Google Updates and SERP Changes - July 2017

[Versado]

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System: The following 4 messages were cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4851947.htm [webmasterworld.com] by robert_charlton - 6:51 pm on Jul 1, 2017 (PDT -8)

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Seeing a lot of changes even on a daily basis specially with new URLs and pages that have got new backlinks. Some pages appear on top 5 and after a few hours they return back to page 2.

On the other hand, I haven't seen any movement on pages that have been already ranking on top 3 for months.

It seems to me like an algo refresh not related with Panda or Penguin which has not finished yet.

[samwest]

@mos - nobody should bully but what's an "adward"? ;)

[mosxu]

@sam
Adwords I did not drink but somehow the brain computer interface thinks that Adwords is the misspelling... Sorry

[Mark_A]

Well I had an odd adwords day Wednesday last week, the usual number of impressions but hardly any clicks. Our adwords consistently produce high click throughs, being very targeted so I couldn't explain it. Overall traffic wasn't down but adwords was and it is the first time in 2 months I have seen that happen.

[samwest]

All user interaction seemed to cease on Tuesday and Wednesday of last week. Sun & Mon good, Tues & Wed dead, Thursday it picked back up and good on Friday. What is curious about these patterns is that they always result in the exact same number of conversions each week. Apparently the AI is getting better at PTQA (precision traffic quota allocation). This just my observation.
Another curious SERP data anomaly is when comparing conversion numbers to last year, it's almost in lockstep day to day, but always slightly on the losing side.
Have not seen a gain pattern since 2010.

[glakes]

The 17th and 18th were good days for conversions. Both before and after these dates are the normal Google blah. I'm not complaining though. I've exceeded July 2016 overall sales this month and there is just over a week to go. I might beat the projected 30% increase in overall sales all without wasting any time,effort and money on Google organic SEO and AdWads. If Google would get their act together and try to compete for relevancy in ecommerce queries, that would be a nice bonus! If Google doesn't, I'm not sweating it. The growth I'm seeing is stable and allows me to incrementally adjust staff and production to meet the higher sales volume.

[mosxu]

Spreading quotas is definitely defying the idea of competition and the laws of any country

They will milk it until they can. Who is going to stop them?

[bw3ttt]

I was a computer science student in 1997 and dropped out of college to pursue professional webmastery. There have been many times that I've had the legs kicked out from under me. Sometimes it's a slow fizzle. Other times I've woken to pure devastation. Each time I roll up my sleeves and reinvent myself.

I have to say that I'm a little disturbed by the perceived bias toward high domain authority. If Google prefers to send long-tail to semi-relevant pages on an authority site rather than highly-relevant pages on another site, there's really no getting around that for a webmaster. After all, I really don't think I'll be hitting a domain authority in the 90s anytime within my natural lifetime. I just need approximately 70,000 more root domains to link to me. No problem.

I hit an all-time Friday traffic record yesterday, a huge increase over last Friday, but the keywords are either irrelevant or overly broad. Today (Saturday) my traffic is slightly lower than it was last Saturday. I'm having difficulty to adjusting to whatever is happening, because I can't figure out what the issue is. No patterns.

[Orby]

One of my sites saw a slow, sharp, steady decline in traffic starting July 3rd. July 10th, traffic started to rise and peaked back to my normal average on the 18th. It's been declining again since the 19th. Today is absolutely 100% terrible. Down 27% from last Saturday, which was low

I did switch over to HTTPS in May, so I'm thinking that may part of the equation here. But after reading this thread, I'm not too sure now...

Oddly enough, my rankings are about the same if not the same as they were before the decline.

This domain is 8 years and traffic has been going up every year. I've been changing so many things on the site around, researching this and that to figure out what the hell is going on. So now, I'm just going to sit back, keep adding great content and hope for the best, I guess?

[EditorialGuy]

I have to say that I'm a little disturbed by the perceived bias toward high domain authority.

