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.

[thejimster]

@renatovieira is it affiliate, ecom, blog, info, anything else?

[masterjoe]

I haven't lost any significant ranks, I have a few different affiliate sites. I have in fact been building links and haven't been hit as severely as some people here -- mostly just getting irritated that Google is scraping poor quality websites and then pasting a nice large chunk of misleading information above far better websites.

[Nugom]

clean directories, 4 years old, page #1 to oblivion

[renatovieira]

@thejimster

Blog of reviews of hotels and lodgings of the east coast of the USA.

[rustybrick]

I think I've found a pattern. I have 10+ sites that shared their URLs so far. If you want to message me your URLs, I'd love to get 25-50 sites so I can share what I've learned.

[nonstop]

@rustybrick you mean backlinks?

[browndog]

I am hoping that it was just a dip while the algorithm is doing its thing. Halfway through the day and I am seeing much more traffic in live view than I would normally expect. But of course that's just a brief window, we will see how the day pans out.

I think all in all it's harder than it was 4 years ago. Now when I search for a topic I see three Google shopping ads, then the knowledge box, then the 'people always ask' bit, I have to scroll almost halfway down the page before I start to see any links.

I was showing my children how clean the kidrex.org search looks (I sometimes use it because I find it gives me more accurate results). No ads, no knowledge box, just a page of sites on the topic I searched.

[mosxu]

Like to share a funny story always great before the weekend. AI apparently got extremely intelligent and can identify a bot (not a zombie) without the need of captcha [thenextweb.com...]

[rustybrick]

@nonstop no, I mean your site URL that got hit.

[glakes]

Like to share a funny story always great before the weekend. AI apparently got extremely intelligent and can identify a bot (not a zombie) without the need of captcha

I could see this code in the algo: ifbot send to small businesses orelse send to amazon. LOL

[mosxu]

@glakes

These jokers are really funny

[nonstop]

@rustybrick I've sent you a message, let me know if you find anything?

[Jori]

I don't know for you guys, but now my incomes (adsense) are good (back to normal), even if I lost 70% of my trafic. I have no explanation, it seems just that now, my ads placements are much more valuable and every one wants to buy some adsense space on my website.

[davgonz90]

The exact same thing with my site. My traffic is down 50% but my AdSense earnings are exactly the same. Talk about strange...

[jeremyers1]

@rustybrick

I got hit in mid December. Steady decline since then. Am now down ~60%. Another big decline yesterday.

I run a Theology blog. I use Adsense and Amazon Ads. Blog is 10 years old. Never bought links or engaged in any link sharing schemes.

Today I did some random searches for articles I knew was on my blog. Scraper sites that copied my posts are ranking higher than mine. All those sites also have way more ads than I have.

This is the worst update by Google. Ever.

I am beginning to think that maybe Google discovered my "pro Trump" posts on Facebook and Twitter, and they are penalizing me. Ha! How's that for a conspiracy theory?

[sangi]

Some of you guys and gals look like drunk pervert's wife, who's beaten on a regular basis (updates and poor ranking) but nonetheless you are staying with your 'love' and giving everything you have (analytics, adwords, adsense etc) voluntarily. The Internet is so much more than the Google, you may want to rethink your strategy... And please oh please value your data.

In the meantime, Google's crawling my site like crazy, something like 100 000+ pages a day.

[browndog]

I haven't checked my stats for the day, I saw a jump in traffic, but then it dropped again. Too depressing to see the final outcome.

One thing I noticed is the sites I heavily edited (and for the better, I went into much more detail) seemed to drop, but the thinner/less popular articles started ranking. I have probably 500 articles on my site, but out of that, it's really the top 30 that bring in 90% of the traffic. But those top articles seemed to vanish and the less popular ones were being viewed.

When I say edited, I mean edited for the better. I truly never engage in SEO on my articles (maybe a bad thing). I write for the reader and not for Google. Those top 30 articles were very detailed (without being complicated), and they suddenly drop. Very strange.

[browndog]

Sorry, not sites...I mean articles.

What frustrates me is that an entire year of full time work on my site and I now have less traffic. Way to go.

