Google Updates and SERP Changes - April 2018

[kewlchat]

System: The following message was cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4889357.htm [webmasterworld.com] by robert_charlton - 5:32 pm on Apr 1, 2018 (PDT -8)


Seems after 3 years traffics picked up some, should we dare to dream?

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 1:39 am (utc) on Apr 2, 2018]
[edit reason] Moved and reformatted message to new month [/edit]

[Shaddows]

Yeah, I thought it was your other alias but wasn't sure.

Here's my big, big thoughts(!) on the matter, still rejecting the "zombie" tag in October 2010: Google & Traffic Shaping [webmasterworld.com]

And then generally in any other dedicated thread, but rarely in the main monthly ones. The problem is that almost all data-led members reject the principle, and many (most?) of those who accept the principle blame it for any and all of their woes.

Also problematic for me is how diffuse it was (note past tense; I cannot any longer separate zombies from other non-converting traffic), so the closer you look, the less you saw. No particular page saw a statistically significant uptick in visitors, but overall we did. My zombies were relatively unique in being additional rather than replacement traffic, and generally resulted in some measurable impact after the horde receded.

My zombie traffic happened during a period of insanely strong growth, so I was not complaining. I believe they are down to the personalisation mechanism.

[mosxu]

I wonder how personalisation works when every credit card transaction on this planet gets reported to AI. Algorithms could be trained to let’s say drive revenue to certain players, displace certain players, bring in fresh players if necessary and so on. It may not be that it has much to do with quality of the results. What goes in the algo and for what reason nobody knows.

[samwest]

@Shaddows - My question then and now is still the exact mechanism of what makes traffic turn ON and OFF like a switch. I've been watching traffic patterns since Google was a baby and Yahoo reigned supreme. My mile high observation is that this all started when G started making a profit and got slowly worse as their endless 20% revenue increased moved forward. Today when you have to scroll below the fold to find your first organic position, it's no wonder.
Still, how can you have a solid few weeks, then several days or now even weeks of nothing all while the SERPs remain totally unchanged. The only thing that appears to be changing is the quality of traffic. I won't take it any further than that, because it's pointless. The real key is to simply find new traffic sources the don't turn ON and OFF. We are doing that successfully on other sites, but not my test site which relies mainly on Google organic traffic, which in itself, tells me a lot.

[Cralamarre]

Google traffic is still going strong today, and even a bit better than last week. AdSense is also doing better than it has all year.

[samwest]

I'm getting plenty of traffic, from bots and logs are full of brute force form attempts from *@mail.ru addresses. Conversions are at zero, so there's another flavor of zombie traffic.

[Travis]

May be the bots/zombies that some of you are talking about, are bots which are visiting sites for given SERP, may be to scrap your content, or, may be they have a way to downgrade your ranking, for example, by emulating real surfers, who visit Google, click on a link then come back to the SERP (which Google can interpret as "this site was not good, since the visitors came back"). Or things like that...

[keyplyr]

Most of Your Traffic is Not Human [webmasterworld.com]

[mosxu]

@travis

If they are bots manipulating dwell time, speed or CTRs would make Google a complete fool.

Zombies actually do stay on the site almost similar to a normal user going through a few pages and loading fast as well. Sometimes they do not make sense getting from one page to another without a link between.

Samwest is experiencing some sort of hacking attempts to maybe get distracted from the real issue.

Any security issues preventing his site from showing to real humans should pop up in webmaster tools. Chrome will not miss on security issues.

[glakes]

But Google will always return brands because people expect to see those brands. If the brand is missing, your average searcher will assume Google is broken.

I suppose that's one way of looking at it, but when it comes to products the logic is severely flawed. All search engines combined get 15% of product searches first. The vast majority of people searching for products first go to Amazon and other big brands. SERPS that repeat where buyers have already visited is counterproductive as the reason why many go to a search engine is to find something other than the big brands (ie. more in-depth product info, better price, etc.). This may help to explain why search continues to decline for products, though many of the big brands have site search capabilities that far exceed what Google produces.

[Nutterum]

@samwest - I posted on the fake traffic thread from 2017 with some new info I managed to get my hands on. If you are interested in the read.

When talking traffic in general in April, it is tad slow compared to the current average for the sites I monitor, but it is better than 2017 especially on mobile where I surpassed the 50% visitors coming from mobile mark for most properties. (they were optimised for mobile users way back when I preached that Google would switch to mobile first, but lets not pat myself on the back any further)

[BushyTop]

I'm seeing one of my pages fall back and be replaced with the home page... whats weird is that we've seen massive growth from this update and up until yesterday this one URL was performing great. Now its dissappearing.

Ive also noticed this morning that the pagination has come back on mobile SERPs... possible roll back again?

[BushyTop]

We're still seeing so much movement. SERPs changing by the hour. Crazy. UK, Automotive

[Shaddows]

We're seeing totally different traffic patterns this morning. Not a roll-back.

Could be the "completion" or of the broad core update from last Monday (2018-04-16)

[mosxu]

@glakes

In my industry some of the big brands mainly high street stores not as much as great brands do not even have the products but a sitting page describing things and outranks so many great small businesses.

I am guessing that those rankings will be sold one day to these high street stores / brands. But the trick is here really is to make them pay for their own branded traffic.

All search box suggestions in my industry are brands. It does tell you that most of the buyer traffic is either branded or direct in Amazon search box.

[glakes]

@mosxu

In my industry some of the big brands mainly high street stores not as much as great brands do not even have the products but a sitting page describing things and outranks so many great small businesses.

