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)

---

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]

[disspy]

@MartinIceWeb

Sorry, but we are not in eCommerce niche. We are more content-related with a lot of UGC. I'm still not clear what's going on, so just trying to figure it out if this is our fault or just another algo-update turmoil.

[StarkReality]

@disspy: I'd say it's not related to links at all, we neither had a significant or unusual loss nor gain around the drop.


@jmorgan: Non-seasonal topic here and while we always saw a slow and tiny drop in traffic in summer, this is totally different.

[MayankParmar]

Is your rank same?

[mosxu]

Sustained zombie activity in the last 5 days,

Is it going to be the summer of the zombies?

[penitentman]

@disspy Not sure what you call official confirmation but ranking sensors like [semrush.com ] show massive volatility towards the end of May

[disspy]

@penitentman I'm not sure how this semrush 'sensors' work, I assume after some webmasters report the drop/spike they create the volatility index, right? The dates are matching, so I'm not sure if Google still announces large-scale algo changes or these times are long behind us :)

Bottom line, obviously there was some kind of large-scale update so it is not our fault, since we rolled out a new deploy a week before so I was just afraid that some of these features affected the ranking, and we even revoked the changes but still at 30% traffic drop.

Anyone else with similar observation?

[penitentman]

@disspy The sensors work by tracking keywords and website serps on google. Google announces algo changes when they feel like it. It's possible that your changes affected your rankings. It depends what they were and if they violate any google webmaster policies or affected user experience in a negative way. Or the websites you compete with made better changes than you did in that time frame. Lots of factors and moving parts. Comes with being a SEO. Gotta figure things out, test, and repeat.

[Blobby]

@disspy
We are also seeing a large 30%+ decrease in traffic (started in April) on a large, very established content site with a big forum (lots of UGC).

No errors in Search Console, no real change in SERP rankings, no big structural changes were done over the last 6 months...but down 30%+ from last year this time.

[penitentman]

@Blobby UGC is not necessarily a good thing. It's usually of very low quality. Google signals of value include high quality content and indications of hard work and investment made by the webmaster. Also, I find it hard to believe you have a 30% drop in traffic and no change in your SERPS. Even a .5 change in your average ranking positions across your kw's can dramatically affect traffic. I would check indexed pages, number of kw's you rank for, and position average. If none of those have changed at all then something broke on your website.

[linkbuildr]

Canada travel brand here seeing rankings rise but zombie traffic flooding in since the 2nd. Thank god for social media..

[koan]

disspy, I have 2 UGC sites that have been hit hard these past months with a -30% sudden drop of traffic, one in end of April, and the other one in end of May, With the recent Adsense coverage changes this year, they're close to not being the trouble anymore. I don't know if it's a penalty, the sites replacing them for their usual keywords are more corporate, less informative, more superficial, but do have more frequent photos/videos. I'm seeing the mcdonaldisation of the web.

[jmorgan]

Does your site have a lot of thin content koan? Just asking because your users could be generating a lot of not-very-useful content.

[MayankParmar]

Anyone ever updated old articles to improve the overall content quality of the site? Any traffic improvements?

I am planning to do. I have to edit like 7000 articles to include minimum 400 words :)

[QuaterPan]

to improve the overall content quality
I have to edit like 7000 articles to include minimum 400 words

Adding more words doesn't necessarily mean adding quality.

[JesterMagic]

Saw this post on Search Engine Round Table regarding Google search engine algo changes compared to site changes:

[seroundtable.com...]

John Mueller said ... that if a site sees a big drop in a day or so in their Google rankings and others are complaining about a Google update then that is probably related to a change on Google's end to their search ranking algorithm. John added that when you make site changes or technical changed, that generally those changes take weeks to months to impact the site...

which most of us know. What the statement does indicate is that the Google may crawl your pages everyday for changes in content but the actually analysis of the page may not be completed all at once (in fact it can take months). For example Google probably doesn't run it's own mobile friendly test on the page every single time as it takes a lot of processing power (especially when dealing with billions of pages). So if an algo change happens that deals with say mobile friendly pages then the algo change could have used old analyzed data about the page. Therefore if you have updated your pages recently to be more mobile friendly you wouldn't see the positive impact of the algo update until Google has reanalyzed the page for that particular ranking factor.

[renatovieira]

@MayankParmar

Same here...

A ((HEAVY)) massive drop in traffic...

[Cyril TechWebsites]

@MayankParmar

Anyone ever updated old articles to improve the overall content quality of the site? Any traffic improvements?
....
Yes. I did this many times with old articles. In 70% cases it really helps improving ranking for a page (but it depends on the quality of the content that you are updating old pages with).
...
I am planning to do. I have to edit like 7000 articles to include minimum 400 words :)
...
I'm pretty sure that's not so necessary, it is much more easier just to keep clean, updated and well-written your TOP20%. That will make the biggest impact on your traffic and will keep your website doing well (but not perfect!).

[Cyril TechWebsites]

Noticing pretty good traffic increase since this Saturday (2.06). Hope the things will remain the same, my revenue from Adsense is just great these days.

[koan]

jmorgan, yeah the affected sites definitely have uneven content, some good, some not that great, it's the nature of UGC sites, like forums, Q/A sites, etc. I know it became an issue around 2012 and my search engine traffic stopped growing because of Panda, but now it's essentially completely crashing down, as if there was no place for sites like these anymore unless you're a big corporation like the main social media sites (where users actually often steal the content).