[andynicky89]

@jeremyers1 i had a problem like yours. I will attach here some screenshots of my two websites that was ranked on page 1. The problem is more complicated than this. I have another website without any backlink on it and 100% 1 page copy pasted content which doubled his rank in the past week and last 2 days for 2 main keywords. So in short, Google rank copy pasted content without links, compared to unique with links. How stupid can be this algo or the programmers who worked on this algo? Also a big problem is that this stupid algo can't see the difference between content that was posted unique and first, compared to content that was copy pasted and posted after first one. If Google want to do a good job, should modify his algo to give power to first content not to the second copy pasted content. Is viceversa wtf...
Here is few screenshots with serp positions:
1st website:
[prntscr.com...]
[prntscr.com...]
2nd website:
[prntscr.com...]
[prntscr.com...]
[prntscr.com...]
3rd website with no links and 1 page with 100% copy pasted content:
[prntscr.com...]
[prntscr.com...]

This was my examples. I hope other owners post their serp positions too. Hope that helps.
Regards, Adrian.

[30K_a_month]

Domains dedicated to specific niches have now been replaced by Amazon/bestbuy type thin content pages.

The entire front page of google for my main search terms are now pure ads thin content pages from big players.

Information is not what is ranking anymore, its all about your relationship with google and your LINKS.

This new update has made it clear from the results that ;

1. CONTENT MEANS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING beyond basic SEO

WE HAVE BEEN TOLD RELIGIOUSLY FOR YEARS TO PROVIDE GOOD CONTENT,

What a horrible way of doing business, tell people to do a certain thing for years then totally disregard it ? I DON'T GET IT ?

I really don't like being lied to like this by anyone, its appalling.

[andynicky89]

For me, just content doesn't work until i hit him with links. But now, i think links doesn't matter that much. See examples in my post. First 2 domains had links with TF20+. So... which links Google likes, this is the problem.

[kumiko]

Hi everyone,

What if all this is because of Google starting to devaluate dmoz.org, and indirectly any site listed there ... This could make sense as dmoz closing was announced few days ago, and for sure somewhere in the ranking algo there was some finetuning related to dmoz ...

What do you think ?

Best regards and high rankings !

[andynicky89]

Not every site in the world had links from Dmoz mate. There is something more sophisticated.

[sangi]

I think dmoz doesn't matter for quite some time now. If your rankings are poor, find and remove bad links that you created.

[kumiko]

@andynicky89

Ofcourse, but I imagine that removing dmoz from linkgraph could impact not only websites listed there ...

[andynicky89]

@kumiko
I think they start to devalue some type of links. And give more credits to content, even if is copy pasted. Check my screenshots on my recent post.

[kumiko]

@sangi

I agree that general opinion is that dmoz lost his importance over time.
However, in vertical I'm watching some dmoz listed websites lost some positions and naturally the notlisted ones had some gains ... just my observation as we are on the 2nd group ...

[nonstop]

the Dmoz directory is still there, I think AOL are going to keep it up, just not do anything with it.

I've often wondered about the 'black hole effect' of a high PR site vanishing and taking small sites with it, I wondered this when IMDB said they were dropping their forums.

it's possible a black hole could have opened up or google devalued some links that we all had.

most of the post I have seen about this update have been from webmastered who haven't done any link building, only natural links so it could be that we all had these natural links and google just devalued them.

my average google position was around 19/20 and I think it's now around 23 so it looks like I may have slipped onto page 3 which nobody looks at, a drop onto the next page can make a big difference.

it's still early days for the data in WMT, i'll know more tomorrow.

weirdly google is crawling my site more than ever and has increased the number of pages indexed.

[andynicky89]

I know one thing for sure. Behind this actions from Google is hiding the biggest mafia. They want to destroy small sites and kill affiliates forever also any optimization. The problem is that a small amount of friends of Google team, knows how to rank websites and this is the problem. I know very sure that Google told us that they will not tell us anymore what update they release and this is another problem. We are in the dark, both websites whitehat or blackhat, https or non https dropped in serp last 2 days.

[kumiko]

@nonstop

I know is still there for now ... but maybe Google is just testing the scenario "what if we remove the dmoz from linkgraph..."

If they do it after dmoz is closing (if...), then would be too obvious ...