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]

[Halaspike]

@arunpalsingh your english is pretty good. @jmorgan tagged you wrongly.

[George_G]

Long time lurker but decided to chime in on this one.

1. Do not get discouraged. I have been hit by numerous Google updates and always managed to get back stronger.

2. The best thing you can do - wait. Do not panic or start changing things on your site. Wait till the algo fully rolls out and big guys come up with some data and analysis. SEO is a game of patience.

That being said, my observations on the update so far:

- it is NOT a penalty update( think Panda, Penguin etc). More of reshuffling of the results. E.g if you drop from post 1 to pos 5, you will still lose like 50% or more of your organic traffic. That does not mean you are penalized. It means Google has adjusted their algo to reward different sites.

- what I see rewarded in the SERPS - Aged content and authority domains; Pages with good links; Sites with good silo structure and onsite relevance

I will be running a few experiments, but I ll be glad if you chime in and approve or disapprove my observations.

[givinguponlife]

@George_G +

That's my observation too, March update rewarded unappreciated sites with less authority but higher quality content. Now it's back to links, links and more paid links.

[arunpalsingh]

@arunpalsingh your english is pretty good. @jmorgan tagged you wrongly.

Thanks for saying that. Maybe @jmorgan wanted to stress on that the articles that appear to be written by non-native writers are not liked by people.

But I doubt people have semantic issues unless you write very badly.

Language could be an issue in Language and English writing niche but hardly elsewhere.

I think people and search engines are more concerned with readability and info contained than the subtle nuances.

Lastly, one should not be judged for the standards of articles from analyzing the language used in the forum.

Afterall, we are to help here. There is enough happening already.

[Halaspike]

@George_G i 100% agree with you. Your observations are on point.

[tranquilito]

@skynet84 sorry for the situation mate; do not give up. Is your website .com or .ctld ? Where your revenues based on Adsense or affiliate ?

[SnowMan68]

@skynet84

After seeing your website I would take a hard look at the QRG again. After that look at the big sites in your industry like WebMD that show for your major terms. You need to build up your credibility, no where on your site did I find any info why I should trust it, who the expert was and why they are an expert.

If I were to go to your website I wouldnt trust the information. Even if your content is infinitely better it looks spammy to me. With large blocks of content, ads that blend in with the page and no author info, I can see why you have experienced drops.

WebMD does a better job at laying out the content, providing ways to quickly locate a section of interest and makes links to other related content more obvious. Same thing is true for the other big players in your niche.

[samwest]

- what I see rewarded in the SERPS - Aged content and authority domains; Pages with good links; Sites with good silo structure and onsite relevance

In my vertical, what I see rewarded is Pinterest, Pinterest, Pinterest...

While my own listing have stayed pretty much stable, I am still seeing wild fluctuations in traffic volume and user behavior. This seems totally independent of search position. Last weeks spike "anomaly" has passed and this week is off to a very slow start. Weekly patterns are very hard to figure these days.

Desktop traffic is very thin.

[aristotle]

SnowMan68 -- There's a lot of medical quackery on the internet. If someone is writing articles about the possible benefits and risks of various nutritional supplements, they should base their information on the results of clinical trials, using reports in the original research papers published in professional journals.

[EditorialGuy]

@Aristotle: Gwyneth Paltrow and her wasp-nest suppliers would beg to disagree. :-)

[yollo03]

Google decided to trash my website a bit more in the past 24 hours. I dont believe I will recover until the next core update. I am going to have to do some serious work on quality. I have no ads, no paid links, good content, good domain age, ssl, load speed less than 3 seconds etc. I did make some changes and that reduced the bounce rate and increased the visitors duration on the website and page views but google didnt care yet.

[George_G]

@yollo03 while at it, you can check your TF-IDF (the WebsiteAuditor free version does that) and check your content structure with PageOptimizerPro (it has some free reports when you sign up).

Also, try building some more supporting content to your main articles and link to them.

Im running some tests myself, but I am curious if this will help you. Cheers

[yollo03]

@George_G+ Thanks for the help, I will look into this. I dropped from page 3 to page 11 for my main keyword. I know that i wont recover until the next core update in a few months. I will do my best to survive until then. Thanks again for help.

