Google Updates and SERP Changes - April 2017

[EditorialGuy]

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System: The following 5 messages were cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4838449.htm [webmasterworld.com] by robert_charlton - 12:55 pm on Apr 2, 2017 (PDT -8)

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We had a noticeable improvement in average Google rankings on the 29th (the most recent date in Google Search Console). Google organic traffic has also been up 6.0 to 9.7 percent for each of the last five days, compared to the same days last week. Another mini-update, maybe? (The changes definitely fall outside our normal week-to-week variations.)

[glakes]

@EG

What I manufacture and sell can be considered specialized, and I can say from experience people are often too lazy to do any research and instead buy and learn on the fly. Being lower cost items, the risk to the buyer is minimal and limited research outside of product reviews is in many cases unnecessary. But for other types of specialized products, search engines still and will always have their place. However, the average consumer most likely purchases few, if any, specialized products in any given year.

The BloomReach study noted that 55% of buyers actually conduct their first search for products right on Amazon, which is an 11% increase from the year prior. Imagine where that will leave search engines five years from now. I've noted this study before, but it is important to note that Google, Bing, Yahoo and elsewhere all share a cut of the remaining 45% of product searches. Google no longer is the main player when it comes to product searches, and may be the preferred secondary destination for those that don't satisfy their research goals directly in Amazon. I'm sure to some degree this is contributing to the zombies that our ecommerce sites have always seen, and we can expect it to increase. As more people with the sole intent to buy go directly to Amazon, ecommerce sites will be left with the option of churning out content in an effort to snag the few buyers that will convert outside of Amazon's marketplace. Browndog eluded to this when he spoke of a Nestle owned company producing info pages, and we can expect to see more of this as ecommerce sites cast a wider net into the information realm to reach the dwindling numbers of buyers in search.

More information on the BloomReach study I referenced in this post can be found on the page:

"Bad news Google: 55% of people start product searches on Amazon"
[businessinsider.com...]

@lefrontal & andynicky89

Though Google's updates are often publicly discussed/disclosed as "quality updates," the average webmaster knows the wild swings in ranks suggest otherwise. From a business standpoint Google's incentive to shake up their index often helps in driving more businesses into Adwords where stable ranks can be achieved through a combination of high bids and a high landing page quality score. I never see wild changes in ranks in the other search engines, and I think most of us can agree that a truly quality page should not go from the first page of the SERPS to nowhere. And it's not because most websites are gaming the system but instead because it is Google who is gaming the system. What shocks me most is that the majority of webmasters can't even see this despite it happening in front of their own eyes.

[NickMNS]

@lefrontal it is simple, you had competitor(s) that was held back due to something, they fixed the something, the update happened and as a result they are no longer held back.

Your ranking has as much to do with what others are doing with their sites as you with yours.

[mosxu]

@glakes

You are 100% right about buyer intent and the more buyers will go to amazon the more zombies we will see.

Also by suffocating small businesses by allowing only brands to rank I think AI is digging their own grave, simply because once the searcher becomes a customer of one these brands a simple email offer will bring that customer back for more without search. This process in time gets worse and worse and AI will need to charge for information soon.

[EditorialGuy]

@glakes: Different research studies show different things, but in any case, the implicit message in your post seems to be that owners of e-commerce sites should be hitching their wagons to Amazon instead of fighting for scraps of organic traffic from Google. That message fits in with what I've been saying all along: Google's stated mission is about providing its users with information (not about helping site owners get prospects or convert traffic into sales). If you want Google to send you traffic, build a site that has intrinsic "content value" (I.e., a site that would be useful to visitors even if the transactional components were removed).

Browndog....spoke of a Nestle owned company producing info pages, and we can expect to see more of this as ecommerce sites cast a wider net into the information realm to reach the dwindling numbers of buyers in search.

I could point to several excellent e-commerce sites that have been attracting prospects via information pages in Google Search for years. What's more, it's a strategy that's good not only for the e-commerce sites, but also for users (which may be why those sites do so well in Google Search).

[lefrontal]

@NickMNS 63 websites got better to take me to the 64th position? I dont think so.

Even sometimes the articles ranked are "category pages" haha.

This is my end. I wont change any article anymore. I will keep them like that until they decide to change the politics because i am tired. The business is yours. Welcome.

[andynicky89]

@lefrontal, true mate. I'm done with any changes too, i will wait until all my website get the positions that had before 10 March. I'm done with any reading, any advice, any case studies, any sh*ts that i read and heard all that time about SEO. Opinions about SEO is like asking 10 guys which car is better, a BMW or a Ferrari. Opinions are divided, and SEO is a very very complex thing to ask or to bend the ear to any idiot that write a blog post and captured the audience because many of us have problems with SEO. I won't give examples but those most owners of SEO blogs just want to bizzy your brain chase away from money by giving you "advices". I remember when @rustysh*t posted an article about Fred, and told us that target ads. How fkn stupid can you be...

