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.

[Shepherd]

Trade winds, rivers, train tracks, highways, Sears catalog, Walmart, google, Amazon... in business things change and everything is out to get you. Get over it. Then maybe the discussion can return to google updates and SERP changes instead of all this incessant whining. </grumpyoldmanrant>

[mosxu]

Considering that Amazon topped 1 trillion market value we all need to understand that buyers are constantly given AI up. Travel not applying but even there the mobile screen only fits about 3 ads and they must be very expensive and have to convert to justify the price paid.

What happens to the rest is a different story.

[yollo03]

Big shifts in US database, google is doing an algorithm update but looks like its just for US at the moment. Hope and pray this will improve things. Looks like its just for desktops at the moment. My guess is that they are experimenting first, might be a fix to the core update. Who knows?

[arunpalsingh]

Yes! It is shaking up everything Semrush was above 7.

[whoa182]

Wow, again!?

I just finished a complete audit on my website and fixed everything up the other day, so I'm hoping to see some gains. But who knows, maybe Google is coming to finish me off. :(

[arunpalsingh]

@Whoa182

Some kind of vendetta?

[samwest]

Since Monday, still seeing much better quality converting traffic. Volume pattern is still very spotty with definite ON/OFF periods. Weekly totals appear to be upwards of three times that of last week. Waiting for G's cute little reports to confirm this anomaly.

[BushyTop]

God, I hope this is partly a reversal.

[Mark_A]

There must be some commonality to these zombies, where do they come from, what IP addresses do they use etc ?

[MayankParmar]

My the US traffic has once again dropped in September. It's not Labour day anymore so maybe a new update has hit me again? Or I need to wait till next week before speculating :/

[samwest]

God, I hope this is partly a reversal.

Agreed, but to what iteration?
I think it's just a change in dynamic behavior rather than a reversal to an earlier era.
The old idea of "google dance" is long gone. Now the changes are (supposed to be) seamless and on the fly.
BTW, wonder what ever happened to Matt Cutts?
I envision his de-commissioned droid shell rusting away in some dark corner of a Jawa sandcrawler.
[youtu.be...]

[TinkyWinky]

"Amazon for example needs only the title and h2 tags to be #1 in my vertical for many items. No description and hundreds of links to other not related items. "

Yep agree with that in fitness vertical - it's a crock of $hit when you consider that pretty much every product page is dup content (supplied by 3rd parties via a feed or manually entered via the awful Amazon system) badly formatted and NOT a great UX IMHO.

If G would get a backbone and stop promoting Amazon pages for products over and above other businesses that do "own the products" they are selling - then for starters Mr Bezos would be worth about 1/10th of what he is right now.

More than that, smaller businesses that cannot compete with A and therefore have to use A to keep sales ticking over - could actually wean themselves off and the A-Dominance would start to wane somewhat.

[Martin Ice Web]

Big shake up in germany too. I got worse though.
Domain crowing in our vertical.
4x brand1
4x brand2
1x brand3

This is much worse than the first panda ever was.

[BushyTop]

@martin Ice

Oh god!

[yollo03]

No impact on me whatsoever at the moment.

[samwest]

While my website traffic and conversions are up, oddly enough my direct Amazon product sales and affiliate conversions are WAY down. I mean WAAAY down to almost zilch.
That might indicate that G is nailing sites with Amazon affiliate ads....however, clicks are still up, but conversions way down....so maybe just sending less converting traffic to those sites. I have a few dozen informational sites that use Amazon affiliate ads quite heavily.
No time to dig through data yet, just sharing this observation.

[penitentman]

@southernguy

This whole thing is totally weird I'm just wondering if it's gonna change for the better or if Google is just trying to kill off organic search altogether.

Google is always making changes to its results and serps. More often than not to award authority sites or ads. With the addition of new interactive offerings like featured snippets, website previews, suggested search dropdown, ads and videos etc all these things affect where your website ranks on the results page and how many impressions you get. More likely than not pushing you down and diminishing your footprint. So it becomes more important by the day to play by the rules and treat your online business and website like a traditional business and really invest in it.

Volatility is picking in the serps up like others have referenced... This might be the refresh everyone has been clamoring for!

fingers crossed

[yollo03]

I dont know if its a refresh, its only in US so far. I can humorously suggest this is the 'trump update' because he was complaining google is showing fake news on him. Setting jokes aside, I cant imagine this is a refresh yet, will have to see how it rolls tomorrow.

