Google Updates and SERP Changes - August 2018

[yollo03]

System: The following 2 messages were cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4909313.htm [webmasterworld.com] by robert_charlton - 3:47 am on Aug 1, 2018 (PDT -8)

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HERE WE GO! Get your sit belts on:

Google Search Algorithm August 1st Update Rolling Out Now; Might Be A Big One
Aug 1, 2018
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-algorithm-update-26141.html [seroundtable.com]




[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 11:57 am (utc) on Aug 1, 2018]

[thinktwice]

We sell products for elderly people for ten years now. Apparently this is not enough E-A-T for Google. What to do? I can't believe this is only an E-A-T issue.

[HammerDown]

What is Dr Axe doing differently compared to Healthline?

Isn't MedicalNewsToday.com the biggest winner of all? I'm obviously missing something because it seems to me that someone with the know-how and tools should be able to look at the top winners and losers of the update and find a picture of what happened.

Why couldn't you find the five winners and losers with the most traffic and most significant change in traffic and compare all the top known ranking signals and have a pattern emerge?

Unless... as I fear... it's some sort of extremely complex, esoteric algorithm for determining trust. In which case, the game for most of us is over.

I can't seem to find the "author" of any of the pages/posts on Dr Axe website. Whereas Healthline, the authors appear to be displayed on the top right with their credentials.

That's one of the first things I checked. If you look at the source code of Dr. Axe you'll see the author info is actually in a "hidden" div tag. I'm checking them throughout the day for changes. They're dropping like panties after sundown so they must have top SEO recovery experts working on it.

[mosxu]

Wasn’t I who suggested months ago that whenever you feel sick and do a search AI tells you that you’ve got cancer...

There is so much content manipulation that almost made Google results look like Bing.

I loved the google bombing technique, the user interacted greatly with a site for what it does and not because of keywords, semantics and ongoing nonsense content creation.

I do not feel that I can learn much if I search with Google.

[NickMNS]

it's some sort of extremely complex, esoteric algorithm for determining trust

I don't think it is complex at all. MartiniBuster here (I think it was him?), had a thread or a few posts were here showed that Google had patents that showed that they were using links from "authoritative" sites as seeds in the link graph. Meaning that if a site in a given niche has a a direct link from the seed it will rank higher in that niche than a site that has many links from a bunch of links from sites that are not link to the seed. As such not all links have the same value and a links value is only of value relative to its niche. Now this is how I understood this. I will try and find a link to the thread.

Why couldn't you find the five winners and losers with the most traffic

The problem here is that your question seems logical and intuitive on the surface but when one really thinks of the problem one quickly realizes that due to the nature of search it is not clear. What is a winner? What is a loser? How is the "most" traffic defined. Each site is unique to some extent, in that not all sites compete for the same set of keywords. Granted one may compete for many of the same keywords as our competitors. But if one attempts to select of few sites that all compete on a representative set of keywords the number of sites will be very low, three or four. Sites can be both a winner and loser at the same time.

A site that has gained traffic relative to its pre-update traffic has gained the traffic across many keywords and competitors, and it most likely gave up some traffic to other sites and keywords, obviously to much lesser extent. So ultimately it becomes impossible to choose clear winners and losers.

[EditorialGuy]

What is a winner? What is a loser? How is the "most" traffic defined.

Exactly. "On what page(s)" matters, too. We've had a very modest overall decline--just a few percentage points--because some of our long-tail pages on tangential topics are have slipped in the rankings. But for our most consistently popular and profitable pages, which are about our core topics, rankings and traffic are largely up. That makes sense in the context of "E.A.T."

[rb77]

Well in our vertical one of the winners from this update is an old site that is the least mobile friendly website you could ever come across, it’s horrendous and incredibly hard to navigate through.

What it has got in it’s favour is that it’s well known and has plenty of good reviews.

[not2easy]

@NickMNS - you may be referring to goodroi's late April "Google Updates PageRank Patent" thread here: [webmasterworld.com...]

There are additional links to information and martinibuster adds more analysis further in that discussion.

[samwest]

I can't believe this is only an E-A-T issue.