My company fought this same battle to be seen, and Google preferred to list Amazon category pages over our specific product pages for laser targeted search queries. It's was beyond an annoyance as it was outright manipulation on Google's part. The only way to be seen in Google's Amazon crowded SERPS, was to sell on Amazon which is what we did.

Though small businesses make up the largest percentage of businesses in the USA, one would not think this is the case when searching for products in Google. As I've said before, Google needs a diversity program for their search results that better reflects reality. At least to some degree, more advanced consumers have learned to look elsewhere. I've had customers tell me what great products we have and state when they searched Google for our type of products we were nowhere to be found. These customers are the rare exception and not the rule, but it's still nice to see some buying customers question why Google has omitted/hidden us from the search results. I'm sure you can guess what my response is to these customers, particularly when I have the opportunity to educate someone on how manipulative Google actually is.

[widgetized]

My report (e-commerce):

- traffic somewhat stable
- sales / conversion ave dropped considerably
- a lot of spam e-mails coming in since 15 April

Nothing new, since this is happening right after every Google update and I can't do anything about it.

About the 'site changes' theory you guys are discussing: I tried to (A) add fresh content / new product pages more frequently during the week (B) keep the website not updated for 2 or 3 weeks. Makes no differences for me.

[Cralamarre]

@widgetized Technically, the only way that adding new content to your site should improve traffic is that the more pages you add, and the more topics you cover, the more you increase the chances of someone finding your site. I don't understand the idea some people have that adding new content should somehow improve the rankings of your existing content.

[samwest]

Samwest is experiencing some sort of hacking attempts to maybe get distracted from the real issue.

It's not likely a hacking attempt or security issue, it's just the usual background spambot activity that has recently been amped up across the board. Many outlets are reporting similar activity. Referral spam is suddenly off the chain too.

To reiterate, traffic quality dropped dramatically on 4/21 - maybe it was due to a 4/20 hangover and all my visitors are now dainbramaged. Funny how many here are reporting the same thing again in lockstep. Another coincidence?

[Maximum44]

We are seeing significant growth since Saturday (21st) with increased Adsense earnings. Growth is pretty much equally spread over mobile, desktop and tablet. We do not see any evidence of a spam bots. Though there is a very slight increase in bounce rate (1 - 2 %). We don't sell anything. We survive on Adsense only.

Average keyword positions remain about the same, but have seen a few high traffic keyword positions move up. But overall they look the same.

Have been cleaning pages and blocking incoming spam links like crazy since February + implementing a little structured data. Hard to say if anything have helped, but we have regained a bunch of traffic we lost earlier this year.

[samwest]

Just another observation and change that happened this morning: For my bread and butter search term (and most of the suggested terms) , I now own the answer box, and the #1 and #2 position (actual domain crowding) yet the site is seeing 30 minute zero traffic periods punctuated by one or two visits and then another 30 minutes of zero traffic. The internet super highway on Google now appears to be a back country hiking trail.

And before you ask, the site is https, mobile responsive, hosted on a dedicated server with a <1 second page load time.

[edited by: samwest at 2:08 pm (utc) on Apr 24, 2018]

[Martin Ice Web]

@aristotle

n reading WebMasterWorld over the years, I've noticed that people who are always making changes to their sites usually don't do well in google, in either the short or the long term.

I think you got me wrong. I never ment to make big changes in stucture but to wipe out errors, rewrite articles that have no good content at all, adding pictures or links.

[Martin Ice Web]

when it comes to zombie traffic ; we analized a big bunch of ips over > 4 weeks.
First think we did was looking for direct traffic. Then we sorted this direct traffic by IP.
Then we looked up the IP.

We could easily detect IP blocks ( e.g. 255.255.255.x ) over the period that was direct traffic. This IPs are 90% located in USA. This are spiders that only read 5-10 pages a day only to hide their work.

This zombie traffic happens only to pages with high "rankings" and high traffic volume. So in times when we see heavy traffic from google the zombie traffic rises too.

[Awarn]

What I see is nothing is really indexed new besides AMP pages. No new structured data in about a week. No new content really indexed. Shows good crawls but the only real change I see is AMP pages being picked up. Other new data should be being picked up but isn't. A little strange. Traffic seems fine though.

[Cralamarre]

What I find strange is that even though my traffic has been on the rise since early March, Google Search Console isn't showing much in the way of changes to the average ranking positions. In fact, last week the average actually went up slightly even though traffic increased by more than 10%.

[mosxu]

Spend in adwards double sales half in the last week, competition prices sky high nothing changed but just more traffic that does not make sense

[seoskunk]

I am liking these results, if they hold...... they change so often now.... but maybe its

[youtube.com...]

[Rlilly]

IT seems like Google has several sets of results. So what seems like an update just might be a different set of results being delivered. And in the meantime, it is constantly updating its core.

[seoskunk]

IT seems like Google has several sets of results. So what seems like an update just might be a different set of results being delivered. And in the meantime, it is constantly updating its core.

Totally agree there rotating cached results and occasionally show the core, to early maybe to celebrate a good result.

[NickMNS]

I'm seeing a lot of bouncing around, some hours are strong followed by few weak hours. Overall, it is looking much better than last weekend but I haven't seen a significant upturn.

I am seeing an up-tick in traffic from Bing and Yahoo, or I should say I am seeing traffic from Bing and Yahoo. This is the first time since I started where I have seen a consistent flow of traffic from these sources. Overall it still only accounts for less than 10% of my traffic.

[Cralamarre]

@NickMNS For me, Bing and Yahoo combined account for only 5% of my traffic, with Bing dominating at 4%. Basically, both could disappear tomorrow and not much would change.