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]

[samwest]

SERP's remain static, but traffic trending way down across all niches. New insights show >10% drops in traffic on stable SERP positions. This just tells me less people are doing Google searches. But watch, their quarterly profits will again top a 20% increase. FM. Pure FM.

[JesterMagic]

Our niche site (launched in 2003) has UGC and was hit March 5th and since then we have seen a loss of about 20-25% of traffic. Since March we have updated our site (backend stuff) and changed the layouts slightly to better prepare for the mobile indexing. (these changes were planned before March)

We have yet to receive the mobile index email from Google and am wondering if that will make much of a change.

Our UGC (forum and comments) which makes up maybe half of our content don't seem to have suffered much in the rankings. It's our own articles, etc that have dropped 3 to 10 positions which has hurt us most. Large Brand magazine type sites and large sites that cover many niches have come out on top. Lots of these pages are outdated, slow and contain a ton of ads.

[jambam]

I never see forums rank (only stackoverflow) in the search results any-more. Shame as I would find a lot more value from buying advice from forums than disingenuous affiliates. On forums mostly if some one starts trying to lie to people and posting spam links people usually pull that person up for it. More democracy. I never see forums rank (only stackoverflow) in the search results now. Shame as I found a lot more value in buying advice from forums than disgenoius affialites. On forums mostly if some one starts trying to sell something.. people usually pull that person up for it.

[samwest]

I never see forums rank (only stackoverflow) in the search results any-more

I'm guessing that this is because most fresh meat in forums has died off as people have migrated like lemmings to Facebook as their new forum of choice. Not to worry, I predict the paradigm will shift back soon enough as distaste for FB grows. Teens are leaving and that's handwriting on the wall and potentially good news for a modern mobile friendly forum comeback (but be ready to incorporate plenty of youtube videos). [theguardian.com...]

[EditorialGuy]

I never see forums rank (only stackoverflow) in the search results any-more.

I do. In the last couple of days, for example, I've searched on a number of queries involving consumer products (including troubleshooting advice), and--in most cases--forum posts or threads have been at the top of Google's search results. I also see forum threads in the SERPs regularly when researching travel destinations.

[UpOnOne]

Something else I have noticed change with Google recently is the way they crawl my sites. I am still seeing fairly consistent crawling but I now see big spikes where they really dial up how many pages they hit in a short period of time. With all the recent focus on Page Speed I can't help but think they are pressure testing my hosting setup to see if I can handle more traffic.

I have spent a fair bit of time getting my speed scores up in Page Speed Insights, Lighthouse and a few other places. This has definitely helped with Google traffic. If I simulate 2 to 3 times my current traffic, these speed numbers go down. I am really starting to think Google knows this too. Its just too much of a coincidence that they seem to send as much traffic as I can handle (at least with fast results).

[mosxu]

@UpOnOne

Your hosting should handle a few times more the daily traffic. How does google know you can’t handle as much as they can send?

[UpOnOne]

@mosxu, I totally agree but Googles recent crawling patterns have made me realize we can't while maintaining high Page Speed scores. Our site has several hundred visitors at any given minute and our hosting setup is pretty big - multiple dedicated servers, cdns, aws, google cloud services, ngix caching, etc, etc.

I am always watching load averages and searching for optimizations and bottlenecks that can be improved upon. While doing this I started noticing that Googlebot would increase their crawl rate (from a few hundred hits a minute to thousands) and then dial it back when response time would increase. Google records response time and would have a pretty good idea of how my setup would handle different amounts of visitors.

This pattern seemed so weird to me I even started checking the ips of the bots to ensure it was actually Google. In the end I am happy I found this. I ended up doing my own pressure testing with some multi threaded curl hits and realized it's time to scale up.

Google wants a good search experience and sites that respond quick. If they know my site can handle a few hundred visitors a minute but not thousands perhaps they won't send them.

Just a thought

[samwest]

^ sure wish I had that problem...

[jmorgan]

stackoverflow, and their spin off sites, are arguably the most heavily moderated sites on the web. They have highly strict rules on posting which they enforce with an iron fist. No surprise that their content consistently ranks highly in Google.

