Google Updates and SERP Changes - September 2018

[lostshootingstar]

---

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)

---

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.

[NickMNS]

When we spend more on google ads our sales decrease and our organic rankings decrease. It's a strange case, not sure why it happens.

For sales, the ads send more traffic to your site but not necessarily with the same ratio of buyers to users so it would be normal to expect conversion rate to drop compared to organic only traffic.
For organic rankings decrease, cannibalization, that is a portion of the people that would have clicked on the organic listing clicked on the ad instead, as a result your rankings begin to slip.

[arunpalsingh]

Expect an update soon. To punish the sites leaking that video ;-)

[lostshootingstar]

Seeing a huge drop in traffic this week, even worse than the same week last year. Pretty demoralizing at this point! [i.imgur.com...]

[edited by: lostshootingstar at 7:29 pm (utc) on Sep 13, 2018]

[goodroi]

Mods Note: This thread is only about recent Google Updates & SERP Changes. Please stay on topic. :)

Want to discuss Google SEO not directly related to this precise topic? Please start a new thread in the Google SEO section.
Want to discuss Google executives & their preferences? Please post in the Google Business section.
Want to discuss something else? Please go to the Foo section.

Thank you from your overworked and unpaid volunteer mod team

[Broaster]

Almost all of my Traffic comes from Social Media

I haven't had any traffic from google search in ages, and recently Google has penalized google news websites, they still index them but they just to show up in search by relevance only sort by date when searching titles of articles

[Martin Ice Web]

I guess this quarter will be a good one for google.
Traffic from google is like a rollercoaster.

Did someone notice that refs from other sites decreased over the last years? google did good work with penalizing for outgoing links. Anybody is scared to link to other sites.

[Mark_A]

removed message after seeing keep on topic message from mod.

I am yet to find the reason my site has been penalised in G this past 30 days.

Unfortunately I don't have a record of who was in what position in the previous weeks / months so it will be hard to detect who were the beneficiaries of the recent changes.

[yollo03]

Your site like mine got under-rewarded at the expense of those that were awarded with more points. In other words, Google felt that some sites should be at the top and thats what it did. There is really nothing you can do until they hand out the next batch of rewards.

[browndog]

I'm starting to wonder if there has been a switch towards thinner content/less words. The articles I am seeing now are much less detailed than the ones I write, and they never ever list their sources. The same sites churn the same statistics, without staging where these came from, whereas I do list my sources, and link to the research and just get hammered.

Instead of editing articles which have been replaced with thin content, I'm thinking maybe it's best to have two versions of an article one long and in-depth and one short. My biggest competitor who are constantly in position zero, plus 1, 2 and 3 often have more than one or more versions of the same content. All their articles tend to be on the shorter side where I've always tried to cover the topic in detail.

Google told me the key to success is write good-quality content and spend money on advertising. I've covered the first, but not the second. Most articles will generally be on the first page, but if they're not in the first 1-3 spots, they just don't get much traffic. I did write an article this week which went to position zero straight away, but because it's a topic professionals write about, the general public wouldn't know to search for the phrase.

[arunpalsingh]

I agree with above findings and @Yollo03 was first to point about thin content.
I think it is temporary and and you should continue making good content in spite of Google showing love for light articles.
Google changes colors and would change again.

If these search results are to continue, Google is the biggest loser in the long run. Already pros are using more of Bing.

[EditorialGuy]

I've got an information site that averages a couple of hundred thousand users per month, and I'm not seeing any obvious changes. Traffic is starting to drop off very slightly (as it will continue to do between now and late December, based on what I've seen over nearly two decades at our current domain), but the pattern of Google traffic--and traffic in general--appears to be normal.

[browndog]

I'm 15% down on this time last week, it's so soul destroying when I see re-churned content topping the results vs the amount of time and research I put into my content. Right now it's shopping sites that have blogs who are doing well.

Whinge, whinge, whinge. I really need to get a full time job and stop trying. I just hate the thought of no longer working on the site when it actually does benefit people.

[whoa182]

I had an article take position 0 and 1 since Oct 2017, and maintain that position until August 1st. It's about 3500 words long and brought in quite a few sales every day.

Not only did I lose my main keyword, but several other variations that I was ranking for dropped. The articles which are now ranking don't even target the keywords or specific search query. There's even a very old and poorly written blogspot page above me which was published in 2010.

But most articles ranking could be written in 15 minutes by writing a brief description of each product and some generic information about the active ingredient. Some of them were also published as recently as June.

It appears (at least from manually checking my previously profitable keywords) that Google is ignoring Title/H1 tags more now and ranking high authority pages more even if the query is briefly mentioned in the main content (especially if the website has a high DA).

[aristotle]

Perhaps google's algorithm doesn't fully trust an article that's written by the same person who is selling the product.

[whoa182]

Sorry I didn't make it clear. It's not my product, but they are products I've used for 10 years (related to skin care) and I wrote a detailed review post. Although, I left over 100 very poor quality on the website as they were written as far back as 2006, and I didn't know it could negatively affect the whole website.

So maybe during the update, all the bad pages it crawled were factored in and Google rated my site lower quality? I only finished the audit and fixed up the site by late August. Maybe I'm too impatient to see any impact from the changes I made.

Just another example from my other website: I had a post on a hair website get thrown to page 2 in the March/April update. Only for it to return to position 1 in the August update. I never changed anything on the website during that time. *shrug*.

