Google Updates and SERP Changes - May 2018

[Shaddows]

System: The following message was cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4894234.htm [webmasterworld.com] by robert_charlton - 11:34 am on May 1, 2018 (PDT -8)

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We've seen a huge shift in traffic patterns today. Traffic and conversions are relatively stable, but destination pages are very different.

In terms of products sold, it is very similar to the pre-March profile (which is different to the various iterations over the last 6 weeks)

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 7:51 pm (utc) on May 1, 2018]
[edit reason] Split to new thread. [/edit]

[EditorialGuy]

You can have the best content in the world but a site with more backlinks will outrank you.

That might have been true back in the days when PageRank was king. From what I can see for the topics that I watch, links are far less important than they used to be.

[Rlilly]

seeing 1 row of picture ads, then 3 rows of organic images each row with 4 images (total 12 so this takes up a lot of space), 4 organic listings, 2 YouTube videos and then 1 organic listing > onto page 2

thats only 5 on a page...

[glakes]

SERP trackers today are showing some stability, and what I see in my industry are the same Amazon crowded SERPS along with all the other bloat (same as what Rlilly observed) that pushes anyone but Amazon well below the fold. Conversions reflect this with few sales coming from Google, though I see increased conversions on Amazon. Maybe Google figured Amazon was still under-rewarded with this update. LOL But to be fair, Amazon's algo also plays games with conversions and many sellers routinely find Amazon suppressing their listings or spurts of sales along with periods of no sales (algo induced zombie waves).

Being a holiday weekend it's really hard to judge the full impact of this update. Tuesday should be telling to see how Google's update impacts our B2B sales. Regardless, it does not look like this update helped the already poor B2C sales we have on Google though conversions from Bing/Yahoo remain quite stable even with the holiday.

[KaseyM]

A lot of movement this weekend. Check your inboxes too folks, Google is switching a lot of sites over to Mobile-first indexing!

[MayankParmar]

All of my sites are still on desktop indexing.

[samwest]

fuss all you want about backlinks, content and brands...
IMHO, the real money is on takeaway value.

[frankleeceo]

how do you tell if a site is on mobile first indexing? I am having a hard time finding that information on the search console.

[koan]

frankleeceo, you get a message in Search Console telling you so.

[MrSavage]

I can summarize my thoughts with one word: minutia

[sofie77]

@lostshootingstar
@penitentman
@whoa182
@MayankParmar

I'm seeing a moderate shakeup in the SERps today, automotive services. We operate nationwide, and one very weird thing I'm seeing today is that in ONE very large US city our page that has ranked top 3 for about 8 years is completely gone; like not even on the top 15 pages of Google. Every other city is mostly normal with a +1 or -1 which is typical. This one page magically disappearing is making me pretty nervous though.

I've seen a big shakeup in my niche this week. Gradually since Monday of this week traffic has dropped. I receive nationwide traffic to different city pages on my website. Seems to be Fred/Maccabees signals. My websites were hit hard by those confirmed updates but have since recovered. Keyword permutations for different city traffic. The top ranking websites are all "not for profit" now in my niche. Even filling up the first page with multiple pages from 1 website. Doesn't look good this time for me I just hope the google dance ends and traffic levels off so I can evaluate more analytical data and come up with a plan.

I woke up to a surprise today. Many of my posts have dropped off 1st positions to page 2-3! D: Some of these keywords I've had on the top spot for years. Some of my articles (information and affiliate) are 2000-5000 words long, and very in depth.

]I've been publishing about 2-3 articles per day for the last few months and getting great results.

Now a bunch of low-quality websites with pages that are from 10+ years are ranking above me in the SERPs.

This is crazy... Is this normal and can the sites bounce back? Trying not to panic... but my conversions are clearly down as well over the last few days.

My articles ranking 2nd or 3rd have dropped to 3rd or 4th page.

Send help.

I think I see some of my articles moving back up...

I'm going to bed, and when I wake up, all of this will have been just a bad dream lol

Hello all together,

at first, I am from germany and NO native speaker, sorry for my english.

