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 :)

[Robert Charlton]

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

No... the "noarchive" attribute in the robots meta tag tells Google that you don't want Google to display the page in the Google cache. It has nothing to do with display of snippets in the visible serps.

The "noindex" attribute in the robots meta, though, would keep all references to the page out of the search results... ie, page content, url, everything. Following your question to its logical extreme, that might be what you want.

There are many SEOs who are trying to get Featured Snippets for their pages. These are rich answers with a link back to the source page, and are widely considered to be desirable, since they're up at the top of the serps.

The "answers" which don't cite sources are general knowledge, like the number of feet in a mile, and that kind of data can't be copywrited, so I wouldn't worry about it being your unique information.

[venom906]

Saw a 83% drop in traffic after May 17th - 19th update. A finance website with 5 unique content pieces every week.
Not able to wrap my head around the reason for such a massive drop.

[Jori]

Would it be lack of EAT, venom906 ? I'm struggling with that, since I also have a finance website.

I was thinking : I don't have the .com (it's an albanian newspaper... ). Is it important ? How is google searching for the right EAT ? Maybe if you don't have .com , you don't deserve EAT points ?

Still searching for clues.

[Martin Ice Web]

as a user: today i gave google a new chance, because bing couldnīt help me ( bing showed my relvant sites but that sites didnīt solve my problem). So i put in

keyword1 + keyword2 + preselection,

where keyword1 is a brand and keyword2 is some feature of this brand.

google showed me 1 result ( not helpfull ) and than only pages from telecommunication carriers. Non of these sites have anything to do with my search. Only the word preselection is to find on these sites.
No wonder that we all see zombies and that clicks on ads and organics "improved" by 40%.
google has gone so bad....

[samwest]

One of my insights reported a page on my site received a 5380% increase in traffic on May 28th. I looked at the insight and it showed 53 clicks. LOL those whacky Googlers. I guess when you're at zero, there's no place but up. Wonder where .8 of a click came from? Fuzzy math I guess.

[aristotle]

Would it be lack of EAT

What does "EAT" stand for?

[Cralamarre]

Aren't Eat Points from Weight Watchers? :)

[smilie]

>> @mosxu: There is a constant migration of buyers to amazon

>> @glakes: 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.

Observation.

On a US ecommerce site that gets over 1K / day, DIRECT traffic is now larger than Google traffic.

Google, literally. When one has over 33% of traffic source DIRECT type-in it's probably popular, huh. One would assume people look for it. Yet, failure to deliver free organic traffic is staggering.

Yet, I am sure garage-based and chinese sellers of poor quality and partially working widgets in our niche are proliferating on Amazon.

When you see this Google's clear attempt at making Amazon take over 50% of all ecommerce (and I am wondering when do authorities wake up and call it a collusion and start involving existing anti-trust laws, as clearly same bankers have a hand in both), one just starts to wonder if it is on purpose.

[Shaddows]

Amazon is a services platform that competes against Google's services platform. I would be surprised if Google is happy with Amazon's large presence, and of course they do not use Adwords.

We've had a brilliant day today, after a small but clear dip since "Fred"

[ionguy]

@samwest this ".8 of a click" was probably some very delicate tap on tablet or phone ;)
short report from me after an update - traffic (with 90% of zombies) looks stable; valueable visitors very few; conversions almost dead;
from my point of view this update changed nothing

[Cralamarre]

Quick question... When Google Analytics shows a traffic source as "Direct", am I correct in assuming that it means those visitors came to the site directly, either from a bookmark or by entering the URL? Or, does it mean that GA simply doesn't know where the traffic originated from?

[ionguy]

@claramarre its from bookmark or url typed in an address bar
edit: or email client

[Cralamarre]

@ionguy Thanks. So having lots of direct traffic is a good thing, not a bad thing.

I wonder if Google has any way of knowing how much direct traffic a site receives. Obviously Google Analytics knows, but does Google use that information for rankings?

