Google Updates and SERP Changes - February 2018

[samwest]

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System: The following 2 messages were cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4880306.htm [webmasterworld.com] by robert_charlton - 2:13 pm on Feb 3, 2018 (PDT -8)

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I've pretty much thrown in the towel on presenting my content alone in hopes of making a sale these days. Now, like many sites I am seeing lately, I've succumbed to Amazon affiliate links. They convert well, add value and Google does it so why shouldn't I? I am however noticing a slip of one of two positions soon after placing the ad blocks. Figures. It's OK for them, but nobody else.

Recent trend: Traffic slow during what was always the busiest time of year for us. Conversions scarce and quotas appear to be holding tight. Exact same conversion totals (+/- 1) the last 6 weeks. Almost magical how that can happen.

[dollarsound]

@bushytop this site is multi language, travel. The improvement has been global. Anyway countries where I've noticed a better change are: BR, IT, FR, USA, AR

[MayankParmar]

Should we noindex sub pages? Yoast actually removed this feature, because:

"Since Google has gotten much better at working with paginated series, we’ve removed the feature that allows noindexing subpages of archives. According to Joost de Valk, the reasoning behind this is simple: “rel="next" and rel="prev" make sure Google sends people to the first page in a paginated series. There is one catch: sometimes it will send people to a specific page in the series, but that’s when that page is the best match for their query. This, therefore, should be better for the searcher. Noindexing all these pages leads to a lower amount of crawls for them (source), which subsequently leads to lower amounts of crawls for older articles, which is not a good idea on most sites.”

Now the homepage, category sub pages are indexed.

[mosxu]

@glakes

Card prossesing data could be used to spread quotas somehow by the end of the week or month we are back to square one.

After a big order is always quiet as well

[BushyTop]

Anyone else seeing big changes today?

[SnowMan68]

I'm not seeing any noticeable changes in my niche.

But looking at the google weather tools they are all reporting fairly significant change overnight.

serpmetrics, accuranker, rankranger, algoroo, semrush, etc.

I haven't seen them all on the same page for an update in a while.

[BushyTop]

really quite significant changes in my sector.... UK, Automotive.

[Cralamarre]

Nothing unusual here so far with my site (US, Education)

[glakes]

Card prossesing data could be used to spread quotas somehow by the end of the week or month we are back to square one.

After a big order is always quiet as well

@mosxu

We get so few sales originating from Google these days that I can't confirm a plummet in sales after a big sale. For all intensive purposes, for us anyway, Google is dead and appears to send what little buyer traffic they get straight to Amazon (Amazon domain crowded/monopolized SERPS like you would not believe). We sell B2B and B2C. Most of our B2B transactions are direct (placed with a purchase order via fax, email or phone) though some still make low quantity purchases off of our website. Sales to various government entities are often conducted via email. Considering the amount of transactions generated out of search, and payments with checks, Google would have a very incomplete snapshot of our sales.

On another note, I see some SERP trackers are going off. Normally on big updates we get an uptick of sales on our website until Google redirects everything back to Amazon. We'll see if that's the case with this update, if it really is an update at all...

[Martin Ice Web]

Anyone else seeing big changes today?

yes, big changes for the worse, GER
100% Zombies

[Jhurwith]

Feb 20 was better than what Feb 14-19 was. USA site.

Too early to tell for Feb. 21.

[samwest]

But give it a few years, Google may buy some banks and the Federal Reserve. LOL

Wait, I thought they already 'owned' them...lol

[Unshiny]

@samwest LOL yep, they own everything... all our base are belong to Google!

[samwest]

5 day traffic trend on client site.
Fri-1151
Sat-3204
Sun-4181
Mon-5344
Tues-8882
No new content whatsoever. PFM, but I'll take it...and it's actual humans, not bots.

[Martin Ice Web]

@samwest,

if you out this list upsite down u see our organic traffic.....
Meanwhile we get lots of foreign traffic...

What about Danny S. at google. wasn´t he hired to be the "spokesman"...?