[samwest]

@yollo - being on page 3 is virtually the same as being on page 11. I have yet to dig three pages in to get a suitable answer to my Google queries, and page 11 only out of morbid curiosity.

[Robert Charlton]

I am going to have to do some serious work on quality. I have no ads, no paid links, good content, good domain age, ssl, load speed less than 3 seconds etc. I did make some changes and that reduced the bounce rate and increased the visitors duration on the website and page views but google didnt care yet.

yollo03, I don't know whether "care" is the right word, as Google is a machine. That said, when did you make the changes, what kinds of changes did you make, and how long have you given the machine to react? ;)

How long does it take for Google to respond to site changes?
- Google has said that it may well take them more time than webmasters expect for site changes and improvements to be reflected in rankings. Most information that I trust puts the time range at somewhere between three months to a year... with four to nine months being the most likely range. If youjr site doesn't get a lot of traffic, chances are that Google doesn't crawl it often, and that's likely to make the bottom end of the time range longer. Ditto with regard to crawl frequency on sites that link to you.

Update is still in progress
- Until this update has been fully rolled out and received some adjustment, I don't believe that you can make any judgements now about how you've been affected.

"Quality" of your inbound links
- I think that, going forward, link quality is going to be far more important than link quantity, and that suggests that the quality of your content has got to be so good that it attracts those high quality and relevant links you're going to need.

[NickMNS]

link quality is going to be far more important than link quantity,

Quality is subjective, what qualities should a link have?

[Cyril TechWebsites]

Quality is subjective, what qualities should a link have?

From my point of view, there are a lot of factors determining the quality of the link. Here are some short list:

1. Overall authority of the domain;
2. Authority of the specific page from which the link is placed (PR, quantity and quality of the links which are linked to the page from other websites, quality of the content, etc.);
3. Overall quantity of the outbound links on the page (if you have a single authority page on authority website with one single link to your website - that's great; if you have authority page with tons of links to other websites (one of them is yours) - that's not so good, but still can work);
4. Anchor of the link (in case it contains an exactly keyword - that's great, if not - it's not so good. Of course, if you have a majority of anchors in your link profile only with exact keywords - you'll be penalized, you should be accurate on playing with this);
5. Is link sending traffic to the website? (I mean if this link is "alive")

[MayankParmar]

Massive drop in rank but traffic is same. Interesting.

[arunpalsingh]

The decline generally follows the drop.

[WhoKnows111]

My gf's blog got decimated - she lost 70% of traffic. Non English, mostly travel related content, in language where spam and forums rule (bloggers are just starting to pop up).

Her content is several leagues above the competitors, getting emails, FB messages with thanks from people daily.

[jmorgan]

@MayankParmar Same here. My average ranking has dropped worryingly, but impressions are up and CTR is steady so traffic is still stable.

I'm just wondering if I've started to rank, on the low end, for a whole new range of keywords which is why my average ranking has dropped.

Or maybe this is just the start of something really bad? Hopefully not.

[HelenOfTroy]

@Aristotle: Agree about the medical quackery. Yet my site has tanked this week, despite providing evidence-based expert advice (I'm a doctor) with links through to pubmed RCTs and meta-analyses, I've gone from 3,500 visits a day, on average, down to 300. I was number 1 for many keywords, now disappeared from view. If this continues it's no longer worth my time or effort to provide self-help advice. :(

[jroc66]

My ranking has improved but my traffic has dropped because of 30% less impressions. It doesn’t make sense. I run a health website.

[yollo03]

I just wanted to say thank you to those that pmd me with support. I dont have the time to reply now but I will later. I was pushed down even more down the chain so the bottom is not over for me. What I did notice that google appears to focus more on short articles that provide the content for what was searched. I dont know if this is the new era, short content with 'precise' match to queries or this is google experimenting. Whoever followed google's recommendations to provide rich content got screwed. What I will do once I am certain this is over is to begin cutting content from the homepage and see if it makes a difference.

For those that got hit like me, what I think google did to compensate is to give new ranking for other keywords so the impressions is stable-ish. This update changed the weight on SSL and page speed load for sure, backlinks to me dont seem relevant with this update.

Semrush is showing ranking changes on mobile devices, my site still ranks well on mobiles, I hope that wont change. What I am working on at the moment is reducing the bonce rate and increasing the duration on the website.

