Google Updates and SERP Changes - March 2018

[Martin Ice Web]

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System: The following 7 messages were cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4885490.htm [webmasterworld.com] by robert_charlton - 1:35 pm on Mar 1, 2018 (PDT -8)

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Biggest drop ever. Much bigger than every panda or penguin.
All the work does not pay off. The only winner in this game is google itself.

[MayankParmar]

Why is it "obvious" ? Are you just copying news from other sites?

Let's say OneDrive for Android receives a new update with only one change. I somehow stretch it to 300 words, while my rival sites write a 70-100 words article.

These type of articles on average receive close to 2000-3000 visits (direct readers). And up to 5000 if it is on Top Stories. I just can't stop writing them!

P.S: The rival site is a big company with close to 50 million visits a month.

[EditorialGuy]

I have been noticing that a higher keyword position does not always equal more impressions. You also have to have the same amount of users searching for the keyword.

One of "evergreen" articles is about a weather/tidal condition in a certain city that happens only now and then. Whenever there's a news story about it in the English-language press, traffic for our article spikes. The spike affects traffic for the article, but also for the site as a whole. If I weren't paying attention, I might assume that Google had changed something in its algorithm, when in fact the only thing that changed was the height of the tide.

[BushyTop]

Anyone seeing anything different from a SERPs perspective today?

[samwest]

No changes seen in serps, but plenty of traffic and visitor behavior flux,

Over the weekend I decided to "dumb down" my test site further, trimming text to the bare minimums.
Gone are the days of long winded ad copy 'ala Richard Thalhiemer'. Anyone remember those original Ionic breeze ads?
Nowadays those would be tagged by the web spam team..and millennial's would get overwhelmed by the first paragraph.
Admittedly, my site used to read like an old Sharper Image ad. Been trimming it slowly for the past 5 years.
Traffic actually showed a slight upward tick in GA yesterday.
So, whoever recently said they needed more text to recover may be 'doing it wrong'. [goo.gl...]
It seems that today, (in my vertical at least) less is more to visitors.

[RedBar]

Wow Google, congratulations on decimating one of my widget trade sites.

This site is the only English language, regularly updated niche trade widget site, there are a couple of active Chinese sites however no other English site on The Net.

Congratulations? Yep, last week was at 45.2% v 2018 average ... I really have to wonder what previously "unrewarded" site(s) was boosted?

Honestly G, you're becoming an international freaking joke!

Or are people stopping using G, not bothering with G, bypassing G, getting their info from elsewhere, relying on Wikipedia and FB? ... I do know that for me G is my last port of call when searching!

[MayankParmar]

FB?

That is for fake news, not info :D

[mosxu]

Eric Shm—-idt told you the internet will not exist nor will clicks to your website from search, except for 3-4 long term advertisers

The rest are high street stores, location based search not sure if “google lens” will play a role and revolutionise shopping but there will be no traffic for small businesses

[RedBar]

That is for fake news, not info :D

Trust me that within Europe, I don't know about the USA or elsewhere, FB rules for fact, fiction and faction amongst certain users.

[Rlilly]

@redbar - sorry the only fake is Google, pretending to be an unbiased NO EVIL search engine.

[EditorialGuy]

We saw a significant jump in average rankings, as reported by Google Search Console, on March 13. The increase has held through the 17th (the last day shown). It looks like the biggest improvement was for desktop, although mobile and tablet averages are up a bit, too.

[Atomic]

As with any update, some sites may note drops or gains. There’s nothing wrong with pages that may now perform less well. Instead, it’s that changes to our systems are benefiting pages that were previously under-rewarded....

Has anyone else found something curious about this statement? One part really struck me: changes to our systems are benefiting pages that were previously under-rewarded..... Is this an admission from Google that they have their finger on the scale and that rankings are being artificially manipulated? I've seen inferior pages lurch to #1 that clearly do not belong there. You have to wonder why. And then Google comes out and says why. They'll just keep twiddling knobs until they get the result they want.

[EditorialGuy]

Is this an admission from Google that they have their finger on the scale and that rankings are being artificially manipulated

Depends what you mean by "artificially." Algorithms don't exist in nature, and in any case, search rankings aren't only about "best," "worst," and increments in between. Take something like "tricorner widget": Should the top result be a definition, an encyclopedia page, a manufacturer's product page, an e-commerce page, a review, or the song "Tricorner Widget" that Joe Bob and His Banjo Band recorded in 1955? That's a judgment call that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with page quality.

Also, beware of reading too much into a word or phrase that someone used in a press release or blog post.

[vlexo]

Seen some fairly decent boosts. Been working hard since October last year to identify why drops had occurred, and believe it was link related. Effectively another website that has held a very lucrative term for about 3-4 years has dropped from the top spot and we've taken it. Not entirely sure if they have done a lot wrong, but we've done a lot right in my opinion and we are feeling some benefit from that.

[RedBar]

Soooo ... what happened to localisation?

Tonight I was searching, to buy, a specific manufacturer plus model number, computer machine, G.uk gave me after the ads:

1. Manufacturer ok
2. Major UK seller ok
3. Major UK seller ok
4. Major UK seller ok
5. YouTube ok
6. German review
7. UK review
8. Bizarre UK review site
9. Good Russian review site
10. Amazon India
11. Australian seller
12. Australian seller
13. Uk tech site
14. South Africa review site
15. South Africa review site
16. UK review site
17. India seller
18. India seller
19. Amazon UK
20. Australia seller

What a FREAKIN' MESS Google!

WTF is going on?

