Google Updates and SERP Changes - May 2017

[reseller]

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System: The following 5 messages were cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4842918.htm [webmasterworld.com] by robert_charlton - 4:18 am on May 2, 2017 (PDT -8)

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Last month April 2017 hasn't been a nice month to webmasters as far as Google Algorithm Updates and SERPs fluctuations are concerned. There are several WebmasterWorld friends who have lost big portions of their organic traffic. If you just take a look at RankRanger's Google SERP Fluctuations chart you would notice dates of medium to high levels of fluctuations on April 17th, April 20th, April 25th, April 29th and April 30th. Those are just indications of the "volatile SERPs environment" of April 2017.

I'm just wondering what would the current month brings us of Google Algorithm Updates surprises :)

Personally I wish to see on this thread happy posts reporting recoveries and the return of at least parts of what have been lost of Google organic traffic during the latest few months. Let's hope so :)

[mosxu]

Yeah either way the quota imposed might be on credit card processing data so you cannot hide

[reseller]

Here are 2 assumptions and food for the thought :)

1- Is it safe to assume that current Algorithm Update (started May 17 - May 18) has been mostly targeting eCommerce sites and large information sites?

2- Is it safe to assume that a site following Google webmaster guidelines 100% could still be hit very hard by current Algorithm Update?

[Cyclops888]

@reseller

My website is an eCommerce's. So that is a safe assumption.

[Cralamarre]

My website is an education/information site, so assumption #1 holds up.

My site also follows Google webmaster guidelines 100%, so assumption #2 holds up.

I guess the saying "Good guys finish last" rings true here.

[samwest]

It's hit ecomms, informational, brochure and just about every site I have looked at...no + moves seen yet. All - moves. Wait, it's usually a + move followed swiftly by a -- move or the like.

[AlwaysOn]

I have two websites, of similar content, both hit by this update. Both lost 33% of their organic traffic, one had 1000 organic visits/day, the other one had 3000. Both of them hosted on the same server, having original informational content with multiple daily updates, absolutely nothing to do with e-commerce. 100% white hat, never purchased or even asked for a link. Both websites get a ton of direct, email and social media traffic as well, probably same amount as organic but from each channel.

[mosxu]

@alwayson

Two sites with similar content on the same server ? It does not sound right!

[Cralamarre]

We've heard a lot that e-comm sites and information sites have been hit by this update. Do we know of any type of site that has not been hit?

A couple of days ago, I disabled the social media plugin I've been using on my site, just to see if it was the problem (my thinking was that if this update has anything to do with links, maybe Google suddenly has a problem with social media links). So far, no luck, although my pages do load a bit faster now for the few remaining visitors I have.

My rankings in the SERPs continue to be high, yet my traffic, as well as my self confidence, continues to drip away.

[sikosaurus]

This was probably the most confusing update of them all....
I'm literally clueless on what it targeted and why it took away nearly 70% of my traffic overnight and through following few days (I'm still on a downward trend..)

My sites don't violate any google quality guideline. I don't have any kind of shady link building going on.

Yet, at the very same time, for some of my keywords, on first page of results there are some sites that violate ALL and EVERYTHING.

Seriously feels like a plot against good guys :)

[Cralamarre]

I have a question about internal links. Recently, Google published an article about not writing articles for the purpose of link building. Are they referring to external links or to internal links as well, and could internal links be a target for this update?

The reason I ask is that my site is a software training site, and my articles are tutorials on how to use the software. Since I can't possibly cover every detail about the software in every tutorial, I include links in the articles to other tutorials on my site that cover topics mentioned in the article in more detail. This seems to be a no-brainer approach, and I've been doing it this way for 10 years.

These internal links add value to my site and help users learn more about the software. They are in no way an attempt to pad articles with keywords (since the articles they link to are for other keywords, not the same keyword). In fact, I don't even really think of "keywords" when I create the internal links. I include them only so people can learn more about specific topics mentioned in the article if they need to.

But with this recent update largely affecting information-based sites, and with many information-based sites probably using the same approach with internal links to related (but not identical) topics, it has me wondering if the internal links on my site could be the problem. I sure hope not, because if I'm forced to remove them to please Google, I'll be seriously lowering the value and usefulness of my site for my visitors. Any thoughts?