It's always been about E-A-T.
If you are just writing about random brain fart topics, you likely won't win that game, unless you've found a virtual information vacuum to fill. If you are writing medical advice, I would hope the info is from a doctor or trained medical professional. [seoinc.com...]

[mosxu]

E-A-T by independent advisers? Easy to abuse any SEO agency would plant some seeds.

[NickMNS]

@not2easy
Thanks that appears to be the one.


Now that the dust is clearing on this update I'm starting to see some interesting trends in my stats. (This is specific to my site, but still of interest. I think?)
I was hit hard by the March update but I immediately began to trend up in terms of impressions growth. This was most likely due to the fact that I had fully updated my site in March. As Google indexed the new versions of the pages my impression and traffic grew. Over the month I made up a good part of the March drop. With the August update I lost about 15% to 20% of my traffic. But it appears (it is still early to know for sure) that the growth in impressions is continuing. There was a step-down during the week of August 1st but the growth continues at what appears to be the same rate from that point forward. The other step down, and where the pain is really felt, is in average rank. There, I dropped about 2 points, and that has not yet recovered.

[Halaspike]

Right now am ranking very well for about 3 keywords. Very soon big sites with more authority will come copy my stuffs & outrank me thanks to Google not being able to detect the origin of a post.

[EditorialGuy]

What it has got in it’s favour is that it’s well known and has plenty of good reviews.

I remember Google saying, when "mobile-friendly" became part of the algorithm, that a desktop-only site could continue to outrank a mobile-friendly site, if it provided a better result for a query. "Mobile-friendly" is just one piece of the ranking puzzle.

[whoa182]

I'm still seeing gains and drops all over the place for my keywords. I checked SEMRush and it shows a 21% drop in traffic.

This is the what search console shows for me: [imgur.com...]

Falling impressions, but an increase in average ranking since the update. Maybe I lost a lot of long tail keywords but not much difference for my main KW?

Right now I'm going through my whole site to improve grammar on my old posts, adding internal links, and improving thin content (I have many old posts with less than 300 words).

Is all this a waste of time? I guess if I am linking from a page within my site, and that content is "bad", then the link isn't as useful? I also had 1 soft 404 error and cleared that up. I also added a contact page and improved the about page.

This is probably going to take a week, and then I'll probably start adding content again to make up for the losses. Whether I fail to recover or not, I guess I'm going to learn something, so I might as well try.

My health site was not affected by the March update from what I remember, but I was only just getting started on published a lot of content at that time. Either way, things were ranking fast and well as I was targeting long tail. I'll check traffic some older pages to see if anything happened around that time...

[Subhnish]

I am also Fixing up my Old Posts, Adding Meta Descript. to all old posts, Increased the Keyword density a little bit, Removed all Nofollow Attribute and Disavowed all Spammy links. I added original info on About us page and Added my Address in Contact us page.
I decided all this fix by Analysing my Competitor who climbing the rankings. Let's see what will happen tomorrow.

[JesterMagic]

@Subhnish even if all those changes improve your ranking you will not see any changes tomorrow. It usually takes weeks or months for improvements to happen. That is one of the reasons why it so hard to reverse engineer the algorithm.

[Subhnish]

I always cared about User Experience, While my Competitors Used Filler Content and Placed Keyword at Pointless places to increase keyword density.

I still Believe in Rankbrain, so I am trying to improve user experience even more.
And I Was expecting result in a day, Cant think right now when traffic falls from cliff. Jeez

[HammerDown]

I'm still seeing gains and drops all over the place for my keywords. I checked SEMRush and it shows a 21% drop in traffic.

This is the what search console shows for me: [imgur.com...]

Falling impressions, but an increase in average ranking since the update. Maybe I lost a lot of long tail keywords but not much difference for my main KW?

Interestingly, mine is quite similar: [imgur.com...]

[MayankParmar]

I'm link spammed :(

[RedBar]

Let's see what will happen tomorrow.

As JesterMagic noted, no way will you see anything tomorrow UNLESS you happen to have someone on the inside who can manually adjust your rankings. It's quite possible that you may see your modified tags, title bars, etc within a few days, maybe even tomorrow, however insofar as your actual rankings are concerned, a ranking's improvement is most unlikely.

