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)

---

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]

[Jez123]

@bwnbwn - Are you seeing this effect with organic or paid? Or both even?

[mosxu]

PPC here mainly curious zombies

Forget oraganic high street stores are the AI vision to compete with Amazon

[Qaeron]

could you give details about the neg seo attack and how you spotted it. Im concerned im suffering from the same because my demise has coincided with the rise of my main competitor (and demise of some others)

Ah just usual stuff. Lots of scraping and republishing...

I personally think negative seo attacks are bogus and a complete farce. A few bad links someone points to your site isn’t going to tank you in the serps. Someone hell bent on screwing you over is better off reporting your url to google directly for guidelines violations.

You could be right, I'll let you knpw......

[bwnbwn]

Jez123 most of the PPC click in click a page to make it a legit visit is PPC and move one to their next victim. PPC averages 1.5 pages were organic averages 3 pages. I really feel PPC has gotten rotten to the core.

[mosxu]

@bwnbwn

Did you think all along that your website is having a problem and all
PPC traffic is bent genuine ?

[jmorgan]

More confusion on GSC for me. My average ranking position is down and yet my CTR is up, and consequently so if my traffic. Anyone else experiencing this?

[NickMNS]

@jmorgan
Yes, it is normal and logical but counterintuitive.

My average ranking position is down

You are assuming that your average and median are the same. But what you are experiencing is a skewed distribution where you have fewer high ranking impressions and more low ranking impressions. The high ranking are seeing a much higher CTR than what you typically see and the lower ranking impressions are behaving as expected or only marginally worse. The net result is a higher CTR overall and a lower average position.

I generally see this occur when I get an increase in impressions, it seems that the increase occurs for a new set of keywords (I am mainly targeting the long tail so I get few impressions for many keywords). These new impressions seem to perform less than more established ones (purely from observation and not based on a any hard testing). Once I continue to get some traffic to these new keywords, things adjust upwards again.

I view this as a positive, but that's just me.

[jmorgan]

Thank you @NickMNS.

[bwnbwn]

mosxu I keep track of conversions on my PPC campaigns it has gone from fair to 0.

[Halaspike]

A big site with thousands of backlinks copied about 1000 posts from my blog word for word & has outranked me. I went from the first 3 spots on serps to nowhere to be found. Google basically replaced my links with their links.

I'm really frustrated. I contacted the site to atleast give me credit by linking to my site or take down the posts but they never replied me.

My site is 4 yrs old their site is 10 yrs old.

Is there anything that can be done about this? Please help

[Dimitri]

You can try a DMCA or similar formal request to this site, but also to its host. Once, a site was copying my content, they ignored my messages, so I wrote to their host, and the site was taken down. They moved to a different host, but this time, without the copy of my pages ...

note: you need to have evidences, that you are the original creator of this content.

[Halaspike]

Already did this but nothing happened.

Looks like Google's algorithms can't figure out the original source of a content.

They just rely on backlinks. SMH

[Dimitri]

Looks like Google's algorithms can't figure out the original source of a content.

That's something I do not understand (but observe too). Or Google just minds the content and not the author. From the moment a content is published, and found by Google, this should be considered the original content, and any other copies coming after shouldn't be listed in the SERP at all, no matter how authoritative the site is. An authoritative site (following the definition of Google) copying someone else content, should boost the original content position, not the copier.

[aristotle]

I am mainly targeting the long tail

In SEO tradition, targeting the long tail is the strategy used by creators of content farms. They create enormous amounts of content and hope that occasionally someone will type in a rarely-used search term that accidentally matches up with something in that enormous amount of content. They normally don't try to target particular search terms, but instead are looking for random matches to something in the content.. In fact, a "long-tail" search term by definition is a rarely-used search term. So if you try to target particular long-tail terms, you will need a lot of them to get much search traffic.

In a way a content farm is the opposite strategy of people who try to target just one high-volume search term and design the entire site to try to rank high for that one specific term.

[samwest]

@Halaspike - I had the same thing happen to me by a big brand realty site. They stole my article title, content and url and now rank #1 pushing me down to page 2. They only swapped out my images with generic non related pics. So Google can't ID the original source simply by date published? Really can't believe these big brands are so desperate as to stoop to theft to dominate a term using their hefty back link profile in order to get more clicks. I tweaked the article and am now recovering to #3. Maybe content still IS king. It's a digital war zone out there.

[MayankParmar]

Publish date to verify original content? We can easily backdate articles and it works if the article is backdated to 12th July for example/....

[Leosghost]

That's something I do not understand (but observe too). Or Google just minds the content and not the author. From the moment a content is published, and found by Google, this should be considered the original content, and any other copies coming after shouldn't be listed in the SERP at all, no matter how authoritative the site is. An authoritative site (following the definition of Google) copying someone else content, should boost the original content position, not the copier.

Pinterest ?
if rapidshare*, mega and other cyber lockers are demoted by Google ( they are ) why not Pinterest ?Oh..I forgot , it was started by an exgoogler, and has Google VC money in it..despite it being 99.99999% other peoples content ( images copied from other people's websites ) ..Pinterest rules the image search of Google, many times it is all of the entries on the first, second and third pages of Google image search.
*rapidshare is now defunct..but was a well known cyberlocker ( source of copied content ).

[Dimitri]

Pinterest ? ...

