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]

[RedBar]

People actually share Google's mood lol.

You show yours at least three to four times every day !

[mosxu]

Any update this weekend? Lots of spend, insanely fast ecommerce site without sales?

[Halaspike]

I still haven't recovered from the loss of over 70% of my traffic caused by the yoast bug. Google is taking ages to remove indexed media pages from serps.

I really don't know how long this will take. Please has anyone recovered from the yoast bug and how long did it take to recover?

[QuaterPan]

May be there is something else than the "Yoast bug". First of all , I don't see how it can penalize a whole site, and secondly so quickly.

[MayankParmar]

It can. Google indexes my pages very quickly, and all of the attachment pages were indexed. Sure, Yoast fixed it the next day, but I delayed the update, to avoid possible bugs, and I still regret my decision. If they had said "it's a important update in the changelog", i would have updated the plugin the same day, but they acknowledged it after three months lol.

Yoast also started indexing the subpages. So, thousands of attachment pages plus subpages got indexed in a couple of days., and it created a huge amount of thin content. I run a news site, so I really don't have any long articles.

The attachment pages finally deindexed after installing the purge plugin released earlier this month. But I still have those sub pages indexed...

[mhansen]

Just following along and wanted to share that we're experiencing an oddity from search traffic, like a few others with random traffic and conversion spikes. One of our sites in the home improvement niche is more popular, and ranks better than it ever has in the 8 years it's been around. We've been through several ups and downs, and after a series of small site improvements, this year has been our best ever when it comes to rankings across the 300-400 main keywords we've always kept up with.

Similar to what others have said, we seem to get "Spikes" of traffic/conversions - that all come and go within a quick time period. For example, we may go an hour or two without a single conversion, then from 11:00am - 11:45am, get 10 conversions in that single 45 minute span. After that, dead again for the next 2-3 hours, before it repeats itself. There were times that I related this to the Google Suggest feature, but I can't believe it's just that any longer.

Traffic from Google search has continued to drop steadily at 10-15% every year, regardless of how well we rank. Those number 1-3rd rank positions used to mean quite a lot, but now you have to scroll 3/4 of the way down a desktop serp to see it, or 3-4 swipes down on a mobile device. Ads have taken over... or features (Other ads) Google is showing to keep users on its site, versus being the good old search engine that defied evil, it used to be.

To me, for quite a while now, it's pretty clear that Google no longer wants to be the "intermediary" between great content and what search users want to find. It wants to be a walled garden of sorts, keeping visitors on Google properties for as long as it can to monetize them, while using our content in the form of answers, answer boxes, etc... to do so.

[MayankParmar]

Search console is so depressing :(

[jmorgan]

Why @MayankParmar? What are you seeing?

[MayankParmar]

Traffic is declining :(

[jmorgan]

Could just be the summer break. People going on holidays rather than using the internet.

[Cralamarre]

My traffic was down 4% yesterday week over week, but I think it's just summer. Happens every year. Things won't pick up for me until September.

[jmorgan]

@Cralamarre same for me.

[samwest]

Woke up this morning to ZERO traffic indicated on GART. Not a single page view all morning according to GA. So I checked the SERP's, showing position 1 and 2 for all B&B terms and for EVERY one of the search suggestion paths. Did the entire world just stop using the internet? According to GA, it looks to be so. CF shows traffic normally increasing...must be all bots or GA is broken.

[Jhurwith]

We are seeing WOW declines as well and that is not normal for June.

[lostshootingstar]

I was down about 5% yesterday as well and looking about the same today so far (still early)

[MayankParmar]

GA wasn't working.

[anandsoft]

I have been trying DuckDuckGo.com for over two years and its okay for most queries. For advanced queries (where context matters), Google seems to have some edge. For example, for queries originating in India (say price of a mobile), DDC still tries to provide global response where as G provides local results. We have to add "india" to tell DDC its india specific query.

[Smittie06]

Conversions and organic traffic have been amazing today, hopefully it remains this way!

[Butes]

my conversions and org traffic have ticked up from previous days and the 7 am shelf I mention on page 3 of this thread lasted for a few days and then this morning occurred at 9, which is the norm for the sister US site. Looking at the sister US site, the 9am decline occurred more steeply than average, but is still trending along week over week.

Referencing rank trackers, my positions have remained steady, but I've noticed more crowding in the serp beyond the traditional head-terms into more long-tail territory which is where our bread and butter lay for a number of years.

[QuaterPan]

For advanced queries (where context matters), Google seems to have some edge. For example, for queries originating in India (say price of a mobile), DDC still tries to provide global response where as G provides local results. We have to add "india" to tell DDC its india specific query.

May be it's simply because DDC is not tracking users, so if they are strict with their policy, they will not identify/use the location of their users.

[MayankParmar]

That's because Google.com redirects to Google.co.in. Targeting one country.

[RedBar]

DDC still tries to provide global response where as G provides local results.

In the UK, after the first set of results, DDG provides a switch whereby one can select UK results or, when opening the drop down menu, you can select any country one requires.

This is far, far easier than the Google.com method of having to go through their settings menu.

[JesterMagic]

Traffic still sliding for us as well. Seems to be a bit of an update In our niche in the last 24 hours, the YouTube carousel can now be found on most searches. Nice how a Google Site gets it's own search widget.

Plus does Google really need to put both the "People also ask" and "Searches Related" widget on the results page?

[MayankParmar]

I am seeing results like:

"A featured snipped of a YouTube video"
"People also ask".
"videos"
SERP.

It's spreading to all niches, from tech to blogging-wordpress.

[NickMNS]

Me too. I'm even seeing it for very unexpected queries, very specific queries that have nothing to do with video. As a result the video results are nonsensical. Note that the query in question is a query I make daily and always expect the same result. The result I always click is now pushed down well below the fold, it is still in first or second organic position.

[Shaddows]

And here. I just ran a string of searches, and can create SERPs that don't have video.

But for somewhere North of 95% of real searches, got videos above organic (or with one organic, then videos). All after the ads, obviously. Gotta get those ads in first.

[JesterMagic]

The YouTube videos tend to be very general oriented and old (5+ years). Not very useful. Not sure why they deserve a snapshot for their listing either. You can't tell much from the photo. It's as useful as if Google was going to include a snap shot for a web page listing.

Not sure how this can all be fixed, Google is slowly replacing the SERPs with all of their own stuff. Most politicians don't understand how much control Google has (or any online monopoly, just look at Facebook privacy issue). I think when they actually try to figure this out it's going to be too late for most small online businesses.

[Cralamarre]

This is why I started making videos of my articles last year. Just published video #37 an hour ago. No matter how popular and high ranking my written articles are on Google, the videos on YouTube get 10x the amount of views. Every new article I write these days gets a video version to go with it, and it seems to be working well.

Also, YouTube doesn't seem to suffer from the same seasonal ups and downs that I see with my website. My website traffic has been steadily dropping this month as school comes to an end for the summer, but YouTube traffic is still going strong.

[Kash1111]

I am seeing a drop in traffic probably because of summer, noticed that facebook reach higher than expected, more traffic from there less from google.

@Cralamarre

How do you make videos of articles? I have seen some on youtube by others.

[Cralamarre]

@Kash1111 My articles are all "how-to" tutorials, so it's very easy for me to make videos of them. I realize that videos are not an option for everyone, but I've been very surprised by how much more traffic my videos get over the written articles, even when my articles are ranked #1 in the SERPs. As an example, one of my most recent articles gets roughly 100 views a day from Google, while the video on YouTube gets 500 views a day.