I found this thread while I searched the internet to find out, whats happening between 19.5 - 25.5. What I can say by now is, that its 100% no saisonal impact. We run a medical website with forum in germany. Over the last 15 years, really no update hurt our page. We never did any linkbuilding but we have a lot of links from universitys, doctors, blogs, a really natural and great linkprofile. IMHO it has nothing to do with our linkprofile.

On 19.5.2018 I searched for a keyword and find out, that we moved from position 5 to the second page. Another keyword (long tail) moved from Postion 4 to the third page. At first I thought, well, maybe a replication problem. I had a little upset stomac but I thought, keep calm...I checked the next day and sometimes the postions are gone, sometimes a roll back. But that was not true. After that I checked the different google datecenters for our keywords and domain with [seo-hero.ninja...] . I saw, that after every hour, more and more datacenters get the bad positions. Then it was clear, this is a update and the bad positions will become more and more public. The final stage was the 24.5.2018. As you can see here:

[semrush.com...]

The 24.5 was a very high day but nobody said something about it. I dont understand why? Such a high peak should be discussed in more forums or blogs?!

I try to find out, why this silent update hit our site. Like I said, we had no impact before, from NO update. We lost 50% of our organic traffic.

Maybe we can make a brainstorming together to find out what is the biggest common denominator of our websites?

My Ideas and observasations:

- Same time the positionloss started at 19.5. our rich snippet stars are gone. Maybe a trust loss?
- We all have arround 50% loss
- Keys from good positions moved arround 5-10 positions back
- Single Keywords moved from page 1 to page 3
- No manual penalty note in webmaster tools
- We have all ads on our webpage? (maybe a update of the above the fold filter?)
- We have 300x250 left from articles and some other banners but no heavy ads. Maybe it was on the border?
- I have a slightly guess, this could have anything to do with our ads but sites before our page have also ads, but this sites are more authoritys or newspapers. So we cant compare. The sites we can compare are NON profit.

I hope we find a solution.
Thank you very much for a reply.

[Martin Ice Web]

It is not only that google serps are crowded with amazon pages but this pages have Keywordstuffing in title, h1, meta and description. Everything that other sites get a penalty for.

From my POV i would do everything like google. This is genius. Do everything to reduce choices in organics. Make poeple click on ads.
The questions is: how long will this go well? Every year amazon is the first place to go to for more and more users.

So if more and more poeple buy from amazon where are all the clicks on the ads are coming from? Less users with transactional intend but more clicks on ads every quarter?

[RedBar]

My sites' removals on US Google.com have almost been completed by G.

Yesterday saw my lowest-ever PVs with a grand total of 10 PVs from the USA ... No I have not missed off any zeroes, 10 effing PVs from the USA.

Whatever it is they're doing to my industry could be yours next.

[whoa182]

My main website has recovered most of its rankings with newer articles a little further down on the SERPs. Amazon affiliate conversions were good at 20% yesterday.

I also noticed that hundreds of backlinks that disappeared over a month ago have now reappeared in search console.

I would just try to ride this out and let things settle before doing anything drastic. The only changes I made was to remove ads or affiliate links from the top of the article.

[QuaterPan]

My sites' removals on US Google.com have almost been completed by G.

Yesterday saw my lowest-ever PVs with a grand total of 10 PVs from the USA ... No I have not missed off any zeroes, 10 effing PVs from the USA.

Whatever it is they're doing to my industry could be yours next.

Are you hosting your site in the USA? Or at least setting the target country in the GSC ?

[samwest]

@redbar - I believe we are in a similar niche and I'm seeing the same decay in spite of still holding many #1 and #2 positions in the vertical. Makes no sense. First zero conversion day yesterday in quite some time, Hard to believe the ENTIRE internet audience behaves like a flock of birds or school of fish around holidays...but apparently it does.