I'd take such perceptions with a grain of salt. (People who aren't happy with their rankings tend to believe what they want to believe.)

A few months ago, Search Engine Land ran an article titled "How Google measures the authority of Web pages" that's worth a read:

[searchengineland.com...]

[Awarn]

One thing I find disturbing any more is sites used to have a main page that had the products for a certain category. That still exists but now there are 2 or 3 pages that is basically the same information reorganized in sub categories that is basically the same information as the original page. Not much added value for the most part. When this whole Google mess started there was all this talk of how the number of sites was growing at exponential rates and Google was having difficulty handling the sheer number of pages to index. They wanted us to reduce duplicate content etc etc. I honestly could see some validity to that argument.

Now I look at what is ranking and the pages per site that are showing on page one and I think that sure looks the same data being presented. Of the first 8 listings they could easily be cut in half and the same companies would provide the same content. I know my niche very well. I know what companies are good and who I wouldn't buy from or recommend at all. Of the four on page one two are good, One is Ebay and that could go either way depending on the seller. One I would never use. Then you have 3 on page two that I would not hesitate to use at all. All 3 have been in business many years. I see 2 of the 3 gradually dropping down page 2 while companies I have never even heard of in 25 years rising. Then if I look at factors like number of 404 errors, page speed etc it becomes even more puzzling. Then lets look at Structured data and errors associated with that. It just doesn't add up. I read the whole article on Authority. I somewhat agree with it. However when I look at Page 1 Google has not nailed the authority in my niche. I would grade at maybe 50%. Any more I am in the middle and not ranking that bad but some of my competitors should be higher, This domain crowding is garbage and zero added value.

[browndog]

I've been complaining about domain crowding for a couple of months now, it's really bad in my niche. The same site often gets up to 4 results on the first page.

I just searched for something like 'what type of widget do I have' (I have an article on it), the Mars owned site who are currently flavour of the month had the first result, with the title 'what type of widget do I have', but when you click on the link, you are taken to a page with links to all the types of widgets, there's no actual article.

[SEchecker]

In my humble opinion G became a "recomendation engine" and is far away from being a search engine. Brand favoring, traffic control, adwords, penaleties, zombies, conversasions control, buyer control, traffic patterns, limited avilible search results/ pages.... you name it...

And yet all world believes G is a search engine, even authorities in all countries of the world... they still trying to regulate G search engine and do not realize or accept that G became a fully controlled "recomendation engine" years back! And G is happy about this and paying fines if problems coming up. Otherwise if G would be "declared as a recomendation engine" they would loose the leagal status of being a search engine and we all know where that would end!

[MrSavage]

@bw3ttt, I hear what you're saying. I talked about this issue a couple few years ago and tedster was all over me for saying it. The fact is (was), the giant site eats every conceivable keyword/phrase over any specialty or expert/niche website. It may be worse now, but I was saying it back then. If a big site just needs to write a 400 word article to outrank a website with pages and pages of specific and more detailed information, then Google is simply not serving the best result for the searcher. However, this fell on deaf ears back then (denial) to the realization today (so some with some shred of credibility). The solution is hoping another true search engine emerges that can actually find expert content, rather than the obvious, generic, albeit recognizable DS. Google has zero to do with discovery. It did, but it does not now.

In terms of SERP changes, I glad to see 4 pages rather than 10 pages of utter DS ramblings. Things are looking up!

[browndog]

I sit here right now having just told my child we are going to lose our house and we need to find homes for our pets. I fought so hard to keep going, it's a good site, the content is great, but now 120 word articles outrank mine. My husband is yelling at me, my daughter has just run into her bedroom. This is how it is. My site is 15 years old, I always put the user first, and we are now facing bankruptcy. My whole family hates me for the failure of my site.

We've lost it all :(

[aok88]

Brow dog - so sorry to hear that. It may sound trite, but sometimes it is the darkest right before dawn.

[Mark_A]

Bad news browndog, sorry to read that. 15 years is a good amount of time to be online.

