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]

[MayankParmar]

World Cup and summer vacation is over.... time for good days?

[Dimitri]

Traffic (conversion/interaction) is doing pretty good here, since the mid of last week. I am surprised because usually, summer months are extremely low for me.I don't know if it's related to the speed update.

[RedBar]

summer vacation is over

Where?

Not in Europe until the end of August beginning of September and, I believe the USA is early to mid August.

[Dimitri]

Not in Europe until the end of August beginning of September and, I believe the USA is early to mid August.

And in the south hemisphere, this is winter.

[mosxu]

Being hated by AI for some reason,

A dumping factor is being applied to my ads I feel like my ads are only shown if the big dogs do not covert in the first place regardless how much I bid.

[samwest]

mos, you're odds of success are much greater playing roulette in Vegas. Buying ads is like burning money...but I'm sure you know that already.

[glakes]

Being hated by AI for some reason,

A dumping factor is being applied to my ads I feel like my ads are only shown if the big dogs do not covert in the first place regardless how much I bid.

I don't know if Google really has much quality traffic to work with these days when it comes to ecommerce sites. A recent Tech Crunch story has Amazon commanding 49.1% of the USA online ecommerce market. See [techcrunch.com...] to read the story.

All these years of Google promoting Amazon with nothing short of top ranks, domain crowding, great ad placement when undeserved, etc. is paying off for Amazon. User behavior has changed to the point that many now have the habit of going straight to Amazon when they want to purchase an item. And contrary to the stories, and my original observation, Amazon is still running paid shopping ads for a product we sell. Those ads point to a Chinese competitor that sells FBA on Amazon.

[aristotle]

Well google is still the best place to start looking for information about nutritional supplements. Their search results list lots of articles about the possible benefits and risks of almost any vitamin, herb, or other supplement. If you decide to buy something, there are usually 3 or 4 ads above the organic results.

This appears to be a thriving industry with a dozen or more small to mid-size businesses apparently doing very well by advertising on google. And google itself must be making a lot of money from the ads.

[mosxu]

Thanks for kind comments,

Problem is I have to give work to the employees, ads need to work for me, organic is a plus but I hardly get a conversion in certain times, traffic from both ads and organic does not convert which drives me crazy

[Halaspike]

Google crawls my site at a rate of one thousand posts per day but doesn't index my new posts fast. It takes hours upon hours for my new posts to be indexed. Scrappers will come copy my new posts and they'll get indexed before me. I'm already feeling sick & feel like google is deliberately against my progress.

[Cyril TechWebsites]

Personally for me, this Google's long silence frightens, it lasts for many weeks this year (no major updates for last months or even more). From my point of view, this is a sign of a great storm that awaits us soon: I bet we will face a large update in the Autumn (Penguin related) that will kick us much. My experience tells me that Googlers can't just calmly spend their time, enjoying the life and the flow of money they are receiving. Instead of going to play bowling, visiting their parents, or spend time with their family - they are choosing to make some wired changes to algo making us hate them here on forum! Calm is not for Google! :)

[Milchan]

Google crawls my site at a rate of one thousand posts per day but doesn't index my new posts fast. It takes hours upon hours for my new posts to be indexed. Scrappers will come copy my new posts and they'll get indexed before me. I'm already feeling sick & feel like google is deliberately against my progress.

Whenever I do a new article or update content I always go to GSC and fetch as google - request indexing (for just that URL - not to follow all links as you cant do that too much) and i find it is usually indexed the updates within hours

[Milchan]

I had a a bit of an improvement last 2 days with yesterdays conversions actually being good. Traffic was up a bit also probably 15 to 20% more than it has been. A bit slower today but thats normal on Tuesdays but still a few conversions.
Some of the conversions I got might have been linked to content I update yesterday - I updated thin content on a couple of pages and then later than evening I got conversions from that product area. Could be a coincidence but , hopefully not. Im keeping working on the thin content.

[Halaspike]

@Milchan i use the fetch as google tool but it's limited to only 10 urls per day & my site is a forum getting over 10 posts daily. I miss the days when it was 500 urls monthly, that was much better.

[jmorgan]

Would it be controversial to say, if you dread the next Google update, you might subconsciously believe you're doing something wrong?

For me, I've worked hard at improving my site, and I actually look forward to the next update to see if my hard work has paid off.

Having said that, there's no guarantee that Google won't tank my website again. But I look forward to seeing if this is the case (or not) nevertheless.

[Robert Charlton]

>>fetch as google<<

FWIW, here's a discussion from a few months back that might be worth checking...

Big reductions in crawl-to-index limits on Google Fetch tool
March, 2018
https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4893740.htm [webmasterworld.com]

In the thread, I go into various methods of submission, and, depending on your volume, what Google's probably looking for.

[System]

Mod's note: Halaspike, to avoid taking this Updates thread off topic, I removed your additional question about the fetch as Google tool and added it to the end of the existing discussion, which is still open...

Big reductions in crawl-to-index limits on Google Fetch tool
https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4893740.htm [webmasterworld.com]

Continue discussion about Google July Updates below....

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 6:50 am (utc) on Jul 18, 2018]

[pritz]

@Milchan i use the fetch as google tool but it's limited to only 10 urls per day & my site is a forum getting over 10 posts daily. I miss the days when it was 500 urls monthly, that was much better.