[BushyTop]

@samwest you're UK based arent you?

[Martin Ice Web]

After this big drop we started some investigations and found about 1.500 broken links, images ... Unfortunatelly this was due to an master update of our sql-database.
In the new search console this errors are now reported. We just fixed it and hope that we will get back our organic traffic.
We had the same problem last september and fixed it, it took about 3 months to get back our traffic

[Cralamarre]

No drop here. Google traffic was back to normal yesterday after a slow week last week.

[Jhurwith]

Cralamarre, we seeing the same. I think it was said here, last week post Vday could have been all those events OR it could have been a crappy update that they are not reversing. I am betting the latter.

[EditorialGuy]

No significant changes here. We had a steady YOY increase in Google traffic (mostly in the 9- to 18-percent range) from about January 22 to February 13, but things have leveled off and held steady for the last week or so.

[reseller]

A relevant post from Search Engine Roundtable of Feb 22, 2018:

Google Algorithm Update Chatter & Signals February 20th
I am starting to see a bit of chatter around the SEO industry about a possible Google algorithm and ranking update. The chatter is somewhat limited, definitely not at the levels of an old fashion Panda or Penguin update, also not at the levels of Fred or Maccabees but still, some chatter is going on about SEOs and webmasters complaining about ranking drops.

[seroundtable.com...]

[TravisDGarrett]

A relevant post from Search Engine Roundtable

It looks like this article is just based on this topic at Webmaster world, isn't it ? (round robin :-)

[Cralamarre]

That's the way it usually goes. Someone here mentions a possible update, SERoundtable uses it to post an article about a possible update, and then someone here refers to the article on SERoundtable as evidence of the update. It's crazy.

I see no sign of anything.

[TravisDGarrett]

Someone here mentions a possible update, SERoundtable uses it to post an article about a possible update, and then someone here refers to the article on SERoundtable as evidence of the update

LOL

By the way, to stay on topic, I am observing a steady increase of traffic since mid February not a big deal, but continuous increase.

[rustybrick]

It looks like this article is just based on this topic at Webmaster world, isn't it ? (round robin :-)

It makes me dizzy

[NeapTide]

Google did release some update around Feb 20-21 because I saw a spike in traffic across all my sites. It could be niche based or country specific update.
I am a regular reader of 'seroundtable' and I can confirm that Barry does take notes from threads here. In fact he sometimes copy entire chats from here and post them on his blog.

[NeapTide]

After a one month penalty the site traffic recovered on one of my top performing site during second week of February. It has been happening since August last year. My this site get penalized for one month and very next month it recovers all its traffic for a month and then again go down for a month and then again recover all its traffic for one month. i am expecting another one month penalty in March or may be not this time because I am trying to fix all the problems with this site especially removing hundreds of crap links that were pointing to my site and fixing duplicate content issue which is actually not a duplicate content in my eyes. I have removed thousands of external links that were pointing to a third party file sharing site and replaced them with internal links after renting a server and hosting files there.

[edited by: NeapTide at 8:23 pm (utc) on Feb 22, 2018]

[seoskunk]

especially removing hundreds of crap links that were pointing to my site

Seems to be a fruitless task, you do know Google are ignoring those types of links?

[Cralamarre]

I like Barry's site, and I don't blame him for reporting on a possible update based on chatter from this forum. The problem is when people from here then use Barry's article as proof of the update, when it's clear (if you read the article) that it's based entirely on chatter from here. I've read my own comments from here quoted in the articles, but that doesn't make me think I must be right. :)

[NeapTide]

@Seoskunk unfortunately that's not happening. You need to use the disavow links tool because if Google is still providing this tool in this age, there is a reason. I usually ignore most things that Mueller says. This site got over 900,000 crap links from p*rno sites in August last year (obviously someone did that intentionally) and site lost 75% traffic. That's when all this mess started.

I would recommend everyone to utilize this tool and not just put your full trust in Google AI.

[samwest]

@samwest you're UK based arent you?

No - USA