Results 1/2/3/4 I expected to see however from #10 onwards they were mostly pointless from MY buying perspective ... not at all impressive plus I did the deal elsewhere through the manufacturer promotion and absolutely nothing to do with you.

Why did I do this? I was simply checking how reasonable their offer was ... or not:-)

[Jez123]

the song "Tricorner Widget" that Joe Bob and His Banjo Band recorded in 1955?

Didn't Radiohead cover that a few years back?

[mosxu]

@RedBar

It sounds like it is the first time you have been personalised way from making money.

Matt Cutts said that websites advertising are as good as the ones in organic so they will not understand your cry for quality.

I wonder if you would want to start adwards if will you get any converting traffic or just zombies...

[capulkit]

News sites and branded site on all positions. Small sites are dying or will dye sooner or later.
I am talking about small sites with quality content.

[TravisDGarrett]

At some point you/we must rethink how we define "quality content". Because to me a quality content means that it answers what the user is searching. And, if sites ranking above you, do not bring this answer, then, users will reach your site anyhow. In other words, it doesn't matter how many junk sites are above you, if they are not bringing the right answer. Now, if these sites you consider low quality, or junk, bring the right answer, then the user has what he was looking for, so the ranking is appropriate...

[Shaddows]

Extremely weird traffic patterns today. Nothing visible in SERPs.

[Marketing Guy]

There seems to a lot of product related stuff hit.

Just checked a couple of searches for "product type + reviews" - first 3 pages are almost all Amazon.co.uk results (first place was a newspaper article and 3rd page had a couple of other sites). That's a solid 25+ pages from a single domain in the top 30. Haven't seen SERPs flooded with a single domain like this since the days of 500k+ page spam sites with spun content.

Searches for "product name + reviews" are the same. One search only has 7k results (pretty niche product). 9/10 are Amazon reviews. 8 are different size variants of the product, one is a competing brand. 10th place is my site. Seen this for a few niche / uncompetitive product searches.

More competitive stuff has a similar breakdown, but with slightly less Amazon stuff and more other review site pages.

Then there is this: [twitter.com...]

Is Google possibly taking a swing at lowish content affiliate review sites?

What's interesting about Amazon's performance is that their product titles are generally stupidly over-optimised by retailers trying to game their internal search. I wonder what impact that is having on Google SERPs - the scale of that over-optimisation would likely sink other domains, but it's likely benefiting Amazon.

Run Amazon .co.uk and .com through SEMrush or other ranking tool. UK showing a 30%ish increase year on year in top 10 rankings / COM showing 50% increase. COM is 20% up in March 18 compared to Jan 18. Those are massive gains.

[MayankParmar]

Wow. Google kicked me out from the Top Stories as well. This is a ridiculous!

[EditorialGuy]

News sites and branded site on all positions. Small sites are dying or will dye sooner or later.

Maybe because big sites can afford copy editors? :-)

[Rlilly]

@editorialguy

"Maybe because big sites can afford copy editors? :-)"

Wrong, its scales of economy.. and manipulation by Google.

[JesterMagic]

In our niche the niche players are getting pushed out as well by large media brands that cover many topics. These brands also more often than not are represented multiple times in the search result pages. The latest Google update seems to have "rewarded" these sites.

Most (not all) of these media brands should not be represented. Most of the content is old and out dated and in some cases completely wrong.

[samwest]

@JM - I know what you mean. In my vertical there is a very sticky yet poorly written media brand (thebalance, formerly aboutdotcom) article that ranks above the fold on nearly every query. It's a non authoritative collection of outdated websites written as a gratuitous review with zero takeaway designed solely to drive visitors to the ad block exit doors (TEN ads on the page plus two syndicated article ad blocks). Large media brands seem immune to any punitive action no matter what ad riddled garbage they sling.

[MrSavage]

The trends you speak of, I was noticing and commenting about this years ago. I was also being criticized on these forums for pointing it out. What I call this? Being squeezed out. Chances are if you don't work for one of these web/corporate giants, there isn't going to be space for you. The squeeze has been going on for a long time. What you have today, enjoy it because you're getting choked out in most cases. Go ahead and be an optimist, but I was just being real about what I observed yet people were in total and complete denial. If an alternative search comes to market and is supported, that's about the only hope if you're an individual. That said, people will be so used to not clicking links thanks to how searchers are being treated right now, people won't accept a new engine that actually expects people to click out, into the world wide web. It's dying folks. Be in denial if you like. But in 2018 to be commenting about big brands covering every niche even with one weakly written or insightful post being top in ranks? There may be some denial going on, sorry.

[westcoast]

I'm curious... those of you who are getting "squeezed out" of Google update after update after update, year after year... How have your SERPs in Bing held up over the last 5 years?

We used to be #1 in google under a huge number of terms. These have slipped with every update, to the point where we are now on the second page (!) for almost all our main keywords. This is pretty stunning -- all of the websites above us are either thin garbage pages or large brands that only tangentially have to do with the keywords.

At the same time, we remain #1 in bing in places where it makes sense. It is shocking to me how much bing and google results are diverging for our site. Bing is weighing us rationally and reasonably, and Google appears to be placing larger and larger penalties on our site for whatever unknown and unknowable reasons.

[Wpow]

Is it weird that Google is not responsive right now?

[MayankParmar]

@Westcoast Bing is very stable, and growing for me. But Bing is not even 5% of Google traffic.

[Maximum44]

We are an example of someone that really has not been pushed out by anyone. It might be because we are in a pretty fragmented area of the market. We actually had it worse before. But after a lot of work cleaning out the old (low quality) we've gained a lot of traffic. At least up until now.

Big brands are not our main competition though. Youtube videos are. Sure, they are a big brand. But the videos are not.