[jmorgan]

@koan, I think that could be your problem.

I'm no SEO expert, but I think culling thin content from your site in Google's index might be a good start to arrest the slide you are experiencing.

[StarkReality]

Thin content can be a problem for sure, but if the majority of content already exists for a long time and the site was so far never affected along the lines of Panda updates, a sudden, dramatic drop is a bit strange. Especially since this update seems to have affected quite a few sites without obvious problems in the past. So, it doesn't look like an isolated problem. I had a look at several sites affected by the update, totally different topics, types, niches and so far I'm missing some common denominator.

[jmorgan]

@StarkReality Sure it could be a number of things. But if the issue of thin content was first highlighted in 2012, and reinforced over and over again over the next few years, and it's obvious you have a problem with thin content, yet you still persist with the same content model, surely you wouldn't expect to survive over the long term.

I came to this realization myself recently. Yes, it will require making some hard decisions if what you've been doing has been working for you (up to the point where it didn't), but ultimately, for me at least, it was going to be much harder watching my traffic dwindle with each passing update.

Again, I'm no SEO expert. Just a webmaster trying to make sense of what's been happening.

[koan]

jmorgan, something I've had in mind for a while now is to maybe automatically noindex UCG pages under a certain word count, with few user comments. Would I be shooting myself in the foot for no reason? A long time ago during the Panda crisis, I did noindex user profile pages (not robots.txt blocking), which represented a significant portion of my pages, and it did help, however, I don't know if that's still a reasonable approach. Maybe that's too simple minded nowadays.

[jmorgan]

Far be it for me to give you advice when I'm not familiar with your website koan. And as I've stressed a couple of times, I don't profess to be an SEO expert. I just brought up the topic of thin content because it's something I've personally been addressing on my own website since mid-April and, FYI, I managed to escape any penalty in the latest update towards the end of May.

Finger crossed, I will see further progress in the next update (which I expect will be around July 4th, if Google continues to push their updates just before major holidays).

[MayankParmar]

No recovery yet :(

I have solid backlink profile, and still the update trashed me.

[disspy]

@koan

IMO the catch is that UGC is not favorable for most of branding advertisers. However, UGC has its value and won't be ever replaced by content-curating same-looking quasi "rich" content. Experience is something you cannot replace easily, and most of UGCs are based on experience sharing. Big corps like Google have to satisfy their shareholders and to boost the revenue without choosing casualties. However, for them is better not to mess with big advertisers and big publishers, so the part of collateral damage is always related to small sites and companies.

This update also came before May 25th. Is this just coincidence or they look more to downgrade UGC partners in order to avoid potential lawsuit in case they wouldn't be able to comply to GDPR because of tight budgets or incompetence?!

Anyways, I'm still not sure what's going on, but it seems that this update widely affected UGC websites which had 10+ yrs stable SERPs. I was afraid that our system update that was deployed 2 days before the drop caused this, but now it seems that this one was clean and the drop was caused solely by Google SERPs change.

[sofie77]

Yes, like I said before, our UGC Site was a very stable authority site in our niche over the last 10 years. Really no update hit that site....I thought this page has so strong backlinks, that nothing can hit that site.

The update started at 18-19 may and the massive drop (datacenter replication) ended at 25.5. At this date all datacenter had the same positions. We lost 50% of our traffic.

Since panda came out, we already tried to minimize thin content with automaticly noindex new topics with less words. Only after X replies with a max amount of chars we set the index instead of noindex. We have over 1 Million posts on our forum and 50.000 topics. arround 10.000 are already noindex. We did already at 2012 a DB select to find all topics with less then X words and set them automaticly to noindex but maybe since the last update it wasnt enough or google removed the influence of good links to page. when links doestn count that much anymore, the panda deadline is closer. Maybe our sites was shortly over the panda line and now google made a major change...like I said they set the value of link trust deeper or set the negative impact of ads higher. after this little changes we are all under the panda line.

When panda is combination of many factors, our goal should be to come again under the panda radar. This means we could noindex more page, get a higher trust or maybe remove ads on the page.

<snip>

...we can only find the common dominator, when we compare our sites overall.

<snip>

1 common dominater is already UGC, Ads and stable over the last years. we have a few other UGC pages. 1 with NO ads. This site has NO drop and 1 forum with Ads but with more content, this Forum also has no sudden drop.

Questions:

> Do you have Ads above the fold?
> How many Ad blocks you have on your page

we had 1 Block above the fold. We have 5 Ad blocks on our page but it depends an the length of content.

kind regards
sofie77 (wife) and ryker77

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 10:27 am (utc) on Jun 10, 2018]
[edit reason] TOS violations - stickie to be sent to poster [/edit]

[MayankParmar]

<snip>

I am also a authority in my niche just like you guys. I have a DR of 60 on Ahrefs but still the update trashed our site :(

Do you have Ads above the fold? | How many Ad blocks you have on your page

Yes, on mobile, I have a 300x250 ad above the fold, that pushes the content slightly down (requires scroll). I have total three ads on mobile and 5 on desktop, AdSense and AdX.

Have a look at page layout algorithm update from 2012: [webmasters.googleblog.com...] Is this the culript? But almost all sites that I visit have 300x250 ad that pushes the content.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 10:31 am (utc) on Jun 10, 2018]
[edit reason] snipped comments referring to sections removed from previous post [/edit]

[Jhurwith]

UGC sites should be hit. Content usually is not good.

[MayankParmar]

Reddit is also a UGC but it rank really well.