crazy.

[mosxu]

sadly after reading everyone comments here it sounds like your content has been downgraded

my personal opinion is that no content is better than great content without high quality links

if users need education they need to go to school and not read online articles

[andreiut]

my site appeared again on first page in search results as it was before so maybe things are fixing now, huh

[jeremyers1]

@vantelli, site is 10+ years old. No backlinks ever created for it. All 100% organic.

@deriklogov, branding in anchor keywords was never intentional, so I imagine the % is quite low.

[30K_a_month]

This is a complete shambles like that first penguin release. Big players rise to the top by abusing every single google guideline while small business get penalised for any minor infringement.

[masterjoe]

Several keywords have returned to high positions, but not their original places today. The ones that have had something of a recovery are 1-2 places up or down.

[Vantelli]

I see some improvements in the last few hours. Not sure if that's the results of changes I made in the meantime or it's some kind of Google dance.

Beside spammy sites which gained better rankings I see a lot of brands in the first page, even their content isn't relevant. I was on the position 1. for a keyword. Now I'm on the position 5. and first 4 spots are taken by one big brand, all with the same domain name! They have 4 posts on positions 1-4, and as you can imagine, only the first one is about the topic, others are somewhat relevant.

[syedyasir]

Traffic to one of my sites is still going down. It started on 13/14th March.
I think Google is also tweaking the Hacked Site Algorithm.

[linkbuildr]

My three spam test sites all went way up and are now making 5x the sales via amazon..wow. All EMD's with spam links and cheap content focused on one product each.

[superclown2]

"Thin" content isn't "thin" because it's short, it's "thin" because it reads like filler material. 

IMO, it's more important to focus on value to the reader than on word length per se. 

I think that there are some people who have had their livelihoods destroyed by 'thin content' penalties will find those comments disingenuous.

In Google's eyes, thin content is content that carries ads or affiliate links. Whether it focusses on value to the reader is irrelevant. I have watched 'thin content' sites having penalties lifted merely for removal of ads/links. The message from that is obvious.

The fact that your site isn't affected yet isn't relevant. Neither is the fact that algorithmic changes have boosted it. If it is checked manually you may find yourself in a different situation altogether.

Remember: every ad or affiliate link takes bread from Google's mouth.

[goodroi]

In Google's eyes, thin content is content that carries ads or affiliate links. Whether it focusses on value to the reader is irrelevant.

Respectfully I fully disagree. Based on my own first hand experiences and varied data sources, affiliate sites can definitely thrive if they provide value. If you use the same affiliate data feed that is on another 100 sites without adding value you will have a bad day. If you use computer generated/ai/spun articles you will likely have a harder time. If you provide value that is not available on 100 other sites, Google will tend to reward you regardless of affiliate links. Many of my affiliate sites are performing well this month and one of my affiliate sites had a 20% increase with Google's changes this month.

In my experience too many people that are asking about word counts are trying to build sites with the least amount of work and those sites tend to be insufficient. Internet marketing is becoming harder everyday and for the best chance to succeed you need to excel past the very crowded competition. Don't ask what is the minimum needed instead focus on raising the ceiling and providing something new. Become the master of your niche. Be the first to provide online tools, videos, tutorials, comparisons, accurate tests, etc. Think of your site not as an affiliate site but as an online resource that just happens to be monetized with affiliate links.