[andynicky89]

I see something changing in SERP right now. Youtube videos are disappearing one by one and old website come in their places in my niches. I saw the movements yesterday but today is more consistent. I'm the only who noticed that?

[NickMNS]

@lefrontal why not 63 sites got better? How many sites rank for the keyword thousands, ten of thousands? When there is very little differentiation between sites, in terms of the sites being great* (as opposed to being similar content), then a small tweak can cause an unduly large shift in rank. A butterfly effect of sorts.

I think we forget the fact that the serps are a ranking, not a scoring. If you were scoring sites than many sites could have an equal score, whereas, with a ranking only one site can hold any one position. So the issue is what do you do when a group of sites that would each hold equal score, but need to be rank there is a problem. To solve the problem you add a differentiating and potentially arbitrary feature by which to rank them. Most commonly, this would be by alphabetical order. It would seem that Google has chosen some other arbitrary feature or features. They would need to use multiple features, so that webmaster's could not game the system. Assume the tie breaker would based on alphabetical order then every website would be aaaaexamplewidget.com. So obviously alphabetical order is not a good solution.

On this basis all it would take is for a few sites to make a few small changes and then after refresh the serp gets mixed up.

[lefrontal]

@NickMNS you didnt understand what i meant.
Google wants to show the best content because when people seach they want to read the best content. Then, i can understand that 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8.9 competitors could create a better article but not 63.


*My websites have no links.

[heisje]

@EditorialGuy

build a site that has intrinsic "content value" (I.e., a site that would be useful to visitors even if the transactional components were removed).

As surrealist a perception of reality as replacing all shops on high street with libraries. As if shops, or salespeople, are of no true value to the public - only reference books! Google has managed to promote "madness" as a form of "sanity". What next?

.

[masterjoe]

Welcome to the artificial intelligence era, where simple words can make or break your rankings. After all these case studies and seeing sites that were hit, I can't come to any conclusions. I don't think that sites with too many ads were hit, because I have a site that plugs the same product in several times on the same page to get people to buy. There are dozens of pages ranking that have garbage spun articles with made for adsense templates. PBN's, content farms like wikihow (they've even being scraped for the "knowledge" graph).

Perhaps this is because people have different writing styles... there are unique word patterns, plays on words, anecdotes, etc that AI just simply won't be able to figure out. It might not make sense to third world "quality raters", and feeds the cycle into ranking poorer, more easily understood content.

All this to say - the featured snippets are a huge drain on everyones time and effort that they have spent researching and writing content. Sure, it would be nice if you did get ranked in one somehow, but as it is right now... it is useless for anything remotely debatable or topics that require elaboration. Google knows well and good that they are giving the lions share to the top of the search results with the boxes, AND they are certainly lining their pockets that little bit more with the traffic that doesn't click through to the webpage it stole content from.

There needs to be a petition from webmasters about this, and something I will look into doing when I am free.

In the mean time, read this fantastic article: Google’s featured snippets are worse than fake news
[theoutline.com...]

[browndog]

I have to wonder if what Google are trying to achieve is not necessarily the best result but consistency.

So let's talk about food. They put McDonalds at the top not because their food is the best, but because you are going to get the same 'experience' with their product if you are in India, London or Paris. Yes there are better products out there, but there are also worse products (greasy Joe restaurants with rats living in the pantry). You know you're reasonably safe eating that McDonalds out there.

That's what I am seeing in the results, not the best, but reliably consistent sites.

[masterjoe]

Highly doubt that. What would make a website "consistent"? Being static? It would be interesting to know whether the sites that were hit were using a CMS like Wordpress or static html sites. But even then, the results don't make much sense for a lot of queries. They should penalize themselves for having too many ads above the fold and basically being the biggest scrapers/content thieves on earth.

[browndog]

The Nestle owned site I mentioned yesterday has an article which is no. 1 and it is all text. There is nothing wrong with the content, but others (including mine), have included photographic instructions on how to do this particular task. That's what makes me wonder if it's more about who is filling the top spots.

I don't necessarily think it's a conspiracy and Google is in bed with Amazon, Ebay, Nestle. More they're big brands are more likely to be reliable or trustworthy. Google don't know who I am, or if I know what I'm talking about.

[EditorialGuy]

As surrealist a perception of reality as replacing all shops on high street with libraries. As if shops, or salespeople, are of no true value to the public - only reference books!

A better analogy would be reference books, text books, trade (mainstream fiction and nonfiction) books, newspapers, magazines, and every other type of content in the library.

But in any case, Google Search is what it is, just as Amazon and eBay are what they are. Google Search crawls, indexes, and ranks content. If you want to flourish in the Google Search environment, try to make your content better than that of your competitors.