[reseller]

@sikosaurus

Is your website eCommerce, informational or something else :)

[sikosaurus]

@reseller
my site is a nice and clean adult site :)

yes, I know SEO is "different" for adult themes sites, but I also know mine is 100% up to google standards

funnily enough, there is a lot of shady stuff in adult seo world and there I see complete nonsense on top spots in google
sites with tons of popups, traffic trading, sneaky redirects of all kinds, scraped content from big #*$! tubes........ etc, yet they rank

like I said.. very odd google update :)

[mosxu]

Update was for all dissidents.

Welcome to digital communism.

[glakes]

@mosxu

My post is in response to the story you linked to titled: "Google Helps Advertisers Track Spending in Physical Stores"

My guess is Google will try to use this new tracking feature to keep big advertisers on board. Google has to come up with some excuse for why their traffic is failing to convert on a website.

This is not the first straw Google has grabbed in an attempt to stay relevant in the ecommerce industry. The recent cross device conversion tracking is another way Google is trying to inflate conversions.

As was noted previously, [cnbc.com...] notes 55% of online shoppers go to Amazon first to buy products. Only 28% of shoppers use a search engine, and when Bing and Yahoo are removed Google may be lucky to get a measly 25%. My guess is more small business ecommerce operators will bail on Google - not just paid ads, but reduce their marketing budgets for organic SEO services.

Years of Google plugging Amazon, especially with Amazon crowded product searches, have permanently change user behavior. I can't see Google ever getting these shoppers back, unless Amazon really screws up big time. Time will tell in how Google adapts to the major loss in buyer traffic, and my guess is many of the current and future updates they release will focus on trying to appear relevant with retailers of product.

[masterjoe]

Once again Google now has a featured snippet for a very broad search term for one of my niche sites. I'm amazed at the moronic attitude they have taken against webmasters in recent years, the product is a scam and precisely the reason all the real converting traffic is going straight to amazon. You think they would stop doing whats probably going to kill their bottom line, but greed knows no bounds.

[westcoast]

While we got whacked in long tail over the past week, have started seeing over the last few hours our SERPs now starting to slip for some of our big keywords...

[Mentat]

It's like sandbox all over again!
First, ~ 5 results = fixed positions for my main competitors; after that a lot of pages full of spammy results.
I'm nowhere to be found for a lot of keywords.

A lot of filth is up in SEPS and I hope this is another Google experiment for a holiday period.

[mosxu]

@glakes

There is a constant migration of buyers to amazon but also other brands I can see that top adwards advertisers will see profits fall and this is what brings the click value down

Long term surely this strategy will not be a success and also cannot bring back from the death small businesses hammered with zombies

[glakes]

I always thought it strange that Google would force feed Amazon down the throats of their users with domain crowding at the top of the search results. Google could have retained their leadership in being the first stop for product searches had they wanted to. Just as Google is putting forth efforts for a mobile only index, they could have produced a product only index that is triggered/displayed with a product query that does not rely on the same tired interface. I'm not saying the the migration of shoppers to Amazon would have a different outcome, but it surely would not be happening as fast as it is now. Instead, Google chose not to satisfy their users with a diverse product selection in shopping so they could retain a fully paid shopping index - touching on the greed masterjoe speaks of. But in this process Google lost a major amount of marketshare to Amazon which is growing (Amazon growing because of Google's loss) at a rate of double digits per year.

As far as this update goes, my traffic is down slightly but pageviews are much higher (about 20% higher). Sales from Google are really low, but being a holiday weekend this is to be expected and I'm slow across the board.

[RedBar]

I have been crawling my logs this afternoon to see which of my sites have been affected by the May 17th "whatever" it is and by how much.

From 40+ sites only one has been totally unaffected, this is a .co.uk local hotel site.

Of all the other sites a couple are down 20-25% however most of the remainder are down around 50% with some 75-80%.

These are all company brochure sites on https, no ecommerce whatsoever, all but two are international specialist widget product sites with a couple of them being trademarked, keyword domain name, 100% product specific sites and industry-recognised globally as the source of information and images for the widgets yet even they have been hit by 50%.

"Whatever" they have done is certainly no improvement to what was already a very poor user experience and making G even less useful than ever for me.

Of course, YMMV!

[westcoast]

Ok... where is all this lost traffic going?