Yes! I had galleries of original images, which were doing well, then from one day to another, Google was displaying these same images, but with a link to Pinterest !

Even if it will be reworked, I hope the Article #13 of the upcoming EU Copyright directive will address this kind of situation, at least for EU creators.

[Qaeron]

To any seo's that have content stolen allow me to console you - "THEIR, THERE, THEY'RE"

Seriously though its horrible when it happens and I have been a victim of this too.

Eu Copyright directive is just tax on links though - it would destroy wikipedia for example.

[Leosghost]

Eu Copyright directive is just tax on links though - it would destroy wikipedia for example.

A spinner of other peoples original content, is a spinner of other peoples content.. if Jimbo's crowd sourced respinner only used content was given to them ( I have given them images )..there would be no problem with it..but it doesn't..so there is, because it outranks the sites that "the editors" take the content ( without permission ) from..Google loves wikipedia, because it allows them to use other people's content ( without their permission ) by proxy..like they do with pinterest..

The difference being pinterest uses all of the image content, no fair use..just crowd sourced intellectual property abuse..and Google ranks them above the originals every time..to add insult to injury, since GDPR..Pinterest insist that one joins them to see a non blurred version of what they stole, but lets Google crawl the high def clear versions, which are what appear in Google's image search results..Click through..instant blurry page with images with a modal teling you "join" or log in with Google or facebook..The silicon valley crowd sourced image theft mafia triad..Pinterest, Google, facebook..

I hope that the EU copyright directive rushes Pinterest and all similar..I make my living by creating ( amongst other things ) original images..I can't make more if my time is spent sending DMCA's to the image theft mafia triad, their human button pushing scrapers can steal images faster than anyone can make new originals..If you completely block pinterest ( I do ) Google crawls you, but won't index you at all..even for your text ...not even with the site: command...you get every page crawled, no problems, but you are not in their index for anything, not just not ranking..but not returned at all in SERPs..Only the sites that link to you are in SERPs..

[Leosghost]

I hope that the EU copyright directive rushes Pinterest and all similar
should have read ..
I hope that the EU copyright directive crushes Pinterest and all similar..

[samwest]

Publish date to verify original content? We can easily backdate articles and it works if the article is backdated to 12th July for example/...

Yeah, no, it doesn't work that way. Think about it. The original article is published on 1/10/2010. It is indexed on 5/10/2010. Then, some scraper tries to copy the article and post it on 1/10/2011. It is indexed on 5/10/2011 with a false publish date of 1/10.2009. It doesn't take any kind of AI or even I to see the problem there. Backdating does NOT change the index date...just verifies the forgery.

[skynet84]

Google wants to make me sick. I have lost in september 50% of traffic other 15% on December, great recover +20% on march and now again 50% traffic lost. Always respect guidelines and users in my 7 years of blogging, many competitors just copy/paste my ideas, article, meta-description etc. and rank better. I think I get sick of injustice.
There is no instrument for the authorship of an article and google threw me into a cage of lions.

[Qaeron]

If you completely block pinterest ( I do ) Google crawls you, but won't index you at all..even for your text ...not even with the site: command...you get every page crawled, no problems, but you are not in their index for anything, not just not ranking..but not returned at all in SERPs..Only the sites that link to you are in SERPs..

I don't get this why would Google care if you completely block pinterest

[Halaspike]

The site that copied thousands of my posts has kicked me out of the serps so bad that i went from 15 thousand unique visitors daily to 300 unique visitors daily all because they have a very large backlink profile.

They didn't even change titles or the words i used in the content.

I've come to the conclusion that having a good site with good navigation to all your pages just makes it easier for thieves to steal all your content.

I wish i never had any navigation or menus linking to all my pages. I wish i only had a homepage and a sitemap for only search engines.

[mosxu]

@bwnbwn

I wonder if you check analytics are there any pages taking unusual long to load?

It looks your ads stopped showing to human traffic

[samwest]

@Halaspike - That 300 number sounds VERY familiar. Since 1996 and up until 2010 many of my higher volume sites exhibited perfectly natural traffic volume spikes and patterns. It was only until the MayDay 2010 update (and the endless progression of subsequent punitive updates) that things began to slide...with negative numbers every month since. These sites ranged from 5k to 20k uv per day, now all get the same range of 300 +/- 10% per day, in spite of many page 1 position 1-4 results. It's like a diode clamp on traffic.I have theories as to why, but I'll keep them under my tf hat. ;)

[bwnbwn]

mosxu speed times are good I agree we have stopped getting human traffic from PPC most of the conversions are now organic. I ask the customer with a dropdown in the cart how they came to the site "word of mouth" is now my best seller. After it is sold I am going to pause all PPC.

To much waste in money in PPC IMO.

[riccarbi]

My guess is theat Google is having a BIG problem about quality, either about its evaluation (their "AI" system is simply unable to actually measure it) or about how much they really care about it, despite what they'are saying in their supposed "quality guidelines"- Either this is intentional or not, the outcome is that they give priority to big, low quality websites or to scrapers and copyrighted content thieves (such as almost all that post on Pinterest) to the detriment of original content creators and publishers.
If intentional, this would be something utterly unacceptable, and deserving a stout-hearted reaction by all the web community .

[pritz]

Folks, have you got any improvement in conversion in last days? Any prediction for this week?