[mosxu]

@UpOnOne

Interesting, maybe there are issues but it would make sense to get a message in the search console indicating that more resources would be needed or maybe they do not like the hosting settings.

Guess work does not help us, we cannot read Google’s mind

[Smittie06]

Things have been moving again, we’ve completely disappeared from the first pages like 2 weeks ago. Hopefully it will come back to normal again after a few hours.

[sofie77]

<snip>

Panda or any other filter is just a number with a deadline. The number is calculated with different faktors diveded with the count of the factors.

Example / Panda factors:

- Website Google Trust
- Website UX
- UAC percent
- Ads
- Link Trust
- Page Speed etc.

Our site / your site factors from 1-100:

- 60 points
- 50 points
- 60%
- 80 points
- 50 points
- 80 points

= 380 points / 6 = 63

When the panda deadline is on 60 points, you are short before the filter / penalty.

That means also, that stack or reddit etc can place alot more ads, when there google trust or link trust is higher. To get out of that filter our goal should be, to leave the filter deadline. This is possible with any factor, increase trust, increase links, reduce ads etc.

btw. this filter or update has nothing todo with page speed. we have a very fast dedicated server and we monitor with our smartphone the server load 24hours a day. when the load is over 1 on our 12 core server we are getting nervous..i know, the load could be 12 on 12 cores...well, our load is mostly under 0,5...so the server can handle alot more.

[edited by: sofie77 at 11:54 am (utc) on Jun 7, 2018]

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 10:37 am (utc) on Jun 10, 2018]
[edit reason] snipped comments referring to sections removed from previous post [/edit]

[MayankParmar]

Discord maybe.

[abettor]

I working in the gambling niche, and our sites got a boost a couple of weeks ago, and have now gone down. Any fluctuations from anyone in the past 24 hours in the affiliate space?

[Justablogger]

50% of my traffic is gone in 4 days....THANKS GOOGLE FOR PROMOTING SPAM OVER GENUINELY AMAZING CONTENT.

Google = Garbage Company

[MayankParmar]

Indeed. I hope Google will be fined for search, AdSense as well.

Report: EU about to fine Google billions in Android antitrust case [searchengineland.com...]

[JesterMagic]

>> EU about to fine Google billions in Android antitrust case

Not really a SEO issue but ... I can't stand having crap apps installed on my devices that I cannot remove (except by rooting the phone).

Shouldn't they fine Apple for iOS as well for not offering other competitors apps or services?

How about phones that you buy (at least in Canada, I am assuming it is similar in the EU) that are locked to a carrier and are filled with apps that I cannot uninstall only disable. Some of these apps are installed by the carrier and not the phone manufacturer.

[QuaterPan]

Indeed. I hope Google will be fined for search, AdSense as well.

If Google get too many fines, this will have consequences on web publishers, like us. It's not because Google will be fined, that they'll make things "better for us". And if Google ends bankrupt or dismembered how will it be profitable to us?

[Shaddows]

Shouldn't they fine Apple for iOS

Android Anti-Trust is based on Google being an oligopolistic OS supplier for phones, and leveraging that fact to make their customers (the manufacturers) add other Google apps that are not essential to the OS, to the detriment of other App makers.

On the other hand, Apple is vertically integrated, and so is not a supplier of OSes, but a holistic phone manufacturer. As such, no leveraging, and no anti-trust.

I can't really see grounds for fining Google over it's search results, on the basis that "someone lost". Search is zero-sum- someone always loses.

[Butes]

Seeing a sharp shift in traffic in the 7:00 hour PDT (14:00 GMT) for a US ecomm, as well as a legacy version of the platform in canada and the UK, and a watered down version of the platform in France. Other regions are too small to see the trend on an hourly basis. The sister US site has no noticeable change.

Most recent release was expanding previously weak hreflang tags to be a full circle of returns across the globe in XML sitemaps. Other supplemental changes involve noindex of duplicative pages and thin content.

Our traffic has steadily been improving in quality and quantity, time on site has been growing, internal links have been tightening, unique content has been growing throughout this year.