Option 1: You can directly submit URL to Google. Simply type in Google "submit url to google". It will take some time but definitely help.
Option 2: In GSC, Go to site setting, Set crawl rate to "Limit Google's maximum crawl rate".

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 8:29 am (utc) on Jul 18, 2018]

[Robert Charlton]

See the dedicated thread, as noted above, regarding submitting directly to Google. Again, there is a 10 page per day limit with the Fetch tool used to submit.

...crawl rate

Recommendation is generally to leave crawl rate up to Google. Increasing the crawl rate does generally not increase the number of pages indexed by Google. John Mueller suggests using sitemap files.

[pritz]

Feeling good. After so long, got few conversion today.

[aristotle]

Personally for me, this Google's long silence frightens, it lasts for many weeks this year (no major updates for last months or even more). From my point of view, this is a sign of a great storm that awaits us soon: I bet we will face a large update in the Autumn (Penguin related) that will kick us much.

Google has been working on its search ranking algorithm for 20 years. By now they should have reached a point where all of the basics have been worked out and no more big updates are needed. In fact it's been a long time since they did anything but occasional minor tweaks.

With a mature algorithm that's performing properly, the rankings will shift slowly and gradually. There wouldn't ever be any big shakeups.

[Cyril TechWebsites]

Google has been working on its search ranking algorithm for 20 years. By now they should have reached a point where all of the basics have been worked out and no more big updates are needed. With a mature algorithm that's performing properly, the rankings will shift slowly and gradually.

I do agree with that. We all know about the facts on how huge was the impact and how strong market shakeup was done after first Panda was rolled out years ago. I'm pretty sure that Googlers learned from that situation and since then they are trying to make the ranking shifts in a slow and step-by-step way (in order to avoid hysteria and mass blaming among the people for Google).

But as I see they can’t do it slowly all time. Some updates (Penguin related, as I believe) can drastically change the website’s ranking in one night even nowadays. I think it’s related with refreshing some databases (these Penguin-Links related updates happening every ~ 6 months). So even when the algo performs properly – it’s still can “kill” someone’s business in a single day.

[pritz]

What is happening suddenly? Monday & Tuesday was Good, but from Wednesday still struggling for conversion.

Ranking is good, traffic is good, even the mobile and desktop page speed scores (90+) are also good. No control on search engine. Seems Google is also not satisfied with their search results.

[BushyTop]

We're seeing so many SERP changes over the past couple of weeks. Domains that had solidified their positions are moving all over the place for highly search terms.

Automotive, UK

[mosxu]

@pritz

Did you not see in the news who is the richest man on earth?

Basically google is not getting buyers to search that much because they go direct to amazon so there are less and less buyers everyday. But also some of top advertisers need to make a profit to keep spending in ads.

So what you are getting is some periods of all searches when you can still convert and compete.

Why is the traffic still staying up and is not converting is a big mistery

[keyplyr]

Why is the traffic still staying up and is not converting is a big mistery

Other big names besides Amazon also had their sales.

[samwest]

I'll add my vote for "Amazon first search" when buying. The SERP layout is really changing in my vertical. Less answer box (none in fact) and now a "Top stories" feed right below the fold. Never saw that before.

Here's the new layout (desktop incognito)...
"Shop for 'search term' on Google", now rather sneakily changed to "See 'search term'".
Images for "search term"
1st organic - my site
2nd organic - my site
3rd organic - indirect competitor 1
4th organic - indirect competitor 2
5th organic - Pinterest 1
6th organic - Pinterest 2
Top stories...3 lines
7th organic - Pinterest 3
8th organic - big brand informational
Ad 1 - Pinterest
Ad 2 - Amazon
Ad 3 - search for "search term" on dogpile (no kidding!)
Searches related to "search term"

I guess if you want traffic, start posting to Pinterest. Not sure who is placing the ads and what their expected ROI may be....
By the looks of things G is looking to buy P.

Compared to the SERPS of old, I can see why the drop in traffic to even the #1 and #2 spots.

[EditorialGuy]

No perceptible changes here. Maybe informational SERPs tend to be less volatile than e-commerce SERPS?

[Steven29]

I just want to leave my 2 cents.

I have been experiencing what many say in this thread too. I went the "I better make it better" route for a while but never really seen any improvements. My website is 100% 100% with the ad blocked running from gtmetrix

In the past 6 months I have been monitoring traffic heavily and trying to stop all of the bots. Blocking these bots seems to give me the biggest effect in traffic and revenue.

In order to successfully block only the bad traffic, I must wait until there is enough data to determine if they are legit or not.

After doing major blocks of these offending ips, I see my traffic go up and revenue increase.

It may be different for you, but I believe all of these bots are grabbing information for their other needs. If they can't grab your links, your pages cannot be damaged with things like duplicate content, fake slow load time penalties and more.

When test starting into the blocking world of ips, you may be shocked and the volumn that it is happening at.

I had bots all day doing searches and hitting the back button immediatly, content on virus spam sites and more.

By blocking these bots I was also able to free up many resources and get my server response time down and steady.

I have not been able to reproduce these results doing any "SEO"

[robert976]

Very interesting. How did you find the bots? did you use any tools or did you manually working on server logs?