Google Updates and SERP Changes - September 2018

[lostshootingstar]

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System: The following 4 messages were cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4913603.htm [webmasterworld.com] by robert_charlton - 12:54 pm on Sep 1, 2018 (PDT -8)

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It's a holiday weekend in the USA, I don't think anyone should really worry about traffic volume until next week.

However, I did see some negative ranking shifts yesterday that are concerning and can't be explained by a holiday.

[jmorgan]

@renatovieira Yup seems noticeably lower today. Not sure why.

This was based off my real time states which looked about 15% lower on average compared to the same day last week.

However, checking my full day's stats on analytics showed it was actually higher. Not sure if I was looking at the stats wrong or if the real time stats aren't all that accurate.

[mosxu]

This mobile index inclusion notification is it a blessing or some sort of invite into a world where conversions are 0. something?

Mobile users coming out of amazon app need to find great websites. Let’s make users happy let’s keep improving our websites.

[EditorialGuy]

With regards to youtube videos ranking, I was also referring to the fact that some of them are also terrible.

On the other hand, some are excellent. And some, while they may be filled with mindless Millennialisms ("What up, guys...") can have great information in them. I say that as a former video skeptic.

Take something like widget reviews: I mostly prefer text myself, but even after I've read a bunch of widget reviews, I'll often watch a few YouTube videos to see how the widgets work for real people in the everyday world. If those videos show up in organic search, that's fine by me. The Web isn't just text these days, so why should search results be limited to "ten blue links"?

[whoa182]

OMG my rankings have just all comeback and my traffic is almost like pre-august. I think I'm going to cry!

I've spent weeks making sure every page left on my site is of high quality and making the site structure the best it could be to enhance user experience and make it flow better.

Ever since I made these changes I noticed big improvements. Session time is up by 1 minute, pages per session went from 1.20 to 1.50+, time on page is up by 2+ minutes, loading speed is lower. I am so much happier with my site today. My conversions rate has been higher, too.

I woke up this morning and all my articles are where they used to be or very close to where they were in July.

Please stick!

[Cralamarre]

@whoa182 Congratulations, that's great news. I hope it continues for you.

I'm not sure if my traffic has dropped this morning or not. My real-time Google Analytics stats have been looking normal, but the hourly report is showing a considerable drop over the past couple of hours. Since the real-time stats look fine, I'm guessing the hourly report is just delayed. I hope so, anyway.

Update: False alarm, traffic is fine. Looks like it was just a delay in reporting.

[edited by: Cralamarre at 2:10 pm (utc) on Sep 27, 2018]

[Halaspike]

@whoa182 same here, my traffic is back to normal, was down for just two days tho.

[BushyTop]

@whoa182 what territory is this in? UK or us?

[Milchan]

this summary of googles future plans is interesting [yoast.com ]

It is also a bit demoralising though as it just seems so complicted to try to keep up with all this stuff and impossible to do,

My first thoughts though are google are trying to use AI too much already and the results are less relevant than before - they will likely get there in the end though. Looks like they really are trying to own as much control over as many aspects of the internet as possible.

[Leosghost]

this summary of googles future plans is interesting [yoast.com ]
deja vu
[webmasterworld.com...]
thread began two days ago..

[thinktwice]

Someone sure flipped a switch today! Some of our most important serps are back to normal. Let's see if it stays this way. Quite bizar though.

[renatovieira]

@thinktwice

Here's the same. I do not know if they are zombies, or it is real traffic because my conversions are low.

I will not cheer up when I'm not sure. Either way the traffic is high after 2 weeks almost dead.

update: right now, after high traffic all morning, decrease again :-(

[Halaspike]

This month has really been great so far, all the pruning of thousands of very old irrelevant pages on my site seems to have helped a lot.

[yollo03]

Something definitely changed, Im happy for those that recovered. My keywords are ranked higher so obviously traffic has increased. The still-not-so-good news for me that my main keywords pre-August have yet to recover.

[broccoli]

I got a pretty significant boost on my longer tail and lower volume short tail keywords today (US serps) and even got a boost to position 3 on my former biggest volume short tail keyword. My site images are back in the serps. But what’s weird is I don’t seem to be getting any more traffic or any increase in adsense earnings. I can’t tell yet but I think non-US international traffic might have gone down (I have an international site), and most of my visitors seem to be on desktop today instead of mobile, which is odd, because my site is designed for and mainly used by mobile users. I’m pretty confused! I hope/presume this is all just temporary volatility.

[Gregorich SEO]

@yollo03+ @renatovieira

Hi Guys. New to the forum. Joined when my rankings dropped post-Google Medic after being quite solid for nearly two years.

My hunch is mobile page speed is to blame. The site was created 11 years ago and has super dense code, large images, and java.

We are slower than everyone who now outranks us.

I keep asking dev to clean up the code, but they say they've done all they could.