[masterjoe]

No, no... same here. Pageviews and traffic has seen a minor increase over the past week due to the "update" that supposedly rolled out. But its all but sucked the living life out of any type of converting traffic. I curate content in a Q & A format sometimes, and Google simply scrapes the questions and answers and puts all the sources that I put in my pages. They are the biggest content thieves on the planet and don't want to give a dime to webmasters who make it all happen.

I also have a very small adwords campaign which starts failing to convert, which is when I know to drop my daily budget down to a few bucks instead of a real budget. When I start getting conversions I simply turn up the budget, which only lasts for several hours 1-2 hours a week at this point. Tomorrow I expect conversions to shoot up at around midnight (for my time), we'll see if it stands true.

[Cralamarre]

The other day I saw a video in the Featured snippet for one of my keywords (not my video, someone else's). The video was cued up by Google to a specific 30 second clip in the middle that Google recommended I watch for the "answer" to my "question".

So not only are they scrapping written content and using it as if they own it, but now videos are fair game as well. I've seen plenty of links to videos in the Featured snippets, but this was the first time I saw a video cued up to a specific point and ready to play directly on the search result page.

I realize that YouTube is essentially a platform to share videos, but to just take someone else's video and say "Here, just watch this little part in the middle, it's all you need" is just wrong. There was no need to go to the person's (or company's) website. No need to go to their YouTube channel to see what other videos may be of use to me. There wasn't even a need for me to watch the video from the beginning, which means any potential ad revenue from the video was gone.

So, where is the traffic loss going? It's going nowhere. Google is stealing our content and displaying it directly on their search results pages.

[westcoast]

Can you prevent snippeting / google content stealing with the use of <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOARCHIVE"> ?

[Cralamarre]

There's nothing you can do. Google does what it wants. I just don't understand how they legally get away with it. Companies have been taken to task by governments and law enforcement agencies for far less, yet no one even seems to be aware of this issue (except those of us affected by it).

[RedBar]

Ok... where is all this lost traffic going?

Insofar as I am concerned:

1. Major US importing wholesaler with very generic pages, nothing in-depth whatsoever.

2. Take a selection of Pinterest, Houzz, Home Depot, Amazon, all very thin, generic pages.

3. Lots of genuine supply sites however extremely thin content, usually one image and a couple of lines of generic text.

4. 99% .com domains, Google favours this over ALL other extensions.

[glitterball]

Just a quick observation on Google's continued annihilation of specialised websites:
A search for 'provincial' news where I am, now returns a major UK newspaper's (presumably auto-generated) category page for that province as #1.
Notwithstanding that it is from a foreign country, the most recent article is from 6 weeks ago (and the rest are years old).

I suppose I should be thankful that the #2 and #3 spots actually are relevant.

[glakes]

@masterjoe

The end of June is the end of the second reporting quarter for Google, so my guess is their latest update has everything to do with Google making more money to satisfy shareholder demands. This latest update also coincides with Google removing the 30% cap on ECPC on Adwords campaigns in June as noted at [webmasterworld.com...] Google has to ramp up the profits in an environment where they are losing ecommerce marketshare. I have a hunch all Google traffic quality in June is going to be abysmal (the worst we've ever seen) for small ecommerce sites. So far conversions from Google traffic have not returned, though my Amazon sales are starting to rebound from the holiday weekend. This week should be interesting. One would think more page views and time on site from Google traffic would result in more sales, but so far this is not the case.

[masterjoe]

Glakes, I was thinking it may have something to do with the holiday on the weekend, but it's been proven time and time again that it is not the case. Everything, and I mean everything points to plain and simple manipulation by Google. That is the crux of the problem, because conversions go through the roof just before big quality "updates" roll out without fail. They probably have to turn off personalization, location tracking, filtering likely buyers and whatever else they do and just let it be as it should in the first place. It is just whack a mole at this point, and Google would do well to take care of smaller business owners when the big boys decide to pull out (like their careless attitude when it comes to promoting things like terrorism and hate speech).

Also, I recall Amazon used to place a lot of ads in the past, along with Ebay... but what happened? I suppose after they got plugged into the top of search all day every day, for just about anything remotely commercial they decided it was just a waste of money.

[ionguy]

@masterjoe same conclusions; im sure i mentioned about this; they turn off all traffic control mechanisms or -- what is also very likly -- they loosing control over traffic during update