[Jori]

@browndog : whatever you do from now on, don't unplug your site. Maybe, just maybe, in a near future, Google put things back to "normal".
It's all a matter of "user satisfaction" and money earned by G. If user is not satisfied, and less money are earned, Google will change things.

And for now, I don't see how in the world users can get satisfied with current results, at least on my niche. Or how Google can earn more revenues this way. Let's wait.

In the meantime, I'm searching for a regular job, I need to see real people and get out my head of this.

[samwest]

browndog - I feel your pain, however, my longtime saying is "enjoy it while it lasts, because it never lasts" It's the same in the brick and mortar business and jobs world. Things change. The bottom line is that they moved your cheese. Giving in is not the solution. Waiting for the cheese to return is not the solution. Reinvention and realignment with the current trends may help.. After 17 years online, my six figure site has also died the same slow death (since 2010). I myself had to take a part time J.O.B. and I'm still barely able to keep above water.
Probably like you, my site looks fine in the SERPS, but nowhere near the user interaction as before. Is it by design or is it just that trends have changed? I suspect a little of both. I will say this, in my niche the current "flavor of the month" Pinterest crowding is really pushing a lot of valuable content down below the fold or to the page two graveyard, especially on long tail. I am wondering if this crowding is intended to push users to explore page two and beyond. If so, it's not working.
PM me if you need other ideas or a new pair of eyes to review your site. Don't give up hope..

[Nutterum]

@samwest - Oh I know. I've ran SEO gigs for the business travel niche for enough years to know the full force of the "below the fold" hell SERPs. Actually, it was in that very same niche, where it all began, where everything was ads and dynamically generated pages, that used internal site search to generate title, page and off-the-shelf image content for a "landing page". One literally was able to create non-existing locations and business cards for a while at hotels and booking by searching for close but, not exact phrases, like "Hilton ski resort Maimi". Only when Google said they'd ban them from the exclusive premium hotel advertisers club (where only big league agencies were able to create paid google "yellowbar" maps listings) they removed the practice.

Now, more and more money related niches are dominated by the same thing, where big advertisers (10+ million per year) and "social content curators" (like Pinterest but also e-bay/amazon and others) dominate the above the fold space, leaving the normal businesses to fight for the scraps.

[capulkit]

I have been running different blogs over the time.
But got success only with my latest blog. Which is getting on an average 7-8k users per day.

However my learning is that whatever SEO gurus teach you, ignore everything.
I have witnessed that in my niche, a particular site with no useful content ranks on top above all other websites.

Infact my niche is very competitive and on my new blog which is hardly 6 months old, I am getting daily 7-8k visitors only because recently search volume has increased.

In fact the site which ranks on top is only 5 years old, compared to a site in same niche which is 19 years old.
The older site has more detailed articles on same topic but do not rank above the top result.

My observations are:

Links matter and Backlinks are the only thing you should consider.

Even if you post some #*$! but have good backlinks, you page will outperform every other competitor.

[samwest]

my new blog which is hardly 6 months old, I am getting daily 7-8k visitors

so if back links are all that matter and you are getting 7-8k visitors per day, how did you get enough back links in that short time to achieve those traffic volumes, especially in a "very competitive" niche?
Are you sure you're not just getting slammed by bots? there is a current topic about that discussing humans vs bots. Hope all that traffic is converting in some way for you.

[capulkit]

@samwest

No its not bot. They are all human.
The niche is currently being highest searched topic in India.
My site is just luck. 10 million people search topic daily, getting 7k visits is not an achievement.

[MayankParmar]

Capulkit, is the site on GST?

[glitterball]

While researching an article on a place, I searched for that place name, followed by the name of the region where it is located.
18 of the top 20 results were for a Hotel that is named after that place, and of the two relevant results, one was in French!

Google is increasingly useless as a search engine.

[Mark_A]

@glitterball to a certain extent that is what they want, it forces everyone to pay adwords for a listing. And when they have all switched to adwords, that is when CPC inflation starts until all of a sudden people are paying ridiculous amounts to be #1 or to at least be above the fold.

[Jori]

Yesterday, I did a search for a very specific page with command site:

It returned me the result, OK. But with 4 ads before and 4 ads after this single result !

And we are the ones that would be penalized for "above the fold" ads on our websites?

[Mark_A]

There is no point complaining about it, joe public still things google is where you go to search for things and it will take a lot to shift that belief, and while joe public is going there so must we, at least with a significant proportion of our online marketing effort.

I phone polled some of our RL customers as to how they found information, both online and in off line media. They all googled but some avoided Ads because they didn't want google telling them what to click on (their exact words) while another did click on ads because the company paying gave him confidence there might be something there of value. Most didn't even realise some of the results were paid for.

None of them mentioned that their google experience was anything other than rosy. I think google will have to do quite a lot quite a lot wrong before the public will start to be dissatisfied.

[sikosaurus]

Google has definitely gone bad. I already wrote GOOGLE IS BROKEN on their webmaster forum.

My current situation:
I have 2 sites in the same niche, one 2+ and other 6+ years old. Both sites are rather big (video + text content). Bigger site used to have 20k uniques / day.
Important for understanding: All texts written on my website are 100% written by me. All videos are hosted on my sites and servers.

Lately I discovered that one very big site (top result in my niche) is republishing my content.
They download my video and upload on their site, and copy paste exact text as is - LITERALLY.

Result of their malpractice? I'm nowhere to be found. My videos are found as results on their domain - I'm speaking of EXACT title search.

Site that steals my content got millions of backlinks and it seems google considers it as authority in the niche.
This is direct and literal proof that google is forcing big brands, no matter what they do.

Another important thing, SEO related:
If I compare on-site SEO of MY site and THIEF site - no much difference. Heading tags, alt tags, responsive design, user friendly, not many ads Classic stuff (my site got lots more textual content though).

However, it seems like backlinks are the only thing that google really cares for since the first days - and the thief site have massive network of supplemental sites and private blog networks to boost their rankings.

So in short, good SEO vs bad SEO comes down to the following:
How smart you are to create a private blog/site network so you don't get caught doing it.
(spreading it on multiple hostings, mixing IPs, site templates and styles, no uniform)

Voila, that is google today, 2017.

[MrSavage]

No sense complaining. It's AI. It's the bots fault. A machine run search engine is about as nifty as you can get. It's not us, it's them. The AI needs tweaking, but we're working on that. We can't blame humans for any SERPS messes, or if we can, that will be ending soon. Bots and AI can't be sued or held accountable. They can only be tweaked so that they eventually behave. I do believe the ads department is yet to be run by AI so read into that what you will.

[goodroi]

Complaining about the AI is just not a smart way to spend our time. We may not like Google using AI but it is reality. Google is a private company and we need to change to their preferences if we want Google traffic. SEO is about staying on top of changes and evolving with the landscape to optimize our chances of surviving.

The Google SEO landscape used to be much more simple and easy to follow. Way back in the old days, if you (mentioned a keyword X times) + (built X links) = success. Now Google has evolved to a much more complicated landscape that is not easy for us to abuse with outdated SEO tactics. I still see people not embracing Google's increasing slide towards a more fuzzy logic style.

I can say from personal experience if you upgrade your site to make it a superior user experience it will succeed in Google. Worry less about checklist SEO shortcuts and focus more on providing value. You need to remember that a superior user experience is not determined by how much you like your own site. It is determined by how real users like and desire your site. Is your site good enough that users seek it out without first searching Google? When was the last time you did a real usability test and asked strangers to honestly review your site? What do you provide that is not on 100 other sites? Unfortunately too many webmasters can't properly answer these questions.

Thankfully we can all succeed if we are creative enough and work hard enough. There are so many profitable traffic sources that you can make yourself popular with or without Google and Google does love to giving rankings to popular sites.