[whoa182]

If your page has completely disappeared from the SERPs, you might want to try fetching the page. I've had to do this for several articles, and then they reappeared near the top of Google within a few minutes.

I've also noticed that my ranking in Search console and SEMRush is about the same, but way fewer impressions and almost half the number of clicks. I've lost about 6 weeks of gains. Can anyone else check their search analytics in SC?

I've also noticed that my informational articles have faired a lot better than some of my affiliate content, although not always the case. I normally cite PubMed, Journals, and University press releases on my health blog.

This isn't the first time I've seen decreases for certain keywords that I ranked well for before, only to rise back to the top again. So, I guess if the content is good, then it will rise again. Or that's the hope. :)

[jmorgan]

Gee, so many people running health websites.

[jroc66]

@whoa182 Same here. Ranking is the same, 35% drop in impressions and clicks. Are you saying that this has happened to you before and you've eventually bounced back? I write high-quality, well-researched health articles with references. Hope it all bounces back.

[lostshootingstar]

It's been touched on in this thread already, but one thing to keep in mind is that as we approach the middle and end of August, more and more kids are going back to school in the USA. At least in our industry, that always correlates to a noticeable decline in traffic. YMMV.

[HelenOfTroy]

@whoa182 Many thanks for your suggestion to try fetching the page - just did that and it worked; back on page 1 for that keyword and above the spammy 'Is this a scam' articles that were edging me out before. Maybe there is hope! ;)

[yollo03]

Lucky you. I fetched and rendered my homepage and noticed googlebot couldnt access all scripts. I fixed it besides font awesome script that I cant be bothered doing now but the page loads fine from the perspective of the bot. Lets see if I get anything from it, fingers crossed.

Also for mobile phone I used animation that brings the text from the left when scrolled. I wasnt sure the bot can actually crawl it so I removed the animation and fetched as google (mobile smartphone) and requested indexing. Lets see how that goes.

[topaz]

Hey,

This is a big update. We were impacted, but probably not for the reason everyone else was.
Alot of our traffic comes from Google News/Top Stories.
Whenever something big is rolling out, we have a drop in traffic from top stories. During the period, the Top Stories section for our keywords are very stale (like 1 to 3 days).
Then after a few days freshness returns and our site (and others) starting showing up with fresh results (sub 12 hours or less). Traffic then returns to normal.

I suspect Google diverts resources that usually keeps things "fresh" to allow for deeper crawling of the whole web when there's an update. I dunno.

[mosxu]

So AI does this, Amazon must be do it being the smartest player and now Facebook needs to know how much money you have in your bank account as well.
[wsj.com...]

Their algo probably thinks why waste my time with people with no money...

Keep spending money changing or improving a website, it is worth it if you have money in the bank account if not zombies would love to do business with you

[Milchan]

im beginning to get some recovery day by day now and yesterday and so far today is looking ok. Something im noticing is that the recovery seems to be "Regional" wereby my increases seem to be coming from a certain region each day it improves. For example update day 1 I lost traffic everywhere, after few days started to get some US traffic back, then australia/pacific region, then Europe and today South America - it could make sense if the update is rolled out in stages, then takes time to reindex / reanalyse things that Im getting things "fixed" in each region as it happens.

[yollo03]

To whoever said there is no difference between page 3 and page 15, my organic traffic dropped by 50%, It might change in the next few days but it is what it is at the moment. I am seeing some ranking changes in my niche although it doesn seem to be aggressive yer.

[yollo03]

I am seeing unusual ranking reshuffling again. Can anyone else confirm you are seeing this in your niche as well? Its starting to get more aggressive, Im not seeing anything on semrush yet. It could be limited to my niche so if anyone else can confirm that would be great.

[givinguponlife]

Can confirm, pushed even further down, with one site taking all serps

#2
#3
#10
#11
#12
#13
#14
#15
#16

Me at #17 from #4

[yollo03]

Its very similar to mine but I actually got to page 31.

#3
#9
#10
#31
#5
#10
#11

I cant even tell I bottomed at 11. Its fairly hard to swallow but it is what it is. I do see some changes, google is trying to push me back to page 9 in the past hour.