[heisje]

But in any case, Google Search is what it is . . . . . try to make your content better than that of your competitors.

Realistically, true.

Still, for commerce, totally distorted : stores ranked not by utility but by literary merit. Grotesque - but not without ulterior motives . . .

.

[browndog]

But in any case, Google Search is what it is, just as Amazon and eBay are what they are. Google Search crawls, indexes, and ranks content. If you want to flourish in the Google Search environment, try to make your content better than that of your competitors.

I can honestly say I have. My main competitor doesn't cover topics in nearly as much detail as I do. Around a year ago I really started digging into why a certain issue has become so prevalent among the topic of my niche. It was incredibly detailed, covered a number of different scenarios, coming from research papers deep within the Internet. The article has images of this condition, as well as the normal stuff...what it is, etc. A well known site published a similar article just last week and this was shared far and wide because most people in my niche have no clue as to what is causing this issue. My article, is still ranking at no. 10. Sometimes I wonder if I go into too much detail. The people visiting my site are the average Joe wanting help.

The Nestle owned site which is suddenly all over Google has cookie cutter type articles which are short and really don't cover the topics in any detail. But they're now ranking one.

[mosxu]

Or a high street store with only 2 products that are not even suitable that much outranks a dedicated ecommerce site with 10 000 products, all products suitable and have great unique descriptions

[maxpersia]

my website came back to first page after 4 years (from page 3). i am so happy but do not understand what happened, if it is for several improvement I did in these years why not happening sooner?! :D

[reseller]

@maxpersia

Congrats. Have your website recovered today?

[maxpersia]

not sure exactly when because not checked so frequently but I am sure in April.

[Mentat]

Something very fishy is going on with my site.
I wanted to update my disavow file and I've found this:

How your data is linked (anchor text)

See the image, as the board will not accept Chinese and Russian alphabet

[i.imgur.com...]

This translate to (Google Translate):

Why does the ad appear?
Register
Buy modular gift pictures

WTF? My site is English informational! I cannot find the location of those links!

After working on the links to my site I feel dirty.
The number of spammy links are ~ 90%. Mostly autogenerated and with countless redirects, a lot of hacked sites.

[sench]

One thing I have noticed this month that is different than the previous period (of maybe half a year) is that the double or triple results from same domains are gone.

Only 1 result per domain, for the queries I'm tracking. I know there are folks here who have been frustrated with that for a while - can you share if you are seeing the same difference? Or is it still the same for your sites? thanks

[reseller]

Dear kind moderators

Would you be kind to start a new thread:

Effect of Google Updates and SERP Changes on Your Business [webmasterworld.com]

Leaving this thread for discussion of Google Updates and SERP Changes - April 2017

Thanks and God bless.

[edited by: goodroi at 9:59 pm (utc) on Apr 24, 2017]
[edit reason] Split Changing SEO Technique thread from SERP Update Thread :) [/edit]

[goodroi]

Many of you made great comments about the changing approach to SEO, so we have split off those comments to their own thread. This should help everyone better follow the two different discussions about April SERP changes (this thread) and the changing SEO approach being discussed in over at this thread [webmasterworld.com...]

Thanks everyone!

[nickchernets]

I heard that more changes are coming connected with backlinks in the guest post, anybody already known about it?

[EditorialGuy]

This got snipped and copied over to the new thread, but it really belongs here:

Things have been pretty quiet for us during the past 10 days or so. We had nice upward bumps in February, March, early April, and mid-April, but our Google organic traffic graph has shown only low single-digit changes since then.

[glakes]

Google has sent the exact same quantity of visitors the last three Mondays in a row. When I see these trends repeated, it's a reminder of how artificial Google's search results have become. My use of artificial is not in reference to intelligence but rather precise and intentional manipulation.

[EditorialGuy]

Google has sent the exact same quantity of visitors the last three Mondays in a row. When I see these trends repeated, it's a reminder of how artificial Google's search results have become. My use of artificial is not in reference to intelligence but rather precise and intentional manipulation.

That sounds pretty unlikely to me. It isn't "scalable," and are you really important enough for Google to fiddle with your traffic?

[Shaddows]

Well, it would be a scaled mechanism.

And not necessarily unfair either. Why should one site win the SERP lottery when 10000 sites are roughly equal in terms of value. Would it not make sense to share out that traffic, or at the very least, the SERP exposure?

Going further, if you were a gigantic hypothesis-testing machine, would you not deliberately A/B/C/D/E/F test (why stick to A/B when you have data centres) near-drawn sites with ambiguous user intent cohorts, in order to refine your understanding of query intent, as well as judging human feeback to the exposed sites.

And if you would not do this- why ever not?

And if you would, why would it not appear to the sites exactly as Glakes reports?