[Cralamarre]

My traffic depends heavily on the school year, so it's no surprise that traffic has improved this week now that school has started. But, Google traffic has been up 10-15% this week compared with the same week last year, and seems to be doing even better today. Yesterday, traffic was the best it has been since May 2017.

[southernguy]

I'm not sure I am buying the quality content thing as some of my sites that I consider good quality have all dropped hard with the exception of the few that I have with just a few pages (low competition). Having said that In one of my niches (bodybuilding supplements) I picked up an expiring domain over the weekend with a big backlink profile over 5000 links with good DA and PA.

I have thrown up a few new pages of content up and it is starting to rank nicely on page two. It seems at least in that particular niche that spammy sites are what is ranking. This sucks and its a lot of work but if Google wants churn and burn aged domains right now so be it.

I'm just wondering from some of the spammy sites I'm seeing ranking at the top if it's not going to be time soon to dust of the old Scrapebox and GSA tools :-)

[yollo03]

Semrush personal score for me was 3,8, nothing major. I cant see any major shifts for me yet. This can continue tomorrow as well. I really hope things will get fixed.

UPDATE! It looks like another major update. I wasnt affected yet but I probably will soon. The trust score ranking is distorted just like it was in August's major update.

[Tin Foil Hat SEO]

Guys, I have something very important to tell you. I've been trying to get this information out there for a long time but every time I try get the truth out there, I discover that people are following me and that I am being spied on.

This can easily explain all of the issues you are having with zombie traffic, traffic fluctuations, traffic sculpting, and how Google is controlling your conversion rate.

See it's not that Google is actually controlling those things, it's who Google is being controlled by...

The truth needs to be out there.

Sundar Pichai is actually an honorary member of the zeta tau alpha tribe, he was inducted by Xyvrel, the leader of the first order from the planet Grichi 3J4.

They have been using Google to mind control the population of Earth to prepare for an alien invasion.

You must understand that even though Google clearly lists that their algorithm works off links on their about page: [google.com...] it's really a conspiracy to take over the planet earth.

The truth is that the aliens are in full control of your rankings.

I have to go now before QAnon finds me.

[Leosghost]

Eric! Larry is off his meds again!..

[RedBar]

WooHoo ... Awesome, beer time :-)

[McPheeSees]

The results have not changed drastically but there is low conversion and traffic is lower. This always happens during a major update which has been going on for the last couple of days and today. I don't ever use Google and purely because the results are so bad. It doesn't matter what they do, they cannot change this in a positive direction for anyone. The only reason Amazon got as big as it did is that Google gave it preeminence in their search results. It wasn't deserved, they offer little in the way of product information and whatever they do have they scrape from other sites. Scraping, in general, seems to be the method of operation for most of these large tech companies. They scrape from the smaller sites and then use it against them. Getting back to Google results, they really are bad. There are times I've done some testing on things I'm looking for and it's virtually impossible to find any good results. They took a fork in the road a long time ago and they can't go back to that moment in time. So they keep trying to correct it, and their search results end up getting worse. They don't seem to think that people might choose something else, but they are. There's a sense of arrogance and hubris and somehow they think they're doing God's work. The whole thing of don't be evil is a complete misnomer. They become corrupted and arrogant to the point where they won't even go in front of Congress now because they don't feel they need to. So I use other search engines purely because they offer better results. It's too bad we got to a point that it's difficult to undo all this. There was a time when the Internet was truly free that's when Google got started and what a mistake it was that we all threw ourselves behind this childlike monster.

[lostshootingstar]

Getting back to the spirit of this thread, I just all of a sudden saw all of our positions in dozens of our target cities revert back to what they were yesterday. Seems like almost a full reversal of whatever they did last night.

[glakes]

I just all of a sudden saw all of our positions in dozens of our target cities revert back to what they were yesterday. Seems like almost a full reversal of whatever they did last night.

I just wonder if this did not have something to do with Amazon's site search going down. Google crawling the pages being unable to find anything other than sponsored ads may have given Google's AI another aneurysm. See [newsweek.com...]

[lostshootingstar]

Personally I'm in a service industry and do nothing with any kind of product sales. Amazon is not a player for us. The closest big companies would be Yelp and Yellowpages.

Unless you are implying some kind of internet wide ripple effect.

[pritz]

Looks like something happen SERP.

[samwest]

Yup, it all shut down again at about 1am last night. Zilch all day. What glakes mentioned makes perfect sense. I was not aware that Amazon's site search had gone down. Would explain my Google gains and Amazon losses. Looks like Matt Cutt's has perhaps resurfaced as TFH. LMAO.