Google Updates and SERP Changes - June 2018

[Martin Ice Web]

System: The following 9 messages were cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4899136.htm [webmasterworld.com] by robert_charlton - 6:07 pm on Jun 1, 2018 (PDT -8)

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Next very big hit. Yesterday 11.30pm . This hit is even more drastic than all the other hits before.
Very big winner in our niche is amazon. amazon has now 2-4 entries in a row where they were not present before.
Most of the amazon pages have spammy title, h1 tags.
Even big brands are now replaced by amazon ( ebay, conrad, mercator ... )

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 2:12 am (utc) on Jun 2, 2018]
[edit reason] Split off to new monthly thread... [/edit]

[StarkReality]

For one of our sites, the drops started at around the 15th, a steady daily decline till the low was hit at about the 25th for a loss of about 70% of all traffic. Still page 1 for a lot of terms, but going from many 1-2 and some 3 to mostly 5-8 for high volume searches really hurts. The site had been stable for 5+ years, but experienced the same kind of drop in september 2017. Then, in march 2018, it pretty much skyrocketed back to the "usual" positions, even a bit higher than before. When comparing historic data, it looks a lot like this updated reverted the march update.

Interesting: Again, like after the september drop, there are loads of big brand (magazines, newspapers) are now dominating the SERPs for many of the terms we dropped for. It's not like these results are really wrong, but most of those brand pages lack in-depth information, they just scratch the surface of the topic. The irony: Many of these magazines obviously derived their articles from our site, not copied, but closely inspired. A few are even using quotes from exclusive interviews with industry experts I did personally...of course without mentioning the source.

[glakes]

Very big winner in our niche is amazon. amazon has now 2-4 entries in a row where they were not present before.

I remember when that happened to us. We thought it was a temporary anomaly, but we were sure wrong. Years later little has changed other than Google ranking our Amazon product pages instead of the loosely related Amazon category pages that were outranking us. If you can't beat them then join them. Looking back I see what Google did as a way to push sellers into Adwords. That worked for a brief period of time until we bailed on Google and went to Amazon and have not looked back since. My only regret is that we did not leave Adwords sooner as it was a huge waste of time and money.

[MayankParmar]

Any updates out there?

Massive drop in traffic :(

[Cralamarre]

Nothing here. No big changes for me since the March and April updates.

[MayankParmar]

Can I blame structured data error (author is missing) for drop in traffic?

[Cralamarre]

Unless people find your content by searching for the author, I'd say no. And even if they did, I'd still probably say no.

My traffic is down a bit today, but it always drops as it gets closer to summer. It would take a drastic drop for me to think there was a problem.

[mosxu]

“the page seeems to drop out of the serps and then come back every 6-12 hours”

This is not hide and seek game, this is more to do with quotas probably if the quota is met then site drops or demotes in rankings/ads ?

[JaviP]

Big improvements three days ago and maintein...

[EditorialGuy]

Like Cralamarre, I'll say "nothing new here." Our Google rankings and traffic have edged upward in recent weeks, but not by enough to generate excitement. It's mostly "same old, same old," with our top landing pages being the same ones that we've had for a long time.

[samwest]

After a week of "zombie like" traffic and conversions on my test site, something turned on starting at midnight on Thursday. All last week it was one conversion in the very early morning followed by drip traffic and nothing the rest of the day, but early Friday morning, in what appeared to be a "quota catchup" session, conversions started rolling in "like mad"; 1am, 4 am, 7am, 10am then a slow down with one more at 5pm, now back to flat drip traffic and nil conversions...but almost to my weekly quota, short week considered. Funny how that works. Sure miss the natural patterns of old.

[McPheeSees]

It's funny that our crawl stats haven't updated since 5/23/18. I know the site is being crawled as I checked our logs.

[vphoner]

I have also seen a massive traffic drop (50%) over the last month or so. What I do see if that large sites are getting all the top spots. If this keeps up, this is the end of the internet as we knew it. Why? Because if smaller quality sites can't rank unless they are giants, they never will get bigger. Google is really stifling the internet and discouraging creativity. They should reverse this latest iteration. How can anyone base their business on traffic, when you are at the mercy of the next index change?