Only thing I can think of as an issue driver is a spam laden UGC section which we are waiting to decommission, but that should be on a page-by-page basis, not whole site.

Anyone else at the scale to see these hourly shifts from the norm? What are some of your recent adjustments?

Thoughts? Observations?

[samwest]

The weird traffic / conversion patterns continue. Every morning, one token sale at 6 to 7 am and then nothing all day. Statistically impossible. An obvious sign of control? This pattern has been appearing every few weeks for several years now. Another pattern is "peekaboo" conversions. I'll get two back to back conversions (within 5 to 10 min) at the same time each day for several days straight amid a day of zip. Strange patterns in what SHOULD be relative chaos.

[MayankParmar]

Looks like there's yet another update. Traffic dropped again.

[jmorgan]

@sofie77 I'm happy to just discuss things here for now. Apart from my website domain, I'm happy to divulge whatever information I have.

FYI, my traffic was steady yesterday (no drop or increase), or perhaps just a very slight drop.

[widgetized]

@samwest Yes, that kind of pattern happens to me as well. Exactly as you described, I find it to be pretty unrealistic to have two sales in 30-60 mins and then nothing for the rest of the day. And it happens so often.

@MayankParmar Yeah, something is happening again... sales / conversions stopped again since yesterday. This is getting a bit worrisome, I went from everyday sales to this stupid ON / OFF behaviour since a couple of months now, my income is suffering from this.

I also want to report that I have free downloads for each product on sale on my website. I find it very weird that both sales and free downloads stop together, while the traffic is steady. Looks like a switch between traffic A (people interested in my website) and traffic B (zombies or people not interested). By a strange coincidence the traffic quantity (A and B) is exactly the same so that I'm left confused.

Another thing I want to report: from my Search Console I'm seeing a costant decrease of Clicks and Impressions in the last months (starting from the end of March), while the Position and CTR are pretty much stable. Not sure how to interpret this... any comment?

[NileshKasurde]

No such drastic change in traffic or ranking for any website.

[Shaddows]

@widgetized

I find it very weird that both sales and free downloads stop together, while the traffic is steady. Looks like a switch between traffic A (people interested in my website) and traffic B (zombies or people not interested). By a strange coincidence the traffic quantity (A and B) is exactly the same so that I'm left confused.

That's classic zombies, of the original sort.

No (repeatable) cure has ever been found, and nor has any sensible mechanism ever been suggested.

[QuaterPan]

May be related to your problems. I am seeing lot of SERP with very few organic sites on the first page, for not saying none.

For example (on desktop)

ad
3 news carousel
one or two big sites (or official sites)
3 rows of images
one or two other sites
4-5 youtube videos
bottom ads.

you can also shuffle things, with 3 rows of image on top, videos in the middle, etc...

[disspy]

At first sight, not able to notice any drastic movements at this point.

However, I have some interesting observation. On Google Search Console we have double so much excluded pages in comparison to valid pages. Interesting fact is that out of 700k excluded pages 100k are crawled but currently not indexed. Starting from the actual drop date May 18th, the number was 70k, now 30k more.

Google's definition:

Crawled - currently not indexed: The page was crawled by Google, but not indexed. It may or may not be indexed in the future; no need to resubmit this URL for crawling.

In short, they won't explain you what is the reason why the engine won't index those pages nor you can do anything about it. Anyone experience with restoring excluded pages back to index?

I'm just curious what is the ratio of indexed and excluded pages with your sites? Mainly asking those with UGC ...

[Martin Ice Web]

Some story beside:

there was an report in german tv about rip-off pipe cleaning business this week.
All the aggrieved persons found the business with google. First and second entrie in serps. And this are ads from this business.
google has been interviewed to this issue and asked if it is ok that they list rip-off business ads in their serps.
googles answered that there are rules for ads and that business owners have to accomplish with this rules ( it will not be proofed though ).
With every click on this rip-off business ads google gets up to 30 Euro!
And allthough google know the business the ads are still displayed!

WTF? google are you more interested in making money than protect your visitors/users?

Still anyone wondering why organics are going down the drain?