Now, if you could go back to 1998 it was possible to see ranking improvements almost on the fly, I used to love playing around with G in those days adjusting a page and watch it go up and down, out, back in etc:-)

[HelenOfTroy]

Removed all Nofollow Attribute

@Subhnish - I understood that nofollow of affiliate/paid links was required by Google. According to Backlinko, 'Having a certain % of nofollow links may indicate a natural vs. unnatural link profile.' Only 'Excess PageRank Sculpting - by nofollowing all outbound links which may be a sign of gaming the system' is frowned on - or is that what you are referring to? Thanks.

[edited by: not2easy at 2:39 pm (utc) on Aug 13, 2018]
[edit reason] See Charter [/edit]

[yollo03]

This update has nothing to do with backlinks, ads, paid ads or whatever. Like others wrote here, there is absolutly nothing you can do unless someone in google adjusts your ranking. I saw a website that is ranked 13,000,000 in alexa but its above me in my main keywords. This has nothing to do with backlinks either. This is a manual intervention of google to filter low quality sites and it is here to stay unless they will lift it off. Therefore, anything you will try to do is a waste of time. My guess is that new content will not suffer from this manual intervention, only old content so thats why they are recommending on focusing on new content.

[Dimitri]

This is a manual intervention

Lots of hands then.

[yollo03]

I will tell you the good news though. There is always balance in life. Those that gains from this update will get hit once it gets updated. It could be today, tomorrow, in a few months or next year. But once they update the algorithm again it will restore some balance. I am 100% certain it will happen at some point.

[jmorgan]

Those that gains from this update will get hit once it gets updated. It could be today, tomorrow, in a few months or next year.

Well you may, or may not, be right. Best not to worry about it and just build the best website (for users, not Google!) that you can, and then whatever happens, happens.

[samwest]

But once they update the algorithm again it will restore some balance. I am 100% certain it will happen at some point.

Unless you do something to effect a positive change, your result will not change, positively.

[Cralamarre]

@yollo03 You wrote "This is a manual intervention of google to filter low quality sites", and then followed it with "Those that gains from this update will get hit once it gets updated... Once they update the algorithm again it will restore some balance."

Are you saying that Google needs to allow low quality sites in the SERPs to "balance" out the number of high quality sites?

[whoa182]

That's not exactly true.

I have another website that lost ranking in April, one of my posts was ranking number 1 for months and it suddenly dropped to page 2. After this update (I did nothing to the site) it went to 2nd position on Google.

Google did say they were rewarding sites that were under-rewarded in the past. However, that doesn't mean your page won't rise over time through positive signals. I mean, that's how it got there in the first place, right? When I write posts, some go straight to the top of Google, but some start on page 5 and then rank for the main keyword in position 1 a few weeks or months after writing it.

And I know that keywords have dropped before, only to go back to where they were after a period of time.

[Cralamarre]

Google did say they were rewarding sites that were under-rewarded in the past.

Problem is, everyone thinks their site is under-rewarded, everyone thinks their site is better than the competition, and everyone thinks their site deserves to be number 1. What people really need is an honest, unbiased opinion. Do your visitors agree that your site is the best? Or is it just you and your mom who think that?

I'm not suggesting that every site that gets hit by an update deserved it, but surely some of them did.

[RedBar]

I'm not suggesting that every site that gets hit by an update deserved it, but surely some of them did.

Yep, however the problem with Google, as always, is the "accidental" collateral damage it causes to perfectly valid and relevant sites leaving their owners wondering what have they done wrong, nothing, and what can they do to correct it, again nothing.

It's downright farcical!

[aristotle]

HelenOfTroy wrote:
'Having a certain % of nofollow links may indicate a natural vs. unnatural link profile.'

That statement refers to INCOMING links from other sites. So it doesn't apply to the issue in question, which concerns putting nofollow tags on OUTBOUND links from your site.

In general, you shouldn't put nofollow tags on any internal links within your site. As for outbound affiliate links, they should have a nofollow tag. But for non-affiliate outbound links, it's an individual decision for each one, but I think it's best to keep them as followed links in most cases.