I'm now seeing GDPR pop ups in my sales funnel from third party payment processors - we can expect to see lower conversion rates simply because regular internet users hate added steps and have no idea what all this privacy hubbub is about. Thanks privacy powder puffs....smh

[glakes]

It is not only that google serps are crowded with amazon pages but this pages have Keywordstuffing in title, h1, meta and description. Everything that other sites get a penalty for.

The keyword stuffing on Amazon is largely due to most product detail pages being nothing more than UGC. Brand owners on Amazon have free reign to use whatever title they wish, five bullet points, description and may select up to five keywords unless they are in a special program that allows them to choose even more keywords. Keep in mind that it is estimated just over half of the products being sold on Amazon.com are by individuals and businesses residing in China, meaning their comprehension of the English language and keyword stuffing may be limited. Beyond the many Amazon pages that are keyword stuffed, the layout of Amazon's site is quite spammy IMO with the product description being buried between many other offers (28 different offers on a page I recently checked). Additionally, unavailable products will often rank #1 in Google for years.

Google really can't go wrong in displaying Amazon related pages to their users. Amazon is a trusted brand and Google gets to shove other retailers of like products beyond the fold, making it a pay to play game for them. Whether ranking Amazon pages directly or affiliate pages linking to Amazon, It's a win, win for Google and also for Amazon who plows millions of dollars back into Google via Adwords. To break it down, affiliates marketers won't spend money to advertise in Adwords and most information sites won't pay to advertise products they don't sell. To capture revenue, Google uses Amazon and other affiliates to hide legitimate businesses from view in the SERPS. This forces some legitimate businesses that stock/sell products to open their wallets and join the pay to play game.

From my POV i would do everything like google. This is genius. Do everything to reduce choices in organics. Make poeple click on ads.
The questions is: how long will this go well? Every year amazon is the first place to go to for more and more users.

So if more and more poeple buy from amazon where are all the clicks on the ads are coming from? Less users with transactional intend but more clicks on ads every quarter?

The last study I saw indicated only 15% of shoppers began their product search in a search engine. That's 15% split between Google, Bing and Yahoo. More paid clicks are largely due to expanded reach (ie. ads in YouTube videos) and how Google handles product information queries. A good example is doing a search for "widget dimensions." Instead of Google ranking the manufacturer's detailed product page first, the SERPS are Amazon crowded at the top in addition to ads. Since a large percentage of shoppers already visited Amazon first, before doing this information search on Google, users are more likely to click on the ads to find widget dimensions instead of clicking on the Amazon organic listings. This is a real life example of how Google has harnessed user behavior to increase click revenue. However, this also manifests itself in a poor ROI for advertisers as paid clicks are coming from many information queries and not transaction based queries. Often the shopper gets the information he or she wants in Google, or merely gives up, then returns to Amazon to complete the sale.

[RedBar]

Are you hosting your site in the USA?

Nope and I am convinced that this is one of the issues since, when I check my important keyword rankings etc, mostly the USA SERPs is showing principally US companies and for the very few non-US companies they are ALL using .coms hosted in the USA.

This has been a gradual removal by Google of both my sites and many of my non-US competitor sites since localisation was introduced, trust me, I am not the only one with this problem. My PVs for this one site alone are 25% of January 2018, yes a 75% reduction.

I'll give you an example of a keyword1/2/3 domain that I have a worldwide trademark for 35 years and until last October it ranked #1 on all English language Google.tlds including .com. This site is about one thing only, the keyword domain product.

As of right now it is on page 4, a Spanish site that used to be #2 behind me is on page 5, it's on a .com however is hosted in the USA..

G.uk - #1
G.co.in - #1
G.com.au - #1
G.ca - #1
G.co.za - #1

Interestingly in all the above the #2 result is the #1 result in .com, a US company.

Now don't try and tell me the results are not rigged.

[lostshootingstar]

Just using this to vent, but once again we were completely and utterly obliterated in rankings over the weekend, and one of our major US destination pages is still going from #3 to completely out of the SERP every 6 to 12 hours for its main keyword. I don't even pay attention to traffic around any holiday, but I'm pretty sure tomorrow is going to be extremely sobering.