[Sally Stitts]

EAT - From the Google "Human Rater Handbook"

Expertise
Authority
Trust

[mosxu]

direct traffic in analytics is not just users typing the url direct in the browser, it is everything else not identified and actually some of zombie traffic will be direct traffic

@smilie

we do not know if alphabet and amazon shareholders are the same but do not count on politicians to read your post and do something about it, google claims that amazon is competition. What both companies seem to have in common is the same source of intelligence and what is more worrying is that the technology of tomorrow does not include small businesses

[masterjoe]

As expected, I had a very good period of converting traffic - for about 2 hours earlier today. Now nothing. The strange part is that every week.it is for roughly the same amount no matter how much I tweak for conversions or how many new keywords get ranked.

[browndog]

While watching Gilmore Girls just now I heard a term I'd never heard before (being English/Australian) and Googled it (coddled eggs). And every search result came back with an image. I've never seen that before. Is that new, am I living in 2006?

As an aside, new computer, forgotten password...reset requires 10 characters...I will never, remember that in a million years.Grrrrr, I hate how sites require such complex passwords that you have to write them down and put them on your fridge so you can remember them. Oh the irony.

[Robert Charlton]

...and Googled it (coddled eggs). And every search result came back with an image. I've never seen that before. Is that new, am I living in 2006?

You were seeing a bunch of recipe / cooking pages. Almost all of recipe sites that rank need to use images to compete. The images are included as thumbnails in the serps. These go back quite a few years... They're definitely not new.

...2006?

Universal Search was coming in around 2007. These recipe thumbnails are not exactly the same as Universal Search results, but they may use some of the same infrastructure.

Image thumbnails in serps have tended to be more common in certain verticals and search types... eg, news and recipes... and they appeared also in Google Custom Search Engines (which I believe have recently been discontinued). We've discussed images in serps occasionally, and will probably discuss them again as images are included more in Featured Snippets of Rich Answer results.

[RedBar]

Googled it (coddled eggs).

Wow, never seen that before!

[venom906]

@Jori - Our tld is .com and Google shouldn't and wouldn't hand out EAT points just cause of the associated tlds
Regarding EAT in general, we are a niche product and the first of it's kind in our country, we also have decent link weightage coming from trusted sources. We recently had an issue with our SSL certificate which is now fixed, hoping that within the next day or two, I will be able to figure what exactly caused this massive decline.

If fixing the https issue changes anything, I will surely let you know.

[samwest]

My final observation of this dismal month: I fully concur with the observations of @ionguy and @masterjoe, traffic is there, but in spurts. Sometimes these are very dramatic spurts as if they are A/B testing a very small number of our higher keyword pages. The only problem is that these surges produce zero conversions, so my guess is that either the page totally sucks (it really doesn't) or the traffic is very poorly targeted and mostly mobile, hence the zombie effect. When "normal" traffic eventually does arrive, these pages convert very well.

Each week they manage to deliver a meager quota of nearly the exact number of conversions. This has been ongoing for well over a year but keeps evolving lower with each update. Like @masterjoe has observed, the timing of ON and OFF periods seems to be the same each week and even each day, with a little "give" in the mornings hours, but now almost never in the afternoon or evening. The natural patterns of traffic are completely gone now. Manipulation is very clear and there is nothing you can do about it no matter how perfect your page. There are still areas unaffected (YMMV) and if you're still in those, feel lucky and blessed. They'll find those too eventually.

With all the post Fred and May SERP churn, I predict Google's quarterly profit will be up in the high 20 to 30% range. Understandably and historically, we are also entering the slowest time of the year, I might as well just go fishing all of June...maybe the whole summer.

BTW - since only three of us seem to be seeing these patterns (actually four, one non posting former member in the UK who I correspond with daily), it's of virtually no concern. Everyone else is doing fine, right?