Anyone know if page speed could completely devastate your rankings like this? I'm talking 90 top 3 spots lost in one evening.

Thanks in advance!

Thomas

[keyplyr]

Gregorich SEO - since the reindexing to the new mobile index, sites are now ranked according to the merits of the mobile version.

Speed is much more significant for mobile devices. If your site is very slow, yes... this could cause your site to loose ranking.

However, what you report is sevre, so it's likely there are other/additional factors involved.

And welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]

[Black_Sin]

My site gain back 20% after image algorithm update, getting almost half from what it was before August 1. Anyone else seeing the same?

[Cyril TechWebsites]

My site gain back 20% after image algorithm update, getting almost half from what it was before August 1. Anyone else seeing the same?

It looks like if the website's already get "hit" positively since the series of updates - it's traffic will continue to increase during all theses series of updates. My website picked up pretty good since August update and keeps increasing it's traffic all these days.

[imgur.com...]

[jmorgan]

I got a nice boost with the early September update but things are leveling off now. Just waiting for the next update to see what happens, hopefully another spike, fingers crossed.

[Black_Sin]

Oh okay, while my site not exactly got hit on 1 August, it was on downward spiral from Mid August to September
Hopefully this boost will stay because I am not sure why click and impression suddenly so low but position remain somewhat unchanged mostly

[analis]

strong growth from Monday 17 September to Wednesday 26 September.

yesterday Thursday September 27 sharp decline now visitors are the same as on Thursday 13 September.

[whoa182]

Bot activity just before my rankings was mostly restored [imgur.com...]

Traffic naturally dips towards the weekend, so I'm excited to see what things are going to be like on Monday!

I made massive changes to my site over the last few weeks. Changed my nav menu bar completely to make it more streamlined and logical (easy for users to navigate). I deleted over 100 thin content pages that also contained very bad grammar and spelling. Also tightened up category pages and deleted thin category pages. I merged a lot of old content that was too similar to other posts and improved the posts hugely.

As I mentioned earlier, all of my site metrics have improved significantly by making these changes.

I suspect one of the issues my site faced was Panda. I used the blog back in 2006 like people use Twitter today. Some posts were literally just a paragraph or two long. So even though I had a lot of high-quality content, the number of bad posts outnumbered them.

In any case, the update on the 1st pushed me to make all these improvements and as a result of that, I'm much happier with my site, and my people browsing my site seem to be as well.

[yollo03]

Good news for me. My personal score in semrush was over 8 yesterday, I got some of my lost keywords back. I cant call it a full recovery yet but its the strongest recovery I had since August. They must have changed parts of that quality update they implemented in August.

[givinguponlife]

< whoa182

Can you show your old vs new page screenshots?

Did you 301 thin pages or removed them at all? Did you remove or merged all into a mega post of some sort.

[Jhurwith]

Traffic hit a big decline yesterday, the 27th. I bet something will come up tomorrow saying there was an update Sept. 27.

[lostshootingstar]

I always like to back up my complaining with graphs: [i.imgur.com...]

Unfortunately we did have ANOTHER 10% drop week over week yesterday. We have been in decline almost every single week in 2018; it's absolutely mind bending. I just need it to finally hit rock bottom for my own personal mental health; I'm in a pretty dark place lately.

[Cralamarre]

My traffic is still good, and considerably better than it was this time last year, but it did drop slightly yesterday (the 27th). Just enough to feel like a kick in the gut after weeks of steady growth.

[southernguy]

The biggest issue I have with traffic is that I have also seen the ups and downs mostly an overall decline. The worst thing about this is that even on days when traffic spikes conversions are nonexistent. (so its obvious bots or users not getting what they are looking for. My conversion rate used to be about 1-11.

Today one of my sites that has suffered almost no turbulence during this whole update (beauty niche) finally dropped from top 3 to page 3. I am being hammered by Amazon, Pinterest, Alibaba and social networks like Medium, and Scoop.

On another note, I have a PBN pointing to another beauty site that is now ranking number 1.

[Gregorich SEO]

Anyone have advice for recovering from Google Medic?

I've lost 90 Top 3 spots overnight.

Making action plan now:

- Increase Page Speed
- Create content that's relevant to the user's search intent
- Title tags that focus on main keyword, not multiple keywords, and are written for humans
- Fix broken links
- Fix redirect loops

Thoughts?

I'll follow up and let you know how it goes. Fingers crossed.

[ichthyous]

Big shift downward for me as well in SEMRush, the first drop in a month so perhaps it's just temporary. It doesn't seem that high scores in SEMrush nor GA traffic really correlate with inquiries anymore on my site. I've had high traffic all summer and a low level of customer inquiries. September has been great traffic and hardly any inquiries at all. I'm beginning to wonder if the shift to mobile traffic just doesn't work for my site. I'm at about 35% mobile and 65% desktop, but mobile visitors do not convert.