But hey, at least Google seems to be ranking crappy thin affiliate sites with spun and in some cases pure spam content above our legitimate decade old business. I guess that's the goal now. Mission accomplished.

[QuaterPan]

Nope and I am convinced that this is one of the issues since

Don't look further. It's been years that Google is prioritizing the geographical localization of a site.

So if your site targets US traffic, you have to host it in the US (even if this is just the frontend, with a reverse proxy to your actual servers), or, in the GSC, you can choose the country your site targets. Do this, and in 6 months, you 'll see a significant increase of your traffic.

I had an issue, as a EU business but targeting North American audience, so I was renting a server in the USA, mostly to have a smaller latency. Then two years ago, when I learned about the GDPR, I thought it would be more compliant, if my server was inside the EU, in case some of my visitors / members be from the EU. So I started renting a server here. But, my North American traffic halved in a matter of 2 months, it was not a problem of DNS propagation. Then, I use the GSC to set the target country to USA and within 6 months my traffic returned to what it used to be. So I think this is very important to take this in consideration. If your site targets a particular country, try to host it in this country, or at least use the GSC to select the target country. If your site targets multiple countries, may be divide your site into several sites, or sub domains, and set the implicit targeting for each of them.

[MayankParmar]

Cloudfront CDN would be helpful with full page caching.

[MayankParmar]

Rank has recovered slightly.

[whoa182]

Looks like I'm going to hit record levels of traffic today.

Seems that my site bounced back even stronger...

[heisje]

@sofie77
I also confirm strange large peak on 24.5, then down the drain - anybody else noticed this? any ideas?

.

[KaseyM]

Having a fantastic weekend here. Especially given a lot of our content went out of date last week.

[samwest]

Wow, GDPR is really getting in the way of a seamless user experience. Just today, I've been hit with dozens of forced GDPR policy pages and "accept our cookies" pop ups. This is worse than pushy Girl Scouts. Expect lower conversions.

[Shaddows]

In the UK, many many companies have made a real hash of their GDPR implementation. The "stay-in-touch" email flood has fully annoyed Joe Public, and a large proportion was totally unnecessary (anyone you trade with did not need an email asking for additional consent; if you asked anyway, you must now respect that decision- decimating mailing lists). Privacy pages are either insufficient or OTT.

But it's the US who have gone crazy. Forbes being a famous example. There is widespread confusion about "EU resident" and "EU Citizen" - the latter putting no additional responsibilities on non-EU businesses unless they are currently resident.

Anyone who has done this properly and not listened to GDPR charlatans with a service to sell should be expecting higher conversions, stickier traffic and possibly repeat business. If (if) user metrics feed back in to the algo, it might end up a ranking boost too

[BushyTop]

We're not seeing the quality results reported here. This most recent update has brought about far more monopolising of the SERPs and some of our competitors that adopt more 'basic' tactics have re-appeared, after getting panned in the march update.

its a step back from what i can see....

In other news, I'm seeing a greater disparity between Mobile and DT search results.

[samwest]

I'm not seeing any improvement either, but why would I? Just because a handful of sites improve is no reason to expect a miracle recovery. The new Google Insights came in this morning...>10% drops and low side "page anomalies" everywhere. What little traffic left is all non converting page sitting zombies. Headed towards another pizza money week. Yay!

[BushyTop]

Samwest I'm interested to know. Is this your own company or are you working for someone else?

[penitentman]

Today is the day that matters. Search volatility is at normal levels and the holiday is over. I have 2 high traffic blogs in the law/government vertical affected by last weeks update. Both have a broad domain name, .com tld, and (keyword+location) string. US traffic exclusively, US based host. Conversion % has mainly remained the same. Saw zombies on the 22nd but since then consistent to my normal levels. These 2 blogs have lost 65% of traffic since the 22nd, steadily dropping 15% every day all week. Fred hit these same blogs with a 75% loss on March 7, 2017 but recovered fully on May 20, 2017. I don't have much confidence for a recovery this time but I will hold out hope and carefully watch the data as it comes in this week. Do we have a name for this update yet?