[samwest]

Perhaps it's time to stop checking the serps every hour and start creating better content with actual takeaway value. That's the key.

Fancy scripts won't improve your site. Useful well structured content will. I've seen some other members sites that look to be straight out of 1995 yet they knock it out of the park with just good useful content.

[edited by: samwest at 6:20 pm (utc) on Aug 6, 2018]

[givinguponlife]

@samwest no it;s not, all top rankings are from high authority spam pages with few sentences of text, or unrelated info + pop up ads, like luxury and super expensive hair brand stuffing content with keywords just to rank for it, i google cheap hair extensions and see manipulation. For niches that i work, it's even worse as you have sites ranking #1 with unrelated content but thousands of footer [sitewide links] that were bought. 99% of that site links are like this. You have 40-60+ external links at the bottom of footer with random sites and one being this particular site. Yeah, this is what pushed that site to #1, getting 3+ million users daily. I can't post url due to WM TOS, but that;s google.

I might have found a reason for drop, or what caused some of it, does anyone of you here use gfycat on pages that got affected?

[edited by: givinguponlife at 6:22 pm (utc) on Aug 6, 2018]

[samwest]

high authority spam pages

that's funny

[givinguponlife]

@samwest

I don't think that you are new on the internet, google has been pushing quora that is full of spam for a long time now, with all answers leading to external pages selling garbage. "Best x camera" questions with 100+ answers of non-sense and it ranks. Why? Because of authority. What is that page for? For spamming sellers who answer and ask the same questions.

[moz.com...]

For other products it's even worse, as chinese are now spamming it left and right. That site deserves no traffic, like yahoo answers. And there are multiple top sites that rank because of bought links, it's spam everywhere.

And for google that says how important it is reputation and ratings, lol at this ranking [imgur.com...]

the top #2 spot for product that has 2.1 stars with all comments saying liar, fake, scam, etc. Sure, nothing to do with DA at all, it's all about amazing user experience and this product clearly delivers among 50000 others

[MayankParmar]

the tag pages are ranking better now, authority ones ofc.

[MayankParmar]

My one article dropped to 85 position on 2nd August and returned back today.

[samwest]

@givinguponlife - I found it funny because the way that was worded, it sounded like you then consider yourself the low authority spam site. If your content is winding up next to Quora, then maybe you're perusing the wrong niche's.

I have a few case studies in crossing paths with Quora content and we can beat them every time. You just need to refine your content. Include fully meta'd original pics, YT video, good references and informed content that stands out as authoritative, not just authoritative because of a massive back link profile. BLP is certainly not the only criteria for high ranking. If it was, it would be a pretty boring web. There are still many gold nuggets to be found out there...take the time to go find them....not wasting away watching fruit rot on the vine. Get er done!

[Halaspike]

Traffic was so high today my server crashed for about an hour. Now I'm worried that my ranking will drop because of the downtime during an update.

[Milchan]

@halaspike - you might want to look at using AWS burstable servers if you continue getting problems like that.

[Milchan]

@givinguponlife - you , and others, might find this thread [productforums.google.com ] interesting on google webmaster crawl forum - it is from the webmaster of the site How to Geek that that you may have heard of. Pretty big site and he is pointing out some of the problems you are mentioning like quora posts that have copied his content taking the snippet results and higher places in serps.

This latest update certainly is causing to confusing results that are often very contrary to what googles guidelines tell us all to do or what they say they are trying to achieve.

[cheegum]

@Milchan the link to productforum's isnt working.

[Milchan]

im not sure why but the forum strips it out - try this one , seems to work

[goo.gl ]

[jmorgan]

I don't use howtogeek myself but it seems, on the surface, like a reasonably good quality website (apart from the ugly banner right at the top), and some of his complaints, again on the surface, seem legit.

I just wonder if the constant flooding of new websites onto the internet will dilute your market regardless of how extremely low quality some of them are. It seems like even if you have a low quality site, if you just keep flooding google with pages, some of them will rank regardless (at least in the short term) at the expense of the better quality websites.

And the conspiracy theorist in me also wonders if Googlers have deliberately put a mark against his site because of his somewhat negative attitude towards them. In which case, it may be best to remain anonymous rather than to post loudly on Google's forums basically screaming, "Hey Google! What the heck is going on?!?!"