Google Updates and SERP Changes - July 2018

[penitentman]

System: The following 22 messages were cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4904681.htm [webmasterworld.com] by robert_charlton - 10:35 am on Jul 3, 2018 (PDT -8)

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On a year like this with the 4th of July mid week, many Americans will take their week summer vacation that week. I expect unusual traffic patterns for the next 8-9 days.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 6:40 pm (utc) on Jul 3, 2018]
[edit reason] Split off to new monthly thread... [/edit]

[RedBar]

1 second is blink of eye lol

According to most factual information a blink is between 300 to 400 milliseconds or 3-4/10ths of a second.

10 seconds to load is almost an eternity these days, what on earth are you loading, heavyweight images?

FYI, text should load almost instantaneously, what else are you "throwing" at visitors?

[Pontificus Maximux]

1 second is blink of eye lol

All my sites, affiliate, informational, etc. load between .5 second and 1.5 seconds. I am using Wordpress with premium themes. 1 News theme and one Affiliate theme.

You are more than likely ad heavy and image bloated if you are loading at 10 seconds. All my images are less than 20 kb. I use cloud hosting that is less than 30 bucks a month. So honestly, it is time to rethink what you think is capable of being done. Even with a news website.

[Cyril TechWebsites]

Pretty sure that how the website speed impacts SEO depends on the niche. I'm running info websites where visitors can get how-to answers for their queries for free. I have a speed of 4,3 (sometimes even 6) and never had any serious problems with organic traffic (at least - speed related). I think if you want to get info for free - then you are ready to wait for a few seconds to get the solution that is needed (at least, the bounce rate will not change dramatically in that case). Another thing is e-commerce or something like this - if users won't be happy to interact with your website, they'll just go to another shop and purchase the item there.

[MayankParmar]

That is correct.

The images size is at least above 100kb and there are tons of images. There are three related post sections. Disqus commenting system and articles are published frequently which clears the cache. My mobile ranking is stable apparently because my rivals are slower than me lol

[mosxu]

In the news Mr Zuckerberg is another one left with no buyers on its platform [firstpost.com...]

Apparently users only sharing some cats pictures and stuff.

Most of buyers start at Amazon the right business model and going strong

[samwest]

Wow, a "normal" Sunday of conversions, one bright day out of seven...funny how your site can be converting perfectly one day and then full on zombies the next. "back in the day", I could set my watch on daily, weekly and monthly conversion regularity and stability. Not so today. Now it's a "clamped" random number.

[RedBar]

@MayankParmar

Assuming that I am looking at the correct website, your site is nowhere near 10 seconds on my connection, closer to 1 second.

Are you sure your figure is correct?

[MayankParmar]

@RedBar GTMetrix says it's 10 seconds. Maybe because of botched ads.

[Halaspike]

Google's algorithm is strictly based on backlinks & localization. Your very good content won't save you when a big brand with thousands of backlinks covers the same topic or topics you cover.

[Milchan]

Google's algorithm is strictly based on backlinks & localization. Your very good content won't save you when a big brand with thousands of backlinks covers the same topic or topics you cover.

Whilst im not sure "strictly based" is correct and there are lots of factors, the rest of what you say with is correct. My site looses out to bad content in so many serps simply because my competitors are using their own small PBN and lots of paid links. For all google says about paid links and that spammy links etc will get you banned, if done in a sneaky way people get away with it and end up winning. You can report them all you want and nothing gets done.I think a lot of what google says is just a tactic to try to reduce the amount of people that do black hat but in reality they know they dont catch alot of the time.
If like you say a big brand with lots of actual good links comes along , then you've no chance.

[Halaspike]

@Milchan, Links are the most important ranking factor, followed by site's audience based on location.

[BushyTop]

Links are still a huge ranking factor...

But i'm confident that usability and speed contribute heavily now. Its easy to measure and Google has the data readily available for most sites. It would be silly really not to consider that they use that data.

[Kash1111]

Well gtmetrix score is when a page is completely rendered, but you know a page is usable after the few secs. I am not buying the google site speed and ranking factor, because I still see slow web pages dominating ranking in our niche. Links and branding are top factors for increasing traffic.

[MayankParmar]

Umm.... so is 62DA on Ahrefs a decent score?

[samwest]

Oddest conversion day of the year so far.

[Halaspike]

@Kash1111 gtmetrix & other online speed test tools would show a very poor result for sites that use "Lazy loading". Any website that uses Lazy loading should stay far away from gtmetrix & other online speed test tools.

[jmorgan]

I'm not sure there's as much of an emphasis on backlinks as there was say 5-10 years ago. Google claims to also be able to determine the quality of a web page's content through various factors. Some people have speculated it's related to bounce rate, dwell time, etc. Whether or not these factors actually legitimately quantify a web page's quality is a different matter, I guess.

[mosxu]

@sam

Are you picking up in conversions?

[MayankParmar]

[thesempost.com...]

this isn't looking pretty. it's scary :O

[yollo03]

Huge drop in ranking in the past 24 hours, wow! Its not a speed issue, site loads on average less than 3 seconds. Is anyone else noticing a drop in ranking? Biggest drop I had for more than a year.

[yollo03]

Is anyone seeing big ranking changes in the past 24 hours?

[jmorgan]

Seems stable on my end @yollo03. semrush sensor says nothing much happening.

[yollo03]

I am on semrush, I will probably see my new rankings when it will update. Dropped from page 30 on average to 70, this is no joke. No idea whats going on. Site is not hacked or anything like it, got a page score of 84 on google speed insights.

[yollo03]

Sorry, not page 30, ranking was 30 and dropped to 70

[jmorgan]

The lower the drankings, the more volatile. Are you talking about one single page? I'm not really sure why dropping from 30 to 70 would be such a big deal, seeing as people rarely click on anything beyond the first page.

It would probably be a bigger deal if you dropped from 3 to 7.

[yollo03]

Its a big deal to me, I also discovered that particular page is now gone from mobile search. I have no idea whats going on but I do hope this is a niche update. That particular page happens to be the homepage so its a big deal.

[givinguponlife]

My site's traffic is down from 50k to 35k in last 24 hours with majors changes across all positions. Frop #1 to god knows where.

My last site (controlled by seo company, not me) was killed post march update, went from generating 80k revenue per month to peanuts. After this non sense drop in last 24 hours, I am done.

My competitors are using pop ups, pop unders, ads on click and other garbage while I have zero adsense ads, zero annoying ads or anything.

[yollo03]

Good to know its not just me so it must be a niche update. Is anyone else experiencing significant ranking changes?

[yollo03]

Just so you know what im talking about I moved from page 3 to page 9 on desktops, on mobile I was 2 and now god knows where I am, cant find it.

[System]

The following 2 messages were cut out to new thread by robert_charlton. New thread at: google/4913603.htm [webmasterworld.com]
3:47 am on Aug 1, 2018 (PDT -8)