[traiana]

samwest I noticed the same traffic pastern with my aff website

[Cralamarre]

I thought I had just suddenly lost the rest of my Google traffic. Turns out to be a server issue which is being resolved. Damn you Google for making me paranoid like this. :(

[westcoast]

Nope samwest, we continue to get hammered. Lost 15% in the most recent update (mostly long tail)

Now over the last 3 days we are starting to slip for all our main keywords. Brand new websites with nearly no content, no backlinks, no history whatsoever have the #1 and #2 spots in our niche. All of the huge, large, established websites in the space have been pushed down. It's completely and utterly ridiculous. Our website is 22 years old and clearly has a corrupted dataset in Google. After 22 years of data collection, algorithm changes, and bugs though what else would you expect. We, and many other old websites are just doomed to google legacy bug purgatory.

They penalize so many things, going so many years back, that no matter how good your site, the collective remnants of algorithms and penalties from decades ago weigh you down like an anchor. With every passing year you will accumulate more micro-penalties, more micro-negative reviews, more micro-bounce rate penalties, more micro-rounding errors, micro-bugs.... which over time result in massive penalties against your site. There's no escaping this algorithmic mess.

The way to succeed in SEO nowadays is as simple as starting a new website. Just start over. Get a new domain. Don't worry about links or content or anything else. You'll dominate.

It is so frustrating. Google needs to fix this "old website anchor" problem really fast. (And no, it has nothing to do with "sites with superior usability and content" overtaking old sites that have fallen behind due to increased competition". These new sites are trash. They should be on page 20, not #1 and #2.)

[edited by: westcoast at 5:20 pm (utc) on May 31, 2017]

[ionguy]

@samwest forgot to ask about your day conversions patterns; as same as you im gettin 1-2 hrs of people who really loves my products;
have you noticed any unusual drops in traffic during your conversions hours? from years i was always gettig nice amount of conversions between 10 and 11am; then afternoon 3-4pm and evening 7-9pm; sometimes yet around midnight some dude with insomnia problems was happy to order something; now since saturday im getting very few conversions at 6-8am and nothing more during whole day with unussual drops in my "converting" hours; its like my website is not visible in ser 3 times a day;

[londrum]

google is so useless these days that i'm starting to think they're running it into the ground, just squeezing as much money out of it before everyone stops using it.

[samwest]

@ion - your are pretty much describing my pattern exactly. Morning conversions only and lately just on Tuesdays. The whole weekly pattern is now the inverse of the long standing patterns of the past. Oddly, my SERP's for main keywords has not changed much, but I did lose a lot of longtail over the past 7 years. Recently though they've simply hammered me out of business.

My page one positions are returning very little traffic while obscure pages and even 301 and 410's just keep showing up as direct traffic. Did I leave a pile of business cards somewhere?

I am also seeing the same blackouts during the day. I've had zero runs for quite a while now, but they are getting worse, but suddenly interrupted by huge spikes of non converting traffic. The traffic I DO get seems to be delivered by drip method...onesey twosey style. Lotsa zombies too.

[masterjoe]

I have not had a single conversion since I made my last post. Yet traffic is still slightly above average, and I havent lost any significant keywords - some have even gained a little bit. I have to LOL at the adwords new conversion optimizing feature, nothing they have created in the last few years can bring better quality traffic than even bing ppc. They have simply messed with it so much it is always going to be a hit or miss which isnt googd enough for serious webmasters.

[browndog]

You were seeing a bunch of recipe / cooking pages. Almost all of recipe sites that rank need to use images to compete. The images are included as thumbnails in the serps. These go back quite a few years... They're definitely not new.

I probably search at least one recipe a week and would expect to see some images (usually at the top), I have never seen them next to each site like that. I just searched for Caesar salad and same thing. I just wonder if it is something that may possibly be rolled out for other search terms too. That would be good.

[samwest]

@masterjoe - you are not alone. Traffic seems higher, but loads of mobile. Zero conversions except for this morning...like always. It's a zombie fest.