[samwest]

I sympathize with those loosing position because my GSERP positions are rock solid at #1 and #2 and yet I still see traffic turn ON and OFF as if by magic. Before someone suggests "check site speed", I do daily, it's also solid. In doing a little backtracking, I found most of my recent conversions were from DuckDuckGo, it's fast becoming my new go to search engine. Just feels safer. Others must agree as I'm seeing more converting traffic from them every day.

[McPheeSees]

@Vphoner

"Google is really stifling the internet and discouraging creativity."

This is the sad naked truth but you're being too nice, substitute stifling with strangling and discouraging with murdering.

[jmorgan]

Expect a general decline in traffic over the next couple of months across the board due to the summer holidays.

Unless your site deals with travel, flights, accommodation, etc.

[EditorialGuy]

What I do see if that large sites are getting all the top spots. If this keeps up, this is the end of the internet as we knew it. Why? Because if smaller quality sites can't rank unless they are giants, they never will get bigger.

Every query is going to yield different results, but I just did a Google search on a major (and highly competitive) travel query, and about half of the top 10 results were for smaller sites. A decade ago, that SERP would have been dominated by TripAdvisor and a handful of big-name publishers. Or, for some queries, a plethora of thin affiliate sites.

It's also worth remembering that most smaller sites will never get bigger, just because there's only so much room at the top of the pyramid. That's how things work in any field: I'm sure there have been plenty of painters who wanted to know why Picasso got all the media attention, and there's no shortage of first novelists who harbor resentment toward the names that always appear at the top of the New York Times bestseller list.

Side note: For information searches, at least, it's amazing to me how much similarity there is between search results from Google, Bing, Duckduckgo, and Yandex. The results aren't exactly the same, or in the same order, but the same players (including smaller sites) typically show up for the queries that I watch. Then again, that was often true back in the days of AltaVista and Infoseek. To borrow a saying from the French, "The more things change, the more they stay the same."

[MayankParmar]

Traffic is down people.

:(

[glakes]

Google's recent SERP updates have made a profound impact on our Amazon sales. There simply is no other reason for it as competition remains the same, but our sales have increased 98% this two week period that ended today and are the highest ever in that marketplace. Sales on our website, which originate from Google, are poor. Amazon crowding in Google's SERPS are at an all-time high, though the quantity of visitors sent to us by Google is stable.

It would appear Google is rotating less buyer traffic to independent retailers and more to Amazon, based on what I am witnessing as both a user and as a seller. This is terrible for all the mom & pops struggling to survive in such a hostile market where Google favors one (Amazon) over many. It would appear that Google ranks pages for product queries not by their content, but by the stock valuations of those companies selling them.

[penitentman]

@StarkReality @vphoner Do you have geo location pages on your websites? I've dropped 60% of my traffic since May 24th on my 2 very large blogs with location specific pages on a broadly main URL. My sites with locations in the main URL have not declined.

[MayankParmar]

Count me in.

My traffic dropped on 24th, and is declining.

#*$! Google.

[Cralamarre]

No changes here, but I'm not using geo-location for anything.

[MayankParmar]

@Cralamarre Do you index subpages (such as homepage, categories)?

[Cralamarre]

@MayankParmar Yes, every page on my site is indexed.

[MayankParmar]

Really depressed :(

I never witnessed such a massive drop :(

[StarkReality]

@penitentman: No geo location pages at all, general information, no e-commerce or local terms.

[RedBar]

FFS, I am seeing sites with keyword stuffing for my widget trade appearing out of nowhere!

[jmorgan]

Public holidays Memorial Day followed by Corpus Christi. Also with the summer break just beginning. Personally, I'm expecting a decline before a gradual pick up again around September, or late August at the earliest.

[disspy]

Is there any official confirmation that some SERP's shifting algo change really happened?

We see 30% drop since May 20th. I'm still not sure if this is a huge algo update or it has something to do with backlink juice ranking.

[Martin Ice Web]

@disspy, we see the same thing and if you look at the serps google has begun to spam the results with amazon pages.
In my niche google lists even internal amazon search pages? What the heck? I thought google doesn´t want to have other search results in serps?!