I think I need to find a job or go on benefits. Thanks Google lol :|

[mosxu]

@aristotle

Very interesting point not trusting an article written by some person selling the product.

I would say that the more people read and extract useful information from an article the more the site will get credit.

A lot of talk about size of the article and author but in reality 90% of articles are written for search engines and it is very tiring now to find useful information with Google.

[Milchan]

I see competitors basically write short, not useful articles that link out to their other Web sites that are selling the products. I wonder if that's the key or one of them

[mosxu]

I am not sure you are allowed to post links to videos with the risk of being “off topic” but here [m.youtube.com...] Elon Musk explains it all.

It is not about the articles you write.

[iamlost]

When looking at obviously (to a reasonable human) off topic or mashed or incorrect or what have you results it pays to remember that every SE, including Google, is neither reasonable nor human. It is a multi-dimensional series of algorithms using implicit rather than explicit, popular rather than expert, inputs to satisfy the average searcher (while also making ads look comparatively worth investigating).

It also pays to remember that, for over a decade, Google has been moving away from organic referral results to answer and own property and enterprise referral results.

All of which means that, in one's own best interest one should have, for over a decade, been moving away from reliance on Google traffic in general and Google organic search traffic in particular.

What I believe from personal search experience is that G's vaunted RankBrain is a ML incompetent. Ever since Google said they'd rolled it out universally the query result quality has tanked big time. The timing may be a coincidence but the query quality hole imo has steadily been getting deeper and darker since then.

For a month or so earlier this year the first one or two results would be on query topic with the rest of the page being in non-English and totally off topic. This implied something serious broken in their back end. Perhaps complexity has caught up to them.

That said, G traffic to my sites remains within report threshold 10% up/down while being up YoY in absolute numbers since forever. The conversion rate remains the same aka worst in class worst in total but consistency is umm OK. Perhaps I'm just fortunate ...

[samwest]

Haha - Stacy Fischer's original about dot com useless aggregation article now sees it's FORTH domain switch and is again rising in the serps. I guess repurposed junk fools Google yet again.

[TalkativeEditorial]

"It also pays to remember that, for over a decade, Google has been moving away from organic referral results to answer and own property and enterprise referral results."

^^^^ This. We saw this most prominently during this year's World Cup and increasingly for sport results where Google pulls data through for things like fixtures, results and in the case of the World Cup, even had its own live updates. Was a big wake up call for me.

[heisje]

@iamlost

Perhaps I'm just fortunate ...

Yes.
.

[jmorgan]

Whose advice would you rather take? Someone whose website was penalized and recommends shortening your content and publishing "thin" content, or someone who actually actually received a traffic boost from the last two updates who recommends focusing on what your user would be looking for?

For some reason, I get the feeling some would rather the former, even if it makes no sense.

[NickMNS]

Who would you rather receive advice from?

The problem with our line of work is that no one really knows with any degree of certainty what influences rankings in any meaningful and sustained way. The person who's website hasn't been penalized is not necessarily any more knowledgeable than the one that has been personalized. The not penalized website is only one update away from being penalized (justified or not).

That is not to say that there are not basic guidelines, such as those published by Google, that should be followed, but following them does not guarantee success. Likewise engaging black-hat techniques does not guarantee success, it will likely increase your probability of failure but even there, there is no guarantee.

Finally, just because something has proven successful in one instance it does not mean that it will successful in one's own particular situation.

All this to say, be weary of advice regardless of where it comes.

[aristotle]

Some people apparently believe that success is mainly a question of avoiding pitfalls that trigger algorithmic demotions or penalties.

I've never looked at it that way. I've always tried to create the best sites I possibly can, using my own standards, not google's. Also, I pay no attention to what other people do with their sites. I spend nearly all of my time working on my own sites.

When I designed my first site in 2004, I knew almost nothing about SEO. I simply designed the best site I could for my users. That site has never been demoted or penalized.

As far as I know, the only penaIties any of my sites have experienced were two sites that were hit by the original penguin rollout in April 2012. That was due to some submisions to free directories that I made in 2007-2009. Both of those sites were later released from the penalty after I disavowed the backlinks from those directories.

So based on my experiences, my suggestions are:
-- Go by your own standards, and set them very high.
-- Pay no attention to what other people do with their sites. Instead, spend all your time working on your own sites.

[browndog]

Also, I pay no attention to what other people do with their sites. I spend nearly all of my time working on my own sites.

I spent 98% of my time working on my sites and my goal is to produce the best content I possibly can, and not just repeat what other sites are saying, because that is of no benefit to my visitors at all. But I do watch what they are doing, I don't obsess over it, but it's nice to know what's going on, it might be an idea for a new article (my site is 15 years old, so sometimes I need inspiration), or it might be a new feature. I can't say I've been to any of them for several days, because well I've been busy on my own stuff, but it's not a bad thing to keep an eye on what's going on beyond my own website.

[JesterMagic]

@browndog same as you down over 10% last week. Originally lost 25% traffic in March. Gained 10%+ August 1. So basically with at least my site it looks like a rollback of the Aug 1st update

[MayankParmar]

Traffic seems to have dropped a bit today. Anyone?

[sk7411]

Traffic seems to have dropped a bit today. Anyone?

If you are talking about indian traffic , it might be due to the Vishwakarma Puja today.

[BushyTop]

We're getting traffic at the moment and it looks like the SERPs shake up has slowed down for us.

Unfortunately it doesn't look to have returned the results we were hoping for... :(

Still lots of questionable results.