Google Updates and SERP Changes - October 2017

@mos - only "'god" knows what's going on...of that we can be sure.

so a big and BAD update is in full swing right now.

Something is definitely up today...I'm seeing very wild swings (as reported a post back) - data sets appear to be shifting...I'm getting direct hits on pages that were 301'd almost 10 years ago....again, only "god" knows.

only "god" knows.

God is a concept
By which we measure
Our pain
I don't believe in magic
I don't believe in I-Ching
I don't believe in Bible
I don't believe in tarot
I don't believe in Hitler
I don't believe in Jesus
I don't believe in Kennedy
I don't believe in Buddha
I don't believe in mantra
I don't believe in Gita
I don't believe in yoga
I don't believe in kings
I don't believe in Elvis
I don't believe in Zimmerman
I don't believe in Beatles
I don't believe in Google

Copyright John Lennon (he was well ahead of his time)

Or "in God we trust, but all others bring data” someone very famous said at a conference about collective intelligence.

It looks like we are not intelligent enough and also we may be boring talking about this zombie traffic too much

Off topic sorry

Or "in God we trust, but all others bring data” someone very famous said at a conference about collective intelligence.

It looks like we are not intelligent enough and also we may be boring talking about this zombie traffic too much

Off topic sorry

Whats on topic - moaning about Google and traffic ? This is far more interesting.....

The wisdom of the crowds = collective intelligence, scares the hell out of me. You see most people don't question they follow, so collective intelligence is just The Wisdom of the Sheep , and before someone cites Wikipedia as collective intelligence the whole thing was done by 35,000 a tiny fraction of the population.

Today is a non google or google zombie day.
google is getting obsolet in regard of conversions. Amzon + ebay rules.

after changing my site To https
google takes too much time to index my new threads

Seeing the results revert back today. Anyone else seeing this. I'm also noticing a lot less domain crowding.

Can we remove the G-d debate?

Can we remove the G-d debate?

agreed, one offhand comment sure spiraled out of control.

Can we remove the G-d debate?

Maybe we should - but I have never understood why religious people can't spell God

Ok according to a source on seroundtable the "Voorhees Update" is expected to start on October the 13th.

This would not be unexpected Google have spent the last few months deindexing spam without affecting serp results, ignore your search console over half those links don't exist anymore I guarantee.
I see this update is going to be a refresh of penguin (now running within the main algo) and some sites will come back, some will go. It may also tackle the recent boost in hacked links, we'll just have to see.

@seoskunk I don't know, all I see at SER is a bunch of people shouting (written) obscenities at each other in the comments section. I always forget why I don't check that site anymore, then I go back, and as soon as I hit the comments I remember.

@rustybrick you should really make an effort to clean that up.

NickMNS I like the freedom Barry allows people to express their self, yep its noisy but their are some gems within the noise. @rustybrick let it be over moderation is #F-u.c_k)ing boring

The Voorhees update... on Friday the 13th. Yep, that definitely sounds legit. What's next, the Kruger update?

the "Voorhees Update" is expected to start on October the 13th.

Awesome, the 33rd anniversary of my first wedding day!

It's bound to be an ulterlly total freakin' screw-up:-)

Honestly I do not understand why there is a Google SERPs discussion any more, their SERPs SUCK, all Google does now is list sites by how many pages a site has by "keyword numbers & supposedly related images".

Therefore if one searches for "keyword1 keyword2 keyword3", all Google will do is return totally crap sites with those at the top having SUPPOSEDLY those keywords ... Google is a total and utter farce seemingly believing that these "social sites" have the "solution".

The gratifying thing is that the amount of people I talk to and associate with also actually agree with this, they know Google's SERPs is crap ... Unfortunately not everyone else is so discerning:-)

I like the freedom Barry allows people to express their self, yep its noisy but their are some gems within the noise.

So true. And the best part about it is the comments are at the end of the story so if people find them offensive they don't have to read the comments, which has worked well for Barry so far and will continue to do so. Those that can't handle it obviously don't have to visit the site and can remain in their bubble. Being a side project for Barry, I don't think it will take any food off of his table if some don't visit. Barry reports and people discuss. Simple and effective.

I actually think some changes have already happened and I might be wrong, but I'm not sure what we are seeing, or will see will be links related. There might be some element of link quality in there (because, as we all know they like to mix things up now) but, if I were to bet - I'd bet on another quality check, heavily weighted to performance.

In another news, I saw a 54% increase in US traffic yesterday. I rank for a UK Market.

Strange things...
1. Huge traffic loss for Taiwan and Iran since 4th of October.
2. Traffic increase on US and UK traffic

Money wise, if ads were paying better, it would be great.

@bushytop

Is the US traffic form many cities when checking locations? If it is one or two cities it must be ghost traffic.

Based on multiple 100k/mo search terms and my positions for those terms on page one, if I had to go by current traffic levels to determine the total number of active Google search users worldwide, the number would be well under 1 million. That's how dismal Google SERP's have become in all my verticals.

It's not just for one or two sites, it's observed across a whole army of sites, some of which hold very high volume page one key phrase positions. This is statistically not possible without some major manipulation going on...or a total paradigm shift in end user search behavior..or a combination of both...and more.

It's like standing in the middle of a busy 6 lane freeway and not getting hit. It defies all logic.

I would guess that if we could visualize all search traffic in real time, we would currently see a "traffic mumuration" around the term "las vegas" right now. It seems trends can drain traffic completely. Site sitting at a big fat zero for over an hour, yet a sale earlier this morning on basically no traffic volume.

In the past, the model was simply "create a good converting product then throw traffic at it" The second part of that has become nearly impossible today.

Here's an interesting link: [internetlivestats.com...]

My question of the day: If I peaked out in say 2007 when there were 1.3 billion internet users worldwide, why is my traffic down over 90% in 2017 with 3.4 billion active internet users?....all on virtually the same page ranks? minus long tail and semantic search which has been gutted from all our sites.

Anyone having a huge drop in AMP audience today ? I got very few users, though i have usually like 3 or 4k a day (stable all year)

I checked analytics and it works when i'm on an AMP page

This is statistically not possible without some major manipulation going on...or a total paradigm shift in end user search behavior.

I've been banging the manipulation drum for ages now however I also feel you are partially/totally correct about end user behaviour My global site visitor numbers are way down yet the businesses continue to get enquiries and orders with USA visitor numbers down by the biggest margin.

Interestingly many of my global trade colleagues are experiencing exactly the same, quiet sites yet busy order books therefore does this beg the business question "Has everyone's experimentation of the last 15-20 years of sourcing new suppliers and products via The Net come to a grinding halt?" since they've realised that repeated requests to potential new suppliers, without ever placing any orders, now results in silence and non-quotations.

My sister's own UK retail business has seen traffic fall yet footfall and orders through her establishment increase, I see this in my home town, no one closing because of The Net, businesses are thriving that a few years ago I would have thought would have been killed off by now.

Whatever it is, it is proving darned hard to analyse and predict than ever before.

Question, a few years ago why did I get traffic 24/7, these days it's more like 12/4? For me Saturdays and Sundays are almost pointless likewise Monday mornings and Friday afternoons.

My question of the day: If I peaked out in say 2007 when there were 1.3 billion internet users worldwide, why is my traffic down over 90% in 2017 with 3.4 billion active internet users?....all on virtually the same page ranks? minus long tail and semantic search which has been gutted from all our sites.

There is nothing the same about how a page was ranked in 2007 compared to today. How are you even measuring your page rank? How do you account for personalization, geo-location and the multitude of other factors that impact ranking? In 2007 one keyword == one set of ranked results , in 2017 one keyword == many sets of ranked results. There is no tool available today that is able to provide a good measure of keyword ranking. GSC "Search Analytics" probably comes the closest given that the providers (Google) at least have access to all the inputs, but even Search Analytics is not very good.

This is statistically not possible

It's simple bad data make for bad stats =>SISO.

10 years have passed since 2007, that is like the Cretaceous period in Internet years.

@samwest

Great example again of suspicious traffic and that has nothing to do with personalisation. You stated very clearly what numbers were decent in times when there was not even chrome arround and now with this amazing browser the traffic is 3 times greater and your traffic is 90% less especially the conversions on your site.

I am facinated that the fan boys being part of the collective intelligence project are having an answer for everything these days and better believe it.

[edited by: mosxu at 7:32 pm (utc) on Oct 6, 2017]

10 years have passed since 2007, that is like the Cretaceous period in Internet years.

I see the same search engine with different priorities, Google have wasted too much time on penalising spam and are now following Bing in deindexing. Meanwhile Bing already has a clean index. They have gone at least in many webmasters eyes from being loved to despised. They went from indexing the web to dictating the web. Yes google has developed allott in the last ten years, just very little of it has been productive and most of it in the coming months will be thrown out the window.

I am facinated that the fan boys being part of the collective intelligence project are having an answer for everything these days and better believe it.

Well spotted! Hey NickMNS say hello to EG from me, I think he's in the next cubicle :)

I'm also noticing a lot less domain crowding.

Seeing the same in our vertical as well. One competitor in specific usually holds the top 2 or 3 results on various KW's we compete with. For the last 2 days, they only fill spot #1.

There is nothing the same about how a page was ranked in 2007 compared to today. How are you even measuring your page rank?

You'll get no argument from me on that. The Mountain View beach bully kicked sand in every webmaster's eyes long ago. If you think I'm referring to that little green "page rank" bar then you really are talking ancient history. I rank my sites manually, by entering the B&B key phrase incognito AND non incognito then marking down the position, then proceeding to the google suggestions rinse and repeat. Yes it's tedious.
I also check keyword search volumes from a variety of sources, most of which do not agree. Yes, it is not as easy to determine rank these days, yet with advances in technology, it SHOULD be easier...but to protect "their" system, it is not. Even the ballpark the numbers I DO get should be producing higher traffic levels and certainly not these long zero runs. Clearly something is preventing traffic, either some traffic shaping, quota system or very different user behavior. It's likely a combination of all these and as I said before, more. (I don't think I need to clarify for any experienced webmasters what "more" means...social, mobile devices, speed, https, etc).

On my test site(s) and in my verticals, personalization has very little effect for desktop searches. Only mobile sees minor differences.
These days we are left with nothing but bad data to work with...by design.

Yes, I had Sezchuan last night and I can confirm => SISO....Spicy In, Spicy Out. ;)

Spicy in, Spicy out!

Lol!

I was not referring to "Page Rank", I meant the ranking of a given page for a specific keyword/phrase. I re-read what I wrote after posting and saw that, it was mis-type. But I think you got the idea regardless.

by entering the B&B key phrase incognito AND non incognito

That covers two states, and I guess using the other sources, provides some additional states. The question is then, is this sample representative? And the answer appears from what you are reporting to be no.

Only mobile sees minor differences

I do not know what your traffic patterns look like, but more than 60% of my traffic is mobile and that number appear to be growing.

Minor differences over many users can have a much bigger impact than one might think.

I believe that over the past few years (2 or 3) that there has been a paradigm shift in Google's rankings, the concept of "the keyword" is dead or dying.The